The Combinations, page 118
thoughts like Braille, knowing the deep-down intimate shape of your anxiety &
everyone around you, invisible hundreds, thousands, who can guess how many?
Huddled under the bombs dropping, sweeping inexorably towards you, all along
the Battersea shoreline, the junction point, where everything’s somehow
calculated to converge at just that instant in time, like a portal opening between
this world & all the other worlds, the Alpha & Omega — could this be it?
Splatsplatsplat, the pingpong ball drops off the side of the table into the
wet weeds, only to be left there, faint dull orb of an eye, the Project kids having
scooted off to find shelter. While you were daydreaming the heavens must’ve opened.
Rain hammering down, beating a tattoo on the roof of the doubledecker,
nothing more than a hulking shadow now, barely even visible. Evocations of a
madman roped to a mast, windlashed, stormbattered. A wash of headlights
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sweeping across, coming down the hillside just as a figure in a surplus anorak
pushes through the gate…
‘Hey, Honza, how’s it hangin’?’
‘Long & strong, Bruce. How’s tricks?’
‘She’s jake, mate.’
‘Pissin’ down out there.’
‘So I can see.’
‘How’s the missus?’
‘Still bangin’ like a dunny door, mate. Yours?’
‘Hardly lets me outa the house.’
‘Tough, init?’
‘Some days, crikey, you’d think it’d never end…’
Inside The Three Monkeys the drinkers were steaming up the windows.
Honza held up a finger & the barmaid brought over a bottle of Pražan & a glass
mug, penned a mark on a chit, all without a word exchanged.
‘Cheers, mate!’
‘Na zdraví, vole!’
Slopping foam down their chins. Freight yards full of old blackmen,
mourned the radio, and graveyards of rusted automobiles… Out in the night a
tram clanged its bell. If you wiped away the fog on the window you’d almost see
it, coming round the far side of the volleyball courts, steam rising off the tracks,
& behind it the blackness creeping up from the valley, moving as if not through
space but through time. And the sallow-faced ghosts within, watching back. At
the tramstop, a woman of indeterminate age, shoulders hunched, gripping a
drawstring shopping bag, climbed out, gasping at the cold wet air. The road
curved away down the hillside into a hairpin where it disappeared from view.
The tram wheezed off, past grey suburban housing blocks on its descent towards
the river. Past streets with names like Gabčíkova & Kubišova. Past the hospital
& tram sheds & Vietnamese markets. The tarpaulined sky. The caged beasts in
the Zoo. The river forking & looping back like tied fallopians. Unravelling
again. North past the sewage works. Darkness primordial. The disappearin’
railroad blues…
The girl with wet hair & leather jacket, with a Walkman blaring in her
ears, scratched the backs of her hands & coughed. A bum asleep wrapped in a
soiled army coat snored. A man with hands as big as his face, eyes fixed to the
floor, reeking of cigarette butts, lurched drunkenly as the tram rounded a bend.
The girl in the jacket stared out the window. Fake people in fake cars. Fake
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traffic lights flashed. The world was just some practiced evasion. They thought
they had her conned, but she wasn’t conned. All you had to do was keep your
cool & not set all the alarm bells ringing. Second you put your hands up they
shoot you dead. Play dumb & they shoot someone else instead. No reason to be
disappointed, the whole thing was so fake. Everywhere you looked. Fake, fake,
fake. Like pop-ups in a shooting gallery. Blam! Blam! Fucking fake. Blam!
A cement truck geared-down, breaking to a stop at the intersection.
Milenko’s Concrete totally killed her view. Blam, you sonofabitch! The driver leant
on his horn. Double-blam! He leant on it again & the girl in the jacket looked up.
The creep was hanging out his window, jerking the middle-finger of his right
hand in & out of the circle made by the thumb & index-finger of his left. Jesus
Christ! The creep was shouting something. She pulled the headphones off.
‘Hey, baby, this’s my big fat kurac in your tight little pička!’
‘Hey arsehole,’ she popped the studs on her jacket & flashed a JUST
DYKE ON! t-shirt, flipping the creep the bird, ‘sit & fuckin’ spin!’
The creep wagged his tongue, revved, burned diesel. The girl in the jacket
unloaded the other middle-finger on him. Blam! The creep made a face like a
baboon’s anus & finger-jerked double-time. The light went green. Horns blared.
The tram wheezed out of the blocks. The truck ground through the low gears.
Shithead creep! Blam!
‘These Golem City chicks,’ Milenko grinned to his passenger, ‘are so
fuckin’ horny all the time. Did you see that? Crazy chicks!’
‘The chicks here’ll fuck anything, just like that!’
‘The chicks in Belgrade are all stuck-up bitches!’
‘The chicks in Pristina aren’t worth half a cock!’
‘The chicks in Novi Sad aren’t worth my left nut!’
‘The chicks in Podgorica only fuck their fathers!’
‘Hey, know how you can tell when you’re in Montenegro?’
‘It’s where they stop fucking mothers & start fucking fathers!’
‘Fuck your God!’
‘Fuck your bloody sun!’
‘Fuck your infidel house!’
‘Fuck your sunny dinner!’
‘Fuck your rat!’
‘Fuck your money!’
‘Fuck your soup!’
‘Fuck your bread!’
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‘Fuck your dead goat!’
Milenko cranked it up, over the island, down the embankment, up the
hill. Wipers batting off the rain. Swung through a rat’s maze of narrow
backstreets. Up Jánský Vršek, headlights strafing the construction site. Jörg
Schuh peered down trough the rain from atop the scaffold as the cement mixer
ground to a stop, but not before wiping out half-a-dozen traffic cones first. A
couple of drunk Serbs climbed out singing at the top of their lungs,
Klintone, možeš da nam pušiš
Širak nabijem ti Ajfelovu kulu u dupe
Olbraijtovo, kurvo stara...*
The foreman cursed —
‘These frigging non-union jerks really get on my tits!’
Jörg shrugged, just doin’ his job like he was paid to do, chipping off the
stucco at a Kč ,- hourly rate. No point rushin’ it, a man’s gotta keep himself
employed. From his vantage up on the scaffold, Jörg observed the spread of the
weather over the City. A dragnet tending east, blacking-out the lights. Times up
there he felt like a monkey in a tree, watching through the high branches, stone
in hand, the jungle canopy laid out below, & any moment down would swooped
a giant eagle & pluck him in its talons, off, off into the ether, never to be seen
again. Nearer, my God, to thee. Gotta be vigilant, eh, never know WTF’s out
there. He scanned the rainclouds. No self-respecting feathered creatures up in
that. No low-flying planes. No falling bits of alien spacecraft, either, though how
you’d ever be sure… Chip-chip. Jörg worked his chisel into the wall, hammered,
twisted, gouged out another chunk of medieval masonry. Suppose they ought to
have a heritage listing on all that rubble. Clunk-clunk. Ricocheting down through
the scaffolds & onto the cobbles below. And there was that queer guy in the hat,
the one who lived there in the house supposedly, trudging down the street.
Jörg’d seen him through the window, sitting around buck-naked mostly, doing
nothing as far as he could tell, talking to himself like the guy wasn’t entirely right
in the head.
‘Eh! Keep your mind on the bloody job!’ the foreman called out.
The drunk Serbs were arguing about where to dump the concrete. The
guy in the hat elbowed his way between them without looking up, like they
* “Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be…” [:]
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weren’t even there. Eh, budala pička! Eh, kurac glava! Queer was hardly the word.
Guy looked like if he stepped on a crack he’d never be seen again, slip on
through to the other side, just the hat maybe.
Němec navigated the planking laid slantwise across the trenchwork
outside the house & weaved his way between stacked machinery into the
courtyard, where even more scaffolding, lit here & there with caged worklights,
was in process of being erected along the southernmost wall. There seemed to be
something inexorable about it, like the spread of damp. Němec wondered if the
whole objective was to pull the place apart simply in order to put it together
again, like a kid gluing the wings back on an amputated fly & trying to get it to
go buzz. They’d dress it all up afterwards like a plastinated corpse with the skin
pasted on & wonder why it didn’t get up off the slab & thank them for it, but it
wouldn’t matter, half the City was being dressed for its own funeral like some
confectioned parody. Just a matter of time before they got to the rest of it.
He looked in at the caretaker’s flat but the lights were out so he went up
to the apartment & dug out the Black Book again to see what it could tell him
about the Prof’s old man, if anything, or shed some light perhaps, those names
for instance, all Kraut names, could that’ve been part of it? Something
completely unconnected to Enochian Tables & Angelspeak? Maybe it was the
Dads’ “l’il black book” on all them Nazi mofos, back in the day. Maybe he was a
secret agent / spy / master-of-disguise, like Fantomas? Was about to put the
finger on that Kammler when his luck ran out? No. It didn’t seem right. The
Dads was supposed to’ve got the chop in . In ’ Kammler wasn’t anyone
you’d put on a list. Not that kind of list. Not Faktor, either. Right?
Němec spread the inner workings of the Prof’s Polygraphia out on the
floor & stood there trying to see it in a different light. Fruitless months
preoccupied with keying it, surrounded by puzzles he’d failed to unlock.
Phenotypes of weirdness. K-ciphers. Ghosts in the attic. Shapes drawn by the
wind. The lost Keys to the Kingdom. The Sphinx’s riddle. The fourth soul of
itself, producing many monstrous & prodigious things. Life, death, the meaning
of. Eh? You’re dreaming, kiddo! Němec peered down at the page directly in front
of his feet. There seemeth a black curtain of velvet to be drawn from one side of the
stone to the other, full of plights… Mmm. K up all night in his lab, assembling
some sort of D.I.Y. automatic anagrammatising apparat to elevate all that
scratching in the dark once-&-for-all to a higher plane of redundancy? Some
Themuru Thingumjig of the superior shambolic permuta-conjugation, hoggibus,
piggibus et shotam damnabile grunto? Being the world’s first proto-Rube Goldberg
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timetravel machine? Or better still, some fourth-century Wunderwaffe
anachronism, some archetypal T.E.S.L.A. ray-gun cobbled together with
nothing but sulphur, lead, demons & astrological almanacs? Hehe. And
wouldn’t the Nazis’ve loved to’ve gotten their hands on that?
Ah, there he is! The man himself! K up in a tower somewhere, prison-
cell-cum-alchemist’s-den jammed with all sorts of unfeasible electronics. Coils,
accumulators, vacuum tubes, conducting rods. Flagstones vibrating with heavy
currents as if alive. And in the middle of it all, K, white labcoat flaring, forked
beard, wildeyed. So good he could beam-in like this at such short notice.
Leaning over a console, he twists knobs & dials, throws switches. High above,
over the tower battlements, lightning shoots into the air from a copper sphere
atop a mast, surging & crashing, the sharp smell of ozone permeating the air.
Lightning explodes again & again, building to a crescendo…
‘Blind, fainthearted, doubting world!’
Unseasonal weather out there of the rather, let’s say, occult variety. Bat
spleen & cod liver oil, frogs’ tongues, cats’ ears & even boiled slugs all falling
from the sky. What’s he done this time, he wonders, re-checking his notes.
‘“Where reason strays into the dark enchanted forests of delusion…”
Mmm.’
Did that mean more mercury or less? He took a ladle & dipped it into the
mercury bath. His unfailing double peered back. Happening to glance over his
own shoulder, as it were, he caught a glimpse of an open ledger propped on a
bench between a couple of retort stands. The handwriting was backwards, but
everything else in the picture was also backwards. Ye olde mirror world at its
finest. K tried thinking Zhid-wise, right to left, everything in reverse. Gibberish
flowed out of the pages’ white static…
Mene, mene, what did it mean?
He turned around to check the original & cut the crap. The retort stands were
there alright, with beakers full of putrid muck, but no ledger.
‘That’s funny, I could’ve sworn…’
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Eyes must’ve been playing tricks. Sucking in too many of those noxious
fumes, quite probably, high as a kite. At which point K distinctly felt a shadow
protruding into his field of vision. Eh? Something from another dimension
trespassing into the three visible dimensions? Something like fear? The fear that
was always there, on the other side, as now, that thing he couldn’t quite believe
he was seeing, climbing out of the mercury bath. My God. It’d been like that
since the moment he first set foot in this godforsaken country. Spies. Demons.
Malign presences. But this was going way too far…
The air in the room grew heavy with a sweet, cloying perfume. At first the
thing appeared to be some kind of exotic poisonous flower in utero floating
upsidedown, like the implex of a mouth sucked into itself. Mercury of Lune.
Then bit by bit it did seem to distil itself, like an alembic of unnatural flesh, till,
foul to behold, the barely recognisable form of Woman stood out of its bath,
quicksilver coursing from limbs crudely stitched to a corseted patchwork body.
The creature grinned, a sickening lopsided grin. Grey teeth between thick
rubberish lips, subtly shape-shifting even as the alchemist look-on in horror.
He knew her, of course. He’d always known her. The “Black Queen”’s
phantom gazed back from bruised eyes, like the blueblack petals of an Aeonium.
Had she ever existed outside his darkest dreams? His darkest convocations with
the Evil One? All those distilled doubles & doppelgängers, those allegorical
freakshow monsters with two heads & a thousand eyes, percolated & twisted
into knots like strings of lead poured from a crucible into a beaker of vitriol? The
army of his abortions? His secret minions? But this? My God! What’ve I wrought?
‘Well, hello Eddie. Long time no see. How’s that luscious Elixir of yours
coming along? Mmmm?’ She snaked her tongue at him. ‘How about a little
taste, eh? A little sample? Just a quick little suck?’
‘…?!?’
‘What, don’t you recognise me, you old fart-in-a-jar? Prefer if I
materialised as a rutting dog? A dwarf in a clown suit? An assessor from Mutual
& Prudential? Open yer goddamn eyes, boy! It’s me! Me!! All ME!!!’
‘Er, yup! Right! Gosh! How could I forget! I mean, I was gonna call you!
I’ve almost got it. Just a couple of more weeks. A few more days. Look, I can get
it for you, no worries. Tell your boss I’ll have it for him tomorrow night.
Morning! I swear. I just need a little bit more time. Just a few more hours…’
‘ I’m the boss, pinhead. And it’s payday! Duh-dah-duh-dah-dah! Oh yeah,
have I got soul, hehehehe! You feelin’ hot, boy? You wanna sweat for me, lover?
Coz we is gonna boogie, baby! I’m a gonna burn you up, sweetheart! I’m a gonna
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set you on fire! This night is gonna be loooong! Now you just turn round ’n’ close
your eyes & let Mama Mefister take care of you good! That’s right honey, no use
runnin’ coz you ain’t never gonna hide! Hehehe! Just bend over there a little bit
so’s I can get a real nice look atcha! Mmmmm! Well ain’t that just the prettiest
piece of putridness, you call that an ass? More like a goddamn donkey,
hehehehe! Say eee-aww, boy! Go on, say it!’
‘Eee-aww!’
‘Louder!’
‘EEE-AWW!’
‘Now where’s that goddamn Elixir you owe me, you earless imbecile?’
Nnnneeeeeeeoooooooowwwwwwwwwwww! went da house fly. Vavavooom!
Vavavooom! Buzzing the old fart’s beard then zapping down for some of those
