The Chimaera Institute
Seven Tales by Sheena
Blackhall
The
Chimaera Institute
Seven Tales by Sheena Blackhall
Cover: A
copy of The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli
Copyright: S. Blackhall 2011
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Sheena Blackhall except for the use of brief quotations in a book review
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Cover: The Nightmare: Henry Fuseli
Henry Fuseli (German:
Johann Heinrich Füssli) (February 7, 1741 – April 17, 1825) was a
British painter, draughtsman, and writer on art, of Swiss origin. His
painting The Nightmare contains significant elements of sleep
paralysis and has become almost an icon for the phenomenon. The
presence of the horse brings into play the word "mare" from
nightmare. The suffix "mare" is actually thought to be
derived from "maren" - to crush. The nightmare is the night
crusher, which suggests that the word nightmare might have been
originally coined to describe sleep paralysis with dream
hallucinations. Tate Britain held an exhibition titled Gothic
Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination between
February 15 and May 1, 2006, with Fuseli's Nightmare as the central
exhibit.
Foreword
Anecdotes,
rumour, gossip...urban myths can straddle all those categories. Often
they are short, like fables and can be told quickly in a paragraph or
two. The tales in this book draw from various sources. The Book of
Nasty Legends by Paul Smith (Fontana Paperbacks 1984: ISBN
0-00-636856-5) is one source. Another is the late Stanley Robertson,
who liked to tell a version of ‘The Bridge’ in the form of a
joke. (Of course it has much darker possibilities.) Ghost tales
collected from the Aberdeen area mention a servant sacked for the
loss of a fiver, wrongly accused of theft who subsequently committed
suicide, and this is woven into ‘The Keeper of the Kennels’. I
like to think of urban myths as little acorns desperate to grow into
oaks, and love providing them with knots, gnarls and leaves.
Acknowledgements
For more information on other publications by Sheena Blackhall, visit http://sheenablackhall.blogspot.com or the on-line catalogue of the National Library of Scotland http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/online/index/html
Sheena Blackhall, 2011
The Secret Crime of a London Diplomat
The
Chimaera Institute
Caleb Anstruther could
hardly believe his luck. For half his student life he’d dreamt of
it, now it was hope made fact. He’d finally been selected to work
at the Chimaera Institute in Vienna, Austria. Even better, as he
spoke not one word of German, the Institute by nature of its research
was self contained, a small scientific community where the staff
lived in and had few, if any, interactions with the host culture. His
time there would make or mar his whole future career.
A middle class young man from a small Scottish town, he had passed the usual psychometric testing, proving his ability to work in a team and as an individual thinker. His references showed he could adapt to challenging situations. He had no close family ties to distract his attention from the work. His CV was impressive, first class honours in DNA and Consequential Technology from Edinburgh University and a PhD in the historical implications of the Frozen Ark project in Nottingham University at the beginning of the 21st century. A 21st century Noah in the making, the Chimaera Institute had high hopes of their latest protégé.
The Frozen Ark project began at a period when rare animal species were dying out at an alarming rate. Cryogenically freezing their DNA samples and sex cells was seen as a way of conserving extinct species for possible future cloning should they be required for medical testing. In the period of time since the setting up of the Ark to the establishment of the internationally prestigious Chimaera Institute, 4 million species of mammals, birds, amphibians and fish had become instinct, existing only in the frozen vaults of government-funded scientific vaults around the world...a huge necropolis which could be resurrected at a moment’s notice.
Caleb was well versed in the collection protocols of harvesting biopsy/ tissue, putting samples into storage in bar-coded tubes, preserved in ethanol. Some were freeze dried in cryogenic tubes stored in liquid nitrogen. As a scientist, his skills were phenomenal. As a man, his own social development had barely progressed past overgrown teenager. He had pustules of acne, jug ears, and an almost child-like interest in the weirder areas of mediaeval science, specifically, that of alchemy. In particular he was fascinated by the work of Paracelsus, who claimed to have created a homunculus. This creation was purported to be 12 inches tall, vicious, and could be formed by laying a bag of skin, hair, sperm and bones in horse dung for 40 days.
There were other systems for forming this creature, one of which entailed the use of the mandrake. This plant was rumoured to develop where semen ejaculated by a hanged man immediately prior to death dropped to the ground. Its roots resembled a human form. Before dawn on a Friday morning it was to be dug up by a black dog, thereafter washed and watered with milk and honey or blood. From this would emerge the homunculus. In the 18th century, Dr Christianus of the University of Giessen in Germany reported on a third way of creating a homunculus. In this method, an egg laid by a black hen was collected. A hole was drilled in the shell, albumen mixed with human sperm, the hole plugged with parchment and buried in dung. The first day of March on the lunar cycle was the propitious date for the burial. Thirty days later, the homunculus would hatch out, to be fed on lavender seeds and worms.
It was doubly pleasing to Caleb that he had come to a Germanic country to further the Chimaera experiments. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, one of his favourite books, the sorcerer’s former student, Wagner, had made a homunculus, who talked at length with Mephistopheles. In Caleb’s mind, business and pleasure could co-exist behind distinct boundaries. But boundaries can blur, from things as insignificant as a cancelled conference. In the summer of 2040, Caleb had been due to present a paper in Iceland, when the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which had been dormant since the early years of the century, suddenly erupted bringing European flights to a standstill.
His colleagues at the Institute had by now all formed networks of friendships, but these did not include Caleb, who was held in a kind of awe because of his achievements. With little to do and a whole weekend to do it, the work-pleasure boundary blurred. A week earlier, a consignment of phials had arrived by special courier, of frozen leopard gecko DNA, that reptile being the latest casualty of the unstable climatic changes the world was subject to.
The documentation included a picture of the leopard gecko; slit-eyed, alert, with the spotty patterned distinctive leopard markings. It was a nocturnal creature, capable in surviving in temperatures of under 10degrees Celsius, used to living underground. A hunter that thrived on live prey. It had highly developed senses of smell and sight, and could stalk like a leopard. About 3 inches long, the gecko could shed its skin, which would then fade to an opaque whitish-grey. Fast, agile, they could scale sheer rocks. They enjoyed baby mice, crickets and worms in their diet. If cornered, they would hiss as a warning. Caleb was about to store the phials when he remembered his visit a year before to the University of Giessen. It had been established in 1607 as a Lutheran university, and was one of the few German centers of learning he had visited during his time at the Chimaera Institute. It had stirred up his early studies in alchemy, the use of the egg as recipient for a little homunculus. Baby leopard geckos used their egg tooth to cut their way out of the shell. But what if human DNA, specifically that of Caleb Anstruther, was combined with that of a leopard gecko? And who would know if he conducted an experiment, using the accelerated development techniques at his disposal? Within 6 hours he could see the hybrid creature with his own eyes...
It was totally unethical, it was monstrous, but it WAS possible. Working alone and with total concentration, Caleb gathered his own DNA and using the sophisticated scientific aids the Chimaera Institute housed, combined with the learning of the ancients, he placed the leopard gecko’s egg, primed with human and reptilian DNA into the hatchery.
For the next six hours he tried to work on a research paper, his eye always straying to the clock. Shortly before midnight, he entered the hatchery wearing protective clothing to keep the experiment sterile. The tiny egg was beginning to crack and split asunder. Struggling out from the shards and mucous of the shell emerged the homunculus, with the skin, eyes and tongue of the leopard gecko, but in all other respects, apart from the bulbous finger and toe tips, it appeared to be human. Gently, its creator carried it across to the sink, where he had prepared a dish of warm water to wash away the birth fluids.
Just then, Björk Geirsdottir, a young Icelandic technician, came into the laboratory. Caleb had thought he was entirely alone in the Institute...shock and guilt made him jump. The dish containing the tiny homunculus slipped from his grasp and slithered onto the floor, the little half-man-thing disappearing down a floor drain which led indirectly down to the sewers.
‘I thought I was the only one working here this weekend,’ the girl said in her halting English. ‘I’m glad you are here Caleb, it’s eerie when the Institute is empty. I hope I haven’t interrupted something important.’
He picked up the dish and shrugged. ‘Just sluicing away the remains of an experiment. It was never going to see fruition anyway.’
Not only did she seem genuinely pleased to see him, Caleb realized they had much in common. Neither had many friends or interests outside their work.
They had an uneventful courtship, no petty jealousies or angst to muddy the stagnant waters. Within a few short months they were married, a perfect match, apart from the fact that they were childless. Tests proved that Björk had a hormonal imbalance, a condition which was common amongst many of her female peers of the time. Whether diet or environment related, it caused permanent barrenness.
They’d been married ten years when the Labbites gained a hold in Austria. This violent anti-science group began in the city of Wittenberg, a German town on the River Elbe, one time home to Martin Luther himself. The Labbites were led by George Clare, an Englishman who named the group after the 19th century Luddites, a group of British workers who destroyed the looms which were radically altering their lives. Clare, and many others, blamed the scientific communities of the world for the plagues caused by genetically modified crops.
Hysteria spread like wildfire throughout Europe, crowds of Labbites stormed major research centers, burning the equipment and killing any scientists they found on the premises. Before long, they were controlling the minds of the Austrian public by storming the media, exhorting them to march on the Chimaera Institute amongst other centers.
They arrived at the gates of the Institute so unexpectedly; most of the workers had no time to flee and were cornered and killed like vermin. Amongst the first to fall was Björk, shot on her way to the gene vaults. Caleb was more resourceful. Slipping out through a back entrance, he lifted a manhole cover and dropped down into the Viennese sewers.
Once underground, he was completely lost. Initially, the sewer was the size of a small tunnel through which he was forced to crawl on his hands and knees. Putrefying filth lay in stinking puddles, which opened out into an underground cavernous world of khaki-colored rivers running beneath the streets. The stench was overwhelming, causing him to retch until he grew accustomed to it. He felt in his pocket for his communicator, flick-clicked a map of the sewers and hit the light projector. The communicator emitted a thin, reedy beam through the pitch blackness. The light fell on something moving along the tunnel towards him on the dank dark ceiling. It was moving swiftly, like a cat, but with tremendous speed. It was a fully grown homunculus, about six feet in length, with the skin, eyes and tongue of a leopard gecko, human apart from the bulbous finger and toe tips which gave it easy purchase on the slimy walls of the sewer.
Just as it opened its jaws to snap his neck, Carl Anstruther looked with horror into the yellow slit eyes of his son.
The
Ratter
Andrew Murray was a ratter, a rat
exterminator by trade, who was so successful and ruthless that he was
more generally known as the Terminator. He claimed on his mother’s
side to be descended from Jack Black, Queen Victoria’s official rat
catcher. A picture of this imposing individual sat on his
mantelpiece, a dashing figure dressed in a scarlet topcoat, waistcoat
and breeches. Around his waist the Victorian vermin death-dealer wore
a massive leather belt, inset with cast-iron rats. This ancestor
(real or imagined connection) also bred rats and sold one in a
squirrel cage to Beatrix Potter which she christened Samuel Whiskers.
Even Queen Victoria kept a pet rat or two in a gilded cage, provided
by her official ratter.
Like Jack Black his hero, Andrew Murray also provided rats for illicit rat-baiting shows, where local yobs would bet on the length of time it would take their prize pit bull to demolish an entire pack of the creatures. In many ways Andrew Murray resembled a rat. He constantly gnawed at an empty ivory cigarette holder. He had given up his twenty a day habit in his youth, but still felt the need for something to do with his mouth, which was bloodless and almost lipless, below a straggly moustache. His ears lay close to his head, and his hair was dark but graying. Like the rats he trapped, he was fastidious in his habits, impeccably clean, very neat, and going about his daily business he darted rather than moved. Everything he did was shrewd, fast, and alert. But here, his similarity to the rat species ended, for rats are sociable animals and the Terminator was solitary.
He lived in a run down street in a drug-infested area, all that he could afford from the money his trade brought him. For the most part he was inured to it...the noisy neighbours, the arguments, the druggies and the drunks strutting their stuff with their hideous barking dogs. He turned a blind eye to the litter and graffiti, the vandalism, the fly tipping, even the burned out cars. What he feared and hated most were the teenage gangs who hung around the street corners day and night in hooded, menacing packs. He had tried reporting them to the local police, who moved them on. But he had abuse daubed on his door in reprisal. Things had escalated. He had been spat on and jostled by Brandon the local gang lord and his cohorts and when he had threatened to report them was warned that they knew his address and would visit. After that he lived like a man under siege, never daring to leave the building after dark.
Soon, the gang found a new target to terrorize, a family of immigrants who had moved in next door to the Terminator; a quiet family who like himself, kept themselves to themselves. Polish immigrants Aleksander Welzman and his wife Irena. They had two children, Graznya, their 8 year old daughter, and Henryk, their son, aged 13. Most of the gang-kids in the area were from mothers who the ratter considered would have been better off giving birth to turnips, which at least would have been useful. Graznya & Henryk were different. They were well mannered, clean, and studious. Henryk, as the elder child, looked after his little sister after school, until their parents returned from work. They were outsiders, like the Terminator. Their father had a master’s degree and spoke four languages, yet earned more as a casual bricklayer than as a teacher and translator in his native Poland. Their mother, a pharmacist to trade, worked as a cleaner in one of the office blocks on the other side of town.
The decision to uproot and move to a new country was hard but there was no future in their home town of Gdansk. The tenement that both the ratter and the Poles occupied was crammed to capacity: lets and sublets galore. The Poles and the Terminator occupied the top landing of the four storied building. It stank of urine, stale drink, and sweat. Aleksander Welzman and his wife Irena shared their three roomed flat with their children and five random people paying £45 a week each.
“I am a not a nasty man but the people we live with, if I met them on the street I wouldn’t talk to them for even a minute,” Mr. Weltzman confided to the Terminator one day. “I am sorry for noise last night. People downstairs had a party with lots of drink and broke down our door. We think they thought a ...how you say?.... prostitute stayed here. Police came, but no arrests.’
The Vipers, the name the local gang went under, discovered to their glee that they now had two targets to intimidate...the ratter and his new neighbours. The abuse escalated, excreta posted through the letterbox, racist slurs on the door, the children hounded mercilessly to and from school, their small amount of dinner money extorted from them. The Weitzman’s bore it all stoically. “We save hard. One day we leave this place, buy a shop back home. No more gangs. No more muggers, druggies, no more filth. No more hassle.”
The ratter, though, had no such hope on the horizon. On the pittance he learned, always terrified the benefits officers would sniff out his little business, he daren’t even think what his future held. More of the same. Until, one night, he thought of the solution. Weil's disease. Why, it was obvious. He wished he had thought of it earlier. Weil's disease... the infection carried in rat’s urine. It was perfect, perfect.
The Weltzmans would not have felt so easy staying across the landing from the Terminator if they had known that he took his work home with him. In his living room he kept cages: wild rats to sell on for rat baiting contests with dogs to the more moronic youths of the neighbourhood, but also a pet-run which contained his three favourite rats, Goliath, Samson and Saul. In the evenings he would pet and feed them, allow them out to exercise in the room, being careful, of course, always to return them afterwards to their cages…for he never underestimated the intelligence of his three pets, nor their natural desire for freedom.
He would stalk the Vipers as he stalked the rats he was paid to kill…learn their haunts and habits and finish them. For he thought of them now as vermin, not human. And it was fitting, somehow, that vermin would be their downfall. He would track Brandon their leader till he found where they kept their stash of booze. And then, he would add a little something of his own to their nightly mix of Vodka and fizz. Rat pee, collected from the sewer rats he trapped for the rat baiters.
It was easier than he thought. Brandon was always visible in the community, the hard man, the leader of the pack, the gang lord. The last thing in the mind of a swaggering bully was that one of his victims might scrape up the gall to stand up to him. Except that standing up to Brandon wasn’t in the ratter’s plan of action. It was enough to follow him with his carrier bags full of vodka and irn bru to his sordid little den behind the allotments. And later, much much later, shortly before the dawn, to creep back with a jar full of a colourless liquid, to add a little something to the stash.
The ratter knew that the symptoms would start from 3 to 19 days after the victims drank from the contaminated liquid. Early symptoms are similar to flu, and it was the season for flu. The Terminator waited on tenterhooks for three weeks, but Brandon and his gang of no-hopers looked healthier than ever. However, the ratter hadn’t seen Aleksander Welzman and his wife Irena for a few days, nor their two children, Graznya & Henryk. He assumed they had gone back to Poland on holiday, perhaps for good. Some folk had all the luck. He wished he was young enough to up sticks and start again.
Three weeks later, he met the couple in the run down café at the end of the street. Irena was leaning heavily on her husband’s arm. She seemed to have aged ten years. They had two huge cases beside them, but no children. They were waiting for a taxi to take them to the airport. Aleksander looked totally drained.
The ratter joined them at the table, asking after the children. Graznya in particular he was fond of, a beautiful girl, with pale blond hair and wide blue eyes. The mention of her name snapped Alexsander out of his lethargy. He was both angry and bewildered. The sad little story was quickly told. They had left Henryk as usual in charge of his sister while they finished their work shift, but the boy had become bored, and took Graznya out exploring. They had wandered off to explore the allotments, and stumbled upon Brandon’s gang hut. Luckily for them, none of the Vipers were about. Graznya was fond of irn bru, and both children had drunk from the contaminated bottle. When Alexsander, mad with worry, found them, he saw the vodka bottles and smashed them, telling the children they must never, never wander off like that again. The irn bru was finished, they had been thirsty.
Some days afterwards the children fell ill with flu: fever, muscular aches and pains, lost of appetite, and nausea. Their condition grew worse… sore eyes, nose bleeds, jaundice. The Welzmans were in Britain illegally, had not sorted out the paperwork required to work in the country, happy to be paid cash in hand. They had been frightened to go to the hospital, tried to nurse the children themselves. By the time Graznya & Henryk were finally taken to hospital, they were suffering from renal failure and died very quickly, like summer flowers after a frost.
‘We are good Catholic people,’ moaned Irena, ‘but I call down a curse on whatever caused this to take our children from us. May the devil swallow it sideways, foul thing that it is.’
‘Ignore her Mr. Murray,’ said her husband. ‘She’s beyond herself with grief. No parent should live to bury their own children.’
The ratter muttered his condolences, and slunk from the café off back to his home. He was sorry, genuinely sorry, that the Welzman’s children had died. But at least he knew that his weapon of choice was effective. His hatred of Brandon and his Vipers was deep and consuming. Their time on earth was limited. He would just need to confirm that they hadn’t changed their meeting place.
Once back in his living room, he opened the cages of Goliath, Samson and Saul, and stood up on a stool to reach the top shelf of a heavy wall unit, where the rat food sat in its tin. With the Weltzmans gone, the remaining subtenants in the flat across the landing had their music on full blast, the party spilling out onto the landing. Losing his temper, the ratter hammered on the wall, losing his footing as he did so. He grabbed wildly at the unit to save himself, but only succeeded in pulling it down on top of him. As he hit the floor, he was aware that his left eye had suddenly drooped. He was completely numb down the whole length of his body on the left side. His right side, however, which still had normal movement, was trapped by the heavy unit. He tried to cry out, but the words were slurred and muffled as if he was drunk.
Goliath, Samson and Saul were hungry. This was their feed time. Timidly at first, they edged nearer their master, sniffing around his face, with its paralyzed left eye. Bolder, Goliath approached, his whiskers twitching. Tonight something new and exciting was on the menu.
The
Keeper of the Kennels
Jeremiah Blunt was
the servant in charge of the kennels at Brindlemere Manor. He was a
powerful brute of a man, aged around forty, with a square face, a
large nose with wide nostrils and a jutting jaw. His ears were high
set and his hair was short cropped and greying. His teeth were sharp
and yellow. Everywhere he went on his master, Lord Brindlemere’s
estate, his mastiff, Samson followed him, close as a shadow. Samson
came from an ancient breed, his ancestors were shipped to Rome by the
legions to fight in the gladiatorial rings of the Caesars. Man and
dog were inseparable; both were fierce with a steely edge of cruelty
in their nature.
Lord Brindlemere’s family had followed the hounds from the early 1770s. The nobleman took his hunting seriously, and expected his hounds to be as obedient as his staff. The kennels had a communal lodge and an exercise yard, with separate lodge for bitches in season and whelping bitches. Across the courtyard of the Manor were seven stables, the best being kept for the exclusive use of Lord Brindlemere’s own steed, Dancer. Dancer was a stunning dark bay gelding, 17 hands high, 7 years old, with a fiery temperament, light and fast for such a strong animal.
It was December, and the fox hunting season was underway. The night before a hunt, the earths in the estate were blocked with stakes, to render the foxes homeless. Both Jeremiah Blunt and his master Lord Brindlemere agreed that the baying of the pack at full pelt was like music to their years. If Jeremiah blew his horn to declare that the fox had gone to ground, the dogs came into play, to chase the creature out or kill it where it lay. If they caught it above ground it was torn asunder, and Blunt would rise in his stirrups and cry ‘Whoo-oop!’, before dragging the fox like a red rag into the air to cut off the mask, the brush and the pads, tossing them to favoured hunters as a momento. The rest was flung to the hounds. After a hunt, the gentlemen would be invited up to the manor for a feast and a hunt ball. Seth Blunt, Jeremiah’s brother would be well supplied with ale to lead them in the hunt song:
It were
early one morning when I rose from me bed
I've heard hark, hark
away me boys so clearly
And so I drew me a little nearer, for to
see who was there
That were going out fox hunting so early
There
were nine gentlemen and the Duke of Buckingham
And they each of
them set out upon the trial
To see the hounds run in the north,
where they have great fame and worth
And the most of them set out
with no denial
It were
at Swarthfell Rocks, where we laid on our hounds
Not thinking a
fox there being likely
Now an huntsman long I've been but the
likes I've never seen
We unkenneled bold Reynard so early
Henry
Wilkinson cried "Hark, hark away me boys"
Joe Clark, our
foot-sportsman, soon heard him
Richard Mounds he cried "Odd
zounds, you mun' couple up your hounds
For this day you never will
come near him"
They
come through our town moor, being late in the hour
It were
sometimes one hound and sometimes t‘other
It were hard to be
expressed which of them ran him the best
For they each ran abreast
close together
There
were Tippler and Towler and Fair Maid and Drolider
There were
Countess and Blossom and Fury
And there were several other hounds
ran close within his bounds
But these were the hounds that ran
near him
They
come through Hallen Hag, their course being strong
I'm sure there
was little ease in it
But our hounds they ran him well and they
turned him in again
And he took Sharrow Woods for his cover
Then
Reynard being weary and seeking for shelter
His way was to take
the straight over
But our hounds they ran amain and they laid him
in again
And there they destroyed him for ever
Oh
Lilter followed him, and never more was seen
Which caused our
great sportsmen to murmur
That a finer little hound never ran
above the ground
He was the bonniest little hound in the number
So now
to conclude, and to finish me song
This gallant fox hunt it is all
over
It's the forty-second fox that's been slain on Swarthfell
Rocks
So that puts an end to me story
The Hunt ball at Brindlemere Manor was always the highlight of the social calendar in the district: because of the added demands on the kitchen staff, an extra scullery maid was hired from the nearest workhouse. If the girl proved willing to work and honest, she might be kept on. Jill Mawkin was one such girl, a timid, tawny haired slip of a thing, pale faced, long legged and plain, apart from her large soft eyes, a cinnamon brown. She had a submissive way that tended to bring out the worst in men, rather than arousing their gentler nature. As a female pauper she was used to discipline and rules, coming from an instititution where poor rations and hard work was the norm. She arrived at the Manor in a shapeless dress reaching her ankles, an under shift and long woolen stockings, with a poke bonnet on her head and hobnailed boots on her feet. The only singular thing about her was a rabbit’s foot for luck, tied on a string around her neck which she refused to yield up with dogged stubbornness.
Her duties were simple and arduous. She rose at 5am to stoke the kitchen range and boil water for the servants’ tea. After this, she emptied the female servants’ chamber pots and rinsed them with a vinegar rag. Cleaning floors, stores, dishes, serving servants’ breakfasts, scrubbing pots, preparing vegetables, lugging buckets of coal was ongoing all day until 9.30pm, when she finally flopped into her bed in the attic. The other servants thought her queer and old fashioned, but harmless.
On the eve of the Hunt Ball, Lord Brindlemere decided to keep Jill Mawkin on the staff. The workhouse had inured her to long hours of hard labour and in the days she had been at the Manor, he had heard nothing but good reports of her. Because she was plain, she would have no ‘followers’. Because she came from the workhouse she could carry no tittle-tattle of the Manor home to a local family. As for the girl herself, she would just be exchanging one life of drudgery for another; only a miracle could pluck her from her circumstances.
On the night of the ball, that miracle happened. While the glittering assembly in the hall were dancing to fiddle and pipe, the scullery maid was trudging up and down the back stairs, to stoke the fires in the guest bedrooms. It was hot work on a cold night. Even after midnight her work still wasn’t complete. She was sent out with a torch in the frost to check that the main gates were locked, as thieves were rumoured to be in the neighbourhood. On the way down the path, she passed a group of the male guests, very drunk, mock wrestling amongst the snow.
Frightened, she slipped into the trees and off the road, cutting back when they were out of sight to complete her task. On her way back to the Manor, the men had dispersed. Lying on the snow, glinting in the moonlight, were three golden guineas, more than a term’s wages. ‘Like an angel had dropped them,’ she thought, as she bent to pick them up and hide them in her pocket. The guests would never miss the money; it was no fault of hers if they got themselves blind drunk and couldn’t take care of their property. Beasts, and worse than beasts, some of them. She hated the hounds, the stink of them, and the noise of them. She’d been horrified to see a young groom just after the hunt being blooded by the Keeper of the Kennels. He had lifted the bloody pelt of the fox from his saddle and rubbed the boy’s face in it, as a rite of passage. Quickly, she hurried up into the Manor and crept upstairs to her bed, sleeping in her clothes for fear she would not wake in time for 5am when her work began again. She placed the guineas under her pillow, and fell asleep immediately.
The week after the Hunt Ball, when all the guests had left and no mention made of the lost guineas, Jeremiah Blunt was counting the fees that the hunters had given him towards the cost of their days’ sport. It was three guineas short. He counted again, four times. Each time, the money was three guineas short. He was too cunning to come straight out and ask the staff if anyone could account for the money. That would be like standing in front of a fox’s earth and warning it the hounds would be a-visiting. Instead, while they were called to Sunday prayers (a short affair, but Lord Brindlemere insisted on attendance) Jeremiah slipped first into the attic room of the scullery maid. The pillowcase was the obvious choice to hide something in such a bare and shoddy room. The girl had not even had the sense to bury the money in the grounds.
Lord Brindlemere confronted her immediately after prayers. Jill Mawkin hung her head and blushed crimson. She confessed to finding the money in the snow, but was not believed. Her master quoted his favourite writer, William Booth, on the matter of dishonest servants. He found theft quite abhorrent.
‘There are some so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued’… ‘I shall return you to the Workhouse by the next coach, with a letter strongly recommending you never leave it,’ he concluded.
And so she was turned out on the road, as penniless as she came, to await the arrival of the coach a mile from the Manor itself. The shadows thrown by the trees were long and sharp, with a blue tinge. The long, rutted road stretched for miles towards a horizon pressed flat by the weight of snow clouds. Everything was beautiful, white and deadly, so still it seemed the world was holding its breath. The scullery maid’s feet in her hobnailed boots, even though they were stuffed with straw, were so cold she almost cried with the pain…stamping brought no relief at all. And then, out of the silence, came a growling and a whirlwind of paws.
Another hunt had been organized for the next day, and the hounds had been kept hungry to keep them keen. Samson, Jeremiah’s dog, the strongest hound and leader of the pack had escaped. Baying and howling, the starving dog was bearing down on her. The staff in Brindlemere Manor heard the sound, and mistook it for the winter wind getting up, until they heard the unmistakable noise of a human scream. Discovering Samson’s absence, Blunt saddled a horse and rode up in the direction of the road where the girl had been set down. He was too late. Fearing that his beloved dog would be shot (for a dog that has tasted human flesh is never the same around men again), he lifted the lifeless body onto his horse and set off for the deepest pot in the mere, where he broke the surface ice and rolled her into the black muck of the morass. The last thing he saw as she was sucked down was the little lucky rabbit’s paw. Then that, too, disappeared.
On arriving back at the manor he assured everyone that there had been no sign of Jill Mawkin who must have left with the coach as planned. A fortnight later, when shifting an accounts book on the oaken desk in his room beneath a window, something glinted in the wintry sunlight. He had found the lost three guineas. They had toppled from the top of the pile when he had been counting the money from the huntsmen towards the costs of the hunt.
He lost no sleep over the matter, convinced that a workhouse girl could have not come by such a sum honestly, and went so far as to complement himself on saving the parish the cost of a funeral. The life of a pauper was cheap and hard. She would not have had much of a future anyway, he consoled himself. As for the three guineas, he was due that and more the way his master worked him. For some time he watched Samson closely, for a dog which has tasted human flesh often acquires a liking for it, but the hound showed no aberration of behaviour, and Jeremiah Hunt began to relax.
It was Yule, the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, the longest night. Soon it would be the Boxing Day hunt. Jeremiah pulled the cork on the first of several bottles of porter, bought with Jill Mawkin’s guineas, poured it into a tankard, put a poker in the fire to heat then plunged it into the beer to warm it. The cook had given him a huge slab of game pie that night as a tightener and had shared out some of Lord Brindlemere’s brandy, so the kennel master was more than ready for bed when the dark swept over the countryside like a black shroud.
He was too tired and drunk to undress, flopping down on his bed with Samson curled up beneath him. Within minutes he was snoring loudly, a trickle of drool running down his unshaved cheek. Some minutes after midnight, the hound lifted its massive head and growled a long, low eerie growl. The hackles on its neck rose stiffly. And then there was silence. A few minutes afterwards, Jeremiah stirred, half waking. His hand flopped from the bed. He was reassured when it was licked by a familiar tongue, and fell back asleep immediately.
Next morning he awoke with a parched tongue and a dry mouth, and rose with a thick head to check on Lord Brindlemere’s favourite horse, before going to the kennels to attend to the hounds. There was no sign of Samson. Had Blunt been entirely sober he might have wondered how his dog had managed to leave a locked bedroom. When he reached the door of the stable, facing him in large red letters scrawled on the wood was the sentence ‘women can lick hands too’.
By now thoroughly alert, he entered the stall. Lying bloody and cold in the straw was Samson. Lord Brindlemere’s prize horse, Dancer, was slumped on its knees with its neck at a strange angle. The vet, hurriedly summoned, announced that the dog had spooked the horse which had reared and hit its head on a low beam, severing its spinal cord. In its terror, it had trampled the dog to death.
‘Animals can’t walk through walls, Blunt,’ said Lord Brindlemere coldly. ‘I’ve warned you before about drinking. You’re a damned liability man. You’ll pack and leave by noon.’
‘But where shall I go, my Lord?’ cried the distraught man. ‘I swear I locked my door last night, and Samson was under my bed then. He licked my hand, I tell you.’
‘There are workhouses, dammit,’ replied his master. ‘For you’ll get no reference for me. Men like you are a liability in service’
The Keeper of the Kennels set off to pack his few possessions. He was to receive no wages for that term’s work, to go some way towards the cost of replacing Lord Brindlemere’s horse. His hound had been flung on the midden. Before him lay the bitter prospect of a life of abject poverty. He was just leaving the room when he turned back to survey them, those four walls which had been the centre of his small universe. His glance fell on a rabbit’s paw, just beneath the bed.
Six months later Jeremiah Blunt was admitted to the nearest Bedlam, raving that a girl with a ruined face was stalking him. The hunter was finally hunted, with no quick kill to release him from the nightly terrors that drove him over the precipice of insanity.
The
Shoes
I’d been working in Washington
for six months as a live-in nanny before I discovered the Hirshhorn,
right on the National Mall at the corner of 7th Street and
Independence Avenue. Each week I got one day off, never the same day
two weeks running, and on my days off I usually wandered around
window-looking, into stores I couldn’t afford to visit.
‘You should go to the Mall, visit the museums’ Mrs. Calvino told me. ‘A clever Scottish girl like you, you’ll never get the chance again. Washington has the best museums in the world.’
Mrs. Calvino was my employer. I contracted to work for her for my university gap year, looking after her kids and helping her with her English. She spoke good English, but didn’t have many friends in Washington. Her husband was a secretary in the city with the Italian Embassy. I took her advice, and began to visit the museums on either side of the Mall. It was as good a way as any of spending my free time of, and interesting, too.
It was July and boy, the sun was blistering. I bought an ice cream from one of the stands on the Mall.
‘It’s hot enough to fry eggs on the road,’ I said as I handed over my money. ‘Pity there’s no water here.’
‘Oh but there is, Ma-am,’ the ice cream seller replied. ‘Head on down to the Hirshhorn. It’s the building shaped like a giant doughnut. It’s got a sculpture garden outside and a fountain in the courtyard in the middle. Yoko Ono’s got a Wish Tree there. Heaps of folks go to the Hirshhorn.’
I was intrigued. Back home in Scotland I stayed not far from the Samye Ling temple, run by Tibetan Buddhists. My folk had a sheep farm there. There was a Clootie Tree in the grounds of the Buddhist Monastery nearby, the old Celtic tradition, of tying wishes to the tree, scribbled on cloth for the winds to catch. It fitted in there very well, beside the Buddhist prayer flags fluttering in the Scottish breezes.
So I went to see this Japanese Clootie Tree, Yoko Ono style, in Washington. In autumn, the blurb told me, the leaves fell off and the tree became a whispering tree. Then, instead of writing their wishes on paper, visitors were encouraged to hug the tree and whisper their wishes to it. But I was visiting in July. The Hirshhorn had provided pencils and little tags to write your wishes on, to hang on the tree. I didn’t bother. I liked my Scottish Clootie tree better. There, the cloth wishes were knotted to the branches until time rotted them off. Anyway, it was far too hot to stay in the garden; I gravitated towards the entrance to the Museum and found my way to the fountain.
Ah! After a week caring for scrapping, argumentative children 24/7 the sound of that fountain was like liquid heaven. Forget Yoko Ono’s paper tags, the sound of water was peace itself, serene and calming. I licked the last sticky slurp from my ice cream cone and sat back to watch the passersby from all over the world, listening to their Babel of languages. There, in the cool seclusion of that place, people were reading, watching the water, snacking, relaxing. It was as if we’d dropped off the cosmopolitan map, like ants which had strayed off the great treadmill of ant metropolis. The soothing sounds of the water were so soporific I almost fell asleep.
I’d been sitting there for about ten minutes, when an old woman sat down beside me. For some time we both sat together in silence, until she rummaged in her pocket and produced two apples, one of which she offered to me. When she spoke, I was pleased to recognize that she was a Scot like myself. She had flown to Washington for a holiday with her son and his family.
‘Mostly it’s fine,’ she said. ‘But they’ve no time to show me the sights, so I’m showing them to myself.’
I asked her if she’d visited the Holocaust museum. I told her that the shoes from Auschwitz on display there were profoundly moving. The word shoes, threw a switch on inside her memory. Her eyes lit up, and she asked if I’d like to hear a story about shoes.
‘It’s
not a short story,’ she warned.
‘Is it a two coffee story?’
I asked.
She laughed and nodded. I wasn’t going anywhere. I liked stories, especially true ones. I dutifully set off to buy some coffee and returned with two brimming cups. When I came back, because it was so hot, I kicked off my shoes and let the cool air ripple over my toes, and wiggled them as I listened. I’ve set her story down here, just as she told it to me. Make of it what you will.
The
Story at the Hirshhorn
‘My grandmother came from North East
fisher folk, and when I was wee she’d speak of her life as a young
girl. Fishermen’s wives didn’t go to sea, but their lives on
shore were hard. They collected seaweed to dry and eat, driftwood to
burn, shellfish to boil. When their men folk were due to set off on
their boats, the wives’ duty was to carry their husbands out
through the waves on their backs, to ensure they had dry clothes for
the fishing trip. My grandmother was a Collieston fishwife…she
walked to the Ythan estuary, three miles and back, and far, far out
at low tide to gather mussels for fresh bait, not once but many times
in a week.
When the men had caught the fish, it was the job of the women to sell them. They had to trudge around the countryside carrying creels that could weigh a hundredweight, up to 30 miles a day, selling the fish or bartering them in exchange for meal and eggs. My grandmother’s folk were well organized. They even sold cured fish as far inland as Braemar. They clubbed together to hire a carter to ferry 10 tons of fish to a bothy up in the hills. Once there, conditions were primitive, very rough, but there was plenty fresh water in the burns and rivers around, and they stayed there for weeks on end, tramping the glens with their creels. The folk in the distant glens still spoke Gaelic then, but the fishwives picked up enough words to get by. Occasionally their paths crossed with the travelling folk, and they would share tobacco or a fire, and a bit of gossip.
Anyway…one day when my granny was a wee lassie, she set off from the bothy tramping with her mammy over two hills to the hill sheilings where men were grazing their cattle. My granny was called Jeannie, and her mammy was called Jeannickie. The mountains on Deeside were rough and steep, heavy going underfoot, and my granny’s mammy was wearing wooden clogs. Crossing a burn, she took them off, the better to steady herself on the stones against the current, and handed them to my granny to carry. But granny being wee, slipped, and the strong current washed the clogs down the hill and away. The creel was too valuable for her mammy to lose grip of, she had to consider the merchandise before her own comfort, and it was far too heavy to fling onto the bank to chase runaway clogs.
The path after that was rougher than ever, sharp edged rocks and thorns, and Jeannickie’s feet were all torn and bruised. She ripped a wee piece from her apron to try to bind them, but it was a long way back to the bothy, and it was growing dark. Over the next knoll they came on an old house with a slate roof, not heather thatched, and two low glass windows. The red paint on the door was peeling, and the garden was beginning to revert back to the wild, but there were still berries and vegetables enough growing there to provide food. Jeannie and Jeannickie knocked on the door. There was no answer. They keeked in through the windows. It was dusty, but hadn’t long been uninhabited. In fact, there might still be an owner around, probably too old to take proper care of the place.
‘I daresay they wouldn’t grudge a mother and child a bite to eat and a bit shelter for a night,’ said Jeannickie to my granny.
And a fine, comfy night they had of it, stretched out on beds of heather with a nice peat fire crackling in the hearth and a pot of soup on the boil.
Next day, Jeannickie left two dry fish on the table, for she was an honest woman and wouldn’t have it said she took advantage of a situation, and the two set off. Now, at the bottom of the garden was a midden, and on the midden there was the smartest pair of shoes you ever saw…beautiful, hand stitched leather, proper walking boots. Even the laces looked new.
‘My my wee Jeannie,’ she said to my granny. ‘Would you look what the good Lord’s laid out for us! Imagine throwing out the like of that! It’s gift from God right enough!’
And she sat herself down in the heather and pulled on the beautiful shoes. And weren’t they just the softest ever made for the sole of a human foot? Mother and daughter fairly skipped back the miles to the bothy, and sold every single fish from the creel on the way. When they returned, they discovered that two travellers had joined the company, and were sharing a hare they had snared for the evening meal. Everyone congratulated Jeannie and Jeannickie on selling all their fish and things were jolly and fine until the travellers asked which path they had taken, thinking that if it was lucky for the fishwife and her daughter, it might bring them luck, too. When Jeannickie described the house, however, the travellers looked grave.
‘Did you take anything from there?’ asked the elder of the two men.
‘Only this fine pair of shoes,’ replied Jeannickie proudly. ‘And you could travel the length of Scotland and Ireland too,’ she boasted, ‘before you’ll find a softer pair. It’s like walking on air, no word of a lie.’
‘Where were the shoes?’ the traveller asked.
‘I’m no a thief!’ bristled Jeannickie. ‘They were out on the midden. It would have been a pure sin to leave them there.’
The travellers rose hurriedly, and took their leave. Before they did so, however, the younger man warned Jeannickie to take the boots off straightaway, and to scrub her feet till they were near raw.
‘And why would I do such a daft thing?’ asked Jeannickie.
‘Look inside at the lining,’ came the response, ‘and ask at the next sheiling. They’ll tell you all you need to know. We’ve stayed long enough around you two as it is.’
Mystified, my granny’s mammy pulled off the shoes and put her hand inside the left one. The lining was soft, very soft. When she pulled it out and held it up to the light, however, she screamed. It consisted of a large strip of human flesh, the shape of the sole of a foot, minus the toes. Horrified, Jeannikie flung the shoes down the linn and scrubbed her feet till they bled.
At the next sheiling, once they had sold their fish, Jeannikie asked if anyone knew who lived in the house over the hills, with the red door and the wild garden. The woman who bought the fish looked suddenly alarmed.
‘Oh you didn’t go in my dears?’ she gasped.
‘No, no’ lied Jeannickie, ‘we met two travellers up the glen and they warned us not to. But travellers are awful superstitious. They said no-one lived there now. Why did the tenants leave?’
The woman made the sign of the cross, for many up that glen still held to the old faith, and told them that a Norwegian couple had come to live there some years ago...a young man and his widowed mother, the Hansens. They kept themselves to themselves. The son was never seen in the villages nearby, but the mother spoke English, and went out and about for all the shopping they needed. They came from Bergen where the father had skippered a whaler. Money was not a problem, but they were very secretive in their ways, very private, and none of the Highlanders could ferret out the least scrap of information about them. Recently, they heard that the son had died, and the mother had returned to Norway.
Not until a mail carrier arrived in the glen one day from Aberdeen, a local man who happened to have a Norwegian wife, did they learn the full history of the little family. Talk had turned on the couple who had lived all alone, and the son who only walked the roads at night until he died. The mail carrier promised to find out what he could, for there is nothing the Scots love more than unraveling a mystery. He returned within the month with the mystery solved.
The Highlanders were astounded. It was a case, they were told, of “spedalsk” (leprosy in Norwegian). Leprosy had long died out in Scotland, but was spreading along the west coast of Norway and the largest number of lepers came from the Bergen area. Sufferers in Norway could either agree to eke out their lives in a hospital, or stay in isolation. The mother had brought her son to Scotland where no-one knew them, hoping that the mountain air might be curative. But some things are beyond cure. The disease had finally killed him. He was buried in the peat moss, and his mother had fled back to Norway. And that’s my shoe story, and it’s why neither travelers nor fisher folk ever wear another person’s shoes.’
The fountain at the core of the Hirshhorn continued to sparkle prettily into the air, but a shadow had crossed the sky. I slipped my feet back into my trainers again. They were a compilation of vinyl and plastic and velcro, typical slob wear, but somehow, for once, the fact that they weren’t leather was reassuring.
Author’s
Note
The traditional traveler story of ‘The Shoes’ was
told to me at the Hirshhorn fountain by the late Stanley Robertson,
while were working on the Mall. In Stanley’s version, a traveler
found the ‘comfortable shoes’ on an isolated midden. The lady of
the house nearby was horrified, and explained that the shoes had
belonged to a leper who had recently died. From this, I wrote my
version of the story. Leprosy was rife during the 13th century in
Europe (WHO: 2005a). In-built into Gothic churches in Europe and
Britain were leprosy ‘squint holes’ through which the leper would
peer and watch the priest at the alter celebrating mass. Once leprosy
was diagnosed, a service of expulsion took place. The leper was
shrouded under a black cloth and the mass of death read out, followed
by a list of prohibitions:
Never
again to enter a church, a house, a tavern or a market place.
Never
again to walk through narrow lanes or speak ‘down wind’ to
anyone.
Never again to speak with children.
Always to wear a
leper’s uniform, which included gauntlet gloves.
Always to give
a leper’s warning either with a bell or rattle when approaching
others.
For all practical purposes the person with leprosy was
‘dead’ to society (Davey, 1987: 16).
In the 1830s-40s, there were a large and rising number of lepers in Norway around the Bergen area. Norway appointed a medical superintendent for leprosy in 1854 and established a national register for lepers in 1856. Mycobacterium leprae, the causative agent of leprosy, was discovered by G. H. Armauer Hansen in Norway in 1873. It was renamed ‘Hansen’s Disease’ in his honour.
A close relative of mine in Sao Paulo, Brazil, adopted a baby from a leper colony there. It was said that the child’s blood had been changed to ensure it was clear of any chance of developing the disease. She grew up leprosy-free. As for the shoes…I was brought up to believe it absolutely taboo ever to put your feet in another’s shoes. Handed down clothes were fine, they could be washed, but not shoes. The reason being, I was told, ‘they harbored dirty diseases,’ no doubt a shadow of the past when leprosy actually did stalk the streets of Scotland.
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