The Transfiguration of Mister Punch (18 page)

Don’t think to come looking for me. I’m very used to the silly games you play, with your Mr Plods (such serious fellas) and your nasty nooses (such ridiculous little threads)... Anyway, I’m off to do another spot of bottling! Ta-ra!

by Cate Gardner

Stijn understood how a man could be alone when surrounded by others. He sat on a swell of limbs, torsos and dentures, his sausage-like fingers attempting to attach a knee to a thigh. A long shadow stretched from the entranceway of the cavern, lengthened by the orange flames that spat from the impossibly high walls. Stijn buried his head in his work. If only one of the disembodied heads would talk to him, would wink and acknowledge he existed. He knew it was in his fingers to resurrect them. If they were many, perhaps they could bust their way out of Hell or at least tear apart his tormentors—Judy and Punch.

At the entrance to the cavern, Judy bent to scratch the stubble that peppered her shins. The sound echoed, reverberating around the damp walls and spiralling up to god knew where. Stijn leaned back. Sometimes he thought he saw a wink of blue sky or a slither of moonlight. As if the world above opened up for a moment to peek into Hell. Sometimes he knew he was going mad. There was no escape from here. No matter how high the bodies piled-up, he’d never reach the top, and if he did, the top would prove feet of thick rock, impenetrable to him. It only ever opened when he lay at the bottom looking up. Eventually, he would sink beneath the pile of limbs, torsos and heads. Be buried amongst the stink and the rot.

Not content with scratching her shins, Judy set to work on scratching her head. She shook her long, red curls releasing fingers and toes and bits of ears that had become trapped within her hair. The falling weight of digits caused a seismic wave to ripple through the mass of bodies. It unsteadied Stijn’s balance. He slipped towards the stream of blood that drained through grate and sewer pipe to the River Styx. Although, Stijn hadn’t seen the Styx, he’d heard it wash against the cavern walls and he’d heard the cries of those who drowned within its current. Stijn clung to the nearest torso, its breasts ravaged by rot. He should drop into the stream and allow it to carry him to the Styx; at least he’d find company amongst the tormented.

He’d be the maddest there.

As Stijn sunk deeper into the swell of body parts, the torso’s ribcage caving in and offering him no purchase, a blue eye blinked in the nearest disembodied head. The face had angled cheekbones and a rosebud mouth, ginger hair sprouted from its scalp, patchy in places. At last, one of the heads showed signs of life. Stijn determined he would replace the hair and find the head a body to match her skin tone. He’d give her big hands, all the better to cling to this place and to prevent the tide washing her away. In the cavern entrance, Judy began to scratch her underarms.

“Hold on tight,” Stijn said.

The head sunk its teeth into Stijn’s calf. Together they rode the wave. It didn’t matter that teeth tore flesh from Stijn’s calf. He could replace the leg with another. There was an endless supply of body parts here and it would rain more soon. The layers were already hundreds deep.

The wave bumped them closer to Judy. Too close and Judy and Punch would snatch him up again. They’d tear him apart and watch as his teeth found a new body, as he began to rebuild himself. They wondered on the miracle of a man made of mismatched parts. Their little Frankie they’d nicknamed him. For all he knew his name wasn’t Stijn at all but he liked to think it was.

Punch steadied himself against the wall. It dripped with blood. Judy’s caterwaul threatened to throw them both into the pit. When they’d first arrived in Hell, they’d had to crawl from the pit. Back then, the layer of limbs and torsos and heads was no more than two people thick. Still, perhaps this time her cries would crack the walls and he could peek into other corners of Hell. There had to be more imagination to the underworld than rotting bodies and a strange little man made up of mismatched parts. Frankie they called the mismatched man, after a character in a book they’d read. The book had tumbled to Hell along with a set of hands (still clutched together). In their quarters (a smaller cavern set apart from the blood stream), they had a collection of things that had fallen with the dead. Gold rings hung from thread that they had unwound from clothes. Walking canes formed tables and chairs. Pocket watches told differing times. They ticked for a while, but Punch allowed them to wind down.

No new pocket watches had rained in days, years, possibly decades. Felt like decades. No fresh anything, their corner of Hell stale, forgotten.

Something tugged at Punch’s coat tails, dragging him back to the cavern of men. A whirlwind swirled about his legs, encouraging him into its embrace. No one pulled his strings. Punch turned and strode into the wind, his cane slapping against rock.

Punch arrived just in time to witness Judy reaching into the cavern. Her impossible arms, despite their length, proved too short to grab Frankie who spiralled towards the ceiling, carried on a wave of body parts. A head bit into Frankie’s leg, riding the wave. Frankie looked to be screaming. Punch couldn’t hear the scream over the roar of the wind and Judy’s wail. The body parts continued to rise; the air thick with them. Judy reached into the melee and caught a hand. Or rather, the hand caught her and began to drag Judy up into the tornado, legs and arms twisting in the wind, red hair whipping against her face, muffling her tirade.

Punch steadied himself against the swirl that tore at his clothes and tried to lift him up into its chaos. Judy lifted higher and higher until she was a red dot on a rocky sky. About him, the cavern was almost empty. A few toes and fingers slid into the stream, and that was that. Everything but Punch had risen into the wind. He looked up. A crack of light pushed through the swell of bodies, finding its way through armpits and knee joints. They were leaving Hell. The idea of Judy’s flight, and subsequent departure, brought a rare smile until he realised he’d have no one to hate.

Everyone needed someone to hate.

Punch slapped his cane against his leg, urging his feet to lift. The wind whipped about his ankles understanding his need. Punch rocked and swayed, swayed and rocked and even added a few frog leaps. What was weighing him down? The wind nudged him forward and he slipped on a couple of rotting toes. The circus of departing body parts, with Judy and Frankie at the lead, rioted above but Punch couldn’t hop more than a few inches.

If left here alone, Hell would become just that. Hell. No one left him behind. Punch roared at the wind, offering it a challenge. He’d not wanted to leave Hell before. It suited him. He slammed his cane against the cavern walls. Circled, circled, circled. Judy, Frankie, all the pieces of people, now formed a single mass, a brief wavering dot. They blocked whatever light had pushed through. The wind lessened to a breeze and centred its breath on the stream, causing ripples on the surface. He’d ride the current into the parts of Hell where the dead screamed. His boot tested the water. Leather hissed, began to melt around his toes. Punch withdrew. He’d think about leaving, no need to be rash.

Yes
, the wind whispered in his ear.
That’s the way to do it, Punch.

His fingers dug into the cavern wall, found handholds. He’d climb out of Hell. Yes, that’s what he would do. Even if it tore the skin from his fingers and knees, he’d scale this wall until he reached the pinprick of black and light (a little like a crescent moon) at the apex. Finding a handhold for his left hand, and a foothold for both feet, Punch reached up and dug his fingers into the next groove. He climbed and climbed and climbed. The higher he got, the different the layers. Sandstone, chalk for a while (not easy to climb, kept crumbling beneath his weight), brick, even a layer of metal (thankfully dented and only a couple of feet high) and of course, flesh-searing flame. Still the top proved an impossible distance away. Breath pained in his chest. His arms weakened by the climb threatened to send him plummeting. Putrid rain dripped from the hole in Hell, leaving the walls slick.

The magnitude of Hell left him dwarfed. The closer he got to the crack in Hell’s ceiling, the lesser he felt, the more like an ordinary human being. Like the man he’d been. Monster, Judy had called him.

Close enough to see into the world, Punch craned his neck and peered up at a hint of blue sky and white clouds. The world looked the same. Its promise urged him on, gave him the strength to climb the last few metres. His fingers reached for the exit. Jagged rock cut into his palm. He’d almost done it. One slip and he’d plummet, would prove the first broken body in Hell. Some would say he deserved such a punishment—if their teeth still chattered.

Punch pushed up through the fracture in Hell, head and shoulders out in the world. The stink of Hell, a smell he’d grown used to and didn’t notice under normal circumstances, wafted away to be replaced by exhaust fumes and decaying kebabs. Smells Punch didn’t recognise. Grease coated his throat. He coughed, his lungs rejecting the air that, although fresher than that in Hell, was thick. In his day, the air had smelled of grass, wet stone and blood.

There was a hint of blood to this air too.

In his day, his name had been Peter not Punchinello. Hell liked to rename people and those names had a way of sticking, had a way of making you forget who you’d been—good or bad.

Punch lay amid decomposing human detritus. It drained through the crack, raining down into the pit. Crack was an apt word, for what had moments before been wide enough for Punch to pass through without his shoulders grazing the sides was now no more than three inches wide and five inches long. He couldn’t pass back into Hell. This world was it and it stunk and looked more Hellish than a pit full of body parts, at least they hadn’t rotted much there. How many years had the Earth revolved? Looking about him, and how his world had changed, it seemed like centuries, but in the distance he saw the clock tower that stood above the old theatre. That had been there in his day—a ramshackle building surrounded by terraces of shops, a bank and an outcrop of houses. He’d lived on the edge of it all. Along with Judy (Caroline then), he’d stolen people from there.

Pressing his palms into the sludge, Punch pulled himself up. Rather than wiping his hands down his suit, he rubbed them against the nearest wall. Similar handprints dotted the bricks. Judy’s.

Apart from the handprints, there was no sign of Judy or little Frankie. In the case of Judy, Punch hoped she’d formed part of the sludge that pattered into the cavern. It wouldn’t be though. Judy wouldn’t decompose like some ordinary woman. Judging by the lessening of the handprints, Judy had exited the alleyway at the far end. He would head in the other direction.

Head.

That reminded him—a head had bitten into little Frankie’s leg. What miracle had caused these two to cling to life despite the ruination and loss of their bodies? If they didn’t drip and liquefy amidst the slush, he would find them. Before he could stride from the alley, a hand grabbed his ankle. Bending, Punch unclasped the fingers and, intending to throw the hand into the wash of liquefied dead, found an arm attached to the hand, and a body attached to the arm, until it ended in a man with a scruffy grey beard and bloodshot eyes, no stink of sulphur to him.