The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read online

  Mary Anne did not appear at breakfast though the housekeeper supplied me so amply with eggs, bacon, sausages, pancakes, coffee and fruit that I guessed, for whatever reasons, she was well satisfied with her house guest. In the bright light of morning, the old woman’s plump, lugubrious face looked indefinably sinister, even malign. She pressed me to return to the Mayor’s house for supper and at last, to quiet her, I agreed to do so and gave seven o’clock as the probable hour of my return, although I did not know if I would still be in the town at that time. When I went to my room to collect my briefcase, I passed an open door and, glancing inside, saw my nocturnal visitant sitting in front of a dressing-table mirror in an untidy room full of scores. She was still in her austere night-shift as she gave her tangled hair its (probably) single combing of the day.

  ‘Mary Anne?’

  She smiled at me remotely in the mirror and I knew she was awake.

  ‘Good morning, Desiderio,’ she said. ‘I hope you had a good night’s sleep.’

  I was bewildered.

  ‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Though occasionally people are frightened by the nightingales, because they make such a noise, sometimes.’

  ‘Mary Anne, did you dream last night?’

  Her comb caught in a knot and she tugged it impatiently.

  ‘I dreamed about a love suicide,’ she said. ‘But then, I always do. Don’t you think it would be very beautiful to die for love?’

  It is always disquieting to talk with a person in a mirror. Besides, the mirror was contraband. Her voice was high and clear and, though she always talked softly, very sweetly piercing, like the sight of the moon in winter.

  ‘I’m not at all sure it would be beautiful to die for anything,’ I said.

  ‘One only resolves to one’s constituents,’ she said with a trace of precocious pedantry. I stepped into the room, leaving a crude trail of heavy footprints on her white carpet, and, lifting her hair, I bent to kiss the nape of her neck. As I did so, I saw my own reflection for the first time since the beginning of the war. I saw that I had aged a little and was now as cynical as a satyr in a Renaissance painting. My face, poor mother, had all the inscrutability of the Indian. I greeted myself like a friend. Mary Anne allowed me to kiss her but I do not think she noticed it.

  ‘What will you do today, Mary Anne?’

  ‘Today, I shall play the piano, of course. Unless I think of something better to do, that is.’

  And I do not know if, for a moment, I saw another person glance briefly out of her eyes for I was not looking at her in the mirror, only myself.

  By the time I left the house, it had become a musical box for she was already playing. Now she was practising Chopin’s Etudes. By daylight, I could see the house was very large, one of those rambling country houses, half farmhouse and half mansion, though it must already have been three-quarters tumbledown when the Mayor himself lived there for whole sections of the roof had caved in beneath the monstrous burden of vegetation upon it while what had once been stables and outhouses now lay open to the weather and nature had already thrown too thick a green blanket over them to have been woven in only a few months. In the pure light of the morning, the fallen bricks, the exposed beams, the roses and the trees still seemed to sleep, murmuring and stirring a little as if a vague, unmemorable dream disturbed a slumber as profound as that of their mistress, the beauty in the dreaming wood, who slept too deeply to be wakened by anything as gentle as a kiss.

  I slipped into the Town Hall and glanced desultorily once more through the Mayor’s files but I could find nothing that threw any further light on a disappearance I was now inclined to believe was quite unconnected with Dr Hoffman but just a simple suicide which might have taken place anywhere, at any time, on the spur of a despairing moment, for somehow I guessed the Mayor had been prone to anguish. When I had satisfied the conditions of my post as an Inspector of Veracity, I once again left the Town Hall in the sole hands of the yawning clerk and went to the bar where the peep-show proprietor had taken me. But even the massive black presided there no longer. Only a golden girl far more Indian than I, in a skimpy dress of bright striped cotton, wiped glasses as she stared aimlessly at the sunlight in the street outside, where only blow-flies buzzed in the choked gutters and, though I described the peep-show proprietor to her, she did not remember ever seeing him.

  So I downed a single brandy and then sauntered along the Promenade, a place now dedicated solely to the joys of summer, although these joys were undertaken with a singular, silent listlessness. As I leaned on the iron railing gazing out over the prim corrugations of the ocean, I heard a tapping behind me. As inconspicuously as I could, I looked round. He scuttled past me, accompanied by the staccato rattle of his cane, muttering to himself; at a discreet distance, I followed him.

  I cannot begin to describe his crabbed, crouched, scrambling walk – how first he tapped with his cane, then set it upon the ground and half swung himself forward on it with a wheezing, triumphant gasp as if at every step he defied and vanquished the ordinary laws of motion. And he managed to perform these senile acrobatics with immense speed, as if there were springs in his stick and the worn heels of his boots, too. He was indescribably filthy. He might have spent the night in a sewer.

  He had moved his pitch to a dreary quarter of creosoted warehouses in which, from the stench, dried fish was stored. At the end of the alley hung with banners of washing, was a small shrine to a fisherman’s madonna with a few dead flowers stuck before it in a chipped coca-cola bottle and, behind it, a little bare plot of grass now almost filled by the familiar, pink-striped tent. And here I lost him. One moment he was there, hopping jerkily through the thick barriers of wet laundry, and the next he was gone, slipped, perhaps, into one of the hovels along the way. So I decided to wait for him in his own booth for a while.

  This time, the poster read: SEE A YOUNG GIRL’S MOST SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCE IN LIFELIKE COLOURS. To while away the time, I strolled from machine to machine, unaccountably disturbed by the things I saw there although, unlike the seven wonders of yesterday’s world, none contained any element of the grotesque. All were as haunting as the cards in Tarot and the very titles of each set-piece were set like an integral medallion into each elegant design. These new tableaux were not, like yesterday’s, models but actual pictures painted with luscious oils on rectangular plates in such a way that the twin eye-pieces of the machine created a stereoscopic effect. These plates were arranged in several layers which slid in and out of one another by means of a system of programmed clockwork which announced itself with a faint click and gave the impression of stilted movement in the figures. It also allowed sudden transformation scenes. Each picture was lit from behind and glowed with an unnatural brilliance so that the moonlight which suffused the first scene was far more luxuriously pure than everyday moonlight and looked like the Platonic perfection of moonlight. This transcendental radiance bathed ivied ruins and the slide shifted back and forth to allow bats to flit stiffly around them. A lugubrious owl perched on the crumbling chimney stack and slowly beat its wings upon the darkened air where hung in iridescent characters the words: THE MANSION OF MIDNIGHT.

  In the second machine, the mansion split in half to reveal a crimson room and the warning: HUSH! SHE IS SLEEPING! She was as white as my last night’s anaemic lover and, like her, she was dressed in black, but this one had a medieval gown of sheer black velvet with sleeves that came to points on the backs of her hands while her streaming hair contained several shades of darkness. She lay back in the voluptuous abandonment of sleep in a carved armchair where spiders propelled themselves up and down on the high-wires they had spun themselves among the hangings.

  When I looked into the third machine I saw a ferocious hedge of thorns; but then, before my very eyes, a young prince with juicy bunches of golden ringlets hanging on the shoulders of his slashed and padded doublet was superimposed on the hedge in a balletic attitude of pleading and from his mouth issued a scrol
l which read: I COME! The hedge parted forthwith to reveal, in a set of cunning perspectives, the sleeper inside the haunted house of the first machine complete with owl above, etc.

  A KISS CAN WAKE HER. In the crimson room, the pretty prince with skin as pink as sugar candy and lips like strawberry ice cream bent over the sleeping girl; another slide slipped into place and showed them so close together, his ringlets mixed with her locks and his face pressed so close to hers her pallor took his colour and blushed. A click of the internal mechanism. The tints of warm flesh rushed back into her face. Her eyes opened. Her newly red lips parted.

  With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton. In one set of phalanges he carried a scythe and with the other pulled out and squeezed a ripe breast from the girl’s bodice while his bony knees nudged apart her thighs. The emblem read: DEATH AND THE MAIDEN.

  The remaining two machines were empty.

  It was now in the middle of the day and the heat inside the tent grew oppressive. I went outside and sat on a doorstep, smoking and waiting, but still there was no sign of the peep-show proprietor. A child with crinkled hair tied up in the innumerable pigtails the poor and superstitious adopt for, I think, reasons of voodoo approached and stared at me. Her plaits were so tight they revealed wide areas of the glossy, brown skin covering her skull and, though I questioned her, she answered me incomprehensibly in the multilingual patois of the slums and began to poke indifferently in a clogged drain with a stick. Her face was covered with the whorled eruptions of a skin disease. The good nuns had taken me away from such pastimes and such afflictions but, all the same, you will have noticed I possessed a degree of ambivalence towards the Minister’s architectonic vision of the perfect state. This was because I was aware of what would have been my own position in that watertight schema.

  No shadows fell in the drowsing noonday. I inquired at several houses but even those who spoke the standard language knew nothing of the peep-show proprietor except that his booth had suddenly arrived in the shrine garden the previous evening. My shirt was soaked with sweat and at last I walked down to the ocean to catch the possibility of a breeze.

  I wondered if all the holiday makers were nothing but phantoms. Nevertheless, most of them had dispersed for lunch and an afternoon nap and the beaches were again deserted. I strolled beside the margin of the water, among a detritus of discarded sandals and plastic sun-tan lotion jars the sea could not digest, watching the dancing white lace hems of the petticoats of the ocean and so, while I was thinking of nothing but sunshine, the breakers delivered her to my feet.

  Mary Anne had indeed found something else to do that day besides play the piano. And now she had suffered a sea change, already. She was wreathed and garlanded in seaweed and shells clung to her white night shift. When I lifted her up, water spouted from her mouth. Dead, she could not have had a whiter skin than when she lived. She was dead. But still I tried to revive her.

  I was overwhelmed with shock and horror. I felt I was in some way instrumental to her death. I crouched over the sea-gone wet doll in an attitude I knew to be a cruel parody of my own the previous night, my lips pressed to her mouth, and it came to me there was hardly any difference between what I did now and what I had done then, for her sleep had been a death. The notion ravaged me with guilty horror. I do not know how much time passed while I attempted to manipulate her lifeless body but, when the sound of voices at last broke into my waking nightmare, the sun was far in the west and cast long beams which fell with a peculiar lateral intensity over the sand. She and I were now both utterly bedaubed with wet sand, so that we looked like those Indian shamans who paint themselves with coloured mud when they want to summon back the spirits of the departed. And I was attempting to do no more than that. I looked up.

  On the promenade I saw a dark, hump-backed figure who gesticulated in my direction with a white stick. Down the iron steps to the beach clattered a posse of the Determination Police in their long, leather overcoats and, at their head, ran the clerk from the Town Hall, an unusual animation contorting his features, and the housekeeper from the Mayor’s house, still in her white apron, plumply stumbling, crimson and breathless but radiating a horrid gratification. These two formed the very picture of malevolent glee and I was seized with the conviction they had, in collusion, murdered the Mayor for reasons of their own, probably connected with money or property, and trusted to the confusion of the times to hide their guilt. They thought I might discover it. Perhaps they had even murdered poor Mary Anne, too, and dropped her into the sea, in order to frame me, for how could I accuse them if I was myself accused?

  They all came nearer and nearer and nearer and I realized I must quickly run away.

  I do not know why I scooped up the dripping corpse of the girl in my arms and tried to make my escape with her. I think I wanted to rescue her from the housekeeper for I knew with instantaneous clairvoyance the old woman hated her, dead or living. Burdened with Mary Anne, I lurched along the beach for perhaps a hundred yards while she, twice her weight with water, slithered about so that it was like carrying a huge fish. Then one of the Determination Police drew his pistol and fired. I felt a tearing pain in my shoulder and fell. The second bullet whistled past my ear and, while I watched, shattered the exquisite rind of the dead girl’s features so that her blood and brains spattered over my face. At that, I fainted.

  I was charged on four counts.

  (1) obtaining carnal knowledge of a minor (for, in fact, Mary Anne had been even younger than she looked, only fifteen years old);

  (2) procuring death by drowning of the said minor;

  (3) practising necrophily on the corpse of the said minor, which act the police had witnessed with their own eyes;

  and:

  (4) posing as an Inspector of Veracity Class Three when I was really the fatherless son of a known prostitute of Indian extraction, an offence against the Determination Regulations Page Four, paragraph I c, viz.: ‘Any thing or person seen to diverge significantly from it or his own known identity is committing an offence and may be apprehended and tested.’

  From the look in the eyes of the Determination Police, it seemed very likely to me that I would not survive the testing in order to stand my trial.

  I was terrified to realize how much the autonomous power of the police had grown. Although I pleaded with them to let me telephone the Minister’s private number, they laughed at me and beat my head with the butts of their pistols. The papers in my briefcase had, of course, all been altered so that they presented masterpieces of the dubious; this was clearly the work of the clerk, done while I examined the files. My weapons were all gone, every one. I was uncertain of the role of the peep-show proprietor in all this except that clearly he wished to be rid of me and all the time I was waiting for him, he had himself been blindly spying on everything I did.

  All the cells in the Police Station were filled with reality offenders so they took me to the Town Hall and put me in the Mayor’s office. They had tied up my wounded shoulder in a rough sling and treated it only with a douse of dilute carbolic acid but at least they were sensitive enough to let me wash away Mary Anne’s blood. They gave the clerk an overly melodramatic machine gun and posted him outside the door, to make sure I did not escape. I heard the key turn in the lock and the harsh, retreating clang of the heels of their jackboots. After a while, I heard a cackle of female laughter and then nothing more.

  It was now night and the room was in utter darkness. I was in considerable pain but a seething fury kept me from despair. I knew I should sleep a little to clear my dis
oriented brain enough to face the ordeal I knew next day would bring but sleep was out of the question. Besides, I was ravenously hungry and as dry as a bone. I felt my way to the bureau to grope for the decanter of Mayoral sherry and discovered there an airtight tin of Marie biscuits, too, so I munched them all down, in spite of their earthy flavour. I pulled the stopper from the decanter with my teeth. The sherry had turned to liquid demerara sugar but I managed to keep it down and it and the food gave me sufficient strength to seat myself at the Mayor’s desk and look at my situation coolly. When I did so, I found it hopeless enough to be risible.

  The moon soon came up and since it was full, shone through the blind over the window and let me see my makeshift prison fairly well. I listened carefully but could hear no sound in the corridor outside. I stood up, went to the window and pulled the blind aside a little. The room was on the second storey at the front of the building and the window was flanked on either side by a pair of stone goddesses. Anyone could have scaled that façade easily for the stucco breasts, rumps, pillars and pediments which covered it offered a multiplicity of foot- and handholds but, on the window-ledge itself, I would have been visible to any watcher in the square as if it had been daylight and, when I let the blind fall with a faint rattle, the sound provoked a volley of knocking on the door so I knew the guard was wakeful. I looked around the room for a better exit and my eyes fell upon the fireplace.

  It, too, was flanked by a brace of caryatids who bore the massive, brown marble mantelpiece on their serene foreheads. In the grate was a screen embroidered with the town coat of arms. Although my shoulder was badly inflamed and I could hardly use my right hand, I managed to move the heavy screen without a clang or rattle and I poked my head into the fireplace. Looking up, I saw a disc of pure blue sky on which shone a few stars. A light fall of soot showered my head and I withdrew it but when I re-examined the interior of the chimney, I saw that, although caked with the soot of years, a series of clefts cut in the sides of it to facilitate the work of the chimney sweep made a staircase to the roof all ready for me. I could hardly believe my luck.