The Smell of Telescopes (24 page)

I controlled my anger and resisted a temptation to break the bottle over his skull. These two wines, together with a Krug 1949, Château Haut Brion 1945 and fin de siècle armagnac brandy had almost crippled my bank balance, to say nothing of the Monte Cristo cigars and Edam cheeses with chives. But for the sake of my manhood, I would have to agree with every one of his opinions, however mistaken.

“Did you enjoy your flight?” Emily asked.

The doctor plucked thoughtfully at his forked beard. “Travelling by air is the root cause of much disease, Señora. Consider the case I had a year ago: a balloonist fell to his death over Cádiz and broke a fountain in a square. From that instant, the buildings were terrified of airborne objects, shivering every time a cloud passed overhead. Social disruption was considerable; the citizens were disadvantaged. I treated this phobia with lengthy sessions of psychotherapy. Cádiz regained its senses and is now a liberated and ambitious locale.”

“We hope you’ll be equally successful here,” I said.

He dismissed the tremor in my voice with a wave. “I’ve cured worse. Allow me to describe the plight of Doña Micaela Valverde, a woman with a passion for cadavers. She visited mortuaries to stare at them, sometimes to take darker liberties. But as with all addictions, tolerance built up until she became immune to death. She kept growing older, but her mortal coil was too tangled to shed. I eased it off with a parsley compress and skeleton-keyhole surgery. I’m clever!”

“Perhaps you can examine my wife now?” I suggested, feeling sure he would grumble at having to go to work.

To my surprise, he acceded. He rose from the chair, fumbling in his pockets for a stethoscope. After listening to Emily’s inner workings for a suspiciously long time, he chuckled.

“What was the name of your lover, Señora?”

“The shameless wench didn’t even learn it,” I muttered.

Emily told him the whole story, including details she had kept from me, and Dr de los Rios nodded smartly.

“I know the fellow in question. He is Juan Chinelato, a gambler and wrestler who has a mysterious power over butterflies and ladies. He does this kind of thing on a regular basis, seducing innocent girls and dying in their arms, to ensure his rebirth.”

This news cheered me up. It seemed to indicate that Emily wasn’t in possession of her senses when she committed her treason. But she quickly dashed my hope. “I was quite willing!”

“Maybe so,” the doctor conceded. “But the point is that he won’t be easily enticed out of your womb. It’s a matter of resurrection and every time he’s reborn he enjoys life more.”

“What a decadent upstart!” I blurted. “A total cad!”

“Quite so, Señor, but he adds colour to Toledo and is tolerated for that reason. His wife disapproves of his behaviour, they argue and smash plates but she always takes him back.”

“She’s welcome to him! What an extreme philanderer!”

“Calm yourself, Señor. Her name is Tia Mariquita and she lives in a house that coughs. There is no other female willing to accept the foetus once it is extracted from your bride.”

“Tell me your plan, doctor. How can you remove him?”

“He is quite comfortable inside Emily. He must be lured out with an irresistible temptation. He is fond of butterflies; we’ll capture one in a jar and parade it in front of your wife’s womb. If the example is good enough, he’ll bound through her abdomen to inspect it more closely. Once he’s inside the jar I’ll screw down the lid and carry him back to Toledo where he can be transplanted into Tia Mariquita. It’s not the first time she’s been pregnant with her husband.”

Emily was dubious. “Trap a phantom in glass?”

“Of my own manufacture,” Dr de los Rios explained. “Holy water ice, shaped accordingly. A barrier to spectres.”

I was eager to search the garden immediately for a suitable insect, but our visitor discouraged me with a yawn.

“It’s too late tonight, Señor. In the morning, I will assist you. I am exhausted and need sleep. Escort me to the double bed, if you please. You may take the sofa near the grate.”

Emily supported him out of my sight while I fumed at his insolence. When he was on the threshold, I approached the mantelpiece and picked up the box he had left there. It was heavy and satisfying to the touch, but served no evident purpose. I sent my voice after him; it turned into the bedroom. “You’ve forgotten something.”

“The box? No, Señor, that is your wedding present.”

Emily returned, having tucked him up. “What a nice gesture! What do you think is inside? Open it, Joseph.”

I shook my head. “It’s inappropriate. When this horrendous business is all over, I’ll be happy to accept the gift. Until then, the box stays locked. For the sake of our marriage.”

We snuggled up on the sofa, but our embrace remained chaste. Dreams did not come, nor an untroubled sleep; I lingered in a state between the worlds, my head throbbing, my manhood cowering. I grew nervous and paced the room, waiting for the first stars to fade and take my cowardice with them, to the other side of the planet.

It was dawn. I descended into the garden and wasted my time chasing butterflies. Despite his promise, Dr de los Rios did not help, and Emily was almost as useless, sitting on the grass and reciting the Latin names of those which fluttered out of my clumsy fingers. When she tired of the sport, she slipped indoors to attend to the doctor, who was shouting for his dinner. I was resigned to becoming a pauper, and the enormity of his appetites was shocking to the eye as well as the purse. His waistcoat tightened hourly.

A similar routine was observed the following day and though I honed my skills to the point where I caught a dozen Cabbage Whites, the doctor adjudged them too bland to interest the spirit and I set them free. What was required, according to Emily, was something more colourful, a bright
Danaus plexippus
,
Nymphalis antiopa
or
Apatura iris
. Part of the problem lay with the restrained markings of our indigenous insects, which surely held scant interest for Juan Chinelato, a connoisseur familiar with such unusual jungle types as
Morpho didius
.

Eventually, after a week of prancing, I netted a remarkable
Pyronia tithonus
, a feat even Emily judged worthy of praise. Dr de los Rios held up his jar, kept solid with an intricate web of tiny refrigeration pipes and we persuaded the butterfly to enter by dropping a flower inside. Now there was no time to lose: before it flew away again, we had to pass the jar near to Emily’s bulge. When the ghost jumped out of her and into the icy prison, the doctor would seal its fate by screwing on the lid. I was uncomfortably aware that tears were streaming down my face. Soon I would have a second chance to be a real man.

However, Dr de los Rios had other ideas. Before lowering the jar to the level of Emily’s womb, he arched a bushy eyebrow, stroked his forked beard with a finger and grinned slyly.

“I haven’t been offered money for my services yet, Señor. There may be no better time to settle accounts.”

Stupefied by his tactlessness, I involuntarily reached in my pocket and removed my wallet. As I’ve already insinuated, I am naturally a very thrifty fellow and only the direst circumstances can ever persuade me to abandon the habits of a lifetime. Although I had accepted the great cost of the operation, my wallet had not. When I opened it, a gargantuan moth rose into the air, a repeat of the restaurant incident. It flew straight into my wide mouth and I swallowed it.

Emily squealed with delight. “
Hepialus humuli
!”

In my desperation to spit it out, I stumbled against my bride. With a hiss, her stomach deflated. My knees buckled; something was wrong with my sense of balance. I had acquired a mystifying burden inside me, as if a dwarf was standing on my intestines.

“Ah, look, the spirit prefers the moth to the butterfly! See how it lovingly chooses you for a surrogate.”

“What do you mean?” I held the radius of my belly.

“You have a tortilla in the oven, Señor.”

Evidently, I had become pregnant!

“This is a terrible accident,” I whimpered. “We must hasten to coax it out of me and into the frozen jar.”

Emily stamped a foot. “You’ve had your way, Joseph, and now it’s my turn. The foetus remains where it is.”

To my dismay, Dr de los Rios agreed. “Yes, Señora.”

I staggered to a chair near the window. It was a relief to take the weight off my feet. I stayed there until sunset, drinking the sweet cups of tea offered by my bride, pondering metaphysical matters until a display of the aurora borealis alerted me to the imminent arrival of Pastor Rowlands. Entering without knocking, he was a focus of instant fascination for our guest. Dr de los Rios raised his nose, still stained with wasted vintage wine, and inhaled.

“I can smell ozone,” he remarked.

The exorcist sighed. “I had an accident with a lightning-conductor. It converted me into a notional grid.”

Dr de los Rios studied the pastor’s effulgent palms and clucked his tongue. “I have dealt with this sort of thing before. We shall earth you to a mandolin and effect a discharge.”

“I don’t require your services. I’m also an expert.”

Pastor Rowlands and the doctor were soon debating case histories as if they were old friends. They were two sides of the same rare coin; the former purged supernature with litany, the latter relied on scalpels. It appeared they had forgotten my existence. To attract attention, I had to use brute force, dividing them like an immature amoeba. The exorcist was joyful when appraised of my condition.

“You’ll make an excellent mother, Mr Pickhill.”

“I’m not sure about that. I can’t cook.”

“Natural birth is out of the question,” claimed Dr de los Rios. “We ought to arrange a Caesarean section.”

The pastor rubbed his chin. “There’s only one hospital in Yorkshire willing to deliver spectres in that fashion.”

“Take me there!” I was already dreading labour, its attendant pains and discomforts. “I want anaesthetic!”

“They use aether, rather than ether, Mr Pickhill. But the nurses at Phantomsville Maternity are highly trained. They’ll take care of you and your little bundle of gloom. Perhaps I can officiate at the christening? I’ve waited for ages to dunk a ghost.”

“Do what you like. Just get me medical attention!”

“I think it best if we register you there immediately. They’ll want to conduct tests and write research papers on your case. As a first-time mother, a primipara, naturally you’re anxious, but think what you’ll add to science—I envy you, Mr Pickhill.”

“Did I ever do anything to deserve this?” I grumbled. “My condition hasn’t even got a proper name, I bet!”

“The dark side of the honeymoon, Señor.”

I don’t care to say much about what happened from that moment. When the ambulance arrived to carry me to Phantomsville, I was alarmed by its resemblance to a hearse. At the hospital, I joined a spirited ante-natal class and learned to stretch my credulity as well as my limbs. Dr de los Rios visited me once, on the eve of my big day, to make his farewells. A commission down south was beckoning; he related its sordid details while eating the grapes on my bedside table.

“There’s a hotel manager who believes the only permissible delights are made from gelatine. I’ll recommend a kilogramme of Spanish Fly and a dozen Viennese Oysters, thrice daily.”

Pastor Rowlands and Emily were more regular witnesses of my misery. They always came together, arm in arm, though I was too intent on myself to register the significance. They took a profound interest in the legal aspects of my predicament. I afterwards learned that Emily had spent the rest of my savings on marriage guidance sessions with Dr de los Rios. He decided it was best if she eloped with the pastor and claimed custody of the ghost. The law courts in Phantomsville are prejudiced against mortal litigants, but the pastor knows how to play the system. Her reincarnated lover was taken from my arms at birth.

They have set up home together, the three of them. I hear they save on electricity bills. But I can’t help wondering where it will end. When Juan Chinelato grows up, will Emily transfer her affections back to him? Will the pastor be forced to challenge him to a duel? I can picture them now, one with a sword forged from Toledo steel, the other with a burning net snaking from his fingers, weaving between draperies, smashing tables laden with fruit, leaping onto balconies. I don’t intend giving them the chance to fight it out. That’s my job.

I have lodged an appeal with the Phantomsville courts for the right to visit my child. If I am successful, I’ll tarry until his twenty-first birthday before making a move. I can’t decide exactly how Dr de los Rios fits into the affair. Did he predict the outcome and act accordingly, or has he manipulated us from the beginning? In my hands I hold his gift, a heavy box with a clasp. Emily appears to have forgotten about it, but my memory is good. I turn the key slowly. It is a pair of flintlock pistols.

Mister Humphrey’s Clock’s Inheritance

The reader is asked to imagine a household of the gloomy sort, dominated by two eccentric pieces of furniture. The first of these is an enormous grandfather clock of polished black wood, its body warped in such a way that when viewed from the end of the hall it resembles the rotten tusk of a mammoth with a craving for sweets. Indeed, the instrument seems to palpably ache; there is an aura of throbbing misery about it, expressed most strongly in the somewhat nauseated face of overlapping dials. This device of charred ebony, green brass and dirty ivory seems to be suffering from a migraine. 

The second item, while no less stiff than the first, has a greater range of movement. This is the owner of the hall and clock; an obscure gentleman by the name of Humperdinck Pumpernickel. His tongue, unable to curl itself around this appellation, has settled for ‘Humphrey’ and this is how he is greeted by that small circle of acquaintances—I dare not term them friends—with which he shares a few mordant interests. There is a mustiness draped on his shoulders, like the ripped bridal veil of a jilted heiress, which oppresses all but his fellow enthusiasts, who are familiar with the taste of damp books and the flavour of aged paintings. For Mr Humphrey is a member of that select group of collectors for whom the licking of antiques is common practice.

The house in which this dubious pair have settled lies on the coast between two minor towns, tucked away behind a frown of sand-dunes which, according to legend, once swallowed an abbey and its bishop. It stands a little way back from the road, protected by a garden of broken artefacts which the occupant has drained of nourishment before casting out from an upstairs window. Because it is on my route, I am often to be found among these lethal
objets d’art
, picking my way through the Fabergé, Wedgwood and Stradivarius splinters which glimmer like the teeth of sophisticated gin-traps. Once or twice I have seen Mr Humphrey peeping at me through a parted curtain; at these times, my hand trembles as I feed my leaflet to his voracious letterbox, which devours all I can deliver, though no good comes of it. Pumpernickel cannot be solicited. One day I shall be free of this menial task—forcing badly printed leaflets on a reluctant public. Until then, I shall endure my daily task with reasonable grace. My peregrinations take me from the eastern hamlet to the western—to be specific, from Abell to Quinn—then back along a beach of crushed shell, over a dozen rotting groynes. As I walk, scaling the redundant sea-defences with considerable difficulty, I reflect on my impressions of the fellow. I can tell a great deal from a glimpse. There are few more jaded examples of that breed of men who seek out morsels of the past than Mr Humphrey. His appearance gives the impression of weary dilettanteism. He wears his whiskers long and bushy, in the style of the early industrialists, not caring to know the purpose they serve—that sideburns are a carpet-sample of a beard.

His predecessor, in contrast, was a man of astounding energy, taste and wit; a credit to his obsession. It was he who stuffed the house with rarities. Abell boasts an antique shop of wondrous dimensions, with a proprietor eager to sell his wares at bargain prices. There is a silly rumour about this chap, a foreign gentleman, which has been of little help to his business: that he is a condemned soul waiting for the thousandth customer to pass into his store. Only then will he be set free—presumably to take up an alternative occupation—while the lucky thousandth customer is forced to take his place. The reason for the curse is never outlined. There is mention of him cheating the devil out of a Gainsborough; at any rate, he is generally avoided by the local population. Only the former owner of Humphrey’s residence was a regular client—he obtained most of his collection, including the tall ebony clock, from the dealer, whom we may henceforth dignify as Herr Fluchen.

Thus the reader may be fully assured of Mr Humphrey’s indolence. He is not even willing to pursue his chosen hobby with a minimum of genuine effort, but must find a short-cut to compulsion. While his brothers take the trouble to build up an accumulation of appetising heirlooms, sparing no pains in learning the locations of secret auctions, roving far afield in the quest for a Clarice Cliff or a Chesterfield, our sullen Humphrey simply casts his eye for a house already crammed with such treasures and promptly moves in. Then he sets to work licking each article raw, garret to basement, much as a conventional gourmand passes over soups and pasta to the pudding. But the building is vast, and a dilettante is languorous in matters of motion, so that by the time our tale begins, though he has occupied the manse for a full decade, our hero has only just reached the end of the hall where the sable timepiece nestles in a recess like a bad odour. Humphrey’s suspense as he approached the clock I need not attempt to describe. His senses were overwound.

Reaching the base of the chronometer, he applied tongue to wood and continued in a single fluid motion upward. At first, all went as well as he hoped. In a rather exciting instant he had the full tang: iron pipes, puddles splashed by freckled girls, soot, roots, gears of a second-hand bicycle, crumbly cheese, apples, wine mulled with a rusty poker, feather dusters, earlobes. He was astonished at the range of savours to be found in this unique antique. When he stretched on tiptoe to lap the numerals and spidery hands, his pleasure was interrupted by a chilling event. The clock actually seemed to laugh at him; more a cynical snarl than a true expression of mirth. And then the mechanism—which had always operated as smoothly as a nun’s thigh—stopped dead.

Our hero abandoned his repast and slumped to the floor. His tongue burned, as if it had been singed by a very small explosion. The baroque dial now mockingly indicated the exact hour at which his palate had met its match. Humphrey dined at eight. Placing his ear to what he presumed must be the pendulum case, he struggled to catch further examples of the vulgar guffaw. But the clock was utterly silent. During the minutes that followed the relinquishing of luncheon, the dilettante staggered to the nearest chair—a Chippendale with a gadrooned square apron in laggard style, and carved tassle and ruffle in pierced vase-shaped splat—and perspired quietly in the consciousness that he had somehow spoiled his dessert. Cuisine is the art of good timing.

Since Humphrey had taken over the residence, the chronometer— like a real grandfather—had minded its own business, and the dilettante had never troubled himself about its maintenance. As he thought about it, it seemed peculiar that not once had he ever wound the thing up. Somehow it coped perfectly well without human intervention. Mechanics was a mystery to our hero—he had a dim notion that Archimedes was a chap who lounged in the bath—and he was quite incapable of grasping the finer points of a clock’s anatomy. But he was sure they needed regular attention, of the circular sort, in the same way that a schoolboy must have an arm twisted to operate at maximum potential.

With a finger on the wood, he felt each side of the machine; but no key or hole did he discover. How then was the device to be rewound? More than this: the frame seemed to be quivering, as if stifling more laughs. “Odd!” said Mr Humphrey. “Now I can hardly bear my hand on it. Better to call in professional advice, I think.”

Moving to his candlestick telephone, he made his first call in ten years. In Quinn worked a jeweller who knew most of what there was to know about timepieces. Mr Humphrey summoned him to the house and soothed his nerves while waiting by nibbling the marquetry off a small Jean Francois Oeben cabinet. Eating between meals was always his problem; he was ruining his health with an irregular diet.

Not that this much concerned the jeweller when he arrived. A chubby American with a Yale education, he was skilled at picking locks, but the dark grandfather defeated him. The thing that caught his attention right away were brackets fixed on the top, twisted as if something, possibly bells, had been torn off them. But there was no way of winding up the device; he did not think this indicated that it was weight-driven. Was Humphrey quite sure it had been running continuously since he bought the manse? If this were the case, then it must be an atmospheric clock.

Grimacing unpleasantly, the dilettante said: “I should be deceiving you, and that to no good purpose, if I laid claim to possessing information on that topic. What exactly do you mean by this?”

The jeweller than launched into a turgid lecture on an arcane field of clock design, which had involved attempts to create a pseudoperpetual motion device, resulting in James Cox’s remarkable machine of 1760. As I assume the reader knows, it is impossible to obtain more energy from the output of a system than is delivered to its input—the rules of physics are very strict about ensuring a loss of energy in any apparatus with moving parts. This has something to do with Thermodynamics and equations which resemble rococo ornamentation.

Cox managed to cheat these laws, at least to the satisfaction of an ignorant public, by utilising barometric pressure to prime his clock. An elaborate winding arrangement was constructed which depended on separate reservoirs of mercury—some 150lbs of the expensive liquid—which, kept in a state of unstable equilibrium, amplified pressure differences via a set of levers: a force which was applied to raising a weight which drove the actual clock mechanism. This ingenious contraption was improved by a French engineer, Jean Leon Reutter, in the 1920s, using a liquefied gas and a saturated vapour as well as mercury.

Mr Humphrey yawned, vexed and ashamed at the fiasco of the lecture, which the jeweller was delivering for his benefit alone. “That is all very well,” he replied; “but can you open it?”

“Not without cutting it in two,” answered the expert; “but it would be a shame to damage such an unusual machine. There is no way of getting inside; I cannot pick a lock which has no keyhole. Perhaps the case-door can be forced. Be patient and pass me my chisel.”

“Certainly, certainly, here it is. If you succeed, I shall pay your fee with a fine wrought-iron Torchère.”

“I would rather the Hepplewhite commode I passed in the corridor. I cannot see it very well from this distance; but it is not unsightly. You must also throw in a few appropriate stools.”

That evening brought an hour’s hard work to the jeweller, who found it a difficult task even to insert the blade of his tool in the gap made by the frame and door. At last he gave it up; he admitted defeat, adding he had never encountered a clock remotely like this one before. In final desperation, he lifted a stethoscope from his box and probed the sternum of the thing. Listening intently, he frowned. “I am ashamed to say,” said he, “that I can hear breathing.”

“Now this is unexpected,” commented Mr Humphrey; “though I did read an article in the paper about a toad which took up residence in a cello. Might there be an animal of some sort within?”

The jeweller pursed his lips. “I should prefer to think the mercury is sighing. But look at this: the maker’s name on the faceplate has been eroded almost to nothing. Pass me my mirror.”

It had not occurred to Mr Humphrey to seek writing on the device: a clock is not a book. Nonetheless, complying with the jeweller’s request, he watched in fascination as the fellow angled the mirror at the base of the dial and shone an electric torch on the brass. A pale name shimmered into sight. Struggling to pronounce the reversed letters, the dilettante whispered the maker’s name and city—Mortice d’Arthur, Chaud-Mellé—in tones of instinctive respect. But he immediately added that he had heard of neither; nor did he believe his friends capable of helping him in the matter. Did the jeweller know anything relevant?

“No, I am sorry to say I do not,” said the expert. “It seems rather alpine, from what I can judge by the syllables. Swiss, I would guess. Perhaps the respiration is due to some kind of cuckoo? Mountain craftsmen are an idiosyncratic breed. In some valleys they are obsessed with automata. My dog is Swiss—I lubricate his cogs with brandy.”

Mr Humphrey was still tired. He rubbed his eyes and pandiculated. I imagine that at this point the jeweller made ready to depart. Before he had packed away all his equipment, the dilettante offered him a glass of wine and a pinch of Regency snuff. This was the sum of his payment, due to his manifest failure with the clock. Wine was accepted, but snuff was refused with a horrified expression. Mr Humphrey could see that the chap was struggling with some superstition which clung about the offer like a damp silk scarf. At last he had the reason—with an uneasy shrug of his shoulders, the expert revealed his quaint fears.

“Snuff? Ah no, it is not that I object to, so much as the resultant sneeze. I am wary of the legend which is attached to the dunes outside. A bishop once blew his nose in chapel. He was divinely punished by being buried under tons of sand; and there he will stay until as many sneezes as the grains which cover him are loosed in the vicinity. When this number is reached, the final sneezer will have to take his place.”

Humphrey was aware of this tale, but he regarded it with a sardonic smile. “In that case, be sure not to catch cold.”

Later, alone again, the dilettante mused on the mysterious clock. A search through his extensive library revealed no volumes about breathing chronometers; one atlas alone showed Chaud-Mellé, which turned out to be a tiny republic some thirteen castles south of Liechtenstein. As for the maker, Mortice d’Arthur, information was as scanty as flourishes in that style of decoration known as Desornamentado, popularised by Herrera. But I am not writing a history of fashion. Mr Humphrey, who had travelled no further afield than his own county, started to conjure up visions of this hilly state, doubtless an ordered, neat sort of town. There would be houses in many bright colours; girls with mittens and chocolate kisses; bankers in smart suits; teeth without plaque; alpenhorns.

Unable to confirm such assumptions with his available books, he was encouraged to make his first independent purchase. There were many tomes to be browsed in the antique shop in Abell—he resolved to make his way there on the morrow. He knew the address; it was staring at him from the piece of paper he picked from the floor of his passage. Since moving in, he had been snowed under by these advertisements, all of which he fed to the stove in his parlour. At last, he was going to respond to one—such belated victory makes my job worthwhile. Persistence with leaflets is an essential quality for a salesman. Now I was delighted for Herr Fluchen, who had never doubted my ability to snare good customers. But I am being disingenuous—the proprietor in question is myself. A futile attempt at suspense has kept me from revealing this fact.