‘Hello, Mrs Sampras,’ he winked.
She approached him, not speaking. Her gloved hands were held in mid-air, hovering in limbo, postponing the moment. Her face was shrouded in gauzy paper, a veil which allowed only her dark eyes to show.
‘Is it you behind that mask?’ persisted the dictator.
‘Yes, it’s me,’ she said emotionlessly.
‘It covers your prettiest features.’
‘It’s necessary,’ she said. Already the inside of her surgical mask was becoming damp with potentially lethal breath.
The anaesthetist, a woman too by the shape of her eye-bows, looked to Gala and nodded. Colourless liquid began to trickle down a thin plastic tube into the cannula taped to the dictator’s pale wrist.
The old man’s face softened and grew infantile. Gala noticed for the first time that he had long soft eyelashes, like her own children. Those eyelashes were fluttering now, as if the old man were struggling against infant sleep at bedtime.
‘If I should die before I wake …’ he murmured.
‘Don’t worry about such things,’ Gala advised him. ‘We both have a long night ahead of us.’
FLESH REMAINS FLESH
Ashton Allan Clark was the richest man in Altchester; he had money on his breath and a sticky ooze of luxury clogging up his ears. If you had asked him what his fortune was founded on (assuming you were granted leave to speak to him, which few people were), he would have told you ‘the finest tannery in all of England’. If you had asked his miserable employees the same question, they would have said ‘maggots and misery’ – unless they suspected you of being an informer. Are you an informer? No? Then let us begin our story.
Ashton Allan Clark was a small, meaty man, resembling nothing so much as a grossly overgrown otter. He habitually wore a black sable coat and doeskin trousers, and a top hat that was likewise furry. His hair, beard, moustache and sideboards were thick, dark and glistening with oil. They had been that way since he built the tannery in 1831, and it was now 1861, so it seemed likely that his hair colour was maintained artificially. Clark’s Tannery bought black dye by the gallon, giving rise to a folk tale among the workers’ children — ragged, underfed illiterates, all of them — that Mr Clark dunked his head in a bucket of the stuff every Sunday. They also said he ate frog’s legs, and fruitcake soaked in vinegar pickle.
This last allegation was a slander, but there was no shortage of truths about Ashton Allan Clark’s private life that would have made the children gasp, were they not already gasping for air in the grey miasma that constituted Altchester’s atmosphere, and were they not kept well segregated from his secrets by iron gates and guards. In fact, Clark’s mansion, a villa that had been forcibly turned into a castle by the superimposition of turrets and imported gargoyles, was perched on a hillside far away from the tannery. The cab journey from the semi-rural outskirts of Altchester, where thrushes trilled in Mr Clark’s trees, to the gloomy maze of cobbled streets and blackened buildings encircling Mr Clark’s grim hive of industry, could take half an hour or more.
This was how long it had taken Mr Damien Hirsch to reach Mr Clark’s mansion. It might have been quicker, but the horse had been sluggish in the summer heat, and a brief shower had turned the last mile of unpaved road into a slippery track of muck. The atmosphere here smelled healthier than those mephitic parts of the town where even newly-washed clothes reeked of the tannery, but still the air hung humid and Mr Hirsch wished the sky would tear itself open and unleash the rain in earnest.
It was late afternoon. He had been summoned to this house by a letter his employer had posted to him that morning. Mr Hirsch, who did not work in the tannery, preferred not to think of himself as an employee of Mr Clark; he preferred to think of himself as a gentleman whose expertise was valuable enough to Mr Clark to warrant remuneration. Nevertheless, the tone of Mr Clark’s letter had been nasty, and Mr Hirsch was coming to the conclusion that life would be altogether happier if he could tell Mr Clark to go to the devil. After all, as Altchester’s only taxidermist, he was due a measure of respect.
‘I put my trust in your competence, Hirsch,’ complained Mr Clark, barely a minute after the servants had ushered the visitor into the house, ‘and you let me down.’
‘What do you mean, sir?’ said Hirsch, following his host into the room known as Noah’s Ark.
‘You will see what I mean,’ said Clark, speaking peevishly and walking stiffly.
Noah’s Ark was a large parlour or a small ballroom, originally intended for piano recitals or intimate dances to amuse the country gentry. Or perhaps it had been a library? It was difficult to tell nowadays, as Mr Clark had no time for music, female company or books. The room had been stripped of whatever had been in it before, hung all about with red velvet drapes, and transformed into an exhibition of stuffed animals. But not the sorts of creatures one might expect in the homes of country gentry – not stags and foxes and wild boar. Nor were there any bodiless heads mounted neatly on burnished wooden plaques. No, what stood in the ballroom, intact and massive, was the following:
A huge cow, the size of – well, a cow – complete with monumental haunches and distended udders. A bullock, only slightly less gross, dark of hide, stupid of eye, with an iron ring through his nose. Three different breeds of sheep and ram, huddled together as if in fear of the colossal bovines, their fleeces varying from lush to newly-shorn, their mouths caught in a half-smile, except for one lamb frozen in mid-chew, its lips clamped on a realistic clump of grass, as though this were the last shred of vegetation grazed from the polished wooden floor. Keeping them together, rearing immobile in an attitude of imperious attention, was a dog – a coal-black collie – whose ears were so erect that it was difficult to believe they could never tremble again.
‘I see nothing out of order,’ said Mr Hirsch. He was perspiring heavily; the room was warm from the setting sun and warmer still from the gaslights.
‘Look closer,’ said Mr Clark. ‘At the nose of Albert.’ Albert was Mr Clark’s name for the bullock, just as Victoria was his name for the cow. ‘Or study the ears of the lamb.’
Hirsch bent closer to his handiwork, these hulking brutes whose emptied interiors he had had to fill with elaborate metal architecture, sackfuls of plaster and miles of bandage. Victoria and Albert had almost killed him, in a manner of speaking. Lifting the flaccid hides was backbreaking work, the sort of labour that befitted those who toiled in Clark’s tannery, not a qualified taxidermist. Sweating, puffing, staggering, Hirsch had heaved the cattle skins onto their fake skeletons, and had asked himself why he was doing this, when his slender fingers were more suited to scalpeling the tiny tarsal bones out of squirrels’ feet.
He adjusted his spectacles as he peered at the bullock’s nose. There were maggots crawling out of it. Likewise, the interior of the lamb’s ears twinkled with some slight activity.
‘This will not do,’ said Mr Clark.
‘I am sorry,’ said Mr Hirsch. ‘In my defence, flies will lay eggs wherever there is warmth and moisture. I had not anticipated you would keep the specimens in conditions of such humidity.’
‘I think I need no reminding of the conditions under which flies breed in dead flesh. Nevertheless it was your task to render the hides perfectly dry.’
‘Flesh remains flesh, unless it is largely replaced with the manufactured substances which you insisted be kept to a minimum in this display. Maggots have been known to breed in manuscripts of ancient vellum, when storage conditions fell below museum standards. Even so,’ declared Hirsch, snapping open his satchel of phials and instruments, ‘I can kill these pests with a simple injection of formaldehyde. Remember that their purchase is only superficial. There are no innards left to be corrupted.’
Ashton Allan Clark nodded. ‘I should hope not.’ Having scolded his visitor, he seemed to feel better. ‘Your talents are very useful to me; I am sure I appreciate them better than anyone else in England. Indeed, I am about to offer you your biggest commission ye
t.’
Hirsch was kneeling in front of Albert, his spectacles fogging up. The hypodermic needle through which he had just squirted poison into the bullock’s nostrils dripped clear liquid. ‘I do not think I wish to mount anything larger than Victoria.’
‘By ‘biggest’ I meant the amount of money I propose to give you,’ Clark reassured him. ‘The creature is significantly smaller than a cow.’
‘Oh?’
This one small word was sufficient encouragement for Clark to stride out of the room and return, a few moments later, pulling a long serving-trolley such as might be used to transport tureens of soup from kitchen to dining-room. The top of it was veiled with a white sheet, and the entire burden was heavy enough for Hirsch to wonder why Mr Clark did not get a servant to pull it for him.
The mystery was not unexplained for long. As soon as the trolley was safely inside the room and the door had been shut behind it, Mr Clark whipped off the sheet and revealed the supine body of an adolescent girl. She was clad only in a loose blouse and a threadbare skirt; her arms, legs and feet were bare. Her thick blonde hair had been pulled, by the force of Mr Clark’s removal of the shroud, across her face. The fact that she did not brush it away from her open eyes spoke the truth of her condition.
‘She is dead?’ whispered Hirsch.
‘Of course she is dead.’
‘How did she come to be dead?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then how did you come by her?’
‘I found her.’
‘Found her?’
‘By the side of a road. Yesterday evening. I imagine she fell from a horse and broke her neck.’
Hirsch stepped forward and stroked the girl’s hair off her face.
‘Her neck looks intact to me.’
‘Then perhaps her sweetheart took liberties with her, and afterwards strangled her.’
Hirsch began to feel giddy, as a memory percolated into his brain. The room’s single elongated window flickered with a silent lightning flash.
‘As I said, her neck looks —’
‘What does it matter how she died?’ thundered Ashton Allan Clark, at the same instant as the thunder rumbled through Heaven. ‘Some humans live until their dotage, others die young. It’s a melancholy truth, but there it is. My choice, when I saw her lying there by the road, was a stark one. Should I leave her to decompose, perhaps churned to a pulp by the wheels of passing carriages, or should I act?’
‘Act? ‘With every passing second, Hirsch was remembering more clearly a phenomenon he had noticed only half-consciously last night while drifting into sleep. Exhausted by the heat and the inhalation of denatured alcohol, he’d been unsure whether the wails and sobs echoing in his ears were coming (as he fancied) from the streets outside his window, or if they originated from the fevered dreams into which he was sinking. Recalling them now, with this poor dead girl in front of him, he was struck by how closely the cries had resembled the forlorn calls for an infant or a pet that has gone missing.
‘To allow a beautiful creature like this to go to waste would be criminal,’ declared Mr Clark with a quiet intensity that resembled passion. ‘I want you to immortalise her, Hirsch. Let nothing corrupt her. She can be my shepherdess. ‘And he gestured towards his immobile menagerie, his Noah’s Ark of farm animals, indicating how a shepherd lass might stand in relation to them. He even essayed a smile, as if this unusual facial contortion might help the taxidermist imagine the pretty picture of the girl and her beasts, as if a rare smile from Ashton Allan Clark might conjure into existence the tableau of a fresh-faced adolescent, clad fetchingly in a diaphanous dress, her hair spilling down her back, her pale white hand clutching a crozier such as might easily be supplied by a walking-stick manufacturer of Mr Clark’s acquaintance.
‘But … in the name of Heaven, Clark …’ croaked Hirsch, perceiving in his employer’s smile the sickening glint of madness. ‘This is someone’s daughter … !’
‘Was, Hirsch, was,’ corrected Mr Clark impatiently. ‘She is meat now, and we must intervene at once, before the skin is spoiled.’
Mr Hirsch’s spectacles were wholly fogged over now, in the unbearable heat of the gathering thunderstorm and his own distress. He dragged his sleeve across the lenses, and noticed he was still holding the hypodermic. ‘This … this girl,’ he pleaded. ‘I heard her friends and family calling for her, last night. She cannot simply disappear. Her loved ones will wish to bury her. Can you not un—?’
‘Burial be damned!’ shouted Mr Clark, and again the windows flashed with lightning. ‘For a few precious days, her hide has value! Then it is a worthless shred of garbage, for parasites to feed on! Where is your pride, man? Where is your professional pride? Give me my shepherdess, and I’ll give you more money that your miserable stags and foxes will ever make you!’
An appalling crash of thunder shook the walls of the house, at the same moment as Mr Hirsch lunged forward, with a cry of rage and terror, and stabbed his employer in the chest with the hypodermic, so wildly that the metal shaft of the instrument sank deep into the flesh, along with the noxious dregs of formaldehyde.
So, was Mr Clark dead? No, he was not dead. He awoke some time later, rearing up from the floor as if reanimated by a galvanic charge. His forehead, by now liberally smeared with sweat, hair-oil and an inky black substance, bumped against an obstruction hanging over him. It was the belly of Victoria, hard and unyielding like a full sack of flour. He crawled out from under it, and strove to gather up, as though they were the spilled contents of his pockets, the realities of his situation. It was night. Torrential rain was inundating the house. He had blood on his shirt-front. His head felt light and full of camphorous vapour, as if he had imbibed too much opium, cocaine and alcohol in unwise conjunction. The trolley which had borne the flawless corpse of the girl he had lured into his carriage was unencumbered. His shepherdess was gone.
Stumbling and cursing, as if his revived consciousness were an unwieldy burden he must balance on the framework of his soul, he burst out of his own front door, immediately drenched by the rain, and confirmed that Hirsch had fled, taking the girl with him. Had this been minutes or hours ago? On no account must the blackguard be permitted to find the girl’s family, nor even wave the body under the noses of police or other meddlers. By the grace of God, no one had yet set eyes on his poor shepherdess – whose fate hung in the balance, entirely dependent on urgent rescue – except for the taxidermist and his driver, both of whom could be dispatched efficiently with the knife. The same curved, wooden-handled tanning knife with the ten-inch blade that had slid, with such buttery ease, into the soft flesh of his shepherdess, liberating her from her drab life as a tannery drudge and offering her an altogether cleaner, more cheerful future as the jewel in his grand display.
Within minutes he was seated in his carriage, rattling and skidding through the deluge towards the town, his knife nestled in his lap. He was still giddy and queasy, but the sound and the sensation of cobblestones under the wheels of his cabin gave him heart: he had reached the solid streets of Altchester already, and would surely draw abreast, any moment, with Hirsch’s much meaner and slower vehicle. What’s more, the farther he got, the less the elements seemed to resist him: the downpour thinned, the lightning ceased to flash, and the thunder kept its counsel.
Mr Clark peered out into the gloom. The streetlamps glimmered indistinct behind their veil of drizzle. A glimpse of peach-tinged light from a public house, and the sound of music, reassured Mr Clark that the world was carrying on much as usual, and that the prevailing hum of normalcy had yet to be disturbed by indignant alarms. Shabby street vendors were emerging from shelter, sniffing out customers for their squalid wares. The warmth stored within the sewers and the dark brickwork of the buildings was escaping as steam.
‘Faster!’ yelled Mr Clark – with such vehemence that the wound in his chest throbbed. Nevertheless his annoyance was justified: the advance of the carriage had, with a sudden lurch, slackened off, pi
tching him forward. After scrabbling in his lap to check that the knife was still there, he slid open the cabin window and poked his head out into the darkness, squinting to determine what was obstructing progress.
He peered for no longer than a few moments, however, before uneasily sliding his window closed again and retracting his head into the raised lapels of his fur coat. In his nostrils and on his lips, he could taste an odour, familiar and yet monstrously intensified: dog dung and cured meat, both in immense quantities, as if a mist of liquefied ordure was drizzling from the skies and the street was paved with butchered flesh. Such was the smell borne by those who worked in the tannery; such was the perfume of those whose daily task was to chisel maggots out of what would soon be coats and gloves; such was the pungency of those who must rub bucketloads of canine filth into the festering hides of dead cattle.
Ashton Allan Clark huddled inside the vehicle which, by now, had come to a standstill. The horse snorted impatiently, and beat its hooves against the cobbles, but succeeded only in jingling its harness and agitating the contents of the cabin –that is, Mr Clark. It seemed to him that his carriage was being stealthily enveloped in a sea of shuffling, half-human forms, a noiseless horde of the walking dead.
In that moment of reconnaissance before pulling his head in, he had seen ghastly pale faces, listless staring eyes, grey flesh showing through torn and threadbare clothing. Now he fancied he could see, every few heartbeats, a naked hand pawing at the rain-spattered windowpanes of his cabin – a different hand each time. Impossible, surely! Phantoms of an over-developed imagination. Yet wasn’t that another ghostly palm? No sooner had the five gloveless fingers loomed into his vision than they had vanished. Mr Clark nerved himself to slide open the shutter once more.