by Rhys Hughes
Cressida asked: “They were out of date?”
The delivery man nodded in relief. “I knew you would understand. My guess is that they were close to hatching when he gave them to me. It is not the first time he has used that swindle, I’ve been told. But I never thought he would try to cheat me. I’m the only one who sells his produce over the web. I’m his lifeline to the future. It’s his loss if I decline to barter with him from now on.”
Rodin grimaced. “The zoo? What do you mean?”
“We’re the cheapest company in the city. Don’t tell me you expected goods from a reputable source?”
“Is that so very amusing?”
“Ha, ha, ha! Tee, hee! Of course not!”
Rodin spat. “We can’t eat that for breakfast.”
Cressida frowned. “A scruffy thing. Are you totally sure it hatched while you were carrying it here? It looks as if it has already been on a voyage around the world. Perhaps even to a land of mountains and pampas? It certainly doesn’t seem young enough to confirm your excuse. Just peer a bit closer at its dusty wings.”
“That’s dirt from our streets, I assure you.”
She rested her hands on her hips, a gesture as fatal as the priming of a powerful crossbow. Her tongue was the bolt, the quarrel, square and heavy as a bodkin. “I think you are a liar, fellow. The local grime is a greyish colour, and this is blue. Furthermore, it hangs from the plumage the wrong way. It is inverted.”
Rodin backed her up, though he had not noted the discrepancy. “This cockatrice has ventured below the equator . . .”
The delivery man sneered. “What’s that to me? You call me a liar? I say the same to you! What are you anyway? Artists? That’s all lies, made up stuff. Busts and stories. By what right do you degrade my job? Go and scream at Mr Slurp. Nothing to do with me. Someone betrays me, I have no choice but to pass the trick on.”
“Well, I don’t propose to sculpt this.”
“Why not, darling? It might make a fabulous study.”
Rodin waved his hand at the monster. “Too ornate! Look at the crown fixed to its head. That’s cartilage, of course, but it has an appearance of electrum: gold blended with silver, I mean. A very difficult alloy to reproduce in stone. It’s tarnished now, slightly askew even, but you can see the inherent quality of its design. And the plumage is also complex. I’m too weak and empty to begin.”
“Listen, mister and lady, it doesn’t bother me what you do with it. Just pay me and I’ll be gone. You can serenade it for all I care. But my other customers are waiting. I can’t hang around here. Business is hard, what with all the little intrigues.”
Cressida stroked her own chin. It made a nice change. “I wonder how much roasting it would take to become edible? The eyes are a problem. If we shut it in the oven, the blindfold might burn off. We could fashion a new one from aluminium foil, but . . .”
Rodin was unconvinced. “I’m not eating a cockatrice!”
The delivery man replaced his cap with an air of irritated finality and said: “You pay for the product now or I take it back. But I’ll still charge you for dragging me up here.”
“We waited all day for you to arrive!” growled Rodin.
“You want quicker service? Choose a different company in future. As for me, I’m off. Return my monster!”
Cressida pounced on the cockatrice. “Never!”
The delivery man hesitated before launching himself at her. Then it seemed to Rodin that a strange dance had commenced. He knew his duty was to assist his agent, but he felt paralysed by an idea that occurred to him. First he saw that the cockatrice remained calm throughout the tussle. It did not squawk or flap its wings like other poultry. It kept silent and inscrutable behind its blindfold. Then he realised that the delivery man was scratching and biting at Cressida’s bodice. Two laces had already snapped. Her generous and powerful bosom was in peril of revealing itself in its full glory to the sculptor for the first time.
And this had a weird effect on him. It numbed him with the idea. An idea for a new work. A nude! She was perfect, already statuesque enough to finish half the piece just by posing. So he now appreciated that he admired her in far more than a professional way. It was a startling revelation. As the fight continued, he stood and held up a finger, to judge distance and relative height. The nude was coming. A few more snapped laces and she would be ready, cheeks flushed with her marvellous fury. He sighed deep.
To defend herself against untimely exposure, Cressida began hitting the delivery man with the only weapon at her disposal. She could not use her fists because her hands were full of the cockatrice. So she employed the creature itself. The foul bird bounced on the face of the man and he diverted his own hands to protect his cheeks from the lacerations of its talons. His thumbnail hooked the blindfold. A knot came undone. Then the piece of rag dropped down. The delivery man screamed, but unlike in most stories where such things happen, his terror was not cut off sharply. It continued after he was no longer alive, an echo, a fading musical scream inside minor anatomical caverns.
Cressida acted quickly, replacing the blindfold on the creature. It fluttered to the floor and waited quietly again. The delivery man stood. He was neither silent nor loud, but more neutral than either. He was now a statue, a man of stone. Somehow he had been turned into rock! And more sounds came to replace the echo of his scream. Small creakings under his dolomite feet, for the floorboards could not tolerate the weight of such a large statue without bending. Rodin was unable to remove his eyes from her cleavage, and she was reluctant to rescue his mind from the ravine, but necessity demanded movement.
“He is cold,” she remarked.
Rodin spluttered: “Dead for sure. But it can’t be like that. Poison is in the glance of the average cockatrice. No more. It never petrifies. The legends can’t be wrong.”
Cressida shrugged. “So the situation must be?”
“Yes, but it’s not. Something must have happened to the bird in its formation that gave it this talent.”
“Every cockatrice commences as an orphan egg. It is laid with major difficulties by a male chicken, and then hatched by a snake or toad. But imagine that this one has been sat on by a gorgon! The paranormal powers of the two monsters might become blended.”
Rodin stamped his foot in dismay. “That’s so typical of my luck! We can’t even be swindled with a standard cockatrice! It has to be some odd mutation of the hideous beast.”
She chuckled and gripped him firmly but affectionately by his tufts of wild hair. “You’re so silly at times, my little maestro! Possibly you are the one with the blindfold? Can you really be so obtuse as to ignore this opportunity which has presented itself? Not long ago, you expressed your longing to have a device, a machine of some kind, which would carve your statues for you on its own. You wanted to sit back while it did the work. That wish is now granted.”
“Yes! That’s true, isn’t it? Cressida, how I adore you! If I wasn’t such a genius I might wish to be as clever as you! The cockatrice is our ticket to renown and remuneration.”
“Any living thing which meets its gaze will turn to stone. Then you may claim it as your own piece.”
“Anything alive? Animals and vegetables?”
“The same victims as are vulnerable to gorgons and cockatrices. All creatures that have eyes. Plants are blind and thus safe. So are many of the smallest insects and mites.”
He nodded. “Do you have any suggestions?”
She stepped against him, and the malignity in her words was sensual and thrilling: “Stick to humans.”
He trembled all over. “We shall be murderers!”
“Preservers of beauty and ugliness in equal measure. Without mercy, yes, but benefactors of a kind of immortality. Without shame too, Rodin! And lovers! Beyond petty morals!”
“You are right, dearest! I concur with this plot!”
“Tell me exactly how you concur . . .”
He spread his arms in a pompous gesture. “Think of the naturali
stic details of my future works! The experimental sculptors may mock, but the academy will approve! I’ll declare that I have embraced representational art in its purest form! The decadent set can juggle violins and neckties for their absinthe. I will sell out!”
“Will we tour Europe and other continents? Wherever we go, shall we create studies of local inhabitants?”
“I shall be lauded for my range and sensitivity!”
“Excessive fame is our destiny!”
“It is! It is! But I am too hungry! Still I’m hungry! At this time, this precious moment! It is spoiled!”
They sank to the ground in each other’s arms. The mood was cooling. The exuberant joys of evil did not suit them, no more than an itch suits a head in a diving helmet. But they could not pretend they had joked. It was too crucial to their stomachs for that. So Rodin rose, with the help of Cressida’s superior leverage, and circumnavigated the chilly delivery man. He made three circuits of the fraudster. He plucked the mallet from his belt and softly tapped its chest.
Then he fixed his ear to its mouth. “Still the faintest trace of an echo. All the hollow chambers of his lungs must be perfectly sculpted in there! Such attention to detail . . .”
“Of course. Close the door. I don’t want to reveal him to the whole corridor. Tomorrow we’ll carry him to the market. Drag him, if he is too heavy for our feeble arms. He’ll earn us plenty of food, and then we can start building up our collection.”
Rodin frowned. “Listen to that! Why not begin now?”
“What do you mean? We must rest!”
“Our neighbour has returned from the office. I heard his key in the lock of his door. He must have been working late! We’ll get him for what he did to us. Revenge, darling! And another piece for sale! He’ll be our next sacrifice to the spirit of fame.”
“We are outside the law now, dearest! And as we jump ever further beyond the edges of society the larger your reputation as a conventional artist will swell! What a fine paradox!”
He wagged a finger. “The ban on those was yours!”
She blushed. “I now decree it lifted.”
“Let’s waste no time turning our neighbour into a statue! I will go onto the ledge outside and inch my way to his window. His doom will come through his locked casement.”
“Doom, Rodin? Why not say redemption or deification?”
“Yes, my art shall make him immortal!”
“No more working in a boring office for him! No more earning plenty of mundane money. How generous we are!”
“That’s right. He doesn’t deserve it! Now watch!”
Gently cradling the cockatrice under an arm, the sculptor strode to his window and opened it wide. Then he climbed through, tottering on the narrow sill. He was high above the street and did not care to look down. Although he had made this journey many times, it never failed to unnerve him, whereas Cressida had grown indifferent to its hazards. With only one free hand to grip the stone of the façade, he was compelled to enjoy the company of vertigo. As he shuffled along, his elbow struck the wires of the aerial web, whose interstices quivered like little nooses for his ears. This was the first time he had made the trip since the creation of the new communication system. Soon he had lurched far enough to transfer the monster and the scruff of its neck from armpit to fist. Then he shut his eyes and removed the blindfold. He reached out, so that the birdlike demon and its gaze were level with his neighbour’s window. He was relying on its curiosity to peer inside.
The twilight air was cool on his grimace.
Now he moved his arm three times, tapping the glass with the curved beak. He heard a groan from somewhere, but he kept his eyes squeezed. He opened them only when he had pulled in his arm and gropingly defused the cockatrice with the cloth again.
He returned to his own window, his elbow still hitting the strings, and jumped down into his studio.
Cressida was listening through the wall.
“I think it worked, Rodin.”
He joined her. “I can hear the creaking of floorboards. Yes, he has turned into stone. Shall I go and check for real? There’s no need, until tomorrow, is there? I worried he wouldn’t be able to discern what it was in this murky light. It’s almost dusk.”
“Time to light the lamp . . .”
“No, let us sleep. We have busy lives ahead!”
“We do. And may I be your pillow?”
“Yes. First thing after dawn: we sell both pieces at the market for food and wine. Then we get drunk, riotously drunk! We may toast Mr Slurp for giving us this gift. This astounding legend! He’s become my patron. But what will we call the bird?”
“Have you named any of your chisels?”
“Of course not! They are just tools of the trade.”
“And so with the cockatrice. Let’s harden ourselves, Rodin. We must forget all that sentimental nonsense. We’re criminals now, remember? Two men have we killed. For personal gain.”
He shivered with the delicious cruelty of it. Then he permitted her to carry him to the divan. No physical thresholds were crossed, but they felt their belated romance was sealed by stepping over a much darker and more serious line. The edge of what is acceptable. Even though they were exhausted and famished, they fell asleep laughing, his head knocking and bruising itself against her chin. The laughter of potential power, a joy which demands no justification, mostly. A pinch of anxiety too, for they were villains only in the name of artistic success, corrupted bohemians, and under the berets of such types are mostly brains which are basically timid, which prefer attention to real change, and elaborate their social conscience from their own bad luck rather than humanitarian principle. A single dream was shared by both: the cockatrice strutting across a stone desert that was also a vast patio.
Another knock on the door. The early sunbeams slanted over the statue of the delivery man like pink searchlights, flaring to orange as the rhythm grew more urgent. Rodin was awake in a blink. He jumped naked out of his agent’s embrace, which had slackened in the twitchings of the dream, and stood firm on two dirty feet. He rubbed his face roughly. He recalled he was not yet famous and his shoulders slumped. There was a kettle to boil and clothes to struggle into but for some reason these had to be denied. Why? Then the pounding told him again.
He hissed: “The police are here!”
“What do you mean?” Cressida did not abandon the divan, but shifted position to show she took his news seriously.
“Somebody must have seen me inching along the ledge! We’re finished now! The judges won’t grant clemency.”
“We don’t want any. Stay calm, silly child.”
He hurried across the chamber looking for a sheet to throw over the statue. There was none. He shouted: “I’ll knock its features off with my mallet and we can deny it’s him!”
Cressida chuckled. She yawned and stretched and stood, her nudeness much larger and warmer than his. “No need for that. We can just say that we used the web to order the delivery man here, and that when he arrived you hired him as a model. We’ll neglect to mention that sitter and piece are no longer individual objects.”
“The same for our neighbour?”
“Indeed. If we only lie about half our alibi, we are less likely to arouse suspicion. And if we were innocent, why would we fret about where the original people have gone to?”
“You are correct. I will answer the knock.”
Forgetting that he lacked attire, Rodin pulled back the bolts, cast open the door and looked up. The secret police of the city were normally very tall. But there was nothing there, so he looked down, possibly with a vague idea that the next worst visitor might be another cockatrice. He was wrong on this score too. He saw shoes. The caller was just a person. He was a delivery man, but unlike the last one, he represented the local council. He ignored the sculptor’s nakedness with all the aloofness of a true bureaucrat and coughed twice.
“This is the residence of Mr Guignol?”
“But what have I done wrong? I didn�
�t do it!”
“Surely you did! Everyone does it all the time. We don’t expect our city to be populated by saints. That’s not why I’m here. The application for material support which you submitted last evening has been approved. We choose recipients randomly. You are required to accept this selection of items for the furtherance of your career. They are wrapped in council paper, which still belongs to us.”
Rodin squinted. “What do you have there?”
“The adjuncts most sought after by creative types such as yourself. Gaudy trousers, a copper mirror, suede boots and secular incense. I hope you intend to lodge no complaint?”
“None at all! I’ve always desired such gifts!”
The man gritted his teeth. “They are not luxuries but essentials. I trust you are aware of the difference?”
“Yes, I won’t violate the terms of the grant.”
The cockatrice had its back turned to the door. The man said: “Huge chicken. Is it fully domesticated?”
Rodin nodded. “A pet. But very ugly. We don’t like to look at it. A stray. We took it in. Don’t know why.”
“Because you are kind and unselfish people?”
Cressida nodded. “That is right.”
The man added: “Don’t much like creatures myself. Too many peculiar ones running around. Worms with legs.”
“Oh, we never keep those. . . .”
The man expanded his cheeks. “Glad to hear it. Well, I’ll leave you alone to utilise your things. Remember that the city council is there to help artists, at least occasionally! Don’t claim we’re uncultured again! You wouldn’t dream of it from now on, I suppose? That’s for the best. We are a lovely lot really. I’ve been delivering the same speech for weeks, but the tips I get are always different.”
Rodin answered: “I have no pockets.”
“Won’t offer me a tip? Grasping snobs! Well, I can make things very difficult for you when it comes to the compiling of the next census. How would you like to be listed as apes?”
“Not much. Won’t you reconsider? We are poor.”
