The Smell of Telescopes by Rhys Hughes Page B

vinegar, cough often and can be thwarted with pepper and thorns. ’Lin and ’Phagia added a vaultsworth of advice to these declarations. Occidental vampires waste less energy in defying gravity: they transmute into aristocrats, who are lighter than air. Oswald might have strummed himself into a corner where refrains and anaemia were inflated.
    The sun is the enemy of musicians, who enjoy the company of candles and glinting earrings. Working through the high, petrified cycle of songs was akin to climbing ladders without eyes. So the disease scraped off on him, like resin from a diseased bow. Playing the music of vampires might be a hazardous venture, when the arpeggios stretch like membranes over a performer. Tunes concealed vast power; a flat truth, a sharp fact. There were precedents: a drum in Bermuda turned a bosun into a shark. This was not a sailor’s tale, but a fish’s, and he stood at the rail when it told itself. Never underestimate minims.
    At the hem of his first year at altitude, his work came so close to completion that he toasted his pins, dunking them in grappa. Every rag puppet he brought with him was reborn as a napkin or bandana, and the inherited wooden figures had been crushed into tablecloths. All that now separated retirement from rest was a single box. The previous owner had been eager to protect its contents, using a lock carved from garlic. He picked it with a sprig of parsley and groped inside, pulling out an exact likeness of himself, a puppet double. Even his cork leg sealed the same dry white panic, judging from the way it jerked.
    Why would anyone want to carve a replica of such a mediocre pirate? A toy of Morgan, certainly; also of Montbars, or William de Marisco. But of a lame sailmaker? There was an omen here, a prefig- uration of doom. In the sombre light which filtered through the window, he turned his double over in his hands. He shook it; a rattle. He probed the spleen and felt another puppet beneath. It had purpose, he knew that with all his heart, it was still real, not worked with cords. But he could barely imagine what that purpose was. Then he reflected. In the restaurant, he confided the event in spaghetti, which was later read.
    “’Tology Spleen is a dunce. Oswald was a mongrel rather than a full bat. His mother wedded an octopus.”
    “She had no gills; the sea was up in arms!”
    “Her blood fell to his right side, gave him half a face in mirrors. He looked for the other in melody.”
    The waiters who washed the pasta plates were experts at decipher- ing messages in the uneaten whips; all diners write diaries in the dish. And it is difficult to lie in oregano sauce. He heard them chatting over the sinks and fled without paying; beer is cheaper at home, so he was forced to pay himself when drinking away his fear in bed. His false leg kicked sleep to death; he rose and fretted over the implications. Now there was no mystery to Oswald’s wink: one side of his gaze was simply rejected by reflection, which refuses to employ fables. The rays which hasten out of vampires are too brittle to bounce.
    Again, he picked up the puppet and studied it carefully. There were only two anomalies apparent: size and life. Other details were flawless, including the numbered sole and gleaming knee. If a vampire is unable to use a mirror, how does it dress or shave? There must be other methods of grooming in the evening. Else they would be no better than werewolves, a deplorably scruffy subset of monsters. Would they not create mannequins, jointed dolls in their own image, which might be manipulated to mimic an act of dressing or washing? Yes, this was the answer; puppets were evil. Measuring silk was silvering fangs.
    The existence of this replica meant that he was also a vampire. Somehow, Oswald’s music had nipped him on the fringe. But a life on the six seas, repairing sails soaked in the gore of innocents with his own nerves, and the gore of Spaniards with monkey’s, had lent him a degree