The Fictional Man (31 page)

When I reached him, he was laying in the same position I had left him in, but something vital had left him. The trembling I had perceived in my madness had ceased in him; he lay stiff and still on the wooden floor, his hollow eyes gazing up at the ceiling as if accepting his fate.

I raised the axe, preparing to strike the head from his body. For long moments I stood there, willing myself to let the blade fall, to end this grotesque charade, this infernal parlour-game gone wrong, to finish it once and for all. But the axe would not fall; I could not bring myself to do it. I put it aside.

All at once, the peg-boy spoke again, but quieter now, not ripping his words from the raw flesh of my throat, but only asking in a gentle, keening tone: “WHY.”

“Why what?” I muttered, sinking to my knees before his maimed form.

“WHY DID YOU INVENT ME.”

“I wanted to make a point,” I said, but I could no longer remember what that point had been.

He fell silent. Again that hollow, contemptuous gaze fell on me. Under those empty eyes, I felt a dreadful compulsion to reach deep within myself, to vomit up the whole and unvarnished truth for his judgement. “I wanted to... to spoil Margaret Sutherland’s party.” The pettiness of the admission was like bile in my chest. “I wanted to wreck her ‘fun,’ take revenge on her for invading my life.”

But had she invaded? She had been a college friend of my wife’s, it was true; but in the early days of our marriage we had welcomed her with open arms and our most brightly polished silver. My wife had been a bridesmaid at her wedding, and I had raised my glass to toast the bride and groom with everyone else. We found her baby-voice and childish ways charming; we thought her boisterous personality made her ‘the life of the party.’

“No,” I found myself saying, almost against my will, “I wanted revenge on her because she was happy. I wanted to attack her, and her husband, and the Fullers, and the Rourkes, because they were happy, because they had found a place in the world for them after my world had died and rotted down to nothing. It was a petty revenge I created you for, a small and vicious revenge, but it was my revenge on them and on the ruin of my life –”

I tailed off there. What else was there to say?

And even that had been only another lie.

The half-truths and deceptions fell away like ancient scabs under that gaze, those hollow eyes that bored into me, stripping me of all pretension. Had I wanted revenge on them? Margaret Sutherland, perhaps. Her husband as well; yes, that I could see. But why would I want revenge on Tom Fuller, who’d showed me nothing but kindness after the pain of the divorce? Why would I wish cruelty on poor Jeannie Rourke, who’d lost so much herself?

My voice was quiet now, empty, as dead as the peg-boy’s own. “I wanted them to think I was clever.”

There, at last, was the truth. I had wanted them to think that I was clever. I had ruined a perfectly innocent evening and alienated the few friends I had, because I thought it might win me approval.

I thought they might join with me in mocking her, in tearing her down from the pedestal that, in truth, only I had set her on. I had hoped, through that cowardly ambush, to take her place, to turn her into the pariah that I had thought myself to be; and yet, had they not brought me company where I was miserable? Had they not been the only ones to take pity on me in my despair? And how had I rewarded them?

I saw myself then, as I truly was. So weak as to be unable to stand on my own. So brittle as to break at the slightest knock. My eyes were empty, hollow, perceiving the whole world to be the same. The unholy sneer carved into the peg-boy’s face was a mirror of the one carved into mine.

His voice was my own.

And still he stared.

I felt an awful dread fall upon me, knowing that I was still steeped in my own deceptions, that there were still things that I was blind to in myself that he would allow me to see in perfect, pinpoint detail. I had to hide myself from that infernal gaze; I cast about for something, anything, to trap him, to bottle and contain the hideous power of those hollow eyes.

An old cigar-box! Cardboard, saved for lighting fires – but it would serve. I grabbed hold of the doll, severed leg and all, stuffing him quickly into the box and tying the lid down with string. He bore his fate with resignation, making no sound, voicing no resistance. Still, the box felt hot in my hands, almost seeming to burn them, and I wasted no time in carrying it to a lonely place down in the cellar and setting it there, under a pile of ancient legal papers, to outsit eternity.

I know with a cold certainty that someday, some future owner of that house would free him and be transfixed by those eyes in turn. He needed me to speak, perhaps, but not to live; of that I found myself certain. I thought I heard his croaking voice once more as I closed and locked the door that led down to the attic; but it was muffled by the weight of paper and the rushing in my ears.

I left him in that place.

I
SPENT THE
remainder of the night trying to sleep. When my eyes were closed, I saw the peg-boy’s face, his empty-eyed sneer accusing me of an endless catalogue of sins; when open, they stared at the floor of the room, as if to try to pierce it and see the doll in his tiny, cramped cell. After long hours of this, I finally drifted into a mercifully dreamless slumber.

On waking, I made some desultory attempts to repair the mess I had made. I was too ashamed to speak to the Sutherlands, but I called the Fullers and expressed my apologies; Tom thanked me for them stiffly, his tone making it quite clear that I was no longer welcome in his home or in his company. Michael Rourke was warmer, almost forgiving.

“Think nothing of it on my account,” he said, and I could hear his reassuring smile across the wire that separated us, “but I don’t think Jeannie’s willing to forgive and forget quite so soon. We’ll give it time, eh? You know how women are.” And with that, and a few other empty pleasantries, he finished the final conversation he would ever have with me.

Now I was truly alone.

At first, I told myself that it was for the best. On my good days, I would lie to myself heartily over a self-prepared steak and pretend that they did not deserve me; on my worse days, I would stare into the depths of my whiskey-glass and know that I could not hope to deserve them. And thus, I occupied my time, and time marched on.

I avoided returning to the cellar. I would collect sticks and twigs from nearby fields to burn in the fire, though I knew I had a store of dry wood under my feet. I fixed the broken front gate with a brand new claw hammer, despite the fact that there was a perfectly serviceable old one hanging on a nail just past the cellar-door. It was as if my unconscious mind had simply eaten that room and everything in it; I did not think it an imposition to never set foot in that place – for I did not think of it at all.

I made little effort to meet new friends. Bars and ale-houses seemed overloud to me now, raucous and unpleasant; each time a glass would fall from a table, or a man would shout to his brother in greeting, I would flinch, and for an awful moment the ghosts of other nights would steal my senses. I considered advertising for a pen-pal, but dismissed the idea; I felt myself no longer able to bear human company in any form, physical or epistolary. For years, I had been a hermit in my soul; now that lonely urge had completely taken over my life, and I lived it as I deserved.

Increasingly, as the nights drew in and the time spent gazing into the whiskey-glass lengthened with them, I found myself thinking again of the cellar, of the peg-boy, trapped inside his cardboard chamber, wanting only not to die. Oddly, even after so much time had passed, I could not help but think of him as a living thing; yes, a living thing that I had created, had ill-used, had maimed, had imprisoned in a cramped oubliette not fit for the meanest of traitors. All for the crime of showing me myself.

His last, plaintive cries lingered with me, and more and more often I found myself plagued by disturbing dreams; dreams in which the peg-boy beat at his card-and-string prison with his thin wooden fists, his cold sneer warped into a howl of anguish, begging for release, begging to be allowed to live and speak again. I would wake from these in a cold sweat, my heart racing like a trip-hammer, a hoarse denial of my guilt wrenching itself from my lips.

But I was guilty. As in all things, I was guilty.

One night, as the whiskey burned in me and I found myself again staring into the ashes of a dead fire, I came to a realisation; that I, too, had been placed in a cell, one that was just as confining as the wooden doll’s, and with just as little way out.

I remembered that I had been afraid of him, but I could no longer quite remember why. He was I, after all; that had been established. Was I so afraid of myself?

Yes, I decided, yes I was. But I would be no longer. The impulse took me, and I stood up, drained my whiskey to the last drop, and marched towards the locked cellar-door. I had made my decision: I would cut the string, tear open the cigar-box, free the peg-boy from his prison, and once more allow him to speak. If his voice was horrid and unnatural, well, so what? The silence of my life was more horrid, more unnatural. If his gaze was harsh, I would rather bear it than have no eyes on me at all. If he had truths to speak to me, then let me hear them. He was I, and I had kept myself locked up for far too long.

My hand fumbled with the thick iron key to the cellar-door, and then I was bounding down the wooden steps, breaking thick cobwebs, a fierce exultation burning in my breast. I looked around the room, saw the scattered paper and the cigar-box peeping out from underneath it, and snapped the string binding it with my hands. Then I tore off the lid...

...and screamed!

One of the far corners of the cigar-box had been chewed open; that was how the mice must have gotten in. The marks of their teeth were all over the little wooden peg-boy. One arm had been chewed off, and there were terrible gouges in his body, like mortal wounds from a bayonet attack; but worst of all was his face. The mice had gnawed it down, chewing and grinding, sharpening their teeth on it. Fully half of the head was gone, chewed away.

The teeth-marks on what remained made it look like nothing so much as the grinning skull of a corpse!

THE END

“G
OOD
G
OD,
”
MUTTERED
Niles, leafing through the yellowing pages.

“It’s a doozy, all right. Anyway, there you have it,” Aspidistra said, “the inspiration for
The Doll’s Delight.
” She chuckled, dryly. “Not exactly Shel Silverstein, now, is it?”

Niles shook his head. “How...” he tailed off, but the way he stared at the dense, typewritten manuscript – and then over at the children’s book – asked his question for him.

“My goodness,” Aspidistra breathed, shaking her head. “Now, thereby hangs a tale.”

I
N
1949,
STILL
smarting from the rejection of the only story he would ever write, and now hopelessly addicted to Benzedrine, Henry Dalrymple fell in with Mervyn and Harriet Burroughs, a pair of ‘swappers’ with a three-year-old child, Aspidistra. Mervyn Burroughs, a housepainter in his former life, had also been a prisoner of war, albeit for a shorter period of time than Henry, and this shared experience led to Henry entering their lives, and their home, as part of a
ménage a trois
.

Together, the three of them managed to function as something approaching a family unit, albeit one that ran on a diet of pills, bathtub gin and anonymous sex with a succession of ‘fourth players.’ “Anyone for doubles” was a regular joke in the Burroughs household, meaning both ‘double shots’ of strong liquor and their regular coital pickups. Occasionally, during some frenzied jag or other, Mervyn would grab paints and a roll of wallpaper that he used as a canvas and attempt to capture some flavour of whatever discordian revel was going on at that moment. All too often, Aspidistra would be front and centre in these paintings, looking on at the writhing bodies with her thumb in her mouth.

Perhaps realising, somewhere deep inside himself, that this was no environment in which to raise a child, Mervyn slowly became obsessed with the idea of childhood innocence and purity. More and more often, while coming down off whatever unfortunate spell had possessed him the previous night, he would attempt scenes of pastoral beauty, of gentle forest clearings, fairy rings and woodland creatures. But each time, the inner demon that fuelled his debauchery would subtly twist the brush in his hand, and his elysian scenes would be altered – only slightly, but enough – into scenes from hell.

Eventually, he turned to Dalrymple for help, declaring his intention to illustrate a children’s book which he hoped Dalrymple would write for him. The idea appealed to whatever was left of Henry Dalrymple, but unfortunately, he was a man of one book – or rather, one story. After wracking his addled brains for weeks in an attempt to think of a new story suitable for children, he made the decision – doubtless aided by his closest allies at the time, Benzedrine and Heroin – to adapt, convert or otherwise butcher ‘The Doll-Party’ until it fitted the new format. It took several days to get completely right, but eventually he had something that he felt confident handing over to Burroughs for illustration.

If Burroughs felt any disquiet at the tone of the piece – which was bordering on Orwellian, and would certainly have raised uncomfortable questions with any McCarthyists who might happen to drop by – he said nothing at the time. Looking at the illustrations he produced, some of his most nightmarish to date, one must assume that his subconscious either rebelled against the verses or took them to their most obvious conclusion. Either way, the thing produced was unfit for consumption by any children whatsoever – although Aspidistra got one of the five test copies that were printed up. In it, her ‘Uncle Hank’ had written:
well, I gave it a shot.