He pushed open the car door, his right sleeve soaked through at once, but that didn’t give him pause. Rain seemed to follow him even in the height of summer, and at least this smelled right: of ozone and tarmac and, peculiarly, of dust. He stepped out, retrieving the heavy duffel bag from the back seat before heading for the hotel entrance. He heard the cackle of the neon sign and turned to see that the ‘O’ had also given up the ghost. A matching spurt of electricity ran down his spine, and he savoured it; he hadn’t felt anything like it for a long time. It was a special night indeed. The shadow of an echo of a smile tried and failed to touch his lips, and he reflected that such a thing hadn’t happened for a long time either.
The glass doors slid aside at his approach—unusual for the establishments he frequented—and the rain was suddenly cut off and other sounds, human sounds, returned. From an opening to one side came the clink of glasses. Somewhere someone was vacuuming, which made him frown, and he stared down at the dust-free carpet. His shoes were as wet as if he’d emerged from the sea and he shifted them, watching the moisture darken the floor with something like satisfaction. Then a voice, a cheery voice, said: “Can I help you, sir?” A young woman with sleek hair pulled back against her head was seated behind a reception desk, smiling at him with reddened lips. The desk was grey, as was her uniform, and the wall behind her, and indeed that too-clean carpet. It looked anonymous; the hotels he frequented were often shabby and dirty, but they were never anonymous. The Professor frowned in answer, but he felt a sudden jolt of—what? Hunger? Eagerness?—from within his bag, and the contents shifted as if they were settling, or perhaps its opposite. He walked towards the girl and simply said, “Snell?”
His voice was dry and cracked. In truth he was unused to using it; his real voice, anyway. Sometimes he used his clown voice, or his jolly comedian voice, but not today. Generally, until it was time, he didn’t need to; he certainly didn’t like to.
“Welcome, Mr Snell. One night, is it?” She wrinkled her nose as if she could smell something unpleasant, then covered her expression by parting those red-painted lips once more. It wasn’t quite a smile. “No.” He leaned in closer until he could sense her wanting to recoil, needing to recoil, and he stared at her and he did not blink.
“The manager. Snell. Booked the entertainment. Snell.”
Her forehead folded into wrinkles.
“Our manager—Miss Smith— she’s not on tonight, I’m afraid sir, but I don’t—”
“Snell.”
His voice was implacable, and she knew it was implacable, he could see it in the way her eyes struggled to focus when she raised them to meet his. “Of course. I’ll get someone for you, sir. I’ll only be a moment.”
She was as good as her word, trotting into the room from whence he’d heard the sound of glasses and returning a few seconds later with a gangling lad in dark, ill-fitting trousers and a waistcoat with grey panels down the front. He looked puzzled, was muttering something to her, but he fell silent when he stood in front of the Professor, who stared at the pock-marks in his skin until he was forced to look away. “I’m sorry,” the lad began, but suddenly another voice rang out behind him, so bright and full of excitement and somehow pure that they all turned to look.
“Punch!” the voice cried. It belonged to a small boy of maybe six or seven, his hair curling and golden, and he grinned and pointed at the Professor’s bag.
The Professor looked, though as soon as he saw the shadow of a hand reaching across the carpet towards the child he knew what he would see. The crimson sugarloaf hat with its jolly green tassel had escaped the fastening and was poking from the top of the bag, along with the beaked nose, the hooked chin, the single avaricious eye, staring and endlessly blue.
“Mr Punch!” the boy said again, his voice disturbing the very air, which seemed to reconfigure itself around them. “Is there a show? Is Judy in there? Can we go, Mummy, can we?”
The child looked up at the slender woman with the fond gaze who was holding his hand, and she smiled back at him. “We’ll see.”
“We will,” the Professor said, but it was like being in the car, that odd feeling that he wasn’t always the one steering, the one forming his lips into words. It was better when he had the swazzle in his mouth. Everything he said felt right then, even though the sound emerged as a series of shrieks and rasps and vibrations, words that no one else could understand. He realised he didn’t know if Judy was in the bag, as the boy had asked. Sometimes it was the earlier one, the older one: Joan. Sometimes it was the newer one, the one he never quite knew where she came from: Old Ruthless.
The waistcoated lad who’d only managed to say I’m sorry drew a sigh. “I suppose we could—in a corner of the bar, if it’s just a booth.”
The Professor answered him with a look.
“Just the one show, is it? Just one? Because we’re kind of busy.” “And dinner.”
The boy looked puzzled. “I’m afraid service just finished. Chef might be able to plate something up for you, before he goes.”
The Professor scowled. “I’ll be fed.”
He nodded in relief. “Our manager—she left no information about paying you—”
“I’ll be paid.” The Professor started to walk across that grey, too smooth carpet, leaving the youth to follow in his wake. A special night, and nothing was ready: he did not suppose his theatre would be set up waiting for him, as it usually was, nor his watery soup turning tepid upon the table. It was lucky he always carried his booth; and his puppets—his special puppets—were always at hand, as they should be, or he wouldn’t deserve the name Professor, or Punchman, or, as some were wont to call the entertainment, Beach Uncle. And without such a name, what would he be? He supposed, once, he had borne some other moniker, but if he had, he could no longer remember it. The space opened around him, larger than he had expected; perhaps the night was special after all. The walls were painted a slightly paler grey, too bright, but it was flaking in the corners and the edges of the sofas were scuffed. The bar was grey too, and the high ceiling, lost to the dim lighting, was a deeper shade. He saw at once where he would set up his booth. There was a little nook off to one side, too small to be of use for anything else, where he knew the floors would not have been swept and the dim corners would have been abandoned to the spiders or whatever else cared to take up residence there. Yes: that was the way to do it.
He did not look at the faces of the occupants of the room, not yet. It wasn’t time. But his gaze went towards the wall of windows, which were dark, reflecting the interior of the bar and the deeper shadow where he stood. He nodded with satisfaction. The rain, finally, had stopped.
*
In the long pause, in the silence and the darkness, the Professor waited. He was on his knees, his back bent; the bag was at his feet with Mr Punch still supine, half in and half out of the opening. Above the Professor’s head was the little waiting stage and beyond that was the bar, entirely stilled, its patrons gathered in to a row of chairs hastily brought forward by the lad who’d said I’m sorry.
Outside the booth nobody spoke, but he could picture their faces, all turned expectantly to the little rectangular opening draped in fabric that had once been brightly striped in red and white. Without looking, the Professor slipped the swazzle from his pocket and into his mouth, tasting the old, cold bone, and he held it in position with his tongue. He could still sense the excitement creeping from the bag and towards his hands. It was the night. Early in May on the seafront, and not just any day in May: it was the 9th, the evening that was recognised throughout the land as Mr Punch’s birthday.
In answer to that thought a faint wheezing, a little like a laugh, emerged into the quiet. He was not sure if it came from his own breath passing through the swazzle or the bag on the floor or from the air around him. It didn’t matter. Soon they would begin and everything else would end. It was almost time. He reached down, his fingers seeking out Mr Punch’s hat, passing over the soft nap of its fabric and fi
nding the opening into which he would slip his fingers.
He couldn’t see it but he pictured the soft brown substance; its touch felt like skin against his hand as he pulled it home.
He closed his eyes. That’s the way to do it.
He pictured the little boy’s face. Is Judy in there? He knew, despite his excitement, the child would not be watching. He was too new, too fresh for any of this. The show wasn’t meant for the likes of him. He knew who would make up his little audience: ladies in voluminous chintzy skirts, their face powder clogging the wrinkles beneath; old men, tired from years of stale marriages and disappointing jobs, disillusioned and spent; the worn out, the mad and the lost. That’s who would be waiting for him, who was always waiting for him.
In the next moment, he had poked Mr Punch’s head up over the stage and an odd sort of sigh rose from the audience. With his other hand he stretched down and rummaged in the bag, finding another soft, leathery opening. As Mr Punch began to shout for his wife, he slipped it on. It wasn’t Judy, he felt that at once. It was the original: it was Joan, though he knew the people watching wouldn’t know the difference. Sure enough he heard a call of “Judy, Judy!” as he used her little hands to grab her baby from within the bag’s innards and sent her up to join her irascible husband.
He spoke through the swazzle, every word and gesture coming as if from somewhere miles distant, the show drifting over him as if he wasn’t the one in control at all, and yet it was the same as always; a sense of being in the very right place at the very right moment, though he felt discomfited at that, and an image of that hotel sign rose before him, flashing its maimed sign as a woman’s voice said: Mr Snell. Mr Snell …
As he thought of it, Mr Punch dropped the baby, Joan screamed, and the couple set to, her beating him with her hands, he fighting back with his stick until the sound the swazzle made rose to a scream. Joan fell, though within reach, as she always did; he pulled her into the dark with the tip of his shoe. He knew that she was waiting; she was only ever waiting. And then he realised that no one had yet laughed.
He listened, hearing only silence on the other side of the booth, and felt the stillness creeping from that side of the grimy fabric and into the dark, and the little twist of discomfiture inside him grew a little. But of course all was still; nothing was happening, and he grasped in the bag for the policeman and sent him up to make his arrest until Mr Punch beat him too and flung him into the void.
At last there came a titter, too high and too clear, but there was no time to think of it. The words were forming, the next puppet fitting itself slick and snug onto his hand.
“It’s dinnertime.” The words were clear, even swazzle-distorted as they were, but as he said them the Professor thought No, it’s not, I haven’t had my dinner, and he knew something was wrong even as Joey the Clown entered stage right and waved his string of sausages at the onlookers. Punch descended once more into the dark and nestled in close. He didn’t speak in words, not exactly, but the Professor heard him anyway: Hungry.
I know. I know you are.
It’s my birthday. I want cake.
The Professor swallowed, carefully, around his swazzle. Punchmen had been known to die that way, choking on the thing that made them what they were: when their time was up. He felt suddenly very tired. His time would never be up, he knew that. The characters were all there, in his bag, waiting: Scaramouche and the skeleton; the hangman; the ghost; the lawyer; Jim Crow; the blind man. The crocodile, who would soon go up and wrestle the clown for his sausages. All had made their appearance in his show so many times, appearing in the very right place at the very right time. Old words ran through his mind:
With the girls he’s a rogue and a rover He lives, while he can, upon clover
When he dies—only then it’s all over And there Punch’s comedy ends.
As if in answer, laughter finally came from the other side of the curtain, as the sausages and then the clown went to join Mr Punch’s wife in the nothingness beyond the booth. It wasn’t the right kind of laughter though, he knew that, felt that, and he found himself wondering if tonight was the night and an odd kind of hope rose within him. Tonight, the devil might come, the one character from the show who never did; the devil might come and take them all.
That’s the way to do it, he thought but didn’t say, because it wasn’t yet time: he always knew when it was time. First Punch went back to dispose of the crocodile and then the doctor tried to treat him only for Punch to beat him with his slapstick—“Take that!” said the swazzle— and he too was thrown into space, emptied and wrinkled without the enlivening force of the Professor’s hand, nothing but an empty skin.
Another delve into the bag and a jolt of that same electricity he’d felt earlier crackled through him. Jack Ketch, the Hangman, was soft yet cold against his hand. Suddenly, he knew he had to look. He didn’t know why but he felt almost sick with the need to do so, and he used Ketch’s arm to draw the awning back, just a slit.
The breath seized in his throat. The golden haired boy he’d seen earlier was there after all, sitting in the front row, his smiling mother on one side and a man who must be his father on the other, all of them smiling, not used up, not worn out, not ready. It wasn’t right. None of it was right, and he realised he’d known it when the steering wheel had turned in his hands and he’d felt the greed rising from the back seat where Mr Punch lay, watching with his blank blue eyes and hungering, always hungering, but especially today.
I want cake.
The Professor closed his eyes. He knew suddenly it was not the right time; it wasn’t the right time and it wasn’t the right place. It never had been. Snell was waiting, he knew that too. Mr Snell had called him and booked him, the entertainment to follow the strife, to follow the rain, but Mr Snell wasn’t here.
The Professor opened his eyes and saw Punch’s blue orbs staring back. “I don’t know how to do it,” he said, except it came out in a series of wheezing growls, the words lost, because this was what he did: a duty that could not be shirked. Mr Punch whipped his head back up onto the stage and Jack Ketch chased him with his noose, Punch pointing at it, condemned but not ready to go quietly, not yet. “I don’t know how to do it.” The words, this time, were clear.
Here, the Professor knew, was where the hangman would put his own head in the noose to show Punch how to do it, only to be kicked off the stage and hung himself. That’s what was supposed to happen. It wasn’t what happened in his show, however, because Joan was back, taking Ketch’s place, holding the noose herself and looking about, shading her painted eyes with one hand.
“I need a volunteer,” she said, every word crystal-sharp despite the swazzle, the old bone that was cold in the Professor’s mouth. He recalled that it was sometimes called a strega. The word meant ‘witch’. He had never known why, not properly, and yet somehow he had always understood and had felt strangely proud of the fact, because it showed that he belonged: he was the Professor, the Punchman, the Beach Uncle.
He realised the boy was staring directly at the slit in the curtain, looking straight at him. He nudged it back into place even as the child pushed himself to his feet.
“A volunteer!” Joan shrieked, waving her little hands in excitement, jangling the noose, beckoning him on, and the Professor heard footsteps approaching, too soft and light.
For a moment there was silence. Then Joan made prompting noises, little wheezy nudging sounds, and she waved the noose, and he heard:
“I don’t like it,” spoken softly and with a little breathy laugh at the end, and the same footsteps retreated, and Joan shrieked more loudly than she had ever shrieked, so loudly that it hurt the Professor’s ears. Then came another voice, a louder, smoother voice, which said “Don’t worry, it’s fine, I’ll show you,” and louder, more tappy footsteps approached, and the Professor knew without looking that the child’s mother was coming forwards; that she was going to show him the way to do it.
Joan showed her the noose. She slippe
d it over the woman’s head. And then there was a pause because Mr Punch wanted a souvenir; he always wanted a souvenir. He bobbed down and reached his camera from the bag—an old, heavy, Polaroid camera—and he bobbed up and had her pose, trying this angle and that before there was a loud bang and a flash drowned the world in light, just for an instant, and the woman’s son caught his breath.
The camera whirred and spat its picture onto the floor. The Professor could just see it, below the old tangled fringe that ran around the bottom of the booth. Faintly, like a ghost, the woman’s grin was appearing in the photograph: only that, her lips parted in the strained semblance of a smile, revealing teeth a little less white than the paper. Then Mr Punch stepped forward and hit her with his slapstick.
There was another bang, this time so loud that everyone would be forced to close their eyes, just for a moment, just as long as it took, and the woman was hung, her body limp and falling, emptied of enlivening force; nothing but an empty skin.
“I don’t know how to do it,” said Mr Punch. “I need a volunteer,” said Joan.
A rough shout came from the other side of the booth, of mingled surprise and awe, followed by loud clapping, albeit from a single pair of hands. The Professor peeked out to see the woman’s husband looking impressed, grinning and clapping. They always grinned and clapped. And he realised that the child and his father were the only ones watching the show. There were no worn-out old ladies, no tired and ancient men. The boy wasn’t grinning and clapping, however. He was peering to left and right of the booth at the blank grey walls and the grey floor, no doubt wondering when his mother was going to appear again, laughing at his surprise and perhaps, too, his fright. But his mother didn’t appear. Instead his father was coming forward, his smooth-soled shoes making hardly any sound on the carpet. Joan placed the noose over his head. There came a bang—flash—whirr, and a photograph drifted to the floor, the ghost of another fixed smile already beginning to form.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 21
