Fantastic Metropolis

A neighbour pounds on the wall. Darktree howls a double wrath. “To the devil!” There is someone at the door, trying to open it. A chorus of shouts, imprecations and accusations.

Darktree promenades up and down the room, discharging his flintlock into the ceiling. Plaster dust billows. Hannah jumps onto the bed and it collapses; her whinny is echoed by a ricochet.

A deep voice in the corridor announces itself as a constable. “Give yourself up, sir. Anarchism is a discredited political philosophy. We’ll discuss Kropotkin at the station, if you like.”

Hannah responds with another mighty fart. Bodies fall away from the door. “Poison gas! He’s spying for the Kaiser!”

It is time to leave. Darktree opens the window and attempts to push Hannah through. She kicks him in the face, leaving the imprint of a hoof on his forehead. Then she plummets into a mound of refuse. Darktree runs and jumps after, heavy chest clasped to his breast. Putrid lettuces break his fall. Above, the room is full of faces swathed in handkerchiefs, one uniformed figure blowing silently on a whistle.

Horse and man slip away into shadows thick with the scents of eels and children. They avoid the hue and cry easily enough; Darktree has no patience with hues, he prefers outright colours.

On the outskirts of the resort, he encounters the baker. The wight has been waiting for him on the main road. He wields an icing implement, a bellows full of poison with a sharpened steel tip. As if assassinating a profiterole, he plunges the valve into Darktree’s arm and squeezes the bag. Toxic cream enters a folklorish artery.

Darktree murders the baker with these words: “You cannot harm me. I am neither man nor myth but a mix of the two.”

Leaving Clacton-on-Sea, he finds difficulty playing his flute. The broken tooth incites his whole mouth to rebellion. Near St Osyth Priory, his treasure chest develops a puncture. Darjeeling dribbles from one of the tinker’s wheels. Darktree plugs the gap with muffin mixture; it sets firmer than solder. Onwards they trundle.

Relieving Hannah, he pulls the cart toward the west. Lucy lives in Epsom; this is his destination. He will lay the treasure at her feet and hope it will entice her from her husband. It was her wedding which first gave him the idea of boarding a ship for Africa. Perhaps the cad is dead now; it has been three decades. What will Lucy be like, after this time? Will she still have twenty-three freckles on her nose?

His love for Lucy is an eldritch passion; for one thing, she knows nothing of it. He has never confessed to her. He saw her from afar, with the aid of a telescope, while he was searching for the star Bellatrix in Orion. So low to the horizon was it that he chanced upon one of her eyes instead, as she walked the crest of a hill. He studied her iris for long minutes before realising his mistake. Her stellar beauty is made of many twinkling virtues; she forms a zodiacal sign which controls his destiny. A formative ambition of his was to discover a new constellation and name it after her—but he would be jealous of flirting comets. The real Lucy has no truck with nebulae; she is practical.

When he reaches Epsom, he lingers beneath her casement, too nervous to call up to her. He is still there the following morning, varnished in dew, when she comes out on her way to church.

After a lifetime of dreaming, Darktree finally has a chance to talk to her. He doffs his hat, bows low, one hand on his gunpowder flask, and loads elegant words into his throat.

“Madam, if I may make so bold…”

His missing tooth glares like a tombstone. Lucy recoils in horror, dainty fingers raised to her lips.

Darktree turns and walks away, his body feeling uncommonly awkward in the early light. It occurs to him that he was too confused to look at her properly; he still does not know if she has changed. But he will not glance back even now. He is too ashamed of his existence, of the fact he tried to intercept the path of her life.

Counting his loot—hardly enough for her anyway!—he plans a trip to an expert dentist. He has heard that the best can cure sore gums with drills. He must journey to Harley Street, London.

He has always been an impatient traveller, sound pearlies or no, so his latest trip to the capital seems to take the lifetime of a weasel. A cumulus cloud gathers round him as he spurs Hannah. The chest jumps like an obscenity in the vocabulary of a nun. Darktree’s geography is none of the best. Somehow he ends up on the Isle of Dogs, in Harbinger Road, a surgery run by a disreputable butcher who calls himself Porlock Sniggervalue.

In the reclining chair, he confesses his troubles. The dentist is a psychoanalyst as well as a puller of teeth. “Women, eh? Not good for the enamel of the soul. Always causing cavities.”

“Her name is Lucy Reeves,” proclaims Darktree. “The redolence of my tongue will never impress her; I am forsaken.”

Porlock dips his pliers in vinegar and levers open Darktree’s jaw. He taps each molar and listens to the note. Darktree’s teeth are poorly tuned, his plaque is set in a minor key. Porlock scrapes away the scale and resolves the chords of his breath.

He fits his patient with a hollow tooth, containing attar of roses. “When you are near her, bite the case and release the perfume. Woman are easily aroused by flowery odours.”

For this service, he charges Darktree half his tin hoard.

Darktree conquers the swelling in Greenwich, in a dark tavern, with a glass or nine of heavy porter. What ought he do next? He has lost Lucy again; he is useless at baking muffins. Attar of roses will not help him in either operation. There is the road, of course; but highwayman is too lonely a profession at his age. Besides, trains have ruined the work; it is impossible to suck sustenance from the few remaining carriages. He is no longer tempted by piracy. What is left?

Banditry seems a viable alternative. Bandits have the allure of the highwayman and the sociability of the pirate; but there are less perils. No pursuing sheriffs or seasickness. Bandits run democracies of a primal kind, they cook beans and strum guitars.

There is a shortage of bandits in America—makers of sombreros and playing cards are advertising for candidates along the Mexican border. A romantic concept, but America is too far; Darktree refuses to risk three thousand miles of seagulls. They detest him and are forming a conspiracy to soil his reputation. This is not paranoia.

He has heard about a country in Europe which also has a frontier, a land of tall grasses and mirages. This place is called Hungary; Darktree assumes it is the stomach of the continent. It sounds suitable. He vows to so fill Hungary with his presence that it will not ask for seconds. A man who is all courses; such is Darktree.

He gives the remainder of his fortune to a German, who requires the tin to make toy-drums. His name is Herr Günter. In return, he arranges a passage for Darktree across the Channel with his nautical brother. It is an ugly ferry, full of musicians. Darktree shares a cabin with a strange fellow, one-legged and with close-set eyes, who spends his time seducing a cello. Commuters, like readers, are odd, present company not excepted. The cello is possibly male— disgusting!

To cheer himself, Darktree attempts to make more muffins, assisted by Hannah, who kneads the dough with her hooves. There is no flour; they must use gunpowder. He bakes them carefully in the furnace of the ship’s engine room. They are inedible, but they make superb grenades. Rolling a cigarette paper with saltpetre, inserting it like a fuse into a charged cake, Darktree terrifies the passengers.

He blows up the lounge when the pianist refuses to play requests. A shower of ivory keys and fingers rattles on the boards. Darktree pockets both; when he finds a real dentist, he will ask that the keys be turned into novelty teeth, connected to hidden strings. The fingers are for his nose. He knots his coat into a sack for his revolutionary muffins. Never comfortable when he bulges, he simmers.

The ferry nears the Gallic coast and Darktree avoids the tedium of Customs by spurring Hannah over the side and into the oily green waters. The beach they approach is similar to the Essex shore; the same flotsam and jetsam they encountered before entering the bear’s cave—perhaps it is washed from one side of the Channel to the other, endlessly, like the flattery of a sycophant who moves in two social circles at once. Hannah hauls herself onto land and rests near a rotting boat. Oars jut from its husk like the spines of a failed porcupine.

Darktree studies the oars while they dry. Their gnashed length can be converted into a pair of stilts for a dwarf. All he needs to free the stilts is an axe. He has no such tool, but he notices one trapped in the underside of a clam. Yet to release the axe, he requires a file; the one file available seems to be locked in the body of a lugworm. He will have to hammer the file free, but the only hammer in the vicinity is residing in the curve of an abandoned bottle.

To rescue the hammer from the bottle, of course, he requires a very short glassblower, someone delicate enough to rearrange the molecules of oxidised silicon. There is a crab ready to be promoted to this position, but it demands a pair of dwarfish stilts…

A grim thought strikes Darktree. What if this process had continued indefinitely, until he fatigued every item in the universe? What if this sequence had also formed a closed loop? Each element of the cosmos would be waiting improvement, but the operation would be impossible to affect. A metaphysical stalemate too glum to contemplate.