It followed. “Yes. ‘As for the witch’?”
Engineer Brozz took a slip of paper from a small leather pocket-case. “I wrote it down.” He read aloud. “ ‘ Water is thy greater fortune; and water, thy greater in fortune as well.’ Now, what does that mean, my good sir?” Eszterhazy began to say that it meant that she must have been a rather sophisticated witch; desisted. Surrendered. “Any pains in the small of the back? Any swellings of feet or ankles? Any difficulty in making —? No, eh. We may dismiss a kidney condition or the like. Hmm. Did the witch say anything else?” For sometimes the witch was only a dirty and mean old man or woman, yet sometimes the witch was something else; sometimes a good deal more.
“ ‘Say anything else’? Yes. ‘Cross my palm with silver, handsome Christian gentleman.’ ”
Eszterhazy sighed. “Well, well. Be kind enough to loosen your cuffs and collar, and to open your coat, waistcoat, and shirt. Yes. Just so. Say nothing until I tell you to.” The pulse was taken, the stethoscopic horn applied. At length Dr. Eszterhazy said, “There are some occasional, very minor, irregularities, but nothing very divergent from the norm. Pulse, heart, are both strong. Respiration normal. Do you sleep well? Can you eat? Does your vision waver? Any problem in hearing? — you never feel that others are mumbling? Your lungs seem sound.” He withdrew the thermometer from the armpit. “Normal. Your eyes are only slightly bloodshot. Well. I can tell you nothing more; what is it that you can tell me? ”
Brozz looked away from the skeleton, looked at the two immense terrestrial and celestial globes. Brozz muttered something very low. He let out his breath in a sudden gust. Jerked his head abruptly from side to side, twice. Then threw out his right hand in a bewildered gesture. “Listen, Doctor, I don’t know if you remember, or if you ever saw, perhaps you never saw, years ago there was a mountebank, sometimes he used to stand at the corner of the alley between the Big Wood Market and the Old Stillery, a very odd chap —”
Eszterhazy’s frown of concentration melted away. “Yes! A very odd chap!” His fingers now moved in a rather peculiar manner, wriggling, jerking, bobbing; and he made a crooning sound, a not-quite tune. The effect upon the engineer was not pleasant. His lips and eyelids seemed to snap back. He made a wavering, wordless sound in his throat. Then his widened eyes darted down past the physician’s moving fingers, down ... almost. . . to the carpet-covered floor. And next he uttered a shuddering sigh and for a while remained silent.
The mountebank, yes. He did not, literally, mount a bench. No matter. Who was he? Whence had he come? Whence had he come? Whither had he gone? Was he still alive? A slight and sallow man, almost dark his face was, and the skin around his eyes was dark indeed. In all weather he wore a short waistcoat exposing much not-very-clean shirt. His trick? Out of scraps of heavy colored paper a sort of doll or puppet had been made, and from any distance at all it seemed as though the man’s mesmeric gestures caused the one-dimensional doll to dance at his command. From right next to him (and only sometimes was he at the corner of the alley between the Big Wood Market and the Old Stillery; sometimes he stood by Sellzer’s Spelt Stores or Klungman’s Bristles For Brushes, or near the Old Little Uniate Chapel, or the Sailors’ Rest) from right next to him it was apparent that a single thread from his right hand kept the marionette up and that threads from each finger of his left hand made head, arms, and legs move and caper. And all the while the odd man keened his odd sub-song. He never indeed seemed to collect much money . . . but then his invested capital was minimal. And his rent was nothing at all. And now Eszterhazy shared the memory of him.
And patiently waited.
“You see,” Brozz said, by and by, “first I attended the old Bella Pantechni- cal School in Upper Hunyadi Street. Then I went to Scotland and worked with Watt and Grant, the great engineering firm in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and next my work was with British Looms Ltd. in Manchester and in Sheffield at Stanley Steel; and I may say: what there was to be learned about machinery, I learned it. I studied in London and in Brussels and Berlin. It was during those years I began to think about the tuned harmonic turbine and the vacuum-pump and the compressed-air engine. When they first began the advanced technical studies here at the Collegium, I returned and obtained the engineer degree.. ..
“My entire adult life, my professional and personal and philosophical res; well, though I was raised in the Calvinist Reformed Church, I am not very religious, my nature is purely pragmatic and rational, and absolutely I have not a trace of superstition in my nature. So ... when I say ... you will not assume that I ... do I not impress you as sane?”
“As perfectly sane.” Brozz may not have been as pragmatic as he thought; but he was certainly sane. Or seemed so. So far. Still...
“So when I say that I am —” He did not precisely pause or hesitate; only, his voice stopped.
Eszterhazy produced and profferred the (possibly) missing word, haunted —”
Brozz did not react other than to resume speaking. “I am haunted,” he said, in a dull, dead voice. His face was thinner than ever.
“You are haunted by paper puppets?”
The man’s face showed, fleetingly, first surprise; then, though quickly sur- pressed, annoyance. “No! What? ‘Paper puppets’? No, sir, what makes you think — Oh. I see, I understand. No, that" he moved his own fingers in the manner of the mountebank (if this were not too high a title to have given him, poor starveling wretch); “ that merely reminded. That —- reminded me of.. . the other. And... the other... reminded me of... that. But no. If I tell you that I am haunted by, oh, ghosts, revenants, vampires, werewolves — whatever — you... or anyone... might not believe. But even if you were scornful, it would be with a serious scorn. Yet...” He looked up, helplessly, as though, almost, his sense of horror was mixed with an equal sense of humiliation.
“At first, merely I saw them by one or two. Just lying around. I thought the workmen had been slipshod, careless. Then these things came more often, and more and more often. Soon one began to realize they were getting into the water supply, dissolving into a sludge, clogging . . . sometimes . . . clogging the machines. And also clogging them with stones, pebbles, fragments of splints. And then next I began to see them out of the corners of my eyes, moving ... moving... walking... and when I would, often, at night, lose my selfcontrol and chase after them....” His words ended in a soft sound half-sigh, half-groan.
Even softer: “Yes?”
“... they would run away ... and never ... I could never catch them . ..” His voice had sunk, now it rose. “Who will believe me? Who will ever respect me? They —”
“What are they?”
The engineer’s somewhat bloodshot eyes looked at him in a mixture of defiance and shame. “They? What are —? They are the gingerbread men.”
Everyone called it “the Old Avar Bakery.” But the place itself did not call itself so, the weathered sign had to be read at a certain time of day with the sun at a certain angle, and the sign read the famous OLD gingerbread bakery AT WHOLESALE AND RETAIL. It read so in Gothic and it read so in Avar. Everyone knew of it; and everyone knew of the Hospice for the Innocents, the orphanage run by the uncloistered nuns. Eszterhazy had brought a large box of the confections for, as he let it be known, to give to the Hospice, and paid cash: all matters disposing the shopman to answer questions. How did they make their excellent gingerbread men? In old cherry-wood molds. Where did the ingredients come from? “Well, sir, the eyes and mouths we make from them tiny raisins that grows in them Turkish islands where the Greeks do live, currants we call ’em, sir.” Yes. The isles of Greece and the cities thereof. Corinth. Currant. Yes. And the other ingredients? “Well, sir, the ginger and the m’lasses they comes from India, from the Indies, sir — Virginia and Jamaica and them-like other Indian places. And — and the what, sir? Ah, the flour? Well — no, not from the Bella Steam Mill, that grinding, well, we doesn’t care for it a-tall. ’Twon’t taste the same, you see. We use old fashioned style flour. Water-ground meal, we uses. Where it comes from? From the old mills way up the Little River. Sir. And mostly the honey, too.”