Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (35 page)

On arrival at the W——– Inn, I made my way to the public bar, where I knew my enemy would be waiting, his being the shorter route. Indeed, he saw me as I was removing my muffler, and smiled into the
froth which
crowned his tankard of ale. It was a pathetic sight and one I tried to ignore in case pity should drive me from my purpose.

It was then I saw my Lygia, pale but lovely, sitting at his side. I paused in mid-stride, hardly able to contain my overwhelming emotion, resisting the urge to rush forward and take her into my arms. There was no smile upon her face, and her eyes revealed a
blankness which
frightened me. The hue upon her cheek was blood red, as if a fever had overtaken her and was at the apex of its trajectory. There were demons at work within her, not of her own making.

Gathering all my reserves of strength I stepped forward.

‘Good evening, Hawthorne,’ I murmured, ‘we meet again.’

He looked about him nervously, the smile instantly gone.

‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘Remember our agreement! I am travelling incognito. Please refer to me as M. du Mirror...’

‘Ah,’ I replied, ‘your usual alias. How well it has served you over the years.’

My purpose achieved I sat down and removed my gloves, calling to the landlord for more ale for my companion ‘M. du Mirror’, and brandy for myself.

‘And a new candle, ‘I cried, ‘for monsieur and I have much to discuss. The night hours are long, but friendship such as ours needs no sleep.’

I heard a faint groan of annoyance escape monsieur’s lips. I knew he detested bonhomie from one such as I, but his breeding and gentlemanly manners would no more allow him to refute my words, than would the stomach of a starving urchin permit the child to reject the discarded entrails of a slaughtered pig.

I studied the hollow visage of my fellow reveller. His earlier disguise of the well-fed estate agent had been discarded. He had pared his appearance down to reality and was indeed much thinner and paler than when we had last encountered one another at a way-station some several miles from N–––k on the eastern seaboard. His eyes were ringed with dark aureoles and lacked the lustre of a person in good health. There were about his lips the dry cracks of one whose surface moisture has been drained by long hours of raving speech. There was something new about his expression and it took me some minutes to decide that the twitch in his left eyelid had not been there at our last meeting.

It was now necessary to begin the game of delving into each other’s recent activities, to see which of us could reveal the least and lie the most successfully. We were both past masters at devious and wily conversation.

‘So,’ I began, ‘what stories have you for me today? Please, do not repeat those twice-told tales you forever foist upon my ears, for you know I am fully aware of their content, though the manner in which you expound each romance differs with every new telling. Perhaps you would favour my ear with any fresh yarns you may have invented since our last meeting?’

He gave a kind of gasping sound and clutched his tankard so hard his knuckles went visibly white. For one awful moment I believed he was going to refuse, to decline outright to pass the information I so desperately desired. Instead, what came was merely in the form of a mild protest.

‘Sir,’ he croaked, ‘since you have already heard all my stories, several times, perhaps we should both drain our glasses and leave this establishment?’

‘No more games,’ I cried. ‘I must know what you have done to my dear wife, who has been prisoner for close to three days now. Not once has she cast a fond look in my direction, but sits by your side like a dead creature, robbed of any reason to smile, bereft of speech, empty of thought. She whose countenance was divine has the features of a corpse and the eyes of an inmate of Bedlam.’

A triumphant smile at last found its way to the corners of his mouth as I tried to attract the attention of my darling Lygia, to signal in our special eyelid code, that she was ready to make good her escape. I received a blank stare in acknowledgement. There appeared no spark of recognition in her eyes, no welcome there, no sign of relief. There was
simply.
. . nothing.

What have you done to her?’ I hissed again.

Du Mirror sniggered.

‘She does not remember you, Wilson,’ he sneered. ‘She will never know you again. I have administered a drug: once which erodes the memory, destroys it for good...’

I sat back in my chair with a start. Such news was of course horrifying. My own dear Lygia, my beloved wife, did not know me. This lady without whom life was an emptiness to be compared only with the void of space, had no knowledge of my existence. Indeed, she stared upon me now with the cold politeness of a stranger. That she was kind and good, generous and
loving,
was evident only in her unblemished complexion, her sweet demeanour, not in her eyes. There was no warmth in them for me.

‘You are an evil man, du Mirror,’ I said, ‘but you have calculated wrongly this time. If it takes me the rest of my life I will win again the love of my dear wife and restore myself to my rightful place in her heart.’

Turning to the lady in question I said, ‘Madam, allow me to introduce myself...’

I was interrupted by a startling cackle, ejaculated from the mouth of my enemy. His eyes were feverishly bright, as if he were in the last days of some consumptive disease, and his thin red lips were cruelly twisted in a gesture of mockery. The lank dark hair that fell about his brow seemed infused with every essence of nefariousness. He was iniquity itself, but he was not yet finished with his wickedness.

‘You poor fool, he said, ‘do you not realise the extent of my scheme? You have taken the drug, not but an hour ago at the Café M——–. The third waiter there is my man. At last, I have you, William Wilson!’

I recoiled in horror at the words, but I too had something to impart to my enemy, which would have him reeling before my eyes. I am not a man to be treated with contempt, regarded as a mere nothing in the eyes of foreign agents, looked upon with disdain. I am a man of action: I do what others have not yet done. I spoke to him then, in the accents of the victorious.

‘You, Sir, are an even poorer fool. The third waiter at the Café M——– is obviously a double agent, for he is also my man, and the potion he slipped into your Turkish coffee should be taking effect within just a few moments from now.’ I stared at him grimly, then added, ‘The difference between our methods ends at last the deadlock we have found ourselves in these past thirty years. You are an elaborate showster, sir, while I am a practical artificer. I have no desire to fool around with vials of liquid that induce amnesia. The fluid that went into your coffee was plain and simple strychnine. Enough to kill a razor-wielding
orangutan,
let alone a worn out husk of a middle European with Gothic pretensions. You are a dead man, du Mirror!’

There was silence between us then, for several seconds. The candle burned, the mists seeped under the ill-fitting door from the river, and the landlord coughed from his stool by the cellar door.

It was then that Hawthorne, alias M. du Mirror, fell forward across the table, foam bubbling from his lips.

‘Curse you, Poe,’ he whispered with laboured breath, ‘my one solace is that you will never again recognise your own wife, the lady Lygia...’

‘The lady who?’ I said, pulling on my gloves, but received no reply, for he laughed an insane laugh before gargling his final breath.

I rose from the table intending to take my leave, but not forgetting to bow briefly but politely to the dying man’s female companion, a lady of unquestionable beauty though uncertain age.

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘your escort appears to be intoxicated. I suggest you call for a cab and transport him to his lodgings without delay.
A very good evening to you.
I have been glad to make your acquaintance but I must go to...go to...’ I searched my mind but finding nothing, left the table in as little confusion as possible. Somewhat puzzled by my elusive thoughts I made my way to the street and strode out in the direction of____
Before
I had gone about a quarter of a mile, I heard police whistles piercing the stillness of the night, and hurrying footsteps behind me. The woman from the inn passed me at a rapid pace, closely followed by the landlord. It seemed that some terrible deed had been perpetrated of which I had no knowledge. I returned to the inn and offered my assistance to the inspector whose task it was to solve the crime, the murder of an unknown patron of the
ale house
. Through weeks of diligent detective work I was able to establish that the man had been poisoned, not in the place where the body was found, but by the third waiter in a café on the other side of the city. The guilty fellow was duly tried and executed according to the law. The identity of the corpse however was never discovered and police files remain closed in that particular respect.

All this was a long time ago. It is a peculiarity of the
drug which
Hawthorne administered that a reversal takes place in later years. Whereas one would normally expect to experience a decline into senile dementia, as one grows older, I in fact have noticed a sudden improvement in the machinations of my faculties. Certain areas of lost events have returned with a clarity never previously possessed. I have recently managed to communicate with my dear wife Lygia, who has also recovered much of the memory of her previous life. Hawthorne, on the other hand, has made no such happy discovery regarding the poison I had delivered to his lips. He has experienced no resurrection; has not leapt from the grave thoroughly invigorated; has not cast off his shroud and danced upon his own tomb. This indeed proves the value of the practical over the absurd. Hawthorne remains, firmly and securely, as dead as a nail.

 
Lectures at Hong Kong’s Royal Asiatic Society sometimes sparked of ideas. ‘Oracle Bones’ was one of
them,
‘China Coast Pidgin’ was another. I haven’t written that one yet and I’ve forgotten much of the pidgin I used, though one phrase will remain with me forever: ‘piano’ in CC pidgin was ‘toothy-face, bashy-in, cry.’

When the youth reached the hill village, the elders were in the Happy Hut, locked in a debate concerning the nature of heavenly bodies and their effect on regional game. The old men were of course smoking opium in order to keep their heads clear during the argument and to increase their skill at presentation. There was nothing the tribes-people enjoyed more than a lively contest of words. It was at the height of this serious discussion that the runner arrived, bristling with urgency. He was told to wait.

One shrivelled husk with a hollow, rattling chest stated emphatically that each time a bird was caught in a snare, or a squirrel was shot with a musket, a new star appeared in the night sky. There was an impatient murmur of agreement. This fact was not in dispute. That
a tally of the hunters’ kills was maintained by the gods
was a truism. In the time of the first ancestors, far back, the heavens had been black and almost empty. The point that was contested was whether each star was a permanent replacement for each separate kill, because certainly the game had decreased dramatically in number over the centuries. It was a fact that wild pigs had all but disappeared. The deer, once as numerous as the termites, were now impossible to find.

The young messenger, who was from the same tribe but from a different village, waited outside the Happy Hut in frustrated silence for the debate to finish. Though the women had immediately taken care of his thirst, his bare feet were hot from the three-day run, and he longed to bathe in the cool stream. He sighed and scratched his insect bites, his heart full of things other than the carrying of urgent messages.

The boy’s own people lived three valleys away in the direction of the sun and his long run was not yet over. There was the return journey to make. When he had been asked to deliver the message he had been halfway through a careful but hasty erection of his bridal hut. Sixteen years old, he had been wed just over seven days, but had yet to consummate the marriage. The living-
hut which he had inherited from his father
was not a fit place for the sexual act, since the spirits of his ancestors hovered around the corners and flickered on the support poles, and they would be shocked if he and his bride performed in their view. So, like all young men, he had to build a separate little bridal hut of bamboo roofed with banana leaves. This post-nuptial dwelling had to be at least a body-length from the living-hut. There, he and his new wife could reveal themselves to each other, away from the eyes of family ghosts. He had to build carefully since it had to be strong enough to withstand youthful athletics, yet swiftly because he was eager to experiment with procreation.