Sam Thompson - Communion Town

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Believe it or not, Hal, you don’t know everything about me. A better question is what are you doing here?’

‘I’m on a case,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’ll bet you are. Listen —’ she glanced back into the dark house ‘— this ain’t a good place for you. Turn around and go home, all right?’

‘I’m on a case.’

She leant closer, and I caught the bready flavour of her breath. She spoke in a hurried undertone.

‘Dammit, Hal, I’m getting sick of looking out for you all the time.’ Her brown hair brushed my stubble, and her eyes softened, but only for a moment. ‘Do you even notice? You shouldn’t have come here. Go away!’

As she flared, she shoved me in the chest. I caught her wrist and we tussled on the threshold. I saw the gap in her strong teeth and tested the sturdy softness of her arms. But then a voice flowed out of the house’s interior, and a presence slid forward to encompass us. He was hard to see. He came over as a tidy group of impressions, a frictionless smile and hair parted with a ruler, a gust of cologne, a linen jacket crisply immune to the heat, a pair of pointed patent tiptoes that seemed to slip along on hidden rails, an arm that curled across Dolly’s shoulders and mine all at once to guide us together into the house. Above all he was a voice, a pleasant, continuous hum of a voice. The man was hard to see straight because the voice never stopped describing itself so smoothly.

‘Well,’ it said, ‘well well well, and who have you found for us today, Royal Doll, incomparable lady, can it be that you have brought us the well-known Mr Hal Moody? Ah, yes yes, very striking, most characterful, and so very much exactly as one would have expected, ha ha — we are honoured indeed though we flatter ourselves it was inevitable you should find your way here in due course — oh, allow me, yes, this way please, might I relieve you of your hat, ah, no, I perceive you prefer to retain that cephalic accoutrement, by all means, but may I introduce myself, I am known to one and all as the Captain, and may I express, Mr Moody, if I might, my admiration for, how shall I phrase it, your straightforwardness in coming here, no no, a particular species of courage without a doubt and I am quite confident we shall be more than able, and, needless to add, willing to ease you in actualising your desires given certain reciprocal considerations into which it would diminish us both to go further at this juncture. Yes, I can assure you it is merely a matter of procedures which though startling to the layman are for the initiated routine, and on that point I beg leave to introduce to you our learned colleague and I would go so far as to say the genius of our little republic — see how he appears from his potently befugged laboratory in the back — this is Dr Dogg himself, blinking behind the pebbly lenses of his erudition. Permit me to apologise in advance for the lapses in manners that are certain to ensue in the course of his conduct but we must take into account that he is a man of brilliance such as must not be yoked by the guidelines of quotidian social concord if we are to reap the bounty of his virtue — here, doctor, you see, our valued client himself, yes!’

This guy didn’t draw breath. He only smiled, smooth as Vaseline. He’d ushered us into a room in the heart of the house. In here there were no windows in the stained brick, and the only light was from a bulb dangling bare from the ceiling. The cement floor was tracked with oily marks. Even so, the Captain hovered in the middle of the den like it was the set of a game show.

The short, undernourished figure stumping from the back room, with his multicoloured fingers and the scorchmarks down the front of his smock, was more in keeping. He peered up at me and pursed his lips so that against his yellow pallor his sparse moustaches wriggled in their own grease. Blackheads stuck out of his nose like peppercorns. He began to quiver silently.

The room was furnished like a bankruptcy in a rag-and-bone shop. There was a sofa that looked to have spent some considerable time on a landfill; there was an incongruous full-length mirror, a selection of packing crates, and a three-panelled screen whose printed cotton had been ripped out, leaving only the wooden skeleton. Against one wall stood a glass tank, murky with waterweed, in which I saw a grey-green shape moving with flicks of a flattened leaf tail.

‘I observe that you share our esteemed doctor’s passion for natural history,’ said the Captain. ‘Here we find yet another one of creation’s young creatures which he has, with all the compassion and rigour of his vocation, nursed from sickness into health and now nurtures towards the fullness of its potential. It is, as you will of course immediately have recognised, an immature salamander, in the larval stage. Once it has undergone its metamorphosis and entered into its adult form, the doctor, evincing the hatred of all forms of bondage that is native to his constitution, is determined to set it free to live in the wider world with its many risks and fulfilments. Think of that, Mr Moody, and consider then whether Dr Dogg is not one into whose hands you are confident to entrust your hopes. If he would do so much for a dumb beast, then how much for you?’

The Captain’s gaze tick-tocked between me and the thing in the tank. It was a bug-eyed blighter with a fringe of fleshy lobes around its neck, frantically pulsing its gills and waving its clubbed legs in the water. Dogg seemed to be suppressing a coughing fit.

While he creased himself up, Dolly Common hung back, hard-lipped, and the Captain bobbed around, his large, flawless hands flicking and stroking the air as if conducting our interactions. It was time to show these clowns what was what.

‘What you’re selling, buddy, I ain’t buying,’ I told him, acting like the diminutive sniggerer wasn’t even there. ‘I’m asking the questions here and you’re going to spill, see?’

Dolly rolled her eyes and Dogg was still locked into his soundless convulsions, but the Captain dipped and swayed. ‘But natürlich , but anything we can do, we are at your service entire —’

I cut across him with your name, clipped and curt. ‘What do you know about her?’

‘Ah, ha ha, yes, but of course, we know her of whom you speak, we share even if I may say so a certain intimacy, and who could know her without holding her in a deep regard? Not yourself, certainly, no, not you. He is a seeker, is he not, poor darling Doll? A pilgrim, we might say, don’t you think, my dear doctor?’

His voice wavered as though he was having trouble controlling himself. But he went on: ‘You have tracked a happy trail, Mr Moody, because my colleagues and I are in a position to help you. Oh yes — I see the salmon hope flash in the torrent of your heart, though your manly outer form strives to conceal it — yes, very much so, we can help. More! My friend the doctor here has a power in his receipts to bring you to her direct and immediate. Think of it, sir, you have succeeded against all expectation by the shortest way and now, very now, she will be yours, impossible though it may have seemed, and all you must do is place yourself entirely — in — our — hands.’

He wafted closer like a sheet flapping on a line.

‘What’s he talking about?’ I asked Dolly.

She just shook her head.

‘The lady is not, precisely, here,’ the Captain was saying. ‘But the important thing to bear in mind is that we can, if you will, convey you to her. The process, be assured, is quite painless and requires only that you place in us a modicum of the trust to which, as your well-wishers, if I may say so, we are surely entitled. Doctor, if you would. The, ha ha, solution to your dissatisfactions resides altogether here, in this rarest of the doctor’s preparations, which I am happy to say is administered … orally.’