Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

I could just barely perceive, within the shadowed cabinet, a human face. Human ? There was a hideous concavity within the face, as if some of its portions had been gnawed away, and the remainder twisted beyond recognition. The candlelight threw its faint gleam against a bright cicatrix of scar tissue, bordered by a single pale eye and a cavity where nostrils should have been. A man that was used up . . .

“ This church was built upon the wreckage of the Richmond Theatre ,” said the voice within Maelzel’s Chess-Player. “ I was there that dread night, Edgar Poe. In the first act of the melodrama of ‘The Bleeding Nun’, in the stage-setting representing the house of Baptiste the Robber, a chandelier was employed to illumine the stage. At the second-act climax, a call-boy was ordered to raise the chandelier into the fly-lofts, where the candles could burn in safety .”

The patchworked face within the cabinet paused, as if each word required immense effort. Then it spoke again: “ I stood watching, in the wings. I snatched the rope from the boy’s hands, intentionally pulling the chandelier askew so that it went into the scenery flats. These were made of oiled canvas, and they burnt most industriously .”

“You did this?” I asked. “Why?”

“ In the service of envy, and anger, and a few other sins. I was a disgraced gambler, a drunkard, a failed actor. My own inadequacy before the footlights was made more embittered by the envy I held for my wife’s superlative talents on the stage .”

The Chess-Player moved within the cabinet. I beheld his face now from a fresh angle. The thick scarrings and disfigurements were less numerous here. In utter revulsion, I discerned in his mutilated countenance a grotesque parody of my own face . . .

“ I was David Poe, your father ,” said the beckoning thing. “ When word reached me in Philadelphia of my wife’s penniless death in a Richmond tavern, I came back here in mourning: to the Richmond Theatre, the scene of her triumphs. I could scarce contain my rage as I stood in the wings and I heard your mother’s understudy speak her lines. How dare this actress live and breathe, when your mother could not? How dare the audience applaud? ”

“Wretch!” I said. “You speak concern for my mother, yet she might never have died in poverty if you had not abandoned her.”

“ True enough ,” said the remnants of my father. “ I had no right to live, and I hungered for death. I coveted my wife’s safe passage out of the living world, and I decided to join her onstage in some other realm. When I set the theatre afire, eighteen nights after my wife’s inglorious death, I resolved to immolate myself in the flames . . . and to take with me as many innocents as possible .”

“You succeeded in that last particular.”

“ True. The place went up like matchwood, and the entire Richmond Theatre was aflame in two minutes. The pit and the stalls were swiftly abandoned, as the patrons in the dollar seats fled quickly. The galleries upstairs were not so fortunate .” The half-man in the cabinet gestured pathetically; I glimpsed the stub of an interrupted limb, bound in ragged bandagings.

“ I was gravely maimed in the conflagration ,” moaned the voice of the patchworked half-man. “ The major portions of my limbs were amputated in a Richmond poor-ward, where I took care not to give my true name. I knew that my family in Baltimore would not welcome me, so I sent them false news of my death. I lived on such charity as I could find .” The half-man coughed. “ Charity came easier for me after August 1812, when I could claim I lost my limbs as a soldier in the siege of Detroit, in Madison’s war against the British .” He coughed again. In the light of the church candles, I saw that the chess-player’s disfigured mouth was coughing up blood.

“How does Herr Maelzel enter this conundrum?” I asked.

“ Maelzel was my savior ,” said the maimed thing that alleged to be my father. “ Maelzel had need of a chess-master who could fit into a small cabinet .” The half-man laughed mirthlessly, and brandished one of his stumps. “ In this one vocation, my abbreviated limbs give me an advantage over men more complete than myself. If only your mother . . .”

The Automaton fell silent.

“What about my mother?” I asked.

A faint rustling within the oblong box.

“You spoke of my mother,” I persisted.

The thing in the box uttered a profane oath.

From that instant, I found myself overcome by a grotesque phrensy. It felt precisely as if my arms and legs were suspended on wires, and I became a marionette whose movements were governed by an unseen puppet-master. Confronting me was a man who masqueraded as an Automaton. True! But now I became an Automaton in the guise of a man . . . for my soul no longer captained my flesh, and I found myself moving and gesticulating as if by clockwork: no more the master of my actions, but compelled as if by gears and levers unseen. As a puppet moves on jointed limbs, so I sprang to the altar.

Just as a chesspiece, with no soul of its own, is manipulated by a grandmaster who cares not for the pawn’s ultimate fate, so I was controlled now by a mind alien to myself .

On the chancel’s wall was a wrought-iron sconce, holding three lighted candles. My hands grasped it, obeying the whispered commands of some unseen clockmaker – perhaps it was Maelzel – as I seized this heavy implement, tore it loose of the wall and smashed it squarely into the carved wooden head of the Turkish chess-player, knocking aside the plumed turban and shattering the face. As the Automaton’s face burst open, I saw the articulated eyes tumble forth; they were fashioned of Vienna-glass, and for one instant my own mind was freed from the clockmaker’s grasp long enough for me to admire the workmanship of the counterfeit eyes. Then the mind of the clockmaker seized me again, bidding me to strike the hour. I brought the sconce down – again! again! – upon the cabinet of Maelzel.

The Automaton was headless, for I had decapitated the figure of the Turk. Now a low groan emerged from the figure’s abdomen, and I recalled that the monstrous figure within the chess-player was concealed in that portion. I fractured this with the sconce. I had the fierce pleasure of seeing blood upon the wrought-iron flange in my grasp. I brought it down again . . .

There was an odour of burning cloth. I turned, and perceived that in my phrensy I had scattered the candles. One of these had ignited the drapes behind the altar. And now the chancel was afire.

Inside the cabinet of Maelzel, some scuttling thing – an abridged edition of a man – was struggling desperately to free itself. I brought the sconce down once more, full in the patch-quilt face of the inhuman occupant. The thing groaned, and went slack. I saw the two remaining fingers of its fragmented hand fall open. A single chessman – a carved wooden pawn – tumbled out of the maimed grasp, and it fell upon the burning altar-cloth.

The nameless grandmaster released my soul from the endgame. The unseen puppeteer unloosed my strings. I was no longer clockworked.

I turned, and fled the Memorial Church as it burst into flame. In the portico, I was confronted by a tall white apparition. It was the marble tablet, commemorating the names of the dead who perished on this site amidst the burning Richmond Theatre. I was tempted to add one more soul to the death-list: the name of my father, David Poe.

I awoke to the strong vapours of distilled spirits. I found myself sprawled on the floor of my room in Mrs Yarrington’s lodging-house The door is latched. The derangement of my clothes, and the spasmodic trembling of my limbs, give token that once more I have succumbed to intemperance. My shirtfront is soaked with bourbon, and a shattered bottle lies nearby.