* unspeakable desolation pouring down from the stars *
CHAPTER FOUR
CATACLYSMIC WINDS ASSAIL WINT through every season of the year. Many towers ring the town. At its heart lies the district known variably as the Dung-rinds, Gobbler's Rents, or the Old Pisspot Ground. Which of these you choose to call it betrays your condition in life: peasants from the hinterlands, foreigners, and parents of more than four children call it by the first name; churchgoers, pickpockets, aircraft-pilots, amputees, unmarried detectives, corn-chandlers, tongue-tied ex-schoolmarms and ambulance drivers by the second; and everyone else, bar pirates of the high seas, by the third. Pirates of the high seas have their own name for the district, but what that is has never been divulged to the unpiratical. At the time of writing, I am father to seven children, so I will henceforth refer to the area as the Dung-rinds.
Into this noisome tangle of open sewers, burial grounds, and dank forbidding alleyways came Fig, Brewster, and Binnie. Each carried a satchel, and inside each satchel was a panoply of deductive equipage: microscopes and microphones, hand-held two-way mirrors, pots of fingerprint dust, packets of iron filings, clip-on moustaches, mauve cretonne gloves, skeleton keys, false cheese-parings, rubber mothballs, wigs, gats, shoe-enlargers, and Thompson pills, among other things.
At the Comptroller's Gate, they flourished their intricately-forged identification papers. Brewster was held up for ten minutes, as he bore little if no resemblance to the cherubic and clean-shaven swineherd whose photograph appeared on his card. A generous bribe, accompanied by threats of demented violence, eventually allowed him to pass through the Gate. Scurrying to catch up with his chums, Brewster dropped his satchel into a ditch: going back for it, he lost sight of them, and found himself alone in the most sinister quarter of the Dung-rinds. Disorientated, he wandered for hours through progressively more stinking streets, until, as evening fell, he was set upon by a gang of knife-wielding maniacs, who cut him to shreds, robbed him of his satchel, and left him for dead. Scooped up hours later by the Dung-rinds Stretcher Patrol, Brewster was delivered to an ill-equipped clinic, where he expired as dawn broke, and roosters crowed.
Meanwhile, Fig and Binnie had booked in to a gruesome guest-house. Once they had fallen asleep, in lice-riddled cots, their luggage was subjected to an astonishingly thorough examination by Jarvis and Paingue, a pair of rogues who occupied an adjoining room. Jarvis was tousled, religious, and frank; his partner was lantern-jawed, dyspeptic, and insane. Like many of Wint's criminal underclass, they were masters of disguise. They roamed from slop-house to drinking-hole, thieving and swindling, assuming different characters at each stopping-place. On the evening in question, they had signed in to the guest-house as Tex Grimes, a circus sharpshooter (Jarvis), and his balaclava-clad idiot half-brother (Paingue). No sooner did they hear great blasts of snoring from the room wherein Fig and Binnie slept, than they removed their big black boots and crept silently in. For such skilled robbers, it was a matter of thirty seconds to rifle through their neighbours' belongings and pocket everything of value. Jarvis returned to his room, weighed down with booty. The crazed Paingue stayed behind, grasped a dirk which he kept tucked into his sock, and cut the throats of his victims. Ten minutes later, Jarvis now attired as a captain of industry and Paingue as a mint-sucking water-bailiff, they clambered down the back staircase and headed for Wint's dingiest tavern, The Treadmill & Cyclops.
Now, consider my situation. Scrimgeour refuses to supply me with booze. Mister Patch is reduced to a dribbling gibberer. Fig, Brewster and Binnie are dead. A lesser man would have thrown in the towel, would have forgotten all about Patch's pre-adhesive stamp collection, would have lain in bed wailing and whingeing and wallowing in self-pity: but I am not a lesser man. Oh, I wailed and whinged - it's something I'm good at - but only for five or six months.
Well, until October the twelfth, to be exact. I woke up that morning and a change came over me. My usual routine, as damnable consciousness returned, was to bury my head in the pillows for an hour or two, letting out shrieks and yelps, before ringing for Scrimgeour. As I slurped my breakfast porridge, I harangued the retainer, comparing him unfavourably with his predecessors and consigning him, his children, his children's children, yea, unto every generation, into hell's fiery maw. Needless to say, Scrimgeour was unperturbed. The rest of the day would pass in a nightmarish repetition of these scenes, until at last I fell asleep again. On October the twelfth, as I have said, something changed. I do not know why, but I awoke brimming with happiness and zing. I summoned Scrimgeour, and before he arrived, I plumped the pillows, sat up, and donned a fetching thrum nightcap, the better to signal my transformation.
"Would sir like his porridge?" asked Scrimgeour, as he glided into my room.
"No, Scrimgeour, sir would not like his porridge. Tell me Scrimgeour, what is your first name?"
He was startled: that was one up to me.
"My parents called me Agamemnon, sir."
"Very well, Agamemnon: take out your notebook and pencil. I am going to give you a long and complicated instruction and I fear your powers of recall will not be sufficient without an aide memoire."
He went weak at the knees: I was hugely pleased.
"Now then, Agamemnon, write all this down carefully: you are to locate and consult as many firms of private detectives as possible, and to adjudge if any of them harbour within their ranks a man or woman of Fig's calibre. I will prepare a multiple-choice questionnaire to assist you in your interrogations. In the unlikely event that you find someone with even a fraction of Fig's talents, you will bring the person to me, and there will be an end to your task. However, I suspect that Fig was in a class of his own, and that you will return empty-handed, as it were. Thus I have made contingency plans, which I will now outline in considerable detail."
I spoke for over an hour, and Scrimgeour wrote down as near as damnit every single word, in big, sweeping block capitals. Before he scurried away to do my bidding, I let out a blood-curdling screech and pointed with trembling fingers towards the ceiling. As he turned his head and looked up, I managed to lift from his pocket a flask of Buccaneer's Ruin, deftly concealing it under my nightcap in the instant before he looked back at me.
"I thought I saw a windigo," I offered. The retainer looked at me strangely, but went on his way.
I had a devil of a job getting the lid off the flask - Scrimgeour had eerily muscular hands, and when he screwed a cap on, he screwed it tight. My own hands were raw by the time I succeeded, but the alcohol banged straight into my brain and I fell back on the bed seeing stars and sunbursts.
Six weeks later, Scrimgeour shuffled into my bedroom and embarked upon a long-winded tirade, the gist of which was that Fig was indeed matchless, that the hundreds of private detectives who had answered my questionnaire were, without exception, the basest ninnies, and that there was nothing for it but to put the contingency plan into operation.
I put the contingency plan into operation. A PT instructor was hired from a nearby gymnasium, and I subjected myself to this florid brute's horribly rigorous training programme until, by Christmas Eve, he considered me fit enough to climb mountains, swim across wide rivers, and survive for a week in sub-zero temperatures on a diet of thistles and rainwater. Meanwhile, Scrimgeour was filling a roomy haversack with supplies, which included a magnifying glass, a portable sundial, galoshes, forceps, The Principles of Magnetism by Buckingham Towser, dozens of maps, a Mackenzie beam, and a belt. He was also busy annotating railway timetables, priming miniature land-mines, wrapping endless lengths of cambric around my candles, and pressing gummed tape on to wafers of balsa-wood.
On New Year's Eve, I sought out my mother, and found her reclining on a couch in the drawing-room, surrounded by hampers. She was reading a book about the Boxer Rebellion. With some misgivings, I kissed her on the forehead and announced that I was fully recovered from my malady, that I was going away, that I knew not when, if ever, I would return, and that I required a few thousand panes to fatten out my wallet, so could I have the key to the hatbox in which, I knew, she kept her cash? Please.
"Forks in a bath," she replied: no doubt I misheard her. I rummaged in the sideboard until I found the key, and bounded upstairs to the attic. The hatbox was there, buried under a large quantity of medicine balls, which I tossed aside with gusto, enlivened by my recent PT drills. Unlocking what I had always thought of as a veritable treasure-chest, I was beflummoxed: the hatbox held only a five soiling piece, some tenpins in coins, and a saliva-splattered etching of the Pointy Town Horse-Trough. Without finances, my contingency plan was doomed to failure. I hared back down to the drawing-room to confront my mother, only to find that she had vanished, and in her place were Daisy and Maisie. By now, I was desperate. I threatened them with a pistol.
"I demand twenty thousand panes!" I shrieked, "Get me the money now, or I'll pump you full of bullets, you curs!"
I have always had a rich imaginative life. What I really did was to whimper in the most nauseating manner, and retreat to the garden. I trudged past the lupins and hollyhocks and turned towards the borage beds, hidden from the house by high hedges. My mother had recently employed a topiarist named Poxhaven, who I came upon now, squatting by a wheelbarrow sharpening his shears on an abandoned lump of masonry.
"How now, Mister Poxhaven," I said. He ceased his honing and peered at me. Seldom have I met anyone whose appearance was quite so ghastly. His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and his straight black lips. His voice, when at last he spoke, was booming and monotonous, empty of human expression and lacking any variation in tone or cadence.
"You look as miserable as a glut of yeast," he roared, "And to my way of thinking the indication is of woe beyond the reach of nursing. It is a big horror to me that youth bends under the large iron of sadness."
He was such an understanding man. I poured out my troubles to him: the torment I felt that perhaps Fig and his companions had died in vain, that just as I had decided to devote myself to the task they had begun, just as my preparations were complete, now, on the eve of my departure, my plans faced ruin because there was no money left in the family coffers, and I had no idea how to set out on my adventure without a huge wad of cash to ease my way in the world. How else was I to procure food and lodging, simple and innocent as I was? How was I to bribe those I needed to bribe, to pay off the numerous rascals who would place obstacles in my path?
"Privilege brings in its train awful strata of unknowingness," declaimed Poxhaven, "Mired in plenty you would best to my method be cast into slumdom and need. Well would lessons other humans learn be embossed on to your nerve-endings."
This was not what I wanted to hear, but the dreadful gardener pulled a face which he probably intended as a smile of sympathy, and continued.
"Mister Patch I hold in high odour: he is a king among punies. For this I will beat the panels of my intellect to your benefit. Ears ho! In a child's steps of half a morning from here lives a man they call a scrapmonger. Where my livelihood depends on the odd shapings of greenery, his hangs on metals. Place in his yard all objects of metal and in turn the monger pelts to his box and gives reams of panes from therein. Take this chart of the steps' direction and go to him. My assistance is huge and lofty and betokens no applause."
That night, while my aunts and mother dangled in dreams - start again. That night, while my mother and my aunts slept, Poxhaven and I dismantled and removed from the house all the metal we could lay our hands on: cutlery, taps, wiring, entire plumbing systems, kitchen utensils, structural reinforcements.... it is a wonder that the building was still standing at dawn, as we drove Poxhaven's metal-laden pantechnicon to the scrap-dealer. By eight in the morning, my wallet was stuffed with cash. I do not know what became of Poxhaven, once he had finished turning my mother's hedges into a leafy history of peasant uprisings. I know, however, that I would not have been able to carry out the deeds recounted in the rest of this story without his help, and for that, from - as he would say - the underparts of my heart, tremendous thankyous rain upon his person.
* a novel by frank key *