* unspeakable desolation pouring down from the stars *
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT COULD HAVE ENDED there, of course: it very nearly did. I had returned home, the weather was balmy, my mother's antics were fairly amusing, and two jaunty headstones under the shade of a crab-apple tree were the only reminder that Maisie and Daisy had ever existed. That very first evening I had wheedled the key to the booze-cellar from Scrimgeour, who, for whatever reason, was a changed man, a factotum I felt I could now treat on an equal footing. His old self, all fawns and scrapes, had vanished. Oh, he was no Brewster, and certainly no Patch, but he had become somehow human during my absence, to the point where he would even share a tot or two from a bottle of Maniac's Water, join me in a game of domino-crushing, or simply wile away with me an afternoon cursing and gabbling and uprooting any flowers which dared to grow upon the graves of my aunts. I was upset that Mister Poxhaven was no longer in my mother's employ. Often I would lie sprawled on a rug upon the lawn, imagining all sorts of fascinating conversations I could have held with that enigmatic topiarist. But he had done his work, been paid off with a pittance, and, according to Scrimgeour, had driven off in his pantechnicon one frosty October morning, never to be heard from again.
Yes, it could have ended there, were it not for Mister Patch. He lingered on, a shattered and sorry wreck, surviving on a diet of slops and hawberry juice, devoid of speech and sleep, and given to marathon bouts of drooling which sometimes lasted for days on end. He suffered, too, from hideous temper tantrums, thrashing about on his pallet like a pinned insect, keening and whining while Scrimgeour and I sat with him, cradling him in our arms in pitiful attempts to give him comfort, tears streaming down our cheeks.
Our finances were low, even non-existent, but whenever we could afford to we summoned a doctor. There was the parish physician, Dr Gabbitas; a roving specialist named Spreak; a quack called Owlbag-Forrester from the local hospice; Hellsmaw, a world-renowned authority on brains, livers and the spleen who lived in a retirement home in a nearby village; and half a dozen others prepared to give a "consultation" in return for the contents of the paper bag in which we kept our cash. One after another, they sighed, sadly replaced their instruments in their bags, stood up, shook their heads, and pronounced Mister Patch a hopeless case, suffering from a hitherto unknown malady. They could not cure him, they said, but if it was any solace, his life was not in danger. He had the constitution of a bison, and could expect to last another, oh, fifteen to twenty years. All sorts of medicaments were prescribed, in the full knowledge that none would do the least bit of good. We were stuck with a sort of ghost-Patch, and were, I think, expected to resign ourselves to the fact.
Losing faith in the medical profession, Scrimgeour and I experimented with our own remedies. We force-fed Patch with coal, bran-tub scrapings, and wrens' innards. We wrapped him in muslin and exposed him to the fumes from a butterscotch factory. Small, half-domesticated beasts of the field were introduced to the household and given a free run of Patch's room. We prodded him with implements of various metals, both tarnished and untarnished, blunt and sharp. For a week, we had him lie face down in the centre of a volleyball court and regularly doused him with whitewash. Nothing worked.
At the back of my brain, throughout these tormented months, nestled a conviction of which I could never quite rid myself. If, just once, Mister Patch could again slap eyes on his pre-adhesive stamp collection, then surely, surely, I thought, he would recover from the terrible sickness which had laid him waste. There was no earthly reason why this should be the case, and I would not claim any great understanding of psychology - or any understanding at all, come to that - but the thought continued to gnaw at me. Eventually, I decided to act.
Scrimgeour was off on one of his increasingly frequent holidays. The Uncle Nobby episode had reawakened in him a sense of his emotional bonds with his family, and he now took every opportunity to visit the widely-scattered Scrimgeours, Pugdamps, Faddlemats and Dundercrones in their castles and hovels throughout the land. Scrimgeour's kin were one of the most remarkable collections of human beings I have ever come across. Space precludes any further examination of them here, but the aforementioned Memoirs go into more detail than any sane person could even imagine: I particularly recommend chapters fifty seven to eighty one, and the sparkling anecdote about Rufus Faddlemat's tweezer experiments in chapter ninety four.
Where was I? Scrimgeour being on holiday, and Patch in one of his becalmed and vegetative states, I spent the afternoon of November the sixth rooting in the cellars trying to hunt down the single bottle of One-eyed Janitor's Mop, 1913, which I knew remained from the original crate. When at last I emerged, clutching the hooch in my quivering paw, twilight was descending. I repaired to the garden, sat in my favourite cane chair, uncorked the bottle and, looking up at the pitiless firmament, took a thirsty swig. Resting the Mop in my lap, I was peering across at the duckpond in which my aunts had drowned, and singing a little ditty in my head, when my mother wafted up to me.
"Purbin!" she cooed, although as you know this was not my name, "Look what I have found inside the piano!"
Readers given to sentimentality will be pleased to hear that I had become more tolerant of my mother. Where once I would have spat at her, or bombarded her with pebbles, or pleaded with her to begone from my sight, now I pulled up a chair and asked her to join me.
"What have you found, mama?" I asked, genuinely interested: she was always coming up with bits and scraps these days. Convinced that a crucial part of her monument-design had been mislaid, she had spent the last fortnight turning the house upside down trying to find it. In the process, all sorts of intriguing items had come to light, not the least of which had been a photograph of my father, dressed up as Blind Jack of Knaresborough, posing at the wheel of an omnibus, cross-eyed, and with an enormous cloth vampire bat dangling above his head. On the back of the photograph, someone had written: Plenty of sour [marzipan?] pies were eaten that day!
My mother clambered into the chair in her spidery way, and shoved at me a sheet of paper, torn along one edge, as if it had been ripped from a book. I took it from her, and almost dropped the Mop-bottle from my lap. The page was covered with Mister Patch's handwriting: Vug, 23rd June 18--, maroon hexagon with badly-inked stipples; Hoon, undated, circular emblem of oil-lantern with flags; Mins, ? March 18--, blue triangle, slightly mildewed, with double-printed lozenge....
I did not need to read anymore. Carefully gripping the bottle between my ankles, I shouted wildly at my mother.
"Do you know what this is?"
"It was inside the piano," she repeated, irrelevantly.
"This is the contents page from Mister Patch's stamp album!" I screeched.
"Has it been chewed by a goat?" asked mama.
"What?"
"I didn't know we had goats."
She was off on one of her befuddlements: if I didn't escape now, I'd have to sit and listen to her talking about goats for five or six hours. Clutching the treasured page in one hand and the bottle in the other, I fled towards the house, heading straight for the music room. My mind was racing: if one sheet torn from the album had been secreted inside the piano for over half a century, perhaps there were others which Mama had overlooked. Barging my way past harps, accordions, kettledrums, flageolots, ondes martenots, and harmoniums, I fell upon the piano with bloodhoundish wrinkles of inquiry creasing my forehead, as if I were Fig. I found nothing.
Next stop, obviously, was Patch. I was convulsed by the fancy that, seeing the contents page, his eyes would brighten, his slobbering cease, and he would leap up from his blankets joyous and reborn. I scampered up the staircase towards his room, but froze stiff with fright half way up: there, on the landing, growling at me, was Flaps, one of my aunts' horrendous hounds. None of their many dogs had ever liked me, but Flaps seemed to harbour a particular loathing for me, which had increased dreadfully since his mistresses' demise. I was perfectly innocent in the matter of their deaths, but not as far as Flaps was concerned. Since my return home, he had done his best to make my life a misery. Scarcely a day passed that he did not shit in the doorway of my room. Whenever he had the opportunity, he nudged his way into my wardrobe, chewed gaping holes in my clothing, and carried off my shoes one by one, dropping them into ponds, hiding them in the coal-bunker, or tossing them to his fellow hounds, who tore them to shreds with their glistening fangs. He took particular pleasure in creeping up on me when I sat in the garden, knocking over a just-opened bottle of booze, then crouching at my feet, fixing me with a hideous stare, and deafening me with his howling.
You will ask why I did not do away with him, and there is a one-word answer: terror. Remember that Flaps was not the only dog on the premises. There were dozens of them, and however much they might scrap and bicker among themselves, they ganged up with ferocious loyalty if one among them was threatened.
One afternoon shortly after my return, I had cajoled Scrimgeour into helping me strangle a puppy. Do not think me cruel: the pooch was a particular favourite of Aunt Daisy's, and I was rather drunk. Alright, I was very drunk. I felt cheated that I had not witnessed the drownings of those frightful monsters: I had wanted so much to do the job myself, to push them under with my bare hands. And, as is the way when one is gripped by such a mood, the fancy took me to re-enact their deaths. The puppy seemed a heaven-sent substitute.
"Listen here, Agagmenomnomon," I slurred, "The little pest will put up a fight. The best thing to do is strangle it first, then plunge it into the dupcond. Duckpond. It's the only way."
"May I advise against that course of action?" said Scrimgeour. He no longer called me "sir", but at times like these he would unleash his retainery tones, knowing, I suppose, that they would give me pause. He was a caution, that Scrimgeour.
"Stop being all obsquious," I shouted.
"Is obsequious the word you're looking for?" he parried. I tripped over a clump of furze and struggled to my feet with difficulty.
"Shutup and come with me," I said, and dragged a reluctant Scrimgeour towards the kennels. I was counting on the puppy to be asleep, so it was somewhat disconcerting to find it frolicking happily, chasing an invisible quarry, accompanied by three or four full-grown companions - a Doberman Pinscher, I think, and some mastiffs. Scrimgeour tried once again to bring me to my senses, but I was in the grip of demons. I bore down on the puppy, ignoring its larger playmates, and attempted to grab it. My coordination, of course, was hopelessly adrift, and I succeeded only in banging my shin on a tree-stump. The puppy skipped easily away, but it had seen the glazed venom in my eyes, sensed danger, and within seconds had, dog-like, communicated this telepathically to its fellows. Within seconds, a mastiff had lunged for my throat, while the Doberman began tearing at my trouser-leg. Good old Scrimgeour entered the fray kicking and flailing his arms in a menacing manner, and managed to drag me away. We fled across the lawn, to the sound of yelps and growls. I did not feel safe until I was back inside the house.
Ever since, I had avoided the dogs whenever possible. I hatched innumerable, hopeless schemes to do away with all of them in a single, instantaneous act of obliteration, none of which was remotely practicable. Now I found myself face to face with the terrifying vision of Flaps. I stood paralysed, half way up the stairs, the remnant of Mister Patch's stamp album dangling from my hand.
You will already have guessed what happened next. The hellhound leaped towards me, caught the sheet of paper in his fangs, tore it from my grasp, and scampered off down the staircase and away. Cursing, I started to follow it, but it was out of sight within seconds. I sat down at the foot of the stairs and let visions of maniacal vengeance wash across my brain. After a while, I got up and went to the telephone. Before leaving the previous day, Scrimgeour had given me a number where I might reach him. I dialled it.
* a novel by frank key *