The Hanging Artist

by Jon Steinhagen

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  abaddon@rebellion.co.uk

  First published in 2019 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith

  Editors: David Thomas Moore, Michael Rowley and Kate Coe

  Marketing and PR: Remy Njambi

  Cover: Sam Gretton

  Design: Sam Gretton, Oz Osborne and Gemma Sheldrake

  Copyright © 2019 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-159-6

  Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Dedicated to my godmother, Judith Coolbaugh Peters, the best there is or ever was — my eternal gratitude for continuing to gift me all the detective stories, and all the love.

  “…you have been entrusted with a given task, you have the strength to carry it out (neither too much nor too little, you have to make sure you don’t waste it, but without undue concern), you have the necessary free time and you are not lacking the desire to work. So what is the obstacle that stands between you and the completion of this extraordinary undertaking? We should not waste time looking for obstacles, perhaps there are none.”

  —Excerpt from Franz Kafka’s diary,

  16 January 1922

  CHAPTER ONE

  AN UNEXPECTED WEDNESDAY

  FRANZ KAFKA AWOKE one morning from unpleasant dreams, to find himself face to face with an enormous insect that was attempting to take his temperature; the insect, however—either confused as into which end the thermometer was to go or set upon giving Franz an abrupt and rude awakening—had the thermometer nowhere near Franz’s mouth.

  Franz recoiled, and was surprised to find he had the strength to recoil. When last he checked—the night before?—he had been too weak to do anything except close his eyes in what he thought would be his final slumber, but here he was, awake and recoiling from the insect with the thermometer.

  Insect.

  “I didn’t mean to awaken you,” it said. “I do hope you’ll forgive me.”

  Franz took in the insect’s domed brown belly, divided into stiff arched segments; and its numerous legs, pitifully thin compared to the rest of its bulk, which moved in various unsettling directions all at once. At the moment, one leg wielded the dreaded baton-sized thermometer while two others poured water from a battered ewer into a glass tumbler.

  “I’ll forgive you so long as you change the destination of that thermometer,” Franz said.

  Said. He hadn’t croaked, he’d said. His clear voice surprised him more than the fact that the giant insect tending to him also possessed the power of speech.

  Franz assumed he was deep in a dream, although it was unlike any of the dreams he’d endured his forty years of life: bright, sunny, calm, and courteous. He ruled out ‘dream’ and tried to adjust his thinking to reality.

  The room, a regular human room, only rather too small, sat in stillness between four antiseptic walls. Beyond the bed was a spindly chair meant for visitors and a shabby wardrobe missing its knobs. Next to Franz was the bedside table, to the surface of which a small electric lamp had been screwed. The lamp and the table stood in front of the room’s sole window, its shadeless panes clear and giving onto a view of—where?

  “You’re still in the sanitarium,” the insect said, offering Franz the water. Franz, reacting from instinct, grimaced and turned away before it could touch his lips. “You must be thirsty,” the insect said. “Drink.”

  The insect’s voice was soft and unrefined, crude but not unpleasant, like velvet gravel running down a sluice. Its head was a brown sphere of exaggerations: shiny black eyes the size of dinner plates and a mouth resembling a complicated gardening tool, which made scissoring motions when it spoke.

  “You can manage this now,” the insect said, pressing the water upon on him. “Trust me.”

  Franz nearly trusted the thing, but aggressive memories of pain kept him from taking the water. His throat was raw and dry, a convulsive hell useful only for producing spasms of red hot knives followed by blood, neither of which could be considered joyful.

  “Trust me,” the insect repeated.

  Franz did not.

  The insect either rattled or sighed, or perhaps its rattle was a sigh. “You need fluids, Herr K,” it said.

  Franz bristled at the informality of the address. “Kafka,” he said. “Herr Kafka.”

  “I apologize for the liberty,” the insect said.

  “Forgiven,” Franz said. And swallowed.

  Nothing.

  No fiery pain, no convulsion, no cough.

  And no blood.

  Which was encouraging.

  And suspicious.

  He swallowed again.

  Nothing. A pleasure, actually.

  And he was thirsty as hell.

  He snatched the tumbler from the insect and drank as he’d never drunk before. The water was gone in an instant. “More,” he said.

  The insect handed him the ewer. “Might as well cut out the middle man,” it said.

  Franz put the ewer to his lips, the pewter delicious to his formerly swollen tongue, and gulped the water down without taking a breath.

  Finished, he belched.

  The insect took the ewer from him. “You shouldn’t try to run when you’ve just learned to crawl,” it said, “but I’m sure allowances can be made in your situation.” It placed one of its stick-like legs on Franz’s forehead, and Franz shuddered at its touch. “I apologize if my touch is a bit brusque, I have a tendency to be a bit heavy-legged,” it said, discarding the thermometer with another leg. “You are as a cool as a cucumber,” it said, “assuming cucumbers are cool, that is; I haven’t felt one. But it seems a nice enough saying.”

  The mention of a cucumber sent pangs of hunger bouncing around Franz’s freshly-watered but otherwise empty stomach, which gurgled like a drained sink. Franz excused himself.

  “I’ve heard worse,” the insect said, “and usually coming out of myself.”

  Franz settled back into the pillow. Whatever was happening to him was happening too fast, and it was catching up to him. He looked at the solid white walls and ceiling, the crisp white counterpane on his bed, the dark blue piping on his cheap, store-bought yellow pajamas. The linens felt like linen, the pillow felt like pillow, the air smelled like air (with just a hint of carbolic), and the June sunlight that lazed through the window was definitely sun-like.

  But was it June?

  Yesterday had been June, but Franz wasn’t sure today was June. He seemed to have a vague understanding that he had been cured of his disease, but—if that were true—could such a thing have happened overnight?

  “Today is the fourth day of June,” the insect said, again anticipating Franz’s questions. “Unless you only wanted to know what day of the week this is, in which case it’s Wednesday.”

  “And the year?” Franz asked.

  “It’s still 1924,” the insect said. “You
don’t look a day older. Actually, you do look a day older than you did yesterday, because you are a day older. I’m just trying to put you at—”

  “Overnight,” Franz said.

  He was no longer a clenched fist of raw, bloody tissue. He could stretch his arms and legs without his entire body constricting into a resistant mass of dry agony. He could speak. He could drink. He could breathe.

  He could not, however, explain the enormous talking insect at his bedside.

  “And yet I know I’m not dreaming this,” he said.

  The insect drew the chair to the bedside and did its best to arrange its awkward shape upon it, but its great round back made it impossible. It cursed and turned the chair around, sitting as best it could astride it.

  “Tell me how you know you’re not dreaming this,” the insect said.

  Franz weighed his thoughts carefully and found them on the light side. “When something is real,” he said, “it gives you the strong impression that it couldn’t be anything else.”

  As the insect seemed disinclined to comment on this, Franz said, “Which is not to say that I don’t have questions.”

  The insect nodded. “Fire away.”

  “Yesterday I was done for,” Franz said. “There was no doubt about it. The tuberculosis I’ve been battling forever had won; I knew it, the doctors knew it, the disease knew it. I had ceded the battle. I had closed my eyes for the last time, or so it felt when I did.”

  And so he had. He had not known who, if anyone, had remained in the room. He had assumed he had been completely alone, abandoned. Not even Dora at his bedside. Or had she been there? In the oily, indistinct swim of his labored last moments, he hadn’t been conscious of anyone or anything except himself, adrift on a hard sanatorium bed, air dwindling until the tiniest wisp was a gift and a farewell. He recalled finally lowering his eyelids—like ringing down a curtain—with a feeling of relief and surrender.

  “And now,” Franz said, “I’m awake, thirsty, hungry, drawing great pails of air into my pink, fresh lungs—at any rate, they feel pink and fresh—as if I’ve never had a sick day in my life. I can smell the faint tang of carbolic in the air, and I think I heard a wretched soul being sick down the hall. I’m well. I’m better than well: I’m nothing like I ever was. I’m robust, acute, conversant, and I haven’t seen a doctor or nurse the ten minutes or so I’ve been awake.”

  “As you say, it’s only been ten minutes,” the insect said. “Perhaps someone will show up soon.”

  “I have a strange feeling that no one will. And if they do, they’ll get a shock of a lifetime.”

  “And how do you account for me?” the insect said, leaning closer.

  “Easily,” Franz said, and smiled his first genuine smile in what must have been ages. “You are my compromise.”

  “Your compromise?”

  “My exchange.”

  “Explain.”

  “Something inexplicable happened to me overnight,” Franz said, and noticed, for the first time, that the white paint at the corners of the ceiling was flaking away, revealing a mucous green color beneath. “Something incomprehensible and—wonderful?—yes, perhaps wonderful, but as miracles don’t come without a price, I understand I may have had to give up something in exchange for my health. And what did I give up? My sanity, apparently. And that is how I explain your manifestation.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t say ‘infestation,’” the insect said. “I’m a trifle touchy about hurtful remarks.”

  “Well, there’s only one of you, so it’s hardly an infestation.”

  “True.”

  “And I haven’t found your presence completely offensive.”

  “The slightly dung-y smell that accompanies me is, I’m afraid, unavoidable, although I borrowed your eau de cologne in the hope that it would take the edge off.”

  “Ah.”

  “The cheap stuff your sister bought you for your last birthday.”

  “Ah.”

  “I ended up using all of it.”

  “Ah.”

  “Didn’t do much good, did it?”

  “I’m getting used to it,” Franz said. Which was a lie.

  The insect stood and moved the chair back to its corner, staying a respectable distance from the foot of the bed, its antennae swaying this way and that.

  Franz propped himself up. “I’m starving,” he said.

  “What would you like?” asked the insect.

  “Everything,” Franz said, and his stomach emitted another vulgar plea for food. “Ring for somebody, will you?”

  “It’s probably for the best if I fetch whatever you require,” the insect said. “What would you like? Stewed prunes? Some fruit? Perhaps a salad. Oatmeal? Gruel?”

  Franz felt his stomach do an indignant turn. “God, no,” Franz said. “I want meat. A beefsteak the size of that table, for starters. A selection of wurst. Schnitzel, every kind they have. All drowning in gravy. ‘Fruit and salad’—to hell with that rabbit food. Come to think of it, I’ll have a nice saddle of rabbit, too…”

  He stopped, as he realized what he was saying.

  “Then I take it your vegetarian days are over,” the insect said.

  Yes, Franz thought, those days were over, and he wondered at the sudden, reawakened craving for flesh. What else had changed about him; or, more to the point, how many of his past convictions had sloughed off and been forgotten in the space of a night? He didn’t pursue an inventory, as he felt his head and eyelids becoming heavy again, as if the buffet of heavy, rich dishes revolving in his mind was already putting him into a postprandial slumber.

  “Days… over…” he said.

  He would try to understand everything when next he awoke, but one all-important question remained to be answered.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why what?” the insect asked.

  “Why didn’t I die?”

  Somewhere, a clock ticked, although Franz knew a clock had never been placed in his room in the nearly two months he had languished there.

  “Why didn’t I die?” he asked again.

  He heard the giant insect sit.

  “Who knows?” it said. “Maybe someone, somewhere, needs you.”

  Franz laughed; it was his first laugh in an age that didn’t cause him pain. It felt good.

  “No one needs me, my friend,” he said.

  “That, too, is possible. Oh well. Have a pleasant nap, Herr Kafka.”

  “How long are you to be with me?” Franz asked.

  “It’s anyone’s guess,” the insect said. “For now; for tomorrow; until the week is out; for the rest of my life.”

  “You might as well call me Franz,” Franz said. He was preparing to dive into a massive bowl of hunter’s stew, using a huge spoon as his diving board. He’d swim to the nearest dumpling and nap. “What should I call you?”

  “You know my name,” the insect said, something of a smile in its coarse, low voice.

  Did he? Yes, he did.

  “It’s too coincidental, too neat,” Franz said, opening his eyes to see the room fast fading from white to yellow to amber as the sun set with unseemly speed. “I can’t believe you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because my creation can’t have become a reality.”

  The insect waited a moment before responding. The shadows grew longer.

  “Perhaps you are a better writer than you think,” it said.

  “Don’t be fatuous,” Franz said.

  “Perhaps you didn’t create me at all,” the insect said. “Perhaps I created you.”

  Franz listened to the emptiness of the sanitarium; every shred of noise had ceased, leaving the oppressive weight of dead silence surrounding his narrow bed.

  He closed his eyes again. He swam through the warm, fragrant stew, already thinking of dessert.

  “You say ‘perhaps’ too often,” Franz said. “‘Perhaps’ is a convenient linguistic escape.”

  “Escape from what?”

 
“Everything.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” the insect said. “Good night, Franz.”

  “Good night,” Franz said, “Gregor.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  AN EVENING OF ENTERTAINMENT

  THEY WERE, AT first, dubious, although ‘dubious’ was not the word they would have used, as they were basically simple people, not uneducated, but not blessed with extensive vocabularies, either. The word they would have used was… well, they wouldn’t have used a word, because they said things like, “What the hell is a hanging artist?” and, “What’s he hang? Wallpaper?” and, “Let me guess—he’s an artist who just hangs around,” and—this from Prinsky, who came off as more sensitive than the others, possibly because he was trying to impress the girl who lived on Wunderstrasse and stuffed anise drops three at time into her mouth—“Perhaps he brings meaning to his art.”

  The girl who lived on Wunderstrasse wasn’t impressed. Mainly because she was trying to get the attention of the handsome cashier whose name was so unlike its possessor that no one could remember it.

  His name was Hermann Herbort, and an uglier name one couldn’t imagine for such a beautiful man. He lived with it, however, because he didn’t have any creative resource when it came to making things up, and besides, it would look funny if a bank cashier went by an assumed name and was later discovered. It would take a lot of explaining. Herbort didn’t like to do any explaining.

  Which is why he loved to go out and be entertained: he could sit in his seat, slightly dozy from beer and knackwurst, and let another human being feed him thoughts, ideas, music, jokes, beauty, excitement, color, dance, delights, wonders…

  Herbort was one of the best audience members in Vienna.

  His salary, however, did not allow him to indulge in particularly majestic art; he was never to be seen at the opera, for instance, not even as a guest, as his friends and cohorts all belonged to his own class (which is to say, one pay packet away from selling something to survive). It had been suggested to him, more often than he was comfortable admitting that he ought to let his achingly good looks provide him a grander manner of living by attracting a wealthy middle-aged or elderly widow dripping in disposable income—by becoming, so to speak, a gigolo—but the thought filled him with loathing. He’d only choose that route if he found himself not much better off ten or fifteen years down the road, assuming his looks held out.