by Rhys Hughes
When he awoke, he discovered that he was unable to even sit upright. But his head was still on his shoulders. For that he was grateful. Yet he would not be needing a crutch anymore. He sighed and rolled his eyes. An idea came to him, an idea of such simplicity and beauty that he would have congratulated himself by shaking his own hand had he possessed more than one. He reached out for the little bedside table and the notepad and pen that he always kept there. In careful letters, he made out his Last Will and Testament. He left the carpet to Camille. This was a superlative jest. Then he threw the notepad back onto the table and smiled. She had wanted to take something of his to remember him by. But it was all academic, of course. He was not going to die. He was not even going to lose his one remaining limb. From now on, he would post his cheques without any problems.
After all, he earned enough money to keep paying the instalments on the expanding carpet indefinitely. The only difficulties that might arise would be if he ever lost his job. But this was an unlikely prospect. Tom had tried to worry him the previous day, but his words were probably no more than the ravings of a drunken lunatic. No, Jefferies would never sack him. True, his performance would be somewhat impaired by the loss of two legs and an arm, but the important thing remained his head. As long as he kept this everything would be fine.
There was a knock on the front door. Lawrence frowned. Who could this be? Not Camille surely; she had her own key. Wriggling to the window and pulling back the curtain with his good hand, he saw none other than Jefferies himself standing in his driveway, looking up at the house. Lawrence tapped on the glass and waved. Probably come round to reassure me, Lawrence thought. He wondered if he should ask him to post his latest cheque. A simple request. He could not understand why Jefferies looked so stern.
***
Mehmet awoke from an alarming dream of his own, which was unusual—he rarely dreamed scenes that he had not already chosen. In his dream, a strange woman of extraordinary grace and dark power entered the house of one of his clients with her own key. The carpet had all but taken over the whole building, crashing like the waves of an impossible ocean against the walls of every room. But the woman trod as lightly on the swirling patterns as on any earthly rug. Up the stairs she glided, unerringly making for the bedroom. There, lying on the pillow, she found what she was looking for. Picking it up by the hair and thrusting it deep into her voluminous handbag, she departed as soundlessly as she had entered.
Mehmet scowled. He hated the idea of the dream as augur or warning, save when it was his to control. But he had to admit that in this case, he had come up against something it was better not to oppose. It did not matter. He was growing stronger by degrees and that was enough for him. One day, there would be no confusion in his world. He would create his own; indeed it was being woven at this very moment, in a hundred different cities. The dream still lit up his eyes. The carpets would expand, join with each other, cover the entire globe. And finally he would feel at home on this planet, a reality whose symbols were his, whose workings were based on his own designs, whose flaws had been deliberately engineered in advance. There would be nothing to fear then: no misunderstandings, no Western values beyond his comprehension, no wine or unfathomable music. In his mind’s eye he could see the carpets bursting out of their confines, spreading like a plague.
Sighing, he swung himself out of bed, raised the hatch in the floor of his little bedroom and lowered the ladder. He had anticipated this minor problem and had made arrangements. He descended down into the first of a warren of linked chambers and made his way to his glass and crystal workshops. So his client would remain without a head? It was of little consequence. He did not require his workers to think. Besides he had prepared a suitable alternative. Reaching the room he sought, he picked up the finished item and held it critically up to the light. The bowl of an enormous water-pipe smoked in his hands. But the smoke did not come from burning tobacco. The nargile fumed and hissed with the sentient vapours trapped inside. A captive genii.
Bearing this gift through the interminable corridors, Mehmet climbed down a flight of stone steps and reached the room of the looms. His workers were as busy as ever, weaving the tiny pieces of silk and wool that would eventually make his dream a reality. He regarded them with fond affection. Despite what others might think, he was no devil. Merely a man who had sought understanding in a deaf and dumb cosmos, had received no answers and so had sought to impose his own patterns and conformity. It would be a softer world at the very end, he mused. A world akin to a hearth rug in front of the fire of the sun. A world where his subjects could recline and break bread together; a world whose physics were known ultimately only to himself.
Patting some of his favourite workers on the head, he placed the steaming crystal bowl under one arm and unbolted the door at the furthest end of the room. Here, the new workers were growing daily. In the dim light that seeped through a crack in the ceiling, he checked the progress of each. Once they failed to make one instalment they were generally his. He motioned to one figure seated against the wall and it stood up and came towards him, arms outstretched, groping blindly for a more fundamental reason than the pervasive gloom. Mehmet chuckled. This one was as ready as it would ever be. He could give up waiting for the head. That woman was welcome to it.
The figure stopped before him and carefully, lovingly, Mehmet screwed the crystal bowl in place. Then he led the new recruit back out into the room of looms and towards an empty machine. Unsteadily at first, but with growing confidence, the figure threaded a length of wool into the loom and began weaving. The shuttle sounded like the cracking of infinitely old knuckles as he swept it from side to side. With precise jerks, the new worker wove the doom of others under his master’s benign gaze. Mehmet took out his pipe, stared at it for a moment, shook his head and replaced it in one of his many pockets.
Reaching for the tube that trailed from the crystal bowl, he raised it to his lips and puffed gingerly on the end. Strange smokes curled like tusks from his nostrils. It seemed to him then that he was growing larger with each breath, that he was expanding like one of his own carpets, becoming more and more intangible as he spread upwards and outwards, filling the room and then passing like a ghost through the walls to tower high above the shop, to waver and dissipate and finally merge with the shadow of the Mevlâna Müzesi itself, tomb of whirling Celâleddin Rumi, bright as dervish eyes, sea-green in a region where no sea glitters.
The Chimney
I am a sad man. I have never known a woman. Actually that is not quite true: I knew a woman once, but it was in a mirror. I caught her reflection in the attic of an old dark house. Possibly she was my mother. I do not know. Perhaps the house was mine; again I cannot say for certain. I was ignored as a child by my parents and did not learn to speak until a late age. Thus my early memories are hazy and vague and undefined by the geometry of language.
Once, I nearly kissed a woman. It was on a train. The lights had failed and we hurtled through a tunnel. Everything was suddenly as dark and heavy as oil. I stumbled out into the corridor and lurched against a girl who had also sought the freedom of the connecting passage. Her lips came within a mere three feet of my own. I was in ecstasy. I could not speak for a whole month. I did not wash for a whole year.
Every morning, I go down to the park to feed the ducks. This park is a meeting place for all the other sad men in this city. There are many of us. We cast torn shreds of sliced white bread at mallards who do not want them and withhold our crumbs from seagulls who do. Sometimes we talk to each other. Thus it was that I met a companion in bathos who suggested that I take a holiday in Jersey. There were many available women there, he insisted; he himself had been wildly successful on his last trip. He had almost been hugged no less than three times.
His words seemed to offer a balm for my despairing soul. I resolved at once to make arrangements to spend a couple of weeks on that blessed isle and to see for myself whether his extravagant claims were true. I could not imagine what it co
uld feel like to be almost hugged by a real woman. I suspected that I might succumb to some sort of haemorrhage out of sheer unbearable joy. But such a demise would be infinitely preferable to my present condition. I decided that I would welcome such a fate with open arms.
Accordingly, I took ship to Jersey in the year of our Lord 19— and landed on the wharf of St Helier during the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless teatime. I was at once impressed by the quality of the females who were moving through the streets of the town. Many of them seemed capable of returning my gaze, but this was mere conjecture. Probably my intense excitement was encouraging this belief without any true justification. Yet I had a positive feeling in my bones, most of which were still inside my body despite the exceptionally rough crossing and the jarring that had been occasioned by the unfailingly regular, though wholly unnecessary, use of the fog horn.
I booked into a cheap but clean hotel and spent some time planning my next course of action. Should I infiltrate the afternoon immediately and attempt to actually talk to a woman? Or should I stay in my hotel and ring for room-service and hope that it would be answered by a maid? I was in such a state of anticipation that I could do little more than hurl myself onto the bed and bite the pillow with my horse-like teeth. I remained in this position for the better part of the day and did not stir until the sun had gone down and darkness folded itself over everything like an opera-cloak.
I instantly regretted my indecision, but resolved to make the best of what time I had not wasted. So I left my room and made my way to the beach for a midnight walk. My feet were full of an unknown vitality and I kept up a brisk pace for an hour or so, away from the town and down the deserted coast. Before long, all signs of civilisation had vanished. The sea pounded the shore and slid pebbles and plastic bottles against each other. It was very romantic. I knew then that I needed a woman more than ever. My life was slipping past quickly and I had never been smiled at. Tears sprang to my eyes as I realised that I was not only sad but bald as well, and there is no more pathetic combination. I vowed that if I did not find a woman this very night, I would walk out into the sea and drown both my worthless identity and my over-shiny pate in the briny deeps.
Whether the sheer dynamism of this thought had any bearing on my perception, I still do not know. All I can relate is that when I rounded the next rocky headland and gazed out across another enormous and deserted expanse of sand, I saw the figure of a tall svelte woman standing in the middle of the beach. I clapped my hands for joy. I capered and leaped. She appeared to be looking in my direction. This was beyond all rational hope. With a sudden and unexpected cry of triumph, I launched myself towards the figure, arms outstretched, lips puckered, heart beating an irregular tattoo on the stave of my ribcage.
That short run across those moonwashed sands now appears to me like a half-remembered opium dream. I know that I reached the woman in a trice, flung my arms about her, planted a long, lingering kiss on her mouth and then recoiled in shock. I know that I rubbed my eyes, blew my gargantuan nose in my sleeve and tangled my wrinkled fingers in my one remaining strand of oily hair. Slowly the truth dawned. It was not a woman after all—it was a chimney! I had hugged and kissed and whispered passionate words of love not to a feminine example of flesh and blood but to a brick structure designed to emit smoke into the atmosphere.
‘Ha!’ said I, ‘and yet you are a very gorgeous chimney, if truth be known.’ I was determined to cut my losses, so I planted another kiss on the chimney’s smooth body and stood back to regard it more critically. It was not an unattractive chimney; to be honest, it looked like the sort of chimney I would want to marry, if a time ever came when I would want to marry one. But it was not a woman. Chimneys can be hugged and kissed but cannot return such gestures of affection. In this respect they are only marginally preferable as amorous partners to hatstands, bread-baskets and vacuum cleaners. A woman was what I really wanted, and I did not think that anything less would ever really suffice.
Of course, I had to wonder what a chimney was doing in the middle of a deserted beach in the early hours of the morning. But no doubt it would have asked similar things of me, had it been sentient. Besides, the answer seemed obvious with a little ratiocination: the chimney belonged to some house or factory that had been completely buried by the shifting sands. Somewhere far below, the building must be bristling under tons and tons of ochre grains. I scratched my cold brow and my lunar chin and took the liberty of patting the chimney on the flank while I debated what to do next.
‘Perhaps I will find a woman down here?’ I cried, climbing onto the top of the chimney and peering into the opening. It was darker than a nightmare’s armpit but there was the faintest hint of a spiral of warm air. I guessed that this would be as good a place as any to seek a female and so, with little more ado, I clambered down into the flue, bracing myself by means of legs on one side and my back on the other. The inner walls were quite slippery, but I was careful to maintain a steady pressure with my feet. In this manner, I began the descent, marvelling at the contracting circle of starlight high above me.
After what seemed an age, I started to catch wisps of sound from far below. The mortar that held the bricks together was crumbling badly and at one point I dislodged a large piece of masonry. It tumbled away, striking the walls repeatedly as it fell. But I did not hear it strike the bottom. Much later, the most dissipated of yelps floated up to me. I frowned. An unthinkable notion had entered my brain. I trembled. I clutched tightly onto the mossy stone. I chewed my scabrous lower lip. But then I mocked myself for my superstition and resumed my heroic climb into the very bowels of the earth.
Slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees, the wisps of sound grew louder and clearer. They seemed to be chiefly composed of moans and groans and sighs. There was still no light from below, but the air had become considerably warmer. The moans and groans were modulated by this rising air and warbled past me like the attenuated cries of ghosts. Again I shivered and it was only with the greatest determination that I could force myself to continue. I knew in the bottom of my heart that this was a mistake, but I prided myself on showing the power of will over flesh. The very antithesis of my previous condition.
Eventually, the glow came, as I knew it must. A point of light very remote: as pale as a dying star in another galaxy. The air by now was so warm that the roof of my mouth had started to dry up. The perspiration on my limbs evaporated almost as soon as it had sprung out on my quivering hairs. The moans and groans were now much more obvious and I could no longer pretend that they were tricks of my mind. It sounded as if they emanated from millions upon millions of throats; an inconceivably vast unholy choir, prodded into the high notes by tridents and pikes. It also seemed that this ungainly crowd was running about, for the combined pounding of feet produced a vibration that carried along the chimney and made my fingertips ache and throb unbearably.
At last, after another hour of descent, I could no longer hide the truth from myself. The howls and screams were mixed with outpourings of diabolical laughter. ‘Damn!’ I cursed, as I nearly slipped on the greasy masonry, and then everything came clear. I knew, with a clarity of vision that I had never experienced before, that I had to retreat; that I had to scramble back the way I had come, my weak heart gripped in the vice of an ineffable terror.
There would be little chance of finding a woman down here, after all; at least not the sort of woman who would be willing to pay me much attention. Any women down here would be more likely to be preoccupied with other things. Things such as being roasted on a griddle, dragged through a forest of metal spikes by grinning demons, forced into blue-green bottles made of burning ice and all that other Dantesque sort of stuff. For I was heading towards no less a place than perdition itself: Tartarus, Hades, Gehenna, the underworld, the boiling lake, the endless drop, Limbo’s cesspit, the other place, the eternal dentist’s-chair, the rather long day out in Cleethorpes. In short: HELL!!!
With a brief, incomprehensible prayer to Providence,
which in my haste I somehow confused with Provence and subsequently delivered in the langue d’oc, I attempted to reverse the motion of my limbs. But my muscles would not cease their blithe and terrible descent; my brain did not send the urgent signals of brake and return. I even—in that grotesque instant—almost forgot about women and their peachy lures.
I was as frozen by my own inertia as a wax apple falling towards the sun. The light grew brighter as I stared; the sounds of screaming and moaning assailed my poor eardrums; my mouth began to throb with the heat, as if I had but lately partaken of a subterranean vindaloo. In short, I was in a pickle—nay, a chutney—and there was no way that I could see of climbing out of the jar. I was also forced to review my own beliefs concerning the brimstone pit. I had been raised as a Catholic and thus had early learnt much of what there was to know about the punishment of the damned. But there had always been a nagging doubt in the corners of my judgment. Would a benevolent God ever really allow souls to burn forever? Was Hellfire really far hotter than the heart of a fission reactor? How could such energy be harnessed?
There was one discrepancy that disturbed me mightily, even as I raced onwards down towards my eternal doom. The discrepancy was this: the flames of Hell themselves were supposed to give off no light, and yet there was a definite glow beneath me—brighter now by far than the headlamp of a girl’s bicycle. I could only speculate that whichever Church Father had first reported on Hell (Origen probably, or Joyce) he must have worn a blindfold when shown through the massy wrought gates into the Stygian Realm. This is the sort of thing that a smart God would do; it would be bad form to let mortals know the exact route into these regions. They might try to retrace their steps with a bunch of their friends, a couple of bottles of Jacob’s Creek and a badly tuned guitar. People will do anything to attend a free barbecue these days.
