* unspeakable desolation pouring down from the stars *
CHAPTER ONE
THE FIRST STAMP IN my collection was an 1898 badly-perforated 14h maroon rectangle on 9x5 gummed tinsy paper, depicting the shallow grave of the whaling captain Rastus Binns, etched from an image taken by a nebulon, a now-forgotten photographic machine. My father presented it to me on my sixteenth birthday, with a gleam in his eye and alcohol on his breath.
Two months later, I acquired my second stamp, steamed off an envelope which I found discarded in Monsignor Sinkpail's wastepaper basket. I was ever the prying sort. This one was a lavish three-colour design on waterbath paper, 8x6, the zealous franking of which almost obliterated a picture of the dirigible Grapplinghook, exploding into a fireball over the Great Beige Dam on the twenty third of June 1907.
The third and fourth stamps were given to me by a lanky, boil-plagued schoolfriend whose name I forget. One showed a blurred view of an unidentified mountain range, the other a fiendishly-spiked cactus against a bright yellow background. By this time I had bought myself an album and, optimistically, a packet of five thousand stamp hinges.
In October of the same year, my father, the Monsignor, and my schoolfriend were drowned, when the boat in which we were rounding a northern headland capsized. As the only swimmer aboard, I was able to struggle back to shore, sopping wet, exhausted, but still alive.
I spent two months abed in the school sick room, at first of necessity, later wallowing in the unaccustomed comfort. My sheets were changed daily by the matron, I was fed with delicacies forbidden to the other pupils, and, of course, I was excused from all lessons and sports, allowed simply to idle my time away poring over my stamp collection, which now became my consuming interest. From my sick bed, I clipped out coupons from magazines and sent off for packets of approvals. A pockmarked prefect visited me one day and gave me as a gift his entire collection, upwards of two thousand thematics - mostly gorges, flags, insects and executions. Matron dutifully soaked off the stamps from the school's daily postbag, until I explained as tactfully as I could that I had more than enough definitives of King Vincenzo, left- and right-profile, brown, cream and puce, and had space in my album for no more.
In January, I was forced to return to my class, but within days, on account of my artificially-induced pallor and neurasthenic fits, I was sent off home for further recuperation. Majestic horses delivered me from the railway station to our coastal mansion, where my mother greeted me with a demented clap on the head, before handing me over to Mister Patch, the retainer, who carried me to my room and deposited me on the bed. I remained there, artfully malingering, for the next two years. Throughout that time, I saw my mother only twice: her derangement pre-dated her widowhood, and I was pleased to note that still, still, she passed her days drawing up plans for a gigantic marble monument to commemorate a footpad who had been hanged in Chockbung on Boxing Day 1804. The monument was never built, of course, but its design, endlessly revised, kept my mother busy for the best part of her life.
I had been carted off to the first in a series of brutal schools at seven, and had spent many of my holidays with relatives: these two bed-ridden years, then, afforded my first real opportunity to get to know Mister Patch. He had been in service to my family for as long as anyone could remember, but I had only dim memories of him from my own childhood. Now, as a daily visitor to my room, he became my closest friend.
Unlike many fictional retainers, Patch was neither wrinkled nor obsequious. He looked like a pirate: bushy black beard, wooden leg, frantic long hair and a black eyepatch. "Patch", it appeared, was only a nickname. He had been dubbed such by his parents when still a tot, after an accident involving an extremely sharp pointed thing took out his left eye. He no longer remembered his real name, and nor did anyone else.
What I liked most about Patch was his cavalier disregard of his social position. Had I been foolish enough to send him on errands, or to order him about, he would have spat at me. My mother, of course, was too distracted even to contemplate asking Patch to do anything, but my two spinster aunts - Daisy and Maisie, who also lived at the mansion - had the terrible habit of commanding Patch to do things they were quite capable of doing for themselves, like fetching their breakfasts, or pruning the hydrangeas, or taking their repellent little dogs for a walk. Patch fixed them with a glare of magnificent contempt, then unleashed a projectile of spittle at them, and turned on his heel. He never did a stroke of work unless he wanted to: no doubt that shared inclination drew us together.
His visits to my room began on the day he carried me there, and continued throughout the two years I lay abed. At first, misconstruing his character, I tried to fool him, dabbing weakly at my brow as he came in, emitting the odd groan as I saw fit. After a week, Patch sat at the end of my bed and gave me a good talking to. He did not give two pins whether or not I was sick; it was all the same to him whether I lived or died; would I like to join him as he worked his way through my late father's wine cellar? He drew from his pocket a bottle of 1904 Brut Glabb, uncorked it with his shining teeth, and took a mighty swig. I proffered my tooth-mug, and our camaraderie was born.
Patch was keenly interested in my stamp collection, which now filled two enormous albums, each bound in some sort of animal hide - reindeer, perhaps, or wildebeeste. He seemed to know everything there was to know about perforations, overprinting, variants, control numbers, shades, forgeries and proofs. His own speciality, he informed me on a wet Thursday in March, was the pre-adhesive period, with particular regard to the postal histories of Hoon, Mins, Berberdept and Vug. He announced, with a strange tremor in his voice, that his collection of covers, emblazoned with inky cancellations made by a variety of rubber, potato, and gutta percha printing devices, had been stolen from him exactly fifty seven years ago to the day.
"By whom?" I asked.
Patch settled himself on an assortment of cushions and told me the story of the theft. It had taken place on Papa's twenty first birthday. There had been a party, here at the mansion, and among those attending had been a noted scientist. Over dinner, while Patch skulked in the cellars pouring bottles of vintage Glabb down his throat, the talk had turned to the recent experiments of the mesmerist Walter Mad, who claimed to be able to propel the spirits of his subjects a thousand years into the future: Patch could hear every word of the discussion, transmitted down to the cellars through a secret system of pneumatic tubes. The talk became heated, half the party poo-pooing Mad as a fraudster, the other half defending him as a new kind of visionary whose discoveries would revolutionise our understanding of the universe. Just before the ladies were due to retire to the drugs-cabinet, Professor Underlip - the noted scientist - suggested a simple experiment which, he said, would prove indubitably that Walter Mad was nothing but a trickster. Down in the cellars, Patch drained his umpteenth bottle and decided to return to the dining room to witness the Professor's little diversion. The wily retainer slid inconspicuously into the room as Underlip was unpacking from his mysterious blue bag an array of outre scientific apparatus. To the consternation of the dinner guests, he cleared a space on the table and placed thereon giant carboys, Faure's accumulators, voltaic piles, coils of wire, Coddington lenses, and great blocks of non-conducting porcelain.
"How in heaven did you fit all that into your mysterious blue bag?" exclaimed Mrs Cambodge.
"We men of science do not dilly-dally," replied the Professor, an enigmatic twinkle in his eyes.
He called for a volunteer, and after two minutes of hubbub, it was agreed that my father should have the honour of submitting himself to Professor Underlip's experiment.
"Think of it as your finest birthday gift!" cooed Mrs Cambodge.
Papa was steered into an armchair, whereupon a grotesque sponge hood was fitted to his head by the Professor. Orange flaps on the hood were connected by wires to the gleaming equipment on the dining-table, which hissed gently, letting forth jets of gas. Underlip attached a couple of wire clips to Papa's hands, fixing them in place with strips of grivelling tape.
"Palms up, Donald," he commanded. (Donald was not my father's name, but let that pass: this all happened a long time ago.) Underlip placed a potato in Papa's right hand, and an aniseed pill in his left. Then he stood back, cleared his throat, and made an announcement.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "You are about to witness a most extraordinary experiment! I suggest that you all sit fast in your chairs and make no attempt to stir."
Mister Patch, hiding behind a tallboy, watched as the Professor fiddled about with the dials, chocks and hooters on his equipment. Then, with a scarcely perceptible finger-flick, he switched it on. There was a flash of brilliant light, accompanied by a monstrous roaring noise. Everyone in the room was made temporarily blind and deaf: with the exception, of course, of the ear-plugged and eye-shaded Professor Underlip, who took the opportunity to rifle through the house, filling his strange blue bag with valuables.
"Among which," concluded Mister Patch, "was my collection of covers from the pre-adhesive period."
"Smite me with a bludgeon, Patch!" I exclaimed, "Do you mean to say the blackguard made off with his loot?"
"Indeed he did," said the retainer, "When our sight and hearing returned some twenty minutes later, the Prof was gone, and many a valuable heirloom with him."
"Could he not be tracked down?" I asked.
He has not been seen from that day to this," replied Patch.
I had further questions, of course, but I am sure you can guess what they were: the answers to them were detailed, verbose, and in many cases highly intriguing, but you do not need to be that well-informed to enjoy this story. You get the gist, after all, don't you?
The point is that, some months later, I vowed to devote myself to the task of finding Patch's stamp collection and returning it to its owner. My decision was made in the autumn of that frightful year. Patch had suffered an attack of the bindings, and was now virtually bed-ridden himself. Of course, I had grown so used to my situation that it was quite out of the question for me to haul myself the few dozen yards along the corridor to his room: but I bid his replacement factotum, a dishevelled ex-convict named Brewster, to wheel Mister Patch to me every day, at four p.m. sharp, armed with half a dozen bottles from the cellar and a brace of tumblers.
It was during one such drunken afternoon that Patch began to sob. Sympathetically, I mussed his hair: it was like a bale of fusewire.
"Ouch!" I said, "What's the matter, Mister Patch?"
"Boo hoo hoo!" was all I got out of him for half an hour. Then, draining the last bottle of Sprinkler's Nightmare, he confessed that, despite appearances, he was a sentimental old fool, and that it was his dearest wish, before death stole upon him and he was enwrapped in a grisly shroud, that he could once more feast his eyes - sorry, eye - upon his priceless collection of pre-adhesive covers, the collecting of which had made his boyhood a sun-glazed idyll, its theft by the unspeakable Underlip having reduced him to the pitiful, cantankerous wretch now sprawled before me. Well.
Some minutes later Brewster arrived to take Mister Patch back to his room, but I had time enough to say something along the lines of: "Fear not! I will track down your collection, and yes, before you expire, you will once more hold your album in trembling hands!", although I may not have put it quite so resoundingly as that.
* a novel by frank key *