The Spirit Cabinet (38 page)
Read The Spirit Cabinet Online
Authors: Paul Quarrington
The boulder was rolled back and the hole to the Grotto gaped. Jurgen was in the bedroom, busy with Dr. Merdam. It was the middle of the afternoon. Rudolfo ducked into the Grotto before he could talk himself out of it. He stopped just inside and caught his breath, which was roaring in and out of his mouth, making his chest shudder.
Jurgen usually lit the place with candles and lanterns, balanced on stacks of books and contrivances rendered from ancient wood. Now the Grotto was lit only by the wash from the corridor. Rudolfo stood motionless and allowed the shadows to take shape. Slowly he saw the columns of volumes, the books balanced off-kilter so that each stack had a distinct list, all inclining toward the centre. He was then very alarmed to see, at the circle’s centre, the outline of a human take form. The figure had both hands raised, the fingers spread wide, the hopeless gesture of a hold-up victim. Rudolfo let out a small moan, a mouthful of fear. Then he noticed the tall domed shape of the creature’s head, and he realized that he’d forgotten about the wooden automaton
Moon
.
Moon was rather crudely carved, his face a collection of ridged bulges, but he had been carefully painted, with fine arched eyebrows and rouged cheeks. It was impossible to tell whether the mechanical doll had been designed to represent an old or a
young man. There was a simplicity to his features that suggested childhood, but the varnish had been cracked by time and temperature, giving him the aspect of great age. The figure was costumed in a bizarre fashion, wrapped in silvery pantaloons, a satin smoking jacket and slippers with toes that curled like snail shells. A turban, made out of sackcloth or at least, Rudolfo thought, something very scratchy, balanced on top of the automaton’s head. He sat, cross-legged, upon his pedestal of thick, clouded glass.
As Rudolfo stared at Moon, the Grotto filled suddenly with the sound of fine gears turning and meshing. It was, Rudolfo thought, a lifeless version of the small noises the bushbabies made, in the middle of the night, when the tiny furry creatures paired up to copulate. Occupied as he was with this idle thought, Rudolfo did not notice, for a moment, that one of Moon’s hands was jerking back and forth, the fingertips twitching. When he did notice, he leapt backwards. His left foot landed on a silver ball that one of the first magicians, Katterfelto, had used in one of the earliest cup and ball routines. Rudolfo’s leg kicked out and he flew back. He wrenched his arms behind his back in order to break his fall and was sufficiently nimble and athletic that he was able to somersault as his butt hit the ground, ending up in a pose of twisted supplication.
The hums now amplified in volume, and the mechanical man began to bounce up and down, a studied and mathematical rendition of shaking with mirth. Moon’s mouth popped open with a loud clacking sound and the jaw and bottom lip, a separate articulated piece of wood, began to jiggle and jounce. Rudolfo realized that the automaton was laughing at him, and he could not prevent volts of anger from colouring his hairless body.
He flipped over onto his hands and knees and in doing so brought his eyes within a foot of the Grotto wall. There was just light enough to illuminate the marks and scratches there. This time his shock was so great that he could not help speaking aloud.
“Fuck shit,” he said—for inches away were the cyphers and runes that had troubled him so as a toddler, those made by Albert Einstein upon the walls of the walk-up at Kramgasse 49.
Rudolfo was up on his feet in a trice. He’d already persuaded himself that what he’d just seen was a trick of the imagination. He was so determined to rid his mind of the image (which floated eerily across his field of vision, like the afterimage left by a flashbulb) that he crossed over to the mechanical man, made a kind of bow and said, “Hi, baby.”
The automaton’s hand again began to jerk back and forth. It was, Rudolfo realized, waving. Rudolfo raised his own hand, spreading the fingers, and moved it back and forth like the baton of a broken metronome.
Moon’s other hand suddenly appeared before Rudolfo. Clutched between the wooden fingers was a deck of cards. They were odd cards, longer and more slender than those that Rudolfo was used to. The design on the back was a simplistic representation of the night sky, a black background adorned with six-pointed stars and a large sliver of moon. As Rudolfo looked at the cards, the machine’s hand snapped, and instantly the deck was spread and fanned into a perfect semicircle. Then the hand raised the deck and then lowered it slowly, and Rudolfo understood that he was to pick a card, any card.
He reached forward, placed his fingertips on a card and then cannily moved them to the right, digging out a card from within a denser grouping. He was smugly pleased with himself, until he flipped over the card and saw that he’d drawn the two of hearts.
Moon’s jaw clacked open and the machine began its soundless laughing. Rudolfo yanked the cards out of the wooden hand and flipped them over, sure that every one would be a two of hearts, that this was some elaborate trick rigged by the increasingly odd Jurgen Schubert. But the cards were different and randomly
ordered. Moon continued to laugh with silent clockwork glee.
“Shut up, facefuck,” whispered Rudolfo, and then he spun about, alarmed at a rustling at his back.
A huge patch of shadow floated toward him. “We have to find his secret,” whispered Dr. Merdam, the whiteness of his eyes gleaming brightly. He tore the top book from the first pile he came to. He threw back the leather cover and took the ends of some brittle pages between his fingers. There was a little poof and a small mushroom cloud and then his fingertips were covered with dust.
“What secret?” demanded Rudolfo.
“The secret of dissubstantiation. The secret of corporeal evaporation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He only weighs fifty-eight pounds,” whispered Dr. Merdam.
“You don’t want that secret, Doc.”
“Yes, I do. It is what I dream about. Weightlessness.”
“Doc, Doc. Don’t say this.”
“I’m a massive blob of protoplasm that’s gone out of control. I’m huge and heavy and the Tony Anthony mental exercises are exhausting. I suffer headaches. I’m addicted to no end of prescription drugs. I long for nothingness.”
“You’re not fat, Doc. You just got big bones.”
Dr. Merdam picked up the next book, held it at arm’s length and focused on the gilt letters on the cover.
“La Magie assyrienne.”
Merdam lifted his sad eyes and translated quietly. “
Assyrian Magic
. Sounds hopeful.”
“Besides,” said Rudolfo, “is just trick.”
There was a buzz and a click and Moon swivelled about, one of his wooden hands bumping into Rudolfo’s shoulder. Rudolfo was not really surprised to see that the whittled fingers held a new deck of cards, blue-backed Bees. He obediently withdrew a
card, flipped it over to note that it was, in fact, the two of hearts, and tossed it away.
“Trick?” echoed Dr. Merdam. “It’s no trick, my friend. My scales are accurate to within a hundredth of a pound.”
“Yeah, yeah. But magic is making assumes.”
“Assumptions?”
“Sure. Your scales say fifty-eight, you
assume
that Jurgen losing weight.”
“He must indeed be.”
“No, no, Doc,” said Rudolfo, waving a finger in the air. “He just not being
affected by gravity
.” As he spoke these words, it occurred to him—in a burst that left him flushed with adrenalin—that if Jurgen were no longer with Dr. Merdam, he was very likely on his way back to the Grotto. “Erps,” gasped Rudolfo, and he took hold of Merdam’s soft elbow and tried to spin him about. “We got to get out of here.”
But it was too late. The light from the corridor—which spilt in through the huge irregular circle left by the remote-controlled boulder—was filled suddenly by a silhouette. Jurgen folded his hands upon his hips and turned his head slowly back and forth.
“So, Jurgen,” said Rudolfo, surveying the Grotto with an air of idleness. “Have you ever thought about renovation?”
Jurgen remained silent, causing the other men to stir uneasily on their feet. He was dressed in his robe, filthy and soiled, indistinct in the gloom; all Rudolfo and Merdam could make out was his dark outline. They watched him raise his arms; the material from the robe rolled down to collect at his elbows. His forearms glowed like neon.
“Uh-oh,” came a small voice. Rudolfo turned to look at Dr. Merdam—Merdam turned to look at Rudolfo. They realized that neither of them had uttered “uh-oh,” and both glanced then at Moon. The automaton had raised both its wooden hands to cover glass eyes.
There came a long whine, like the sound of a crone keening at the funeral of a child. The papers strewn about the Grotto—pieces of parchment, broadsheets advertising Ehrich Weiss, the “world’s greatest mystifier and self-liberator”—stirred and rustled on the floor. Then they lifted into the air, borne by the wind—for it was a wind that was howling—and began to whirl above the heads of Rudolfo and Dr. Merdam. The towers of books shook, trembled and toppled. The leather covers flew open and the pages flipped from front to back and made little drum rolls.
Jurgen remained in the doorway, blocking the one avenue of escape, moving his arms like a symphony conductor.
“Okay, Doc,” Rudolfo said quietly, “we better be going now.”
Dr. Merdam exploded toward the doorway, his four hundred pounds accelerating so quickly that he’d achieved maximum velocity by the time he hit Jurgen. Rudolfo never saw, quite, what happened, because Merdam’s bulk plugged the opening as tightly as the remote-controlled boulder. Then, with a long sucking sound and a clownish pop, the doctor was through. He executed an elegant pirouette, trying to decide which way to go, then disappeared.
Rudolfo moved toward the doorway.
“Don’t go.”
Rudolfo turned around slowly. He was actually hoping that the words had come from the fucking wooden doll, even though that was a fairly horrifying prospect. But he’d recognized the voice.
Jurgen sat behind the small schoolboy’s desk, his square brow propped on a luminous hand. His eyes pored over the pages of an ancient tome while his fingers deftly and rhythmically turned the pages. “Don’t go,” he repeated. “Stay a while. Read a book.”
“I can’t read,” sighed Rudolfo. “You know I can’t read. If I could read, I don’t know if I would read. Maybe I would. Sometimes I want to. But the fact is, I can’t read.”
Jurgen looked up then, and smiled gently. For a moment his aspect changed. The glowing abated, briefly, and flesh tones, mottled by fever and spackled with illness, returned. His dark eyes suddenly filled with emotion, at least, Rudolfo was fairly confident he could see emotion back there, trapped and restless, like a big cat in an iron cage. “Rudy,” said Jurgen quietly, and then his eyes deadened and his skin became incandescent and he looked down at the book once more.
The intruder in the Grotto—who wears a black bodysuit and a balaclava, large spectacles balanced on the blunted nose and pinching the flattened ears—has made a few discoveries. The automaton, for example, when set into motion, surveys the circle of books and ends up facing a particular stack. The machine then produces an ancient playing card, always a spot, never a face; that number is counted off in the stack and reveals the book to be looked at and investigated. At least, that’s the theory the intruder has come up with, although—he pauses momentarily and wonders at a loud, long sound that must be distant thunder, yet seems to come from within the bizarre mansion—the practice doesn’t yield much in the way of results. One book tends to refer the quester to another book, that book to yet another, and while each might have some small kernel of information, the accumulation of knowledge is infuriatingly slow. The intruder had been hoping there was one book, one ancient volume, that held the key, something that could be stolen
.
He hears someone clear his throat, a dainty “ahem” such as a librarian might come up with if a patron were absent-mindedly drumming a pencil on a tabletop. The intruder turns away from the books and there, in the hole that serves as the Grotto’s doorway, stands that fucking ghostly tiger
.
Samson roars, a very long roar, because it feels good—the mouth-expansion, the way his jaw muscles and tendons stretch to the point of pain
.
The intruder jumps. The spectacles pop away from the mask and tumble to the floor
.
Samson steps into the cave and begins to circle. He lifts and drops a paw, carving up the air into thick slices
.
The intruder pulls off his balaclava, desperately relying on the fact that he is world-famous. “Look,” says Kaz, “it’s me.”
Samson, of course, roars even more loudly now, because he hates Kaz, wouldn’t even eat him with a side of fries. He snakes his head forward, trying to bounce candlelight off his fangs, trying to make them glisten
.
“Aaagh,” says Kaz, a sound that is almost hidden by the gaseous bubbling erupting from his backside
.
Samson chuckles lowly, but immediately becomes fearsome once more. Roar, snap, swipe, roar snap-snap, swipe, man, you never really forget this stuff
.
Kaz shrieks, so high-pitched that Samson winces, and then he lights out for the doorway. Samson wheels around and takes after him, but only for a few steps. Kaz disappears down the hallway. Samson tilts his head and listens—in a few seconds comes the sound of glass shattering. Kaz has driven himself through a plate-glass window. This sound, in turns, terrifies the small marauders inside
das Haus,
and Samson can hear them scurrying, the footfalls fast and frantic. Then all these sounds disappear
.
He wanders over to sniff at Moon. Perhaps his nose brushes some button or switch—Samson has no sensation—but suddenly the Grotto is filled with the grainy, hushed sounds of clockwork. The mechanical man begins to laugh with silent mirth. Samson lifts a paw and bats the automaton off its perch. Moon tumbles to the ground and, being made of old wood and rusty metal, cracks into many pieces. Samson swivels his backside, then sprays a little stream of steaming piss all over the pile of lumber
.
It seems as though, after all those years of timidity, Samson is now nothing but rage. He circles about the Grotto knocking over stacks of books. The stacks in turn knock over the candles, and the two lie together on the floor, old paper and flame. Samson knows what that means. But he does not leave the Grotto. Instead, he sniffs about and locates the remote control. He takes it into his mouth, bounces it about until his
left incisor comes to rest on the button marked ><. He bites down and sets the huge boulder in motion. As it rolls to block the entrance to the Grotto, Samson calmly begins to chew. There are a few sparks and electronic hisses.
The rock falls into place, stopping the hole forever
.