K Jeter - Infernal Devices

So deep were my musings that the pangs of hunger reminded me of the engagement to which I was committed for that same evening. One of Clerkenwell's more prosperous watchmakers (that prosperity owed more to the cheapness of his goods than to any other quality), whose snobbishness made him anxious to associate with one bearing my renowned father's name, had renewed his invitation to me. The opportunity of a meal beyond that afforded by my meagre larder and Creff's slight culinary skill enabled me to endure the man's stultifying company.

Leaving Creff, armed with the broom handle and the kitchen-knife of which I had relieved him earlier, in vigilant guard over my shop and home, I made my way the short distance to my colleague's residence.

Nothing in the man's conversation, or that of his wife, intruded upon the continuous hidden flow of my thoughts. I was able to maintain a fiction of polite society with a few appreciative comment, a murmured "Oh?" or "Indeed" over the boiled potatoes, while all the while the spectral figures of the day's drama trod the stage and declaimed their lines inside the theatre of my skull.

Only when my host and I were draining a resinous Oporto at the edge of the fire, did his comments enter my consciousness.

"Peculiar thing – eh? – these street costers – most peck uliar." he poured himself another tumblerful. "Peddle the damnedest stuff. Never seen the like."

"Pardon?" Perhaps I had finally grown weary of turning the thin pack's cards over in my mind. I emerged from my thoughts to hear his oration on the London Street vendors.

"The other day – just yesterday, it was-" He leaned forward to impart this confidence. "I was in the Tottenham Court Road with my little daughter." (I knew the child, a wretched pug-nosed creature.) "An old Irish woman, dirty as a pig, selling dolls from a basket, approached us. 'Shure they're bhutiful dolls,' she says." He imitated the accent with mocking scorn. "'Shuted for them angels of the worruld,' meaning my daughter. With that sort of blandishments, soon enough my little Sally must have one of the wretched things." (I had often heard the child in the street outside my shop, whining for some gimcrack or lolly.) "The old witch wanted fourpence – can you credit it? – for one of the things, and eager enough she was to sell one, too, until my Sally sees a few wrapped in tissue at the bottom of the basket, and says she wants one of those. Then damned if the woman doesn't go all coy on me, refusing to bring one of the bottom ones out, saying they weren't 'shuted' for such a fine child and such-like, until my Sally was near choleric to have one. I finally had to pay sixpence to entice the woman to hand it over – and a fine show of reluctance she made, too, even then! – and when she had scuttled away with her basket, and my Sally unwrapped the doll, damned if she didn't scream and drop the thing on the street! I'm sure it's quite the ugliest creation possible, and a wicked joke to sell for the hands of a child." His broad face was red from the port and indignation, as he stood up and opened the doors of his writing cabinet. "Here the thing is – see for yourself."

I took the object he thrust towards me, and with but small curiosity examined it. It was a doll as is often sold in the streets, cheaply manufactured of pappy-mashy, as the costers term it, dipped in wax. The striking aspect was its extraordinary face: a crude parody, as though the maker's rude art had meant to represent some animal other than the human. Sloping forehead, goggling rounded eyes, and protruding lips over a non-existent chin; these features, in combination with the greenish cast of the wax, gave a distinctly piscine impression, as if a herring fresh off the fishmonger's slab had been dressed in a plaything's clothes. For a moment, as I turned the thing over in my hands, I again felt as if I were toiling through the rigours of a dream; it reminded me of the sea water – from where? – on the floor of my workroom.

"Extraordinary," I agreed. I reached to hand it back to my host, but he waved it away.

"Keep the damned thing," he said.

"Your little girl-"

"Faugh. She can't abide the sight of it. No, no, do us a kindness and take it away from here."

I laid it on the arm of the chair. My thoughts drifted away, to their former channels, as my host expostulated on some other subject. My hands came to rest on my stomach – stuffed to bursting against future famine – and I felt a circular shape in my waistcoat pocket. The coin the Brown Leather Man had paid me; idly, as the other's voice droned on, I took it out. A familiar shape and weight; perhaps not familiar enough of late. I looked down at it in my palm, and felt my gut hollow beneath the half-digested meal.

The face, in profile, on the coin was the twin of the hideous doll.

A sudden panic pushed me up from the depths of the chair. I made a hasty excuse to my host and, gathering up my hat and cloak, rushed from his house. Outside, I realised that the doll had found its way into my hands along with the coin. I thrust them into my pocket to remove them from my sight.

The mist had thickened, swallowing every aspect of the houses and the railings in front of them. Under the sulphurous glow of the street lamps, mere smudges of light swathed in grey, indistinct forms scurried from one dark cranny to the next. I hastened home, guided by memory rather than sight, unable to look behind me to see what blurred shadow might be entwined with my own.

I awoke the next morning, half-believing that the preceding day's events had been but a dream, driven by its own eccentric machinery to a baffling conclusion. My sleep had been vexed with shadowy figures, darkskinned and sombre, or with eyes hidden by blue glass and spouting incomprehensible obscenities; I would have been grateful to shake them out of my muddled head, to disappear with all the nocturnal phantoms that had gone before them. My waistcoat had been left draped over the chair by the side of my bed; reaching out my hand from under the covers, I felt the shape of the Brown Leather Man's coin in the garment's pocket. With my thumb I could trace through the wool the oddly shaped profile that had been twice revealed to me in my dinner host's parlour. If it were a dream, I had not been released from it yet.

Once dressed, I scarce touched the breakfast that Creff brought to me. I pushed aside the scant fare and set before me on the table the tangible remnants of the previous evening. The doll stood upright, its ichthyomorphic face goggling at me. A crude thing; if its ugliness could be attributed to its maker's lack of skill in capturing a human physiognomy, it would have been only a sad bit of rubbish, and no more. Its power to disturb, however, lay in what seemed the craftman's intent: however awkwardly formed, these were the features he had meant it to have.

"Here, Creff," I said. He was clearing the dishes away, maintaining an offended silence as though the untasted food were a comment on his own abilities. I picked the doll up and offered it for his inspection. "Did you ever see the like?"

Creff peered at it suspiciously, then shook his head. "Damned if I have." His taste for novelty had been exhausted by the turmoil of the day before. Perhaps he held me to account for that parade of oddities; the doll was evidently seen as another jape at his expense. "No, sir, I never have." He bore away the dishes in aggrieved dignity.

I had hoped to obtain from him some further idea of the doll's origin. He had far more experience than I with the costermongers that filled the London streets, deriving many of his simple pleasures from their wares. I had often seen him return to the shop poking among the remnants of a pennyworth's whelks wrapped in a twist of paper, or some other ambulatory delicacy. His purchases were not just of eatables: shortly after I first came to London and the shop, he began to sport a chain and timepiece. Unable to purchase one of the expensive articles offered in his employer's shop, he had bought from an itinerant vendor an example of that cheap imported article known to the watchmaking trade as a white jenny, and festooned his stomach with its glittering links. It little mattered to him that its hands soon froze in one position, never to circulate over the face again, as he was in fact ignorant of the art of telling the hour in any manner than the sun's overhead position; he did feel somewhat swindled when the chain's sheen wore off, revealing the base metal beneath.