The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read online

  ‘His set of samples?’

  ‘Plenty more in my sack,’ he said. ‘Lots and lots of samples. Dozens and scores and hundreds and thousands of samples. You’d think they breed in there and I just put them in the machines, don’t I, and stick a sign along with them and sometimes people pay and sometimes they don’t and sometimes they scream and sometimes they giggle and sometimes the police turn me out of town and off I go down the road again, pushing my barrow. And times grow worse, since he began to put it into practice. No more money to spare for an old man’s disgusting if didactic demonstrations; you can get as good at home. Soon I’ll have to charge a pin to see it – or a jam jar, or a cigarette card. And who will exchange such rubbish for liquor, then? When that day dawns, poor robin must tuck his head under his wing, poor thing, and pretend to be warm, yes!’

  ‘But,’ he added, pouring out the seventh glass for himself, ‘the singular privilege of becoming Mendoza was never granted me. I was allowed to make my own transformations and if you look at me you can see how well I have succeeded.’

  A tear trickled out from under his glasses so that I knew he had eyes even if they were sightless and I seemed to remember a cutting in the files that said Dr Hoffman’s old professor had suffered some injuries in an accident in a laboratory many many years before. I judged the old man was now sufficiently drunk and handed the bottle back to the barman.

  ‘I should like to kill him,’ said the peep-show proprietor. ‘If I were ten years younger, I would go to the castle and murder him.’

  ‘Do you know the way to the castle?’

  ‘I should follow my nose,’ he said.

  But then a cock crowed and the sound affected the old man curiously. He sat up and listened attentively; it crowed a second time and then a third.

  ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ shrieked the old man.

  With that, he struck me full in the face with his cane so that blood streamed into my eyes from a cut above my forehead and, when I could see again, he was gone. I hurried immediately back to the pier but, though he could only hobble, I caught no sign of him along the way and when I reached the place where his booth had been, it was, of course, also completely gone. So I made my way to the Town Hall, to do my official business.

  The plaster scrolls and garlands on the pompous exterior of the Town Hall were crumbling like dry sponge cake and all the windows were screened with green blinds but the heavy mahogany doors swung open readily enough and, though puffs of dust rose up when I trod on the maroon plush carpeting and most of the offices were empty but for cobwebs spun from inkwell to pen-rack across blurred surfaces of desks, at last a yawning clerk came out of the ante-room of the Mayor’s office to greet me. Metal bracelets hoisted up his shirt-sleeves to bare his wrists for work; he had been left in charge.

  The Mayor’s office itself was a mausoleum. It had been tidied since he left so there were no papers or files to be seen and they had drawn his carved, pompous chair so tightly up to the scrupulously denuded desk that it looked as though it were denying admittance there to any future body. The Mayor’s pink blotter was thickly furred with mildew and his dried-out water flask, topped with an inverted tumbler, had grown hunched shoulders of settled dust. The indefatigable spiders had woven a canopy across a photograph of the late President on the wall. The clerk opened a cupboard to reveal half a decanterful of mayoral sherry, now grown viscous as treacle, groped on a lower shelf and produced the fur-collared overcoat the Mayor had left behind him on the snowy morning he vanished. The pockets contained only a single balled glove and a dirty handkerchief, nothing of significance.

  But after only the briefest search through the other offices, I found evidence that a certain peep-show proprietor had filed an official request to open a booth on the pier in the preceding month of April; this form, signed with a tentative cross, still waited for the official stamp so my ramshackle friend had clearly gone ahead on his own and set up shop regardless. It was, at least, a connection. I tucked away this form to take back to the Minister, took the clerk’s name and briefly checked his reality rating with my information. It appeared satisfactory. Then I asked him to ring the Mayor’s home, where his daughter still lived with a housekeeper. The clerk got through after only seven or eight minutes and I noted the services were still functioning satisfactorily though the clerk told me the telephone switchboard could neither take nor receive calls outside the immediate neighbourhood while even these local calls were constantly interrupted by voices in unknown languages. After a good deal of country town chat with the Mayor’s house, he ensured me some nights’ lodging there, at the probable source of my bureaucratic mystery.

  ‘It’s all got very run down since the Mayor left,’ he said dubiously. ‘Just the old woman and the, er, girl…’

  Something in his voice indicated a strangeness in the girl. I pricked up the ears of my mind, briskly jotted down the directions he gave me and went to my car. It was now early evening and, since I stopped on my way to eat a supper of meat pies in a fly-blown café too squalid to be illusory, I did not reach the house until it was almost dark. It lay some way out of town at the end of an old-fashioned, rutted lane, where there were no other habitations than one abandoned barn. The sky was the tender, transparent blue of a late summer’s night and a slender intimation of the moon hung above a copse of fir although the tiger lilies of the setting sun still growled in the west. I parked my car in the road and, once the engine ceased to throb, there was no other sound but a faint shimmer of birdsong and the rattle of the quilled boughs of the pines.

  Although I knew it was inhabited, at first I thought the house was quite forsaken for the extensive garden which surrounded it was sunk in the neglect of years. Whoever made the garden first must have loved roses but now the roses had quite overrun the garden and formed dense, forbidding hedges that sent out such an overpowering barrage of perfume that my head was soon swimming. Besides, roses sprayed out fanged, blossoming whips from cupolas which almost foundered under their weight; roses reared up in groves of sturdy standards now the size of young oaks; and roses sent vine-like tendrils along the sombre branches of yew trees, of ornamental rowans, of cherry trees and apple trees already half-suffocated with mistletoe so this summer, which had suited roses so well, seemed to have conspired with the gardener to produce an orgiastic jungle of all kinds of roses, and though I could not distinguish any of their separate shapes or colours, their individual scents all blended into a single, intolerably sweet essence which made every nerve in my body ache and tingle.

  Roses had climbed up the already luxuriantly ivied walls and lodged in knots on the roofs where flowering weeds were rooted in the gaps between the mossy tiles while a great, unlopped elm with lice of rooks in its hair towered over the house as if about to drop its great limbs upon it, to smash it, while at the same time its roots clutched the foundations under the earth in a ferocious embrace. The garden had laid claim to the house and was destroying it at its arborescent leisure. Those within the house were already at the capricious mercy of nature.

  Enormous clumps of mugwort had torn apart the gate and blocked the path entirely so I had to clamber over the tumbledown wall, dislodging a few more stones as I did so. Looking towards the shaggy outlines of the house, I saw a greenish glimmer of light on the ground floor filtering through the leaves which obscured the windows and took this for my clue out of the hostile, vegetable maze which, as I moved forward, lashed me, scored me, stung me and left me sick, bleeding and dizzy with its odorous excess. As I drew nearer to the house I heard, over the pounding of the blood in my ears, notes of music falling ‘plop’, like goldfish in a quiet pool. Breathless, I halted for a moment to find out if the sound was true. It went wistfully on. Somebody in that ruinous place was playing Debussy on the piano.

  At last I reached the lighted window and parting the foliage which covered it, I peered through. I saw a drawing room with worn Persian rugs on the floor and walls hung with a once crimson brocaded paper that was now faded
and figured with damp and mould, rucking and buckling over the dank walls beneath. There was an alabaster fireplace with a bouquet of shell flowers in a misted glass dome upon it and a fan of silver paper in the grate. Oil paintings so heavily varnished one could not make out their subjects hung here and there askew in pompous frames of tarnished gilt and an unlit cut-glass chandelier in the centre of the ceiling scintillated with reflections from the two candles in a branched stick which stood on the grand piano and threw a soft light over the girl who played it.

  Her back was turned towards me but when I craned my neck I could see her white, thin, nervous fingers on the keyboard and caught a glimpse of the pale curve of her cheek. Her hair, the lifeless brown of a winter forest, hung down the back of her black dress. She played with extraordinary sensitivity. The room was full of a poignant, nostalgic anguish which seemed to emanate from that slender figure whose face I could not see.

  I thought it best not to disturb her and made my way round to the back of the house where I found a black cat washing itself on an up-turned bucket, and inside an open door, a fat old woman who sat in a darkened kitchen to save, she said, the electricity; and that was also the reason why she made the mistress of the house play the piano by candlelight. The housekeeper guessed who I must be from my lumpish shape in the shadows. She greeted me warmly and turned on the lights in my honour to reveal a blessedly commonplace kitchen with a gas stove, a refrigerator and a saucer of milk put down for pussy. She settled me down at the scrubbed table with a cup of tea and a saucerful of shortbread biscuits, asked about my journey and hoped, too solicitously, that I would find the accommodation adequate.

  ‘Though how could we put you up luxuriously, sir, I mean – in the circumstances…’

  She had a slippery, ingratiating quality which was meant to disarm but somehow offended me and she loquaciously set sail on a rattling stream of nothings while the girl in the drawing room continued to play the piano exquisitely and the music echoed down a corridor into the room. The old woman spoke of the vanished Mayor with neither embarrassment nor surmise. She had apparently absorbed the fact that he was gone so well into her world that if, one day, he returned, she would feel subtly affronted. She hinted that she suspected a woman might lie behind it for, she said: ‘Not many women would want Mary Anne for a step-daughter. Oh, no! Oh, no!’ She rolled her eyes significantly and chatted on about the difficulty of obtaining women’s magazines and knitting wool. Presently the music ceased and Mary Anne herself came into the kitchen, on some errand she forgot as soon as she saw me for the housekeeper had not bothered to tell her an unexpected guest would arrive at her home. She stood in the doorway, transfixed with surprise and apprehension; in her face, only eyes the colour of a rainy day moved this way and that, as if looking for a way out.

  She had the waxen delicacy of a plant bred in a cupboard. She did not look as if blood flowed through her veins but instead some other, less emphatic fluid infinitely less red. Her mouth was barely touched with palest pink though it had exactly the proportions of the three cherries the artmaster piles in an inverted triangle to illustrate the classic mouth and there was no tinge of any pink at all on her cheeks. Now she was standing up, she was almost hidden in her dress and her tiny face, shaped like a locket, looked even smaller than it was because of a disordered profusion of hair streaming down as straight as if she had just been plucked from the river. I could see her hair and dress were stuck all over with twigs and petals from the garden. She looked like drowning Ophelia; I thought so immediately, though I could not know how soon she would really drown, for she was so forlorn and desperate. And a chilling and restrained passivity made her desperation all the more pathetic. The housekeeper clucked to see the wraith-like girl’s bare feet.

  ‘Put your slippers on at once, Miss! Bare feet on those stone flags! I never did! You’ll catch your death!’

  Mary Anne moved awkwardly from one foot to the other as if her chances of catching death from the stone floor of the kitchen were halved if only one foot came in contact with it at a time. She was about seventeen. Her distant gaze wandered vaguely over the table and she whispered in a pleading undertone:

  ‘Perhaps a little tea…’

  ‘Not unless you step on to the rag rug,’ said the housekeeper, too authoritatively for the circumstances perhaps.

  The girl edged into the room until she stood on the bright strip of carpet, allowing her eyes to rest on me again while the housekeeper got her a cup and even a biscuit, although she muttered to herself as she did so.

  ‘I am Mary Anne, the Mayor’s daughter. Who are you?’

  ‘I am a civil servant and my name is Desiderio.’

  She repeated the name quietly to herself but with a curious quiver in her voice which might have been pleasure and eventually she confided:

  ‘Desiderio, the desired one, did you know you have eyes just like an Indian?’

  The housekeeper went ‘tsk! tsk!’ with annoyance for we whites were not supposed to acknowledge the Indians.

  ‘My mother always found it embarrassing,’ I replied and at that the girl seemed obscurely pleased and thrust out her hand in such a sudden, unexpected gesture of goodwill it was more like a thwarted blow than an offer to shake. But I took her hand and found it was icy. She would not let go of me for a long time.

  ‘Mr Desiderio is going to stay in the spare room for a while,’ said the housekeeper grudgingly, as if reluctant to share the information with her mistress. ‘He’s come from the government.’

  Mary Anne found this very mysterious; her eyes grew wide.

  ‘You won’t find my father, you know,’ she informed me.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. My fingers were still in the snow trap of her clutch.

  ‘If he didn’t come back in time to prune the roses, he won’t come back at all,’ she said, and shook with such silent but vigorous laughter her tea slopped from her cup on to her dress, which was already stained with all manner of other spilled food and drink.

  ‘What do you think happened to him, Mary Anne?’ I asked gently for, though I knew from the records and my own intuition she was quite real, I had never before met a woman who looked so conversant with shadows as she.

  ‘He disintegrated of course,’ she said. ‘He resolved to his constituents – a test-tube of amino-acids, a tuft or two of hair.’

  She gestured with her cup for more tea. She had not given me any answer I might have expected and, when I tried to question her further, she only giggled again and shook her head so that a twist of apple leaves fell to the floor and her hair flopped over her eyes. Then she put her cup down on the table with the excessive care of the born clumsy and ran up the dark corridor again. She must have left the door of the drawing room open, for her piano sounded louder this time, and she must have changed her music, for some irrational reason; now she played the lucid nonsense of Erik Satie. With a sigh, the housekeeper gathered up the cups.

  ‘A screw loose,’ she said. ‘A piece missing.’

  Soon she took me to a bed with a patchwork quilt in a simple but pleasant room at the back of the house. It was a soft, warm night and the girl at her piano picked out an angular fretwork of audible lace on the surface of my first sleep. I think I woke because the music stopped. Perhaps her candles had burned out.

  Now the moon had fully risen and shone straight into my room through the screen of ivy and roses so that dappled shadows fell with scrupulous distinction on the bed, the walls and the floor. Inside looked like the negative of a photograph of outside and the moon had already taken a black and white picture of the garden. I woke instantly and completely, with no residue of sleep in my mind, as though this was the proper time for me to wake although it could only have been a little past midnight. I was too wakeful to stay in my bed and got restlessly up to look out of the window. The grounds were far more extensive than I had at first thought and those behind the house were even further on the way to wilderness than those through which I had passed. The moon shone so brigh
tly there was not a single dark corner and I could see the dried-up bed of a large pond or small lake which was now an oval of flat-petalled lilies while the roses had entirely engulfed in their embrace a marble Undine who reclined on her side in a touching attitude of provincial gracefulness. Delineated with the precision of a woodcut in the moonlight, a family of young foxes rolled and tumbled with one another on a clearing which had been a lawn. There was no wind. The night sighed beneath the languorous weight of its own romanticism.

  I do not think she made a sound to startle me but all at once I grew conscious of a presence in the room and cold sweat pricked the back of my neck. Slowly I turned from the window. She lived on the crepuscular threshold of life and so I remember her as if standing, always, hesitantly in a doorway like an unbidden guest uncertain of her welcome. Her eyes were open but blind and she held a rose in her outstretched fingers. She had taken off her plain, black dress and wore a white calico nightgown such as convent schoolgirls wear. As I went towards her, so she came to me and I took the rose because she seemed to offer it to me. A thorn under the leaves pierced my thumb and I felt the red rose throb like a heart and saw it emit a single drop of blood as if like a sin-eater it had taken on the pain of the wound for me. She wound her insubstantial arms around me and put her mouth on mine. Her kiss was like a draught of cold water and yet immediately excited my desire for it was full of an anguished yearning.

  I led her to the bed and, in the variegated shadows, penetrated her sighing flesh, which was as chill as that of a mermaid or of the marmoreal water-maiden in her own garden. I was aware of a curiously attenuated response, as if she were feeling my caresses through a veil, and you must realize that all this time I was perfectly well aware she was asleep, for, apart from the evidence of my senses, I remembered how the peep-show proprietor had talked of a beautiful somnambulist. Yet, if she was asleep, she was dreaming of passion and afterwards I slept without dreaming for I had experienced a dream in actuality. When I woke in the commonplace morning, nothing was left of her in the bed but some dead leaves and there was no sign she had been in the room except for a withered rose in the middle of the floor.