My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (5 page)

‘What brings you here, young woman?' She asked the question kindly enough but with an imposing authority for one so diminutive,
barely turning her neat profile, & not taking her eyes off what was happening below. She looked to be in her late thirties
or early forties, with a handsome nose & chin. ‘Are you seeking work?'

‘No,' I answered, ‘for I already have it, cleaning on Rosenvængets Allé, in the home of Fru Krak.'

At the mention of this name, the whole of Frøken Olsen's small body stiffened. She said nothing for a moment, then pivoted around to look at me, thus revealing the other
side of her face – the sudden sight of which immediately made me gasp, for across it a huge red scar was raggedly drawn, beginning
at the outer corner of her left eye & reaching to the contour of her upper lip, marring what was otherwise (& only now could
I see it) a quite beautiful face, open & pure. What tragic mutilation!

‘I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone came to me & asked about the Kraks,' she said. ‘But who would have
thought it would be a friend of dear Else's?' A weary sadness clouded her voice.

‘Tell me, if you would: what did you make of the Professor?' I asked. ‘For now that I am working in that mansion, I confess
to finding myself most intrigued to discover what manner of man he was, & what became of him.'

To my surprise, Gudrun Olsen smiled fondly. ‘Where does one begin, when speaking of Professor Krak? Unlike his wife, he was
a person of great enthusiasm & charm,' she said. ‘Though I often believed him to be quite unhinged. If ever I met a man too
clever for his own good, it was he. But I was attached to him, & when he disappeared I missed him greatly, despite what happened
to me there. Despite …' she fingered her scar ‘despite
this.'

I drew in a breath. ‘I do not speak of my accident,' she said warningly. ‘For I bear a measure of guilt – excruciating guilt
over what happened. But I have to warn you, Charlotte, that you are risking your life working in that place. No good will
come of it. And nor I think do you want your pretty face ruined, as mine was.'

A shudder ran the length of my spine as I eyed her dreadful scar.

‘By Fru Krak?' I whispered, aghast. My mind was in a whizzy: yes, Fru Krak had a whiff of madness about her, to be sure. But
the thought of her lungeing at another woman's cheek with a ragged blade ... it beggared belief that she might muster the energy.

Finally, as if guessing my train of thought, Gudrun Olsen gave a small smile & shook her head. ‘Fru Krak is a lazy, vain fool,
& as unpleasant a human specimen as you could wish to meet. But she is not the danger in that house, my dear girl. It is something
else entirely that you must fear.'

‘What?' I asked, all a-tremble suddenly, & wrapping my cloak around me more tightly.

‘The thing that did this to me,' said Gudrun Olsen (& she did not need to indicate her mutilation for my eyes were still locked
to it, mesmerized), ‘was not of human flesh.'

It was late afternoon when, soaked through with steam, I left that place, dear reader, a more fearful & anxious young woman,
so much so that I fancied, in my agitated state, that the tall balaclava'd man who had so kindly given me directions earlier
was now following me in a sinister & invisible fashion, at the periphery of my vision. But he remained elusive, for although
I sensed his presence, when I turned my head he was not to be seen. That night Gudrun Olsen's words crept into my dreams,
where in the foul, sunken heart of that labyrinthine home on Rosenvængets Allé I imagined wizardry & toad-spore, & hooded
men performing dark deeds that the day would quake to look upon, to feed the avid hunger of a vile machine whose wheels never
stopped turning. I awoke shuddering & feverish & clad in a cold, cold sweat.

Perhaps, dear reader, you might argue that no young woman in her right mind would have gone near that house again after what
Gudrun Olsen had said about the mysterious goings-on within it seven years ago. But Professor Krak himself was seemingly dead
& gone, & only superstitious fools believe in ghosts, & without its engineer, the demonic machinery Gudrun had spoken of,
whose purpose she did not know, was surely of no more harm than any abandoned object left to dilapidate. What did I actually
know that was concrete, as opposed to a random jumble of oddities? This is what I had learned: that Professor Krak was an
eccentric, reclusive man, prone to passionate outbursts of fury at his wife, & obsessed with the construction of a large machine
in the basement. That the more strained his marriage to Fru Krak became, the more time he would spend in his workshop, & the
more money his wife would spend on clothes, as though it were part of a silent bargain they had struck, that if she granted
him the peace he craved to work on his inventions, then he would fund her wardrobe. That the couple did not sleep or eat meals
together, & that Gudrun Olsen would set trays of food & drink outside his workshop door, & clear them away when she found
the dishes emptied. That she would show desperate-looking, dark-cloaked men & women in at midnight or the small hours, folk
whom she would never see emerge from a basement cellar known as the Oblivion Room, & how these people must be ushered in through
a back door, & Fru Krak must not discover their presence. That Professor Krak would send Gudrun Olsen on tortuous errands
to buy machinery parts – one kilo of nuts & bolts from this mechanical supplier, another half-kilo, of a different size, from
that; a little cog-wheel from a particular ironmonger's in Frederiksberg, a flexible cord from a specialist india-rubber shop
in Amager, a huge, heavy jar of mercury from a one-eyed woman in a brothel in Christianshavn. Once she was obliged to take
a carriage all the way to Hellerup, at midnight, & knock on a door where a man handed her a heavy, squeaking, agitated box
which she suspected, from the smell, contained live sewer rats. Then on other occasions she had been dispatched to the home
of a widow, where she was instructed to elicit the story of her husband's gory death by arsenic poisoning, & then recuperate
the handkerchief into which she had wept.

‘You'd get her to cry, & bring him back the handkerchief?'

‘That's right'

‘And he never told you why?'

‘He never told me anything. But he paid me well.' Each time he sent her on such errands, Gudrun said, Professor Krak would
give her a thick wad of banknotes, & tell her that under no circumstances should she mention his name in association with
the item she had bought.

‘What happened to him, in your opinion?' I asked finally.

‘I have no idea. One day he was there, the next he had disappeared. But you can be sure that if Professor Krak is indeed dead,'
she finished, ‘Lord bless his soul, then it is thanks to his experimenting with ideas & practices that he should not have
meddled with.'

So that was what I knew. Much and little, all at once – but if there was physical danger to be feared, I had protection at
least in the form of the stout Fru Schleswig, who could kill a man with a single blow of her hand, & still any machine with
a thunderous kick of her hoof, however out of control it may become: with such a physical force acting as one's human shield,
& taking the brunt of whatever attack might be launched in one's direction, what need I fear? That was my reasoning, as I
went with Fru Schleswig to work the next day, & the next, & furthered my forays into the heart of the building. But there
was something else too, that drew me deeper in, despite what I had heard: a rapacious greed to know more about the locked
basement room that Professor Krak used as his workshop & the dangerous mechanical device that might still lie, rusting & abandoned,
within. And to witness for myself what horrors or what marvels Professor Krak had created illicit access to –

Yes, marvels. For surely there were marvels. Why else would all those people flock to the house in such a secretive & desperate
manner? Why else would I feel so burning an urge to see the contents of the basement workshop that Gudrun called the Oblivion
Room for myself? Yes: what drew me, magnetically, to discover more was the same impulse that had sucked others in. Adventure.
Danger. And escape. Looking back I realize that even then, I was like an opium eater, drawn to the source of woe, heedless
of its ill-effects, & mindful only of the brief ecstatic sweetness it might offer, whose boundaries were only those of my
imagination.

Yes, O dear one: even then, Professor Krak's demonic invention had exerted its pull.

The Pastor, whom I met the second week, was a paunchy man in his middle to late years, with clattering false teeth that seemed
to roam his mouth like a tribe of nomads in search of land on which to pitch camp.

‘Pleased to meet you, my dear,' he said, eyeing my curves like a greasy old flesh-merchant, & somersaulting the contraption
in his mouth. ‘I hear that thanks to the good Fru Krak, you are in the process of reforming. I am glad to hear it. And I know
that Christ is too.' (I was quickly to learn that Christ and Pastor Dahlberg were most loyally twinned, and always agreed
with one another, whatever the subject might be.)

‘I beg your pardon, sir?' I asked.

‘Fru Krak informs me that she saved you from the streets. That you were a
harlot,
my dear young woman. But have since sought more appetizing work? Here with us? Praise be to God.'

But I could see from the Pastor's greedy porcine eyes that his thoughts were less with the Lord Almighty than with my breasts,
& at that moment I envisaged the possible transmogrification of my employment quite clearly.

‘Ah yes,' I said, cottoning on to the self-serving tale Fru Krak must have spun him, about her heroic role in my ‘redemption'.
‘I am so grateful to the good lady, indeed I am. Were it not for the bounty of your noble fiancee, I would be forced, through
sheer need, to unbutton the top of my dress thus, & reveal my lacework corset to strangers.'

The Pastor gasped, went red in the face, & came close to choking on his oral prosthesis.

‘And provoke the dirtiest & most shameful lusts,' I continued, undressing further: ‘– & reveal the exquisite bosoms & pert girlish nipples that nestle beneath my intimate underclothing – no! No touching, sir! And at the same time tweak up my petticoats so that they can see the flesh at the top of my leg, where the stocking ends, & …'

Yes, dear reader, I had him where I wanted him, for by now he was breathing heavily & struggling with the buttons of his tweed
knickerbockers, but I told him, steady on, mister, cash first: five kroner. Such a pitch he had worked himself into just with
the thought of seeing more, that by the time he had scrabbled for the money in his pocket & revealed the pale & desperate
thing that poked from his breeches like a worm struggling for air, it was all over. Which was just as well, for a moment later
Fru Krak swept in wearing an outfit of pomegranate pink as depicted on the cover of that week's edition of the
Fine Lady,
& I barely had time to cover the incriminating translucency on my skirts with my feather duster before greeting her demurely
& receiving my orders concerning the tasks ahead of me & Fru Schleswig, while Pastor Dahlberg scurried from the room muttering
something about a sermon on penitence, his face the colour of a peeled beetroot.

And thus did two sources of income open to me in the space of one week, & I was right glad for it, & pleased with myself indeed.
For I knew that the Pastor's need for repentance would crop up again, it having struck me over the years that many married
women, due to their husband's negligence, have never become acquainted with their own lust, & seeing nothing emerge from the
act save more babies, they cry off with complaints of headaches, bunions & women's trouble, thus catapulting their frustrated
menfolk into the laps of mistresses, or girls such as myself. Fru Krak, to look at her, was surely the last woman on earth
capable of lifting her petticoats for any other purpose than to piss or shit, so it was clear to me that she would soon tire
of the ordeal of servicing the ageing but still eager Dahlberg once she had secured him with the forthcoming nuptials. And
had her horoscope not advised her, on the subject of subordinates, to
make sure they know their place, but allow them leeway in matters that
could help you privately?

Very well, I thought, my dear Pastor, & his good Lady Muck. But if it's to be, you shall pay a high price for it. Five kroner
is just the beginning.

Have you ever had the experience, dear reader, of waking every morning obsessed by the same thought? A thought which nags
at you all day, & will not relinquish its grip even as you drift into sleep, but worms deeper into your psyche, manifesting
itself in the most disturbing dreams? Such was the tenacity of my urge to discover the mystery that lay deep in the bowels
of the Krak household. Unearth it I must! And yes, as I have already remarked to you, the frightening but insubstantial facts
Gudrun Olsen had imparted to me, accompanied by warnings of doom, had, far from damping my appetite, only whetted it further.
But it turned out that there was more to come, unexpectedly, from another quarter. A week after my encounter with Gudrun,
I had taken advantage of Fru Krak's absence at the hairdresser's to visit the apothecary for some rose water. Herr Bang was
behind the counter, & we were soon chatting about some of the changes that were being wrought in the neighbourhood of Østerbro. He told me that his girls were to attend the new school run by Ingrid Jespersen, & that his wife would teach there too,
& I in turn told him where Fru Schleswig & I were employed, it being not far from that very school, & at this news his face
darkened.

‘I know Fru Krak. She's been a regular customer of mine ever since her husband disappeared. A bad sleeper. I sell her a lot
of potions for the nerves, but I have remarked that nothing seems to work. I'm not surprised she's twitchy, the things that
went on there. And do still, if the rumours are to be believed. She has been trying to sell that house for years, but none
will buy it, for it is said to be haunted.'