The Smell of Telescopes (33 page)

We had reached the point where the stairway bent back on itself and it became apparent he would not be able to manoeuvre the carbine through this sharp angle. I turned and ran down into the hallway while he fought to twist the oversized barrel. My impulse was to head for the front door and escape into the street, but a low groan from the kitchen reminded me that my wife might still be in the house.

I knocked along the corridor in the dark, restraining an impulse to weep on our relatively new carpet. The kitchen was fitfully illumined by the candles we had used to bathe our salad. They were no more than stubs now and threw shifting shadows on the walls. Odette sat on a chair, face contorted in anguish. The bindings were invisible until I stood directly above her. I removed her gag and frowned.

“What are you doing all trussed up?”

She took a deep breath. “Look to your left, Donald.”

I obeyed her command and was astonished to note a bishop sitting at our table, leaning over a vast ledger. He held a quill in one rough hand and seemed to be scratching occult symbols on the vellum. Frequently, he would pause to pluck the strings of a lute which rested on his knee. The resulting note was plaintive and shrill. I covered my ears at the savage beauty of it and the bishop chuckled.

“
Ples de tristor, marritz e doloiros
,” he crooned horridly. “
Comens est planch per lo dan remembrar
.”

“It’s unbearable!” I stammered.

“I entirely agree. But who is he?”

“How should I know? I’ve got Jacob Degen upstairs. He used a flying machine to break into the bedroom.”

“Somebody’s coming down the steps. Release me!”

I snatched the broken scissors from the rack and hacked at Odette’s bonds. As I blistered my thumbs, she related all that had happened while I lay asleep. “There was this unbelievable downpour and then I heard the most wondrous singing outside. So I went down and unlocked the back door and this bishop pushed his way in and tied me up with this rope. I think he’s been torturing me for heresy.”

“It wasn’t a normal storm, evidently.”

“Let’s leave them to it. I’m not staying here another minute. We’ll spend the rest of the night in a hotel.”

The bishop regarded our departure with genuine sorrow. It was clear he would have obstructed us had he been more agile. But the girth of his abdomen and the dislocation of his hip when he rose demonstrated how the advantage had passed into our hands, or rather feet. He consoled himself by slamming his book, spraying wet ink over table and mitre, and picking out a haunted arpeggio on his lute.

“
Perparan dreg, es tortz tant enantitz.
”

We hastened down the hallway, also ignoring the voice which warbled from the landing. Herr Degen was still having problems working his rifle free. “
Können Sie einen Mechaniker schicken?
”

“Tell me what’s happening, Donald.”

“I thought it had something to do with you!”

Opening the front door, our eyes were assaulted by a chaotic scene. The streetlights had failed but illumination was provided by a fire upon which smouldered a dozen neighbours. A convocation of men in robes stood around the blaze, warming gauntlets and perspiring through the peepholes of pointed hoods. Dishevelled people raced up and down the middle of the road, dressed in sundry historical garb. At first it appeared that every amateur thespian in the district had suddenly chosen to stage an outdoor tragedy in the same place, lacking only a script. But these protagonists were too talented to be local actors.

We stepped forward warily, slipping on a puddle of vomit. Suspended from gables and chimneys, massive streamers of regurgitated food emitted an abominable odour. The entire city had been used as a bucket by a vast debaucher, a macrocosmic Vitellius of ineffable appetite. Mingled in the slurry, spices bubbled forth in opaque clouds which tumbled over gardens and parked cars like battlefield gas.

“There must be a link with that restaurant.”

Odette nodded. “Why don’t we find out?”

Directly opposite our house, a swarthy character climbed slates and launched himself off a roof. Sigils were spattered over his robes and he wore a corrugated beard. Instead of falling, he hovered in the air, wild kicks shredding the saffron vapours, a fist glinting with barbaric rings describing arcane figures above his head.

“
Zazazaoy, Zothzazoth, Thozaxazoth!
”

A papyrus sandal dropped from one foot, exposing toenails as curved and sharp as damascene scimitars. The shoe struck a Victorian gentleman, perhaps a physician, who lingered below. He carried his own selection of blades and beckoned to my wife as if she was a prostitute. Further along the pavement, a traditional impalement was in progress. A telephone pole had been uprooted and sharpened with an axe. It was being replanted with a burden even more vocal than the lines it had previously held. The wiry form of our newsagent, recently engaged, now hung up, undulated over the smoky street like a tapeworm kebab.

I was tempted to rush to his aid, but the appearance of the man who stood under the stake quickly discouraged me. Perched above the vomit on a mound of crimson cushions, he managed to blend uncouth mannerisms with elegant apparel, like the king of a remote medieval principality, which is what I suspected he was. He chided his lackeys, who flopped in the vomit as they righted the pole.

“
Înca un rînd, va rog. Imediat, noi grabim
.”

I gripped Odette’s hand and we skated past the grisly vista, but as we came within range of the sadistic king, he reached out and pinched my nude buttocks between finger and thumb. Then he winked at me with a slow eye and through simple reflex I found myself returning the dalliance. My cheeks burning, heart brimming with self-disgust, I left him for another horror. In one of the myriad potholes neglected by the City Council, now overflowing with sick, a miniature submarine floated unsteadily, while a businessman with the starched grin of a double agent accepted money from rival groups of sunburnt murderers.

“I’ve seen his face before,” Odette cried. “He was a notorious arms dealer active during the Boer War.”

“We’ve been sent to Hell!” I replied.

“No, Donald, I think Hell has come to us.”

We struggled up Constitution Hill and when we turned at the apex to stare across the city we beheld a panorama worthy of the lunatic artists of Holland, an animated combination of Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel and Hugo van der Goes. The Mumbles lighthouse span its wounded cyclopean eye over the sub-Neapolitan bay, but it irradiated only muttering filth. The devastation was broad and unique. The Guildhall, the only attractive edifice in the sprawl, was crusted with vultures, while elephants on the sward below stamped men in turbans. From the Vetch, the football ground, came sundry dog Latin sounds: the jabbing of a thousand inverted thumbs, the roaring of unspecified animals.

Odette swallowed with difficulty. “I never imagined it was feasible for Swansea to sink any lower.”

Pressing on to St Jude’s, we entered the church and stumbled to the altar. An impossible staircase led upward from the ciborium, higher than the loftiest steeple, into a metaphysical region that my eyes refused to define in terms of honest perspective. We shuddered in each other’s arms as we estimated the length of the bannisters—precisely that of levers to shift the Earth off its orbit. And there was a place to stand for the job, a location which met Archimedes’s criteria. A bistro in the sky. An ontological eaterie. Vomit cascaded down the steps, eroded cubes of meat and bones rolling in rainbow slush.

I began the daunting ascent. My wife tugged at my shirt to restrain me, but I broke into a run, chest heaving, stomach likewise. And finally the flock wallpaper, almost a hypothetical concept at the bottom, an act of faith, came into sight, expanding from a glowing dot into an unstable square flooded with twenty shades of scarlet, the pattern saturated with this sanguine spectra, like a beermat for the Holy Grail. I ran for half an hour. And something vile came down to greet me—a sheep born not in Wales but in a vat of stomach acid.

Exhausted and delirious, I kneeled and waited for the half-digested lamb to reach me. It bleated and pranced in a jerky rhythm, as if auditioning for an epileptic’s nightmare. This spot was the midpoint between my wife and the origin of the vomit, and I judged it to be the happiest position I had ever attained, equidistant from two purgatories. Squinting between the haze of capsicum gas, I watched the gigantic morsel splash closer, a second helping of panic cooling on its scaphocephalic visage. It wobbled competently on two legs, and I wondered whether it was trying to imitate the shepherd who had sold it to the cook, or the gourmand who had forced it whole down a bourgeois gullet. 

Yet the lamb turned out to be neither oviform nor macerated, but an old man wrapped in dirty woollens. He strongly resembled the thaum- aturge who hovered over our street, though there was a weariness in his motions not negated by his obvious haste. He called to me in a voice deader than myrrh, each letter of his sentence pronounced with a different accent. I struggled to interpret his words. At least with the foreigners, tone had provided context, but there were no clues here: the meaning was unaided. It was like listening to a cedar.

“Turn back! We are evacuating the restaurant!”

“You speak English? That’s a relief.”

“I know every language in which mortals can argue, save Volapük and Euskara. Now hurry up and run down.”

“Not before you tell me who you are.”

“I am Cartaphilus, the Wandering Jew. But Satan is coming! His guts are empty. Do you want your head chomped?”

At the top of the stairs, the square of wallpaper was eclipsed by a hairy shape, immense and awkward. Yet it did not betray a purely bestial outline. It was more rococo than that. The impression it gave was one of filigreed evil, utmost depravity with a gilded shell, a Fabergé devil. I envisaged topaz horns, braided eyebrows, powdered cheeks, though details could not be confirmed at this range.

I preceded my new comrade on the descent, until we rejoined my wife at the altar. Ludicrously, we paused here, as if level ground was secure from the demented Prince of Darkness.

I made polite introductions. “This is Odette.”

He offered a hand. “Call me Ahasuerus.”

“You said your name was Cartaphilus!”

“So it is! And Giovanni Buttadeo. I have as many names as countries and favour none of them. Striking Christ on the route to the crucifixion was an unlikely beginning to the adventure holiday of the aeon! One tiny blow, the sort of thing anyone might try, and there I was, off on a tour of all the kingdoms of the world.”

“Have you been to Peru?” inquired Odette.

“I was present when Pizarro ordered the murder of Atahualpa. He had mild breath for a conquistador, but his ears stank. Doubtless he is here now, with his ruffians, digging for gold in Cwmdonkin Park. Nonetheless, we must leave the church and hurl ourselves into the tumult. A respected eccentric, I am quite safe. Unfortunately, you don’t share the necessary attributes to mollify the damned.”

I choked. “Will you aid us? For payment?”

“What need have I for money?”

“I’ll show you something you’ve never seen in all your centuries of travel. Consider it: a new sight!”

While Odette frowned at me in stupefaction, Cartaphilus stroked his forked beard and nodded. I had chanced on his one weakness. He was jaded to such an extent that his kidneys almost passed green stones. With only a brief glance back up the steps, he ushered us onto the street. Panting back to our home, I indicated the spectacle of horror, my gesture taking in the flames, screams, tears, stains, decay and blades. The environs of the Guildhall were strewn with skin and unravelled turbans. And vultures squabbled bloatedly, like gloves.

“Ah yes! Emperor Aurangazib. He often trampled his own citizens. He was the only sober man in Hindustan in the seventeenth century. Totally insane, of course, but a snappy dresser.”

I pointed at the stadium. “And there?”

“Another despot, but a different age. I conclude it is Commodus and one of his special circuses. He enjoyed fighting gladiators himself, but only after they had been drugged. However, he was an accurate archer. He is shooting giraffes, by the sound of it. First time real skill has been demonstrated at the Vetch for decades!”

Thus we were provided with a commentary on the most terrible rogues from times past. All were there—Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel rode past us on a white stallion, with a string of tongues dangling from his pommel, which he poked out at us in sequence by jerking the cord, an insult only he laughed at. Cartaphilus lowered his voice. I learned that this was perhaps the most cruel man who had ever lived. When Pope Pius V excommunicated the entire population of the Netherlands in 1567, valiant Fernando was sent to carry out the sentence of death. He was diligent in his work, with pokers and shears.

Our street had changed for the worse. The submarine was burning and sinking in its pond of sick, while the bearded arms dealer counted a wad of roubles. Cartaphilus hailed him in Greek and the icy fellow held up a Mauser pistol for inspection. I doubted the value of bullets against the devil and shook my head. No sale.

“Basil Zaharoff, a most intriguing scoundrel. Started wars and sold weapons to both sides. One of the richest men who have ever lived. Satan was especially fond of him. And the medieval king is Stefan cel Mare of Moldavia. He will attend any party where there are sausages and gherkins on sticks. Clench your buttocks in his presence. You rarely know when he might slip a stake between them.”

I made certain to follow this advice. I resolved to ransack laundry baskets, both Odette’s and mine, for trousers, the moment we reached our house. On the telephone pole, the newsagent still writhed. Soon he would be lonely no longer. King Stefan was preparing a dog and milkman to keep him company. And now the Victorian gentleman approached and leered at my wife, suggestively flexing a saw.

“That is Francis J. Tumblety, quack doctor and pornographer, better known as Jack the Ripper. Does it surprise you he’s American? Misogynist all his life. Worked the canal banks as a boy, selling dirty pictures to navigators. Collected wombs even then.”