Restoration (32 page)

  "Sounds like he was a great parent."

  "Can't say I miss him much," Ryan admitted.

  The corridor finished at a large pair of double doors. To one side there was a dark wood easel with a heavy card sign on it. "Today" it announced in excessively florid calligraphy, "experience the joy of the Wurlitzer with Professor Luptna".

  "The joy of the Wurlitzer," said Penelope. "I can hardly wait."

  "Sooner we get in," Alan sighed, reaching for the door knob, "the sooner we can be out the other side and on our way to the library."

  He opened the door and their world dropped out from beneath them.

 

 

Barnabas was exhausted, but as long as the music played and his fat wife continued to sway he knew there would be no rest. He held her hand and led her around the shed constellation of stars that fell from the mirrorball above. The organ music rose and fell like a carousel's song, high twiddling notes dancing over the low hum of the bass. Whenever he looked towards the organist he was somehow unable to catch sight of him. He could see the stage, its sweeping red drapes and goldpainted ornamentation – the bulging clouds of heaven punctured by fat-cheeked cherubs blowing their slender trumpets to herald this terpsichorean apocalypse. Of the organist – or indeed his organ – there was no sign, just a shimmer of colour, like a rippling flag viewed through thick, decorative glass. Its edges moved and folded in on one another. One minute it was there, swollen and massive, then gone but for a hairline of colour. No matter how hard he tried to focus it eluded him. Not that his wife gave him much opportunity.

  "You're out of time," she hissed in his ear, flecks of spittle peppering his cheek. "Do try to keep up."

  
Out of time…
That certainly seemed like a familiar notion to him. If he tried to put his finger on why it was familiar he lost concentration on his dance steps and she kicked him. The sharp, sequinned point of her high-heels punctured his skin even through his socks. His ankles felt hot and damp from her repeated administrations.

  "Sorry dear," he said, trying not to wince as she kicked him again. He imagined the skin of that ankle to be puckered and bloody, like a steak pulverised by a hammer.

  "Lead with the right foot, idiot," she said and snapped her teeth at him like a dog nipping at a fly. Those teeth were mammoth flagstones, beige and glistening, smeared with lipstick, scarlet skid-marks. The fur on her upper lip bristled like corn in the wind as she fixed her showy smile back in place and tilted her head at the other dancers. Her eyes were small: hazel bullseyes at the centre of lilac eyeshadow targets. Her ashe blonde curls were piled high like dog dirt, a crisp slender flick at their summit. She was horrendous and his stomach churned to look at her. When she spoke, a noxious puff of rot billowed past those monstrous teeth. In his head it was the sort of smell one imagined erupting from the split carcass of a drowned man.

  She kicked him again. "Lighter on your toes," she demanded and he tried to lift even though he felt a trickle of blood run into his shoes to boil against his hot and throbbing foot.

  He tried to follow the other dancers but they made his head hurt almost as much as the elusive organist. He saw them as swooping triangles of black evening jackets or spangly gowns. Light and dark, bouncing around them like moonlight on a rough sea.

  
The sea
, he thought,
I'm much more at home on the sea.

  She kicked him again.

 

Hawkins couldn't help screaming as Maggie dug her thumb into his broken wrist.

  "You dance like a cripple," she said. Not the soft voice of the woman he loved, but a harsh rasp like a striking match. "Do better."

  "I'm trying," he assured her.

  "Not hard enough," she replied, digging her thumbnail into the crack of his splintered bone again. In the delirium of his pain her hair stretched like the tendrils of an anemone. Always large it now seemed to reach the ceiling, the ends probing the heavily decorated cornices and the sparkling mirrorball as if hunting for scraps of food.

  He loved his wife. He loved her more than anything else in the world… he just wished she wouldn't hurt him so.

  "Twirl me you slovenly arse," she said and spun in front of him, that impossible hair whirling around her head. It writhed towards the other dancers, one man turning so that Hawkins could see the scab he wore as a face, crisp yet weeping, yellow stains creeping into the starched white of his collar. Once glimpsed it vanished, replaced by an indistinct blur that swept away across the floor, vanishing into the darkness.

 

Chester pulled Penelope close. His face sponged his sweat onto her hers, wiping a salty snail-trail across her cheek and lips as he rubbed against her.

  "I just want to explore," he whispered, the voice carrying over the music as if it weren't even there. "You'll help me won't you?"

  When he spoke she saw a wisp of gun smoke trickle from between his thin lips.

  "Please," she said, the word as unwelcome in her mouth as a piece of broken glass, "just don't kill me."

  He smiled and the rivulets of sweat that poured from his forehead met the puckered lips and branched around it like a stream diverting around a fallen tree.

  "There are worlds upon worlds," he replied, as if she had said nothing at all. "There is a box, and inside that box is a door, beyond that door…"

  She knew the answer to that one, it was on the tip of her tongue. "Beyond that door…"

 

In Alan's arms, Rebecca, his one time therapist, whispered non-constructive thoughts as he fought to carry her gracefully around the floor.

  "Fat and ugly," she said as he tried to turn with the music. Tears of agreement coursed down his face as he lifted her arm and tilted her back, their groins pressing together. "I'd never let you fuck me," she assured him, "your dick's too small for me to even know it was there."

  He lifted her upright, leading her backwards through the faceless dancers who parted before them.

  "You're hollow," she said, "and the hole is filled with piss and shit."

  The organ surged and they clasped beneath the mirrorball.

  "I wish I was dead," he said.

  "So do I," she replied, "I'd hate you but I really can't be bothered."

 

Ryan's mother walked him in time with the music, his feet stood on hers. Despite his size she managed this just fine, towering above him, a plump giant in pink satin. She swung him around the floor, the sprinkled light from above trickling over grey, loose skin.

"I wish you weren't dead mum," said Ryan.

  She said nothing, her jaw hung too low for words, clanking around her chest like dirty pearls. She simply pressed his face into her gaseous belly where it sunk deep, as if there were not flesh beneath the fabric of her dress but rotting leaf mulch.

 

Maggie did her best to hold onto her husband but she was too fat. The sagging folds of flesh beneath her arms caught in the straps of her frock, squirting to either side of the cheap cotton like sausage meat twisted and tied.

  "There's just too much of you to love," Hawkins said, his handsome, manly face wrinkling in disgust at her bulging folds. The fat poured, wobbling, from every angle. Her colossal thighs clapping together like retarded seals, her drooping breasts running away from her chest like pink tapeworms.

  She tried to beg for his love but she couldn't speak, the great collars of blubber around her neck choking her words.

 

For Jonah all was delirium. The organ screamed like a hundred factory whistles, leather shoes machine-gunned the walnut dance floor, laughter roared with the cacophony of a field of geese.

  Hands tugged at him, plucking at his shirt, his hair his skin.

  "Dance with us!" they cried. He tried, spinning out of control, bumping from one to another like a pinball, hands shoving him this way and that. Someone snatched away his eyepatches and he felt the searing hot touch of fire, sprayed down from the mirrorball landing on the useless white of his blind eyes.

 

Beyond that door…
the words pricked at Penelope.
There is a box… and inside that box is a door…

  "Beyond that door…" she said looking up at Chester, his hair plastered around his skull like a newborn. "Beyond that door…"

  
Beyond that door is the House.
A voice said, somewhere deep inside her,
a terrible House, an impossible House
.

  "And inside that House…" she let go of Chester's hands, watching him spin away on his own into the faceless crowd, sweat dripping behind him like water from a wrung cloth.

  "Inside that House is a ballroom," she said. A sudden moment of clarity pierced her head with a light greater than that thrown from the ceiling above, or the spotlit stage or…

  She ran towards the stage, climbing up the ornate cherubs and the unfurling clouds to reach for the stage beyond it. The organ screeched, a train approaching a tunnel, as she clambered over a thrusting gold trumpet and fell to the dusty boards beyond it.

  In front of her, ever-moving, light trails trickling out behind him as he swayed, the organist played on. Long, distended fingers pulled stops and pressed keys. Thin, lifeless hair flicked from his peeling scalp as he thrashed, his feet pounding the pedals.

  "Dr. Luptna I presume?" she asked, grabbing at the flaking cadaver and wrenching him back from the organ. He squealed to be torn free, strips of skin left hanging from the organ keys like the tongues of thirsty dogs.

  "Thank you," he whispered, as the last notes faded up the organ pipes to be puffed out like smoke, "I was so very tired."

  The houselights came up, revealing the rest of her party, stumbling in blistered pain around the wood of the dance floor. They were crying, or raging, or gasping, each according to their nightmare.

  Alan dropped to his knees, remembering Sophie on his back at the last minute and shooting out a hand to support himself so he didn't topple over any further. Maggie was clutching at herself as if insects had been crawling over her. Jonah reached for his eyepatches and sighed with relief to feel them still in place. Ryan sat still in the middle of the floor, head down to try and hide the tears in his eyes. Hawkins cradled his throbbing arm. Barnabas rubbed at his ankles, took one look at Penelope and gave a brief smile. "Good job girlie."

  They took a moment to gather themselves, tightened their packs and their hearts and left that insane ballroom to the music that roared inside its own head.

 
 

Whatever Martin might have imagined would be on the other side of the door it wasn't this. He stepped passed the planks and screws the door had shed and left his lonely house behind him. He recalled the noises that had baited him during the night – when he had lain in the darkness resolutely refusing to believe in the door he had just stepped through. He had heard machinery, old music, whispering, the muffled sound of a woman talking… He had conjured abattoir images: split meat, thrusting blades… all the horrors he could conceive of. That must have been fear and his own neuroses talking because it was nothing like that beyond the door. It was an old-fashioned penny arcade. Colourful wooden cabinets bleeped and flashed to the percussion of flying ball bearings. A pneumatic clown jerked and spun behind glass, fixed plaster maw offering a tinny cackle at his own private joke. Thick, red drapes kept the machines warm and hid soft, orange lights somewhere in their folds. One of the machines,
The 64,000 Volt Challenge
, dared him to move a silver hoop over the bends and spirals of a metal bar.
Winner takes all!!!
It insisted, offering a warning buzz of electricity, blue sparks bristling from the bar, as a clue as to what the loser could expect.

  He moved to the next machine, an upright pinball that sent its own ball bearings around a large metal spiral waiting for someone to take its mind off the boredom. Next to that
Doctor Heinrich Von Schutt's Medicinal Marvel
wanted to guess his weight and offer
Sagely Sanitory Advice
. Martin had no wish to experience the
Diagnostic marvel of the century!
so he moved on. He passed them all. No desire to prove himself on
Max's Magnatronic Mallet
, play a hand or two on
Hank Henry's Riverboat Saloon
or watch the race at
Grand Falls Steeplechase
.

  "I know what you want," a woman said causing Martin to cry out in panic. He spun around to face
Madame Arcana, the Mystic Beauty of the East
. She stood in her glass cubicle, one shapely wooden leg crooked up to show off the shine on her cream-coffee thigh. She was swathed in layers of colourful silk. Her glass eyes sparkled from beneath a headdress of golden coins. "I know what you want," she said again, her walnut and brass voice box offering a tone richer and more compelling than Martin would ever have thought possible. He walked over to her, stroking his fingers on the cool glass of her cabinet as a motor within her hips began to jig.

  "Beautiful," he whispered, a dreamy wave falling over him as he watched her dance. He shoved his hand into his pocket for a coin as he pressed his nose against the glass. He found some change but was barely able to tear his eyes away from hers to see what he had. Surely it wouldn't work anyway? Wouldn't it be built to take old pennies? He checked the slot and figured a two pence piece might just do the trick, slotting it in and hoping for the best.

  
Madame Arcana
took his donation gratefully. She shimmied on her pistons offering a partial glimpse of her beautifully planed pine breasts as the silks swayed from side to side.