In the morning the snow-haired Leap couldn’t stop shaking. He pointed at a window and said he saw tatters of devil flapping there. Snapper was unsympathetic and appalled. ‘This nerve farm of yours has served as a betsy lamp — we’ll have moaning glowheads converging on us from miles around. God almighty!’
‘Mind you,’ began Father.
‘Don’t encourage him!’ yelled Snapper, astonished and exasperated.
The dense mesh in the hothouse had been warped by the intrusion. ‘What if it’s still in there?’ whispered Leap, trembling. ‘I daren’t plug in again.’
‘This ganglia should be destroyed by fire,’ bellowed Snapper. ‘Verger, back me up on this — nerves?’
The Verger pulled up the hood of his robe, his face extinguishing in shadow.
‘Well I for one think it’s the spice,’ I said, barely registering Adrienne’s slow, stern, meaningful shake of the head. ‘And I’ll plug into this mess like the fierce one I am.’
‘There’s no guarantee my nerves won’t cause a rejection,’ said Leap eagerly.
‘Won’t be the first time, Leap,’ said Father amiably, and we all laughed.
All except Snapper, who couldn’t believe what I can only describe as his ears. ‘You can joke about this eh? You can stand and roar. Well by god you’ll know the full extent when the Artless Dodger here has a meeting of minds. He may have been delivered by the bastard but a special relationship? With that thing?’
I really didn’t know what I was doing — mainlining a spectre isn’t wise. But I’d been having end-of-the-world dreams since I was three — if anyone could take it, I could. Hooked into the nerve cable I lay awake in a sleeping bag. ‘Break a leg, laughing boy,’ said Father, going off to bed. ‘And take a gander at the marrow if you get a chance — looks like pepperoni.’
Hours passed like night clouds. I had become forgetful and sleepy. Then the atmosphere shifted. There was a gust of wind — a door slammed like a menu being returned to a waiter. I was approaching the jump ledge of Hieronymus’s sidelong world. The room exploded in my face. I suppose being young I was more tolerant of having my brain torn like a paper bag and after a few preliminary horrors I was sat on the shore of an electrocutive river, my body anchored to the land by a muscle web reminiscent of melted pizza string. Mister Hieronymus was beside me and believe me it was weird. Brows like shoulderblades. Sternum and ribspread like a crab’s underside. Soul flooded with poison. ‘That beak of yours,’ I said and, realising I had been whispering, bellowed as though at a foreigner. ‘That beak of yours. Iconoclastic. Max Ernst. Mythological Woman. I like it.’
‘Many have,’ it said, ‘and lived.’
‘Broken skin,’ I said. ‘Nice one.’
‘Laughing boy, we go back a long way — I delivered you. And I was worried when the Professor felt willing to use you for his experiment — he has a forehead like a dirigible and for a few bob he’d flog his aunt and shadow. But I know how stubborn you are so we may as well get this over with.’
‘What’s the deal?’
‘Things occurring behind the freakshow scenes of the Hall. Things in which you are not included.’
‘You mean Nan’s funerals? I’m going to the next one though I don’t care to — I’ve told them in every bloody language but improvisational mime.’
‘I know — but it’s not that. I daresay it’ll cause a rift but I’ll be judged by god and my peers — none of whose existence I have been able to verify. Fact is, laughing boy, the Hall is building a quantum of energy to be released subsequently in an audacious crescendo. Pulling out the stops as it were. Getting uncomfortable?’
Every atom of the landscape hurt — each man has his share of pain but searing agony smacks of decadence. ‘I want to hear it.’
‘So we have a transcendence operation,’ it continued. I realised that it was fishing — a thread trailed from the high-voltage river into Hieronymus’s mouth and it was hauling in the line by swallowing periodically. Whatever it had caught was nearing the surface. ‘Live and let live, laughing boy. Keep your head down if you have to dig a hole to do so. You sense your own importance far beyond the human range. Life’s a carousel with skeleton horses. And you’re aware the motivating force behind the universe is —’
A burst of static and I was back in the dining room — Snapper stood before me with a flaming torch in one hand and the pulled plug in the other. Behind him was a fiery glow. ‘If god wanted us to cultivate our nerves,’ he roared, ‘he would have told us not to.’
I pushed past him and he followed across the yard. The hothouse was a halloweenhead. Windows popped and the roof exploded, flames belching through. Inside, nerves curled and burnt like nettles.
THUMPING DOUGH
Occasions of trial and forbearance for one and all were the visits from Father’s vexingly exuberant cousin, Roger Lang. Sometimes when speaking of him, Father would become uncharacteristically pop-eyed and begin strangling empty air. I remember one occasion when Roger turned up yelling like Santa and expecting us to respond. Me and Adrienne crept halfway down the stairs and saw him shouting toward Father in the hallway. ‘Good heavens old man, this place of yours is a gothic nightmare. A few ornamental fiends and Bob’s your uncle. Speaking of which.’ And he tore the wrapping from a huge mounted moose-head at which Father stared in appalled astonishment.
‘A cow.’
‘I prefer to think of it as a moose, old fellow — and the best of its type I’ve ever come across. Quite a find really. It’s been sat on a barrel in an unsuccessful fruiterers for the last six years and the shopkeeper was arrested the other week for going mad — said the blessed thing kept shouting at him and trying to run things. In fine condition though. Name’s Ramone. Eyes are quartz crystal, and those antlers are tough enough to swing on. I believe it even salivates.’
Father was doubtful. ‘Yes, well the benefits of having a dribbling wildebeest forever mournfully regarding one are dubious at the best of times.’
Lang looked at Father as though at a madman. ‘Dubious? Why the benefits my dear fellow are legion. I’ll hang it on the hook here, shall I?’
‘If you have strong feelings on the matter.’
Lang placed the bleak-featured head on the hallway wall. ‘Now — where are those brats of yours? There they are — Alice and the Little Prince!’
‘That animal head is rotting from the inside,’ I stated, walking solemnly down.
‘Like Roger’s principles,’ stated Adrienne, following after.
‘Antlers like radar,’ I muttered.
‘Perhaps it’ll whisper the racing results,’ muttered Adrienne.
‘Crack your face, you two,’ chortled Roger like a toytown mayor. ‘You’ve got to laugh otherwise you’ll cry.’
‘I see no impediment to doing both at once,’ said Adrienne, looking expressionlessly up at the moose-head. Then she turned, giving Roger a scornful glance, and walked back upstairs.
‘Did it relinquish its bonce by choice?’ I asked, regarding the head.
‘Ha, ha — nice one, Scooter,’ he laughed, fuzzing my hair.
‘Don’t ever,’ I emphasised murderously, ‘call me Scooter again.’ And I marched away.
Roger took a spare room and toured the house like a stranger. His routine rejection of the facts allowed him to be surprised by the same ones repeatedly. ‘Listen old man,’ he said to Father, pouring port, ‘I’ve just been in the west wing — entered a room back there and interrupted a nun in a welding mask. What’s the story?’