When Snap was recovered I began a nightly vigil of the picture. The changes always occurred at night and I was determined to see them happen. There was alot of nodding off and rushing over to see if I’d missed anything. Nothing changed. Until one night I was checking out the picture in the light of a torch.
The little gremlin which sat in its own chair next to Snapper, its face full of mischief. The bare board floor coated in grey ash. Dim, pastiche wallpaper and ill darkness. Creepy, indistinct corners.
I realised I was inside looking out at the dark hallway. The seat and everything was attached to me and nothing but my eyes could move. Straining to see through the visor of my face, I located the figure seated next to me. It was all front, like a piece of stage scenery. I was in a sterile, airless, annihilative space. It was starkly scary — my spine was an electric eel, stinging itself and wanting out. The whole setup was familiar. The moment I thought to scream the Snap figure said ‘I increasingly think action is the only way.’ Its voice was like ice and vinegar.
‘I didn’t burn the nerve farm,’ I said, uncertain. ‘It was Snapper. Doesn’t like people pushing the envelope.’
‘Pretends he doesn’t,’ answered Mister Hieronymus. ‘On the quiet he drags out a vein and uses it as a skipping rope. Eyes front, laughing boy, if you want the facts.’
I looked into the hallway — Snapper walked up in his pyjamas, brandishing a fine art brush. He reached up and carefully retouched the Snap figure’s face, drawing up the mouth into an inane smile, smoothing out the brow. His eyes strange and glassy, he turned and plodded off.
‘Sleepwalking,’ said Mister Hieronymus. ‘Subconscious urges he’d never admit to.’
‘Why did you stand for that?’ I asked, looking askance at the wet face of the Snapper effigy.
‘I’ve taken the opportunity to inhabit this nightmare,’ it replied, ‘so as I can talk to you — it seems nobody else will. You’ll be left alone here, laughing boy. Your life’ll fly off its hinges.’
‘And I wanted everything to be so perfect.’
‘Now’s not the hour for snide abstraction, boy — don’t imagine I thrive upon perching like something preserved in a museum. Everyone’s reading more into this than you are. As sure as you’re sitting there, a garden beetle’s backflaps will lift to reveal a hotrod engine.’
‘I’m not convinced I’m sitting here.’
‘Please yourself. You’re a Machiavellian bird I’ll say that for you.’
‘Wasn’t he that bastard who said authority was the spice?’
‘And more. That by making an example or two a ruler will prove more compassionate than those who allow riot and disorder.’
‘If such examples are proof of compassion then surely disorders will prove the more compassionate as they harm the whole community, while executions only affect individuals.’
‘Can’t change a circle to a square without reducing its surface area, laughing boy.’
‘What about a cube.’
‘You mar my argument by no more clever means than an increase in dimensions.’
‘To no greater number than that in which normal people move and have their being, Sideshow — it’s not my fault your crap argument hasn’t the stamina to exist in the real world. This is terrible. Get me out of here.’
I was instantly back in the hallway, gasping for air. My body was aching like inept architecture. In the picture Snap beamed and the little creature beside him was looking, its head now turned aside.
Late the next day I started feeling stupid for bailing out — it was clear Hieronymus had information to impart. I went to the hallway but the picture was gone — Snapper had burnt it. ‘The gremlin,’ Snapper said, fronting off defensively. ‘Suddenly didn’t like it. All day wherever I went — felt the little shit was watching me.’
METAL BOX
Like human hair, the reputation of a saint grows after death. Uncle Blute had driven a Morris Traveller into the lake. Now the turquoise square of its roof rippled just below the surface, dappled with emerald moss and jacinth rust. ‘Your mother’s brother,’ stated Snap. ‘Strange chap. Eyebrows met in the middle of someone else’s face. Insisted the same birds were being born every few years. Finite number. Made calculations. Invented devices he couldn’t operate. Disappeared for days at a time. Staggered back unable to tell the tale, covered in insect bites. A gentleman in the days when the word had a meaning.’
Adrienne said she dimly recalled him doing a stunt with his nose. ‘Turned it inside out,’ she said, frowning. ‘So it looked like a sea anemone. Arced over laughing — never grew tired of it.’
‘Well he won’t be doing anything with his muzzle these days,’ I said. ‘First thing to go Father says and I’m tempted to agree with him. Becomes a luxury.’
But I was forgetting the lake. Like certain Nevada lakes its water was clinically pure, preserving anything which sank there. After ten years Blute was at the wheel in immaculate condition.
Yet the strangest thing was that due to the water’s conductive alkalinity the headlights and radio were still on. If you sat at a particular spot on the shore you could faintly hear the weather report. At night a corner of the lake glowed an agreeably ghoulish green. Adrienne would sit with me on an overhanging rock, her face underlit as she crunched an apple. ‘He was ready.’
On the anniversary of his death it was decided we should endure a memorial service for this amusing fellow. We trooped down to the lake in a squelch of rubber insulation, carrying wreaths of iron flowers which the nuns had hammered to order. ‘Why the hell are we doing this now?’ I asked, tugging on Father’s sleeve.
He raised his mask. ‘Man is made up of body and spirit, but not until death is he forced to take sides.’
That shut me up — I bit upon the snorkel and looked toward the water. The others were already getting in, big ripples spreading — they were like zealots in a ritual cleansing. As I began wading after them I heard classical music throbbing through the water and thought maybe it wasn’t such a malignant ceremony. Above all, I was curious to see an authentic gentleman.
As my mask went under the surface everything became luminous. I saw the others floating like haunts around the two headlights. Debussy’s Rondes de printemps was playing as Mother laid a metal wreath on the bonnet. I couldn’t help but marvel at the condition of the wooden panelling.
‘There’s Blute,’ said Father, touching his mask to mine. ‘Absolutely mint.’
The driver, whose white balloon head became visible through the windshield, was certainly in good repair. He was staring like a madman, his chalky hands still on the wheel. His nose was squashed against the glass like the sucker of a snail, nostrils flared. Light and shadow shifted like commune ideologies, giving the illusion of life. But there was no reaction when I laid the wreath — nothing there atall. This was either a dead, abandoned body or a wax mannequin. Neither was of interest to me.
As I stared, the music faded and an announcer began to describe the royal celebrations. It was Jubilee year.
ITCHES IN THE SKY
Snapper missed his medication and started seeing itches in the sky. ‘Truth is as small as an itch,’ he had said that morning and we should have been alarmed. Now he was utterly incoherent, springing over hedges yelling gibberish which two years later he patiently explained as meaning ‘I’d give my weight in snails to know what’s going on around here.’ He entered the sitting room covered in ferns and wearing a chrome helmet. He was laughing like Lamb at Hazlitt’s wedding as he described the web-like constellations of truth and the inevitable collapse and infernal damnation of the universe.