The Smell of Telescopes Read online

  There was still time to ring for assistance. Limbless, voiceless, there was only one course of action available. He nodded at the bell and his head fell from his torso, rolling on the polished surface of the desk and knocking the bell over the edge. It tinkled once as it landed. Then, before utter blackness blew into every corner of his mind, he became aware of the wall splitting from ceiling to floor. It was a concealed door, and through it came an ancient figure, thin and menacing, with a shock of white hair and a peculiar limp. Was this the Bank Manager? His hopes fell with his blood-pressure as the figure cried:

  “Tough luck, Mina. The practical is always the hardest part.”

  “Sorry, Doctor Waldman. I tried my best.”

  “I know you did.”

  “It was nearly right. After my theory exam I was so confident. But there was a trace of compassion buried in its subconscious. It had to be destroyed. A single flaw and the creature is useless.”

  “This is a discipline for perfectionists, Mina. I believe you will do better in the resits.”

  “I hope so, Doctor Waldman. I certainly intend to use these limbs again. They performed very well. But the head is not right. Back to the morgue, I think!”

  “Let me help you cram all the pieces in your handbag. You are my favourite student, Mina, and I know you will go far. I feel it in my selection of hearts.”

  “My only wish is to emulate Victor Frankenstein.”

  “Oh, you will surpass his achievements. Your aptitude is as staggering as your originality. What a remarkable project for your finals! The Utterly Evil Banker!”

  Together they passed through the door, locking it behind them. The props would remain until the examination room could be booked for a resit.

  In a corridor of the University, Mina stopped and clutched at Doctor Waldman's sleeve. Her eyes were like icecaps awaiting a mysterious sledge.

  “I must succeed,” she said, “for the sake of the human race. The centuries to come will be characterised by unrestrained progress. Science will give us weapons of which we cannot conceive. Motorised guns which can spray thousands of bullets every minute, flying machines which can level whole cities with explosives, armoured wagons and undersea boats, rockets capable of sending germs or poisons to distant countries in a matter of hours, unimagined sources of destructive power borrowed from the sun, mystic rays to blind or carve up crowds, electric gadgets able to monitor and punish citizens. In short, everything necessary for autocrats to stamp their psychoses over the nations of the world! And who will create these devastating tools? Graduates, that’s who! What better way to limit their excesses than to nip them in the grant?”

  “You always grasp the big picture, Mina.”

  “We must ensure that as many students as possible are discouraged from graduating. They must be mercilessly harassed at the fresher stage until they drop out. Naturally, there will be those who refuse to abandon their studies, but I can’t be expected to cure the problem, merely alleviate it. If my Utterly Evil Banker proves a success, and if I can get it to breed, the banks of the future might be staffed by callous sadists, working tirelessly to oppose students. Such is my dream, Doctor Waldman. I am banking on monsters!”

  He patted her shoulder admiringly. “That is what Sociology and Reanimation is all about.”

  Arm in arm, they strolled to the morgue. But they kept their own arms folded.

  Ten Grim Bottles

  I want to tell a story about the cannibal who lives under our old stone bridge but first I need some characters and a pot—I mean a plot. Not much is known about him. It is almost certain that he has lived there since the beginning of time and answers to the name Toby. Aside from that, he is often feared for his bad breath. He never cleans his teeth between travellers.

  Lladloh village is that sort of place. There are too many wonders to get worked up over one little cannibal. The uncanny is a part of everyday life; if you can’t digest the odd over breakfast, it is best you leave quickly or do not come in the first place. Having said that, the village is impossible to find unless your arrival is absolutely essential for some anecdote or other.

  There was a gaunt fellow who came to visit us last summer. I remember him as a flapping crow of a man, all dressed in faded black, with a tall hat and a nose. This nose was so prominent, so remarkable, that nothing more need be said about it. But his dark cloak rose high in the wind as he roared in on his old motor cycle and he cut quite an impressive figure. Glum as the devil’s dentist, I said to myself.

  In his battered sidecar, poorly concealed by a dusty tarpaulin, a box of tall blue bottles jumped. The stranger stopped his motor cycle in front of the public house and made his way inside. In the gloomy interior, he tipped his hat at all and ordered a whisky. “For my tongue is as dry as an ancient flatworm,” he remarked. To which Emyr, the landlord, replied, “Merely as dry as that?”

  The stranger regarded him with pinpoint eyes. “Oh, drier than that by far,” he added. He rolled the whisky in his mouth and let loose a chuckle as sinister as a finger in a pie. But Emyr was not going to let him go so easily. “How far exactly?” he pressed. “As far as the furthest star in the Milky Way,” the stranger whispered. “As far as Judgment Day from the Day of Creation.” He finished his whisky at a gulp and ordered another.

  “Quite far then?” said Emyr. He placed the little glass down onto the bar, making two wet rings like eyes. “Further than Aberystwyth, for example?” And this time, the stranger toyed with his drink, swirling the contents around, watching the sediment rise and fall. “I think so,” he agreed. “Oh yes, much further. So far that by the time you get there, you have quite forgotten the reason why you went.” But few people present in the bar that day could see how this differed from going to Aberystwyth, and so the poetry was lost.

  I was one of those who happened to be there. It was obvious that a battle of dark wills was in progress. Emyr is not overly keen on serving locals, let alone visitors, and indeed he resents all attempts to make small talk. So when the stranger turned his head to take in the patrons and said, “Does anyone here have an ache in their soul?” we knew that trouble was brewing. It was at this point that Hywel the Baker spoke up from the shadows. “I have an ache in my hands,” he said thickly. “And how do they ache?” the stranger asked, with a leer. “Not how, but what sort,” Hywel replied. “What sort then?” the stranger returned, knitting his brows. “A fruit ache,” said Hywel, spluttering crumbs. “But there’s none for you.”

  The stranger hissed and it seemed that he was grinding his teeth together. But eventually he turned back to his whisky and this went the way of the first. I was able to take the opportunity of studying him more closely as he stood there, elbows on the bar, tall hat tipped at an angle over one of his disturbing eyes. Later I was to learn that these eyes were like tiny obsidian mirrors, although it did not seem so to me at the time. But you know how folks will have things; the eyes of a stranger are always like tiny obsidian mirrors in the same way that a ghost is not a real spectre unless it is trailing a bloody winding-sheet behind it and talking with a voice tuned to the pitch of the autumn wind.

  “Perhaps I have an ache in my soul,” said someone from another corner. And now my knees knocked together and everyone else in the bar looked to their cups. For this was the voice of Elizabeth Morgan, the fiery witch of Cobweb Cottage, who rarely spoke except to augur some crisis and whose nettle jam was an inarguable reason for living one’s life in a state of quiet desperation. But when my curiosity finally overcame my better judgment and I glanced up, I saw that she was talking to herself and staring at the bottom of one of her shoes.

  At last the stranger stretched himself and once more addressed those gathered. “I am looking for the local poet. All these villages have one. I see no reason why yours should be any different. Lladloh is it? Well then, my fine fellows, where can I find the Bard of Lladloh?” And suddenly I bit my lip, for this personage was none other than my good self, or so I liked to think. “Why do you seek h
im?” I ventured, not entirely sure that I wanted to hear the answer. The stranger turned those mysterious eyes upon me and a faint smile cracked the stiff parchment of his face. “I have a service to offer,” he said slowly, bowing a menacing bow and doffing his dusty hat.

  I felt a sudden, absurd urge to throw myself at his feet, grasp his ankles and cry, “It is me, sir,” in a vain attempt to solicit mercy. But as I did not know what he had planned, I managed to restrain myself. My hand shook as I raised my drink to my mouth and took a long draught to steady my nerves. “What sort of service?” I managed to gargle into my beer, the bubbles exploding around the lip of the glass and sloshing over the floorboards.

  The stranger moved a pace closer and his left eyebrow arched ever so slightly. “I am an extractor of egos,” he announced with a hint of a chuckle. “I travel the land seeking out poets whose ambition is greater than their talent and I remove the source of irritation that is making their lives a misery. In short, I cut out their egos. I perform an egoectomy! I have the tools, such tools you have never seen before in all your dreams. I made them myself. Out pours the ego like blood from a broken nose and I collect it in a blue-glass bottle. The operation is almost painless. My fees are reasonable, but I make a good living. My services are always in great demand, if not from the poet himself then certainly from his friends and family!”

  I glanced around the bar at my companions. Would they betray me? Despite their public endorsement of my verse, what did they really think? I noticed that they were all frowning. There was indecision etched on every face. The stranger stepped forward another pace and stroked his pale chin. All eyes in the bar were now turned upon me. The very air bristled with some horribly subtle meaning.

  I guessed that my drinking companions would not be able to resist the temptation to give me away for much longer. This was a profoundly depressing insight. I had no wish to lose my ego. After all, it was only a very small one. I had spent the last five years attempting to build an extension to it, but had repeatedly been denied planning permission for the project. In other words, I was an unpublished poet. A failure. But I liked to think that I had preserved at least some measure of pride, of hubris, throughout all my rejections. I did not want to lose this small crumb of what I still hoped my identity might one day evolve into.

  I had produced reams and reams of verse in my thankless capacity as self-styled Laureate of the locality. My untitled magnum opus, in twelve handwritten volumes, told the sombre story of a young man who wandered cemeteries at night in a state of lyrical angst and who fell in love with the reanimated corpse of a drowned girl who rose from her grave before him during a freak thunderstorm. Her name was Gwyneth Bellows and she had been dead for just a month, so she was still quite maggoty as well as bloated, but this minor objection aside, he found her rather fetching. Indeed, he eventually summoned up the courage to propose to her and she accepted.

  They spent many secret nights arranging their elopement. Finally, on a predetermined hour, he came for her and they slipped away, hand in hand. They raced through the deserted streets of the village, laughing silently, her worm-gnawed feet clattering on the cobbles like the hooves of the devil himself. The man felt delirious with joy, as if he had just imbibed large quantities of black wine. Once beyond the village, he paused to kiss his prospective bride and found that her decaying lips tasted of sweet nepenthe. Everything seemed perfect. They would escape to some distant land, they would swim among the wrecks and coral reefs of an exotic shoreline and lurk among dank forests where voodoo drums pounded a hole in sanity. They would consummate their unholy marriage and conceive an eldritch child. It would be a phantom pregnancy.

  These were the thoughts entertained by the man when he suddenly realised he had forgotten his pet raven. A true romantic never goes anywhere without a pet raven. So, stroking his true love’s matted hair, he left her alone on one of the fields behind Iolo Machen’s farmhouse and hastened back to his garret to fetch it. When he returned, she was nowhere to be seen. Iolo’s sheepdog was standing in her place, wagging his tail and extracting the vestiges of marrow from a splintered thighbone. Needless to say, the young man was inconsolable. He vowed that he would never love again. But despair had a perverse effect on him. As well as wandering cemeteries of an evening, he also began to saunter down to the local pub. This might have been perceived as bad form for a romantic, whose purpose in life is to seek out the phantasmagoric. But what better place to dabble with frightful spirits?

  This then was the theme and development of my major poem. I had seen the manuscript of this masterpiece bounced around more publishing houses than there were eyelids in Emyr’s meat pies. I had also been more than a little confused by the reaction of editors to the work. They generally replied that my poem stretched credulity and suggested that in future I should only ever write from personal experience. But that is precisely what I had been doing.

  Anyway, unpublished or not, I was still the closest equivalent to a Bard that existed in Lladloh. And now the stranger had satisfied himself that I was indeed the one he sought. “Well,” he hissed, as he regarded my trembling frame, “I think that there is little need for modesty here. Come now, my fellow, why not admit your profession? You will not regret it, I assure you. As I said earlier, there is only a little pain. Just a few incisions and a little blow with an iron hammer and all will be over! You’ll probably be on your feet again within a couple of days, if nothing goes wrong.”

  I stammered and sweat poured from my brow. “There must be some mistake sir!” I gasped. “I am not a poet. Oh no indeed! I can’t even read the stuff, let alone write it! Besides, poets all have curly hair. How can I possibly be a poet with hair like this?” And with a desperate look, I appealed to all those gathered to confirm the truth of my words. But they merely continued to frown ambiguously.

  The stranger was now so close to me that I could smell his fetid breath and see the phosphorescent veins that glowed faintly under his skin. He jabbed a finger at my chest and icy chills ran along my breastbone. “Good poets have curly hair,” he pointed out, “as you say. But bad poets have hair that... dangles.” He raised his hand and brushed my greasy fringe. Another fit of trembling seized my body. I shivered and dropped my glass, which shattered into a thousand sharp fragments at my feet. “Look!” the stranger cried and pulled open his coat. All along the inside, held in place by black ribbons, strange steel instruments glittered. He toyed with a selection of hooks and miniature saws and then drew out a twisted scalpel. “Ten egos I have collected this season. Ten hideous egos in ten grim bottles! You shall be the eleventh. Do not fret! The operation takes little more than a couple of hours.”

  I lost all control of my legs and collapsed to the floor among the rivulets of spilt beer. I clasped hold of his bony knees and closed my eyes. It is said that when a man loses his life, he sees the whole of his past rush before him. I wondered if this also happened when a man lost his ego. I sincerely hoped that it did not. I had no desire to relive all my mistakes, all my dashed dreams. The shock alone would probably finish me off.

  It was Emyr who saved me. With haughty contempt, he growled at the stranger: “What is all this nonsense? Do you mistake this man for the local poet? Any fool can see that this is not he. I am insulted by your insinuation that I would let a poet drink in my establishment! What sort of place do you think this is? This is not Swansea! Do you believe that we have no pride? Of course this man is not the local poet. You’ll find the local poet where any genuine rhymester would choose to spend his time. Down by the river, under the old stone bridge. His name is Toby.”

  The stranger curled his mouth in a sneer and angled his head to one side. Suddenly, he pulled away and departed with a nod at Emyr. “If he refuses to pay me, I shall be back to claim my fee,” he said. Emyr proceeded to wash and wipe the stranger’s glass. “Don’t worry about that,” he remarked. “Toby is a very generous soul. You won’t be back.” We watched through the open door as the stranger mounted his ancient motor
cycle and started the engine, roaring away in a cloud of oily smoke. Clambering back to my feet, I made for the bar and ordered another beer. Unusually, Emyr insisted I have one on the house.

  We never saw the stranger again. We found his broken motor cycle lying in the centre of the road that leads over the bridge. And we also found the box that had held the blue-glass bottles. Only one of these bottles was intact and I brought it back and set it up behind the bar. What happened to the contents of the other nine can only be guessed at. However, poetry has started to appear on the walls of the bridge, awful poetry, written in what appears to be dried blood. It is said that it glows faintly at night. It is also said that Toby has recently taken to wearing a tall hat and picking his teeth clean of travellers with a curiously twisted toothpick.

  Even more disturbing than this is the fact that someone has been taking sly drinks from the bottle behind the bar. I suspect that it is Emyr. It seems I will soon have a rival. This is the last thing I need at my stage in life. Had I submitted to the operation, my own ego might now be the one which is being consumed and I wouldn’t have to worry about competition. I sometimes stare out of the grimy windows of my garret, hoping that the stranger, or one like him, will return. It is a forlorn hope. More often, I take myself out to my favourite cemetery and lay myself down in that opened grave which I refuse to see refilled. Ah Gwyneth! She alone understood my essential nature. How I yearn for her puffed face close to mine, her wormy embrace! There is another poem somewhere in this, I am sure. Who knows? If I persist, I may yet attain the status of creative genius.