by Rhys Hughes
Monkey Jekyll pouted and Trumpton defended him: “He has no spare hands!”
Reginald nodded. “You are right. I am nervous. Well, if he keeps a firm grip on the razor and basin, we can return with the spade later.”
Lyndon asked: “What did you learn in those grimoires?”
Reginald picked up the nearest flask. He held it high. The vapours which spilled from the top were slightly heavier than air and rolled down the side of the glass, over his knuckles and wrist and into his bulging sleeve. The arm of his jacket was a tunnel to his collar, and the froth boomed silently out and about his thin neck, like storm waves against the single surviving column of an ancient part-sunken city. A city which deserved to sink.
“An alchemical formula for this. It wasn’t too difficult to mix. Most of the ingredients were readily available in the local pharmacy.”
“You are going to turn yourself into a gorilla?” cried Justin Legg. “That’s such a despicable thing to do! And this poor creature was doubtless your prototype! Who was he originally? Anybody I knew? Is that you, Ambrose? Ambrose Chipper?”
“It is not he. The gorilla has never been changed. What leads you to that deduction? It is false. This potion has never been tested. I am the first. If it works, it will not transform me into an ape . . .”
“A different kind of monster, perhaps?” hissed Nigel.
Reginald was genuinely bewildered. “Why any sort of monster? I plan to change into something much bigger!”
And so saying, he inclined the flask and gulped down its contents. His throat bulged first, with the pressure of the descending liquid. Then the rest of his body followed. Because he seemed disinclined to say it himself, Herbert Ogerepus cried: “Watch!” And the gorilla stamped its feet because there were no drums, and no thunder, and implausible events in silence are damaged wonders, which in turn are often just lies, and there was no dissembling here, only disassembly.
Reginald was coming apart. Or rather, he was unfolding.
First he swelled and burst his clothes. Then he turned green, not a uniform colour, but more lush in some places than others. The sweat on his brow resembled dew. Hair sprouted from his body, from every pore, and it thickened into blades. In the breeze from the gorilla’s frantic stamping, these waved lightly. A fine spot for a picnic, his face. All this time his frame was growing flatter and larger. He collapsed to the floor. He was a type of carpet. But he kept expanding, thin enough to slide under the feet of his guests. They stood upon him and gazed at the horizon.
There were trees and a lake. Plenty of benches, but the place was deserted.
“Looks like Hyde Park,” said Lyndon.
“Why are we here?” snapped Trumpton. “Where is Reginald?”
“How should I know? Ask the gorilla!”
The gorilla answered. The first slash caught Trumpton below the left ear. As he staggered, Monkey Jekyll held up the basin. Very few drops missed the white porcelain. He stood on Trumpton’s chest to disgorge the last pint, and then he chased after the others, who had scattered in different directions.
He brought down Davy Lewis with a flying tackle, breaking his back. The mining engineer was already dead when his wrists were opened. More artificial pumping was required to summon all the red juice. Ribs cracked on each jump.
Herbert Ogerepus had almost reached a clump of bushes. He screamed thrice as his heels were slashed. Monkey Jekyll stood him in the basin.
Billy Terbun, unfit and reluctant to shed his blazer, had made poor progress. He was hiding behind a tree near the site of the first murder. The dentist, for such he was, lost his measure through his tongue and gums.
It was the nose of Augustus Summers which was sliced. And his ears. A little fitter, he was lurking up a tree. “Waahnunghaa!” he cried, as he was shaken out, and then a little later he added: “Blurrrrnghoooo . . .”
Nigel Diamond did not scream once. He had already fainted. He lost his future through his abdomen and Monkey Jekyll danced with his intestines like scarves.
Justin Legg’s doom was all fingers and thumbs.
The cure of Myron Kettle’s malaria had something to do with his lungs. No more coughs, gasps, sighs or anecdotal evidence in deliriums.
Only one guest had not moved from the point of arrival. Lyndon Williams crouched and hugged himself and whimpered as the gorilla returned with a brimming basin. The fact that this vessel was full and the razor was now closed should have told him something. But he still trembled when Monkey Jekyll squatted down beside him and started picking at his hair for fleas. The search was generally unsuccessful.
They waited like this until the horizons contracted. The park was shrinking and slipping from under his feet. He was resting on bare floorboards again. He was back in Reginald’s apartment. And his host was beaming, somewhat painfully, on the other side of the low table, as if he had developed a headache.
He had. He said: “Enjoy my demonstration? It worked!”
Lyndon shuddered. “The potion wore off?”
“Yes, after about an hour. I was worried the change might be permanent. You can never be completely trusting when it comes to old spells.”
“I understand now,” answered Lyndon softly.
“It was a partnership,” said Reginald. “Monkey Jekyll and Hyde Park!”
“A most unexpected metamorphosis . . .”
“Indeed. And more clever than a mutation into some other animal or a regression to the primitive. Turning into a monster is relatively easy. Almost anyone can do it. A monster is an individual agent, a free creation, chaotic and unmanaged. Turning into a designated area for public recreational pursuits, protected by municipal laws from building developments, is much harder.”
“I believe that it is,” agreed Lyndon.
“The park is wholly inside my head now. And so are the bodies. There is no evidence inside this room that people have been murdered.”
“Apart from the blood. Why collect it and bring it back?”
“Nine guests. Eight were slain. Eight pints of fluid in each, making sixty-four in total. Enough to stain every square on a chessboard for a lifetime, or else to bathe a gorilla . . .”
Lyndon blinked. “Bathe a gorilla? Ah, fleas!”
“Precisely. They will jump from his fur into the liquid and then I shall pull the plug. Blood is inadequate evidence without the bodies. I am confident that I shall never have to pay for this crime. I won’t caution you not to talk to the police. They will automatically dismiss your claims.”
“What if I lead them to the corpses in Hyde Park?”
“Sorry. I didn’t change into the real one. I became a copy, which is now locked away tight inside my mind. However, I do plan to bury the bodies in shallow graves. At the moment, they are resting just under my skull. They feel like tumours. An accident or surgery may expose them. They must be concealed deeper in my brain. Enough potion remains for another transformation.”
Monkey Jekyll had left the room. Now he returned with a spade.
Lyndon rubbed his chin. “Why did you spare me?”
And Reginald laughed. “I didn’t! You received the correct punishment, just like the others. But your sins were less. They actively worked against me. You stood back and watched it happen. You were a neutral. You didn’t join in, but neither did you discourage them or protect me. I sentenced you to observe their dooms.”
Lyndon frowned. “How did they offend you? I don’t remember . . .”
Reginald clutched his head and winced. Something was weighing on his thoughts. It was not his conscience, but eight cadavers. He exchanged a wink with his gorilla. He muttered bitterly: “Why did they pick on me? After all, my name was no more ridiculous than some of theirs. It was always so unfair!”
He raised the flask again. The remaining potion swirled thickly. Lyndon turned to leave. He had no desire to witness the inhumations, psychological or physical. But as he reached the door, Reginald cleared his throat. He said:
“You didn’t make fun of
me at school!”
Asparagus On The Tooth
When a big city declares war on a small town, the womenfolk of both must be shut away. Not for their own safety, you understand, but to stop them from trying to tell everyone that size doesn’t matter. In such a conflict, it does.
It was in Sardinia many years ago that this all happened. I wasn’t there; I was here, where I am now. But Sardinia’s where the story was born, and it came to me of its own accord. Some tales split and branch as they travel the world, creating imperfect copies of themselves, until there is a different telling in every land. Then each is a version but none is an original, and the story has outgrown its words. Not this one. It kept the shape of a morsel, just enough for one mouth at a time, and was passed to me intact. Why it didn’t spread, I can’t say. If you forget it quickly, you will know why.
The warriors of the big city rode horses and pulled wagons full of swords and spears and slings. They also carried cages. They didn’t have arrows because there weren’t any birds in the cages to provide feathers. Catching birds in the city was difficult because the smoky chimneys discouraged them from landing on the roofs. The cages held toads instead, which are less use in combat, save as mascots.
The defenders of the small town had scythes and spades and hoes, but no toads. They probably knew how to croak on their own. They didn’t have a strategy because their leaders were publicans. They dug ditches which weren’t wide enough. Indeed they resembled the streets of the big city. They were dark and deep.
Some even dug ditches inside their own homes. In the cellar of the oldest tavern, a pick broke through the stone floor to reveal a pit, an ancient well so deep that forgotten splashes from long ago were still rising from the bottom.
So the protection of the small town presented a problem. But there was a solution, or so it seemed to Aldo, on the night before the attack. Nobody had fled the general fate and he didn’t want to be an exception. He was a carpenter with empty pockets and an ambitious wife who was always demanding a better life from him and structural improvements on the house. They dwelled in a hovel, which she considered beneath contempt.
He had promised under threat of a severe scolding to convert it into a minor palace. Unfortunately, his ideas and skills resided in different places on alternate days. The damage he had caused already was remarkable. His new project was the construction of a bed with legs, but it collapsed on its first trial, even though they had been married ages and no longer did what you are thinking.
“Aldo, you are a fool!” he said, to save her the trouble.
“But this accident has shown me how to save the town, I suppose!” she replied for him, and when he nodded she added: “Really?”
“Yes, I shall fetch my boots and saw.”
And off he went into the night. The small town, I ought to reveal, stood high in the Gennargentu Mountains, on the flat summit of a lofty crag. The only approach to it was over a wooden bridge which spanned a perilous gorge with a wild river far below. This bridge had been built centuries earlier by a good carpenter whose name nobody knew because he had caught his tongue on a lathe and was unable to tell anyone. Whenever he made something, he always included a single flaw, to avoid insulting the concept of perfection.
It was also he, so legend insists, who first brought asparagus to the island, for that is not a native crop. He had been sailing between two elsewheres on a merchant ship when it sank in a storm. The hold was packed with vegetables, but only the asparagus floated. And of the crew, only he swam. As he bobbed on the huge waves, he made a raft from the tasty spears, weaving them together one at a time. When it was finished, so was the storm and he pulled himself aboard to rest. The currents drew him along to Sardinia and he awoke on a beach.
Without money or friends, he couldn’t rely on receiving a warm welcome. Or rather, there was one waiting for him but he had to earn it. His talent with wood saved him from a miserable exile. All over the island he roved, designing and erecting houses, towers, windmills, whatever was too grand for the locals to carve for themselves. And he became rich, in financial terms, if not in amorous encounters, for lack of a tongue didn’t endear himself to the ladies of those communities who otherwise might have hoped to pay for his services with smooth limbs instead of hard coins.
Anyway, he lived to a senile age and died somewhere inland, having cheated the sea of a drowning. But the point was that he left behind this strong bridge when he had passed by so many generations ago, and Aldo reasoned that he alone was the man to weaken it, for only a carpenter unable to make a bed, in both senses, was inept enough to undo the work of a master. His rivals in the small town would weep if they attempted the task and their tears would rust the saws before they had cut midway through the supporting beams. He groped his way by starlight to the ravine, his long serrated blade rasping behind in the dust of the road as if he was hacking at the roots of his own culture.
He passed the final house and reached the bridge. If he cut it down completely, nothing much would be achieved; a stalemate or not even that. For the enemy warriors would clatter to a halt on the lip of the abyss, glaring across at their marooned prey, steeds snorting cones of vapour into the chill void, as if these might solidify and build a new arch by stealth of breath. Futile, but they would keep their hatred safe and soothe it with the idea they had the moral victory.
However, if he, Aldo, was cunning enough to weaken the bridge without collapsing it, the span might be transformed into a trap. The trick was to estimate exactly how much weight was required to bring it down after he had sawn partly through the supporting beams. He performed the calculations with his clumsy fingers and inflexible toes. The bridge was wide enough for nine riders abreast, and long enough for ninety. So 810 horses and an equal number of men, give or take a few wagons, plus armour and saddlebags. The sums were beyond him, of course, but he didn’t realise this.
He climbed over the rails and dropped among the beams and struts, looking down at the glittering ribbon of agitated water because he knew he shouldn’t. Then he thought of his miserable life and began cutting. The wind whipped the sawdust into his face, slick with sweat, and it stuck there, so that he soon resembled an amateurish wood-carving, the sort of carving he might attempt, which symbolises either naïve genius or utter foolishness, possibly both.
You know how it is. A craftsman of any type who fails to create will by all the laws of symmetry also be too incompetent to destroy. He had taken so much care over his bogus calculations, and was sawing at the beams so precisely, that dawn caught him with the task unfinished. And then his new world, a lattice or web with chunky strands, and he the fly, was shaken by hoarse thunder. The bridge swayed but it didn’t fall. The hooves of the invading army made him deaf to his own cries of frustrated rage.
The warriors of the big city had crossed over without incident. That wasn’t the idea. By the time the first riders had nearly reached the far side, the total mass of suspended aggression should have been enough to crack the bridge, and down, down into the frothing doom would tumble the cream, though rancid, of the cruel opposition. Most of a thousand troops, their mounts and equipment, dwindling below into crimson foam.
Instead, because of his inefficiency, they hadn’t even noticed the trap. The only thing sprung was the despair coiled in Aldo’s heart. He knew they were entering the small town at this very instant, leaping the useless ditches, cutting down his neighbours, customers and acquaintances.
It was a horrible thought. To distract his mind just a little, he completed his series of cuts, discarded his saw into the void and climbed up again to sit on the ground, facing the town across the abyss.
The houses and terraces on the crag remained curiously silent.
The clash of weapons did not come. Of rapine and slaughter, Aldo heard none.
Then he heard an outburst of guttural cursing from the invaders! The inhabitants had fled! Fled! But how? And they had taken their wealth with them. This was implausible and Aldo didn’t appreciate it
as much as he should have done. He waited, despite the dangers inherent in staying still, to watch developments.
Which were sharp and sudden but also long, in one direction: down. Yes, the warriors of the big city came back out of the small town and they were laden with nothing. All that pointless excitement! All those unused swords and spears and slings! They might have been saving them just for Aldo, the way events had turned out, but the silly carpenter was as inexpert at dying as anything else, and just before the first rider reached him with uplifted blade, the bridge, which had been sabotaged properly at last, went down.
A flash of steel among splinters. Loose horseshoes kicking nails, one of them bent; the single flaw. Into a chasm where the sun never peeps, so deep that polished armour might corrode before the inevitable impact. White spray turning dark. And shattered planks and beams losing their sandy sheen as they drank the crazy water.
Aldo was alone. He walked away, as if triumph was a sour relationship. Out of the mountains was his unspecified direction. He inched along narrow ledges which curled down and grew wider. Eventually the peaks became hills. He was in the grasslands of the Campidano, a windswept plain where wild ponies kicked over ancient ruins as a favour to time. He continued to stroll south, until the landscape showed signs of contemporary exploitation. He wondered as he wandered through the asparagus fields, recalling the story of the tongueless carpenter, doubting its truth for the first time.
It slowly dawned on him, as the farmhouses of great estates began to clutter the horizon, that he was heading toward a major centre of urban civilisation, perhaps the big city itself. The probability of this increased when he considered the fact there was only one city in Sardinia at that time, for this was an age not long after the decline of the mysterious Ozieri culture, but just before the rise of the equally obscure Nuraghic people. That’s a crumb of history for you; toast it yourself. Anyway, Aldo almost decided to turn back.
