The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter Page A
Authors: Angela Carter
Ads: Link
strolled beside the margin of the water, among a detritus of discarded sandals and plastic sun-tan lotion jars the sea could not digest, watching the dancing white lace hems of the petticoats of the ocean and so, while I was thinking of nothing but sunshine, the breakers delivered her to my feet.
Mary Anne had indeed found something else to do that day besides play the piano. And now she had suffered a sea change, already. She was wreathed and garlanded in seaweed and shells clung to her white night shift. When I lifted her up, water spouted from her mouth. Dead, she could not have had a whiter skin than when she lived. She was dead. But still I tried to revive her.
I was overwhelmed with shock and horror. I felt I was in some way instrumental to her death. I crouched over the sea-gone wet doll in an attitude I knew to be a cruel parody of my own the previous night, my lips pressed to her mouth, and it came to me there was hardly any difference between what I did now and what I had done then, for her sleep had been a death. The notion ravaged me with guilty horror. I do not know how much time passed while I attempted to manipulate her lifeless body but, when the sound of voices at last broke into my waking nightmare, the sun was far in the west and cast long beams which fell with a peculiar lateral intensity over the sand. She and I were now both utterly bedaubed with wet sand, so that we looked like those Indian shamans who paint themselves with coloured mud when they want to summon back the spirits of the departed. And I was attempting to do no more than that. I looked up.
On the promenade I saw a dark, hump-backed figure who gesticulated in my direction with a white stick. Down the iron steps to the beach clattered a posse of the Determination Police in their long, leather overcoats and, at their head, ran the clerk from the Town Hall, an unusual animation contorting his features, and the housekeeper from the Mayor’s house, still in her white apron, plumply stumbling, crimson and breathless but radiating a horrid gratification. These two formed the very picture of malevolent glee and I was seized with the conviction they had, in collusion, murdered the Mayor for reasons of their own, probably connected with money or property, and trusted to the confusion of the times to hide their guilt. They thought I might discover it. Perhaps they had even murdered poor Mary Anne, too, and dropped her into the sea, in order to frame me, for how could I accuse them if I was myself accused?
They all came nearer and nearer and nearer and I realized I must quickly run away.
I do not know why I scooped up the dripping corpse of the girl in my arms and tried to make my escape with her. I think I wanted to rescue her from the housekeeper for I knew with instantaneous clairvoyance the old woman hated her, dead or living. Burdened with Mary Anne, I lurched along the beach for perhaps a hundred yards while she, twice her weight with water, slithered about so that it was like carrying a huge fish. Then one of the Determination Police drew his pistol and fired. I felt a tearing pain in my shoulder and fell. The second bullet whistled past my ear and, while I watched, shattered the exquisite rind of the dead girl’s features so that her blood and brains spattered over my face. At that, I fainted.
I was charged on four counts.
(1) obtaining carnal knowledge of a minor (for, in fact, Mary Anne had been even younger than she looked, only fifteen years old);
(2) procuring death by drowning of the said minor;
(3) practising necrophily on the corpse of the said minor, which act the police had witnessed with their own eyes;
and:
(4) posing as an Inspector of Veracity Class Three when I was really the fatherless son of a known prostitute of Indian extraction, an offence against the Determination Regulations Page Four, paragraph I c, viz.: ‘Any thing or person seen to diverge significantly from it or his own known identity is committing an
Mary Anne had indeed found something else to do that day besides play the piano. And now she had suffered a sea change, already. She was wreathed and garlanded in seaweed and shells clung to her white night shift. When I lifted her up, water spouted from her mouth. Dead, she could not have had a whiter skin than when she lived. She was dead. But still I tried to revive her.
I was overwhelmed with shock and horror. I felt I was in some way instrumental to her death. I crouched over the sea-gone wet doll in an attitude I knew to be a cruel parody of my own the previous night, my lips pressed to her mouth, and it came to me there was hardly any difference between what I did now and what I had done then, for her sleep had been a death. The notion ravaged me with guilty horror. I do not know how much time passed while I attempted to manipulate her lifeless body but, when the sound of voices at last broke into my waking nightmare, the sun was far in the west and cast long beams which fell with a peculiar lateral intensity over the sand. She and I were now both utterly bedaubed with wet sand, so that we looked like those Indian shamans who paint themselves with coloured mud when they want to summon back the spirits of the departed. And I was attempting to do no more than that. I looked up.
On the promenade I saw a dark, hump-backed figure who gesticulated in my direction with a white stick. Down the iron steps to the beach clattered a posse of the Determination Police in their long, leather overcoats and, at their head, ran the clerk from the Town Hall, an unusual animation contorting his features, and the housekeeper from the Mayor’s house, still in her white apron, plumply stumbling, crimson and breathless but radiating a horrid gratification. These two formed the very picture of malevolent glee and I was seized with the conviction they had, in collusion, murdered the Mayor for reasons of their own, probably connected with money or property, and trusted to the confusion of the times to hide their guilt. They thought I might discover it. Perhaps they had even murdered poor Mary Anne, too, and dropped her into the sea, in order to frame me, for how could I accuse them if I was myself accused?
They all came nearer and nearer and nearer and I realized I must quickly run away.
I do not know why I scooped up the dripping corpse of the girl in my arms and tried to make my escape with her. I think I wanted to rescue her from the housekeeper for I knew with instantaneous clairvoyance the old woman hated her, dead or living. Burdened with Mary Anne, I lurched along the beach for perhaps a hundred yards while she, twice her weight with water, slithered about so that it was like carrying a huge fish. Then one of the Determination Police drew his pistol and fired. I felt a tearing pain in my shoulder and fell. The second bullet whistled past my ear and, while I watched, shattered the exquisite rind of the dead girl’s features so that her blood and brains spattered over my face. At that, I fainted.
I was charged on four counts.
(1) obtaining carnal knowledge of a minor (for, in fact, Mary Anne had been even younger than she looked, only fifteen years old);
(2) procuring death by drowning of the said minor;
(3) practising necrophily on the corpse of the said minor, which act the police had witnessed with their own eyes;
and:
(4) posing as an Inspector of Veracity Class Three when I was really the fatherless son of a known prostitute of Indian extraction, an offence against the Determination Regulations Page Four, paragraph I c, viz.: ‘Any thing or person seen to diverge significantly from it or his own known identity is committing an
Similar Books
