Chapter One Hundred and Forty-Four
Suddenly, it had been fated that Frau Hühnerbeinstein, as representative of Old Religion, and Miss Trojczakowski, as avatar of the New Morality, should meet in epic combat as a means of proving the validity of their respective positions; and so, each found her feet plodding, for reasons neither understood, toward the theatre.
But another “battle” was already underway in that very venue: Herr Voot and Monsieur Mifkin, with their ragtag bands of merry men, had wandered to the theatre, bent on a final battle to end all battles. Mysterious letters had begun popping up, affixed to various walls and furniture around the hotel; then, confusing, contradictory rumours were whispered from ear to ear (because that part of the anatomy was judged the most appropriate for the conveyance of audio-based information); and finally, the manager, the deputy manager, and their soldiers were all called, wordlessly, to the clash. The rest of the occupants of the hotel, guests and staff alike, followed, as along the stations of the Cross.
The lamps had all been lit. The arch loomed above them like a maw. The footsteps of the participants echoed far out from the theatre, as if the import of their actions would reverberate round the world, if not, notwithstanding the absence of sound in the vacuum of space, the cosmos. Voot and Mifkin, the leaders, stepped up onto the proscenium, crossed to the middle, and stopped before one another. Their disciples, and the audience, respectfully taking their seats, awaited the commencement of hostilities. Herr Mifkin, seizing the initiative like a crocodile a frog, cleared his throat and confessed: “I have many regrets.” He nodded to Voot, then turned to face the audience more generally. “You see, when a young man, I abandoned my mother and my siblings. Out on the streets, I prostituted myself, with little sense of shame, and less pleasure. Then to the countryside I fled, where the goats eyed me curiously, sniffing my dishonour, then turned their noble backs upon my darkened brow. Years later, when, flush with funds from renting my arse, I went back home, my family had vanished. I never saw them again. And what had I won? Freedom? Cash? A rectum torn to ribbons? That was but the first stone in an unending trek cross a stream, each stone a regret. I step upon them still.”
He bowed to Herr Voot, who returned the bow, and, seeing it must now be his turn, addressed both his adversary and the stalls: “I have come to realise, deep within myself, that respect of any kind—certainly for something as temporal as the directorship of a hotel—is, ultimately, devoid of worth. There is a far profounder life to be led in humility: the deep, simple sleep in your lover’s arms, competing for nothing with no one, each person content with a tiny garden and the same shared sun overhead.”
He bowed to Mifkin, and Mifkin to him, then they clasped hands, turned to face the crowd, and bowed as one. The audience were too weary to offer applause, but mumbled modest approval. Voot and Mifkin shook hands, and called each other “friend”.
Now Frau Hühnerbeinstein and Miss Trojczakowski climbed to the stage and met in the centre. Voot and Mifkin gave them space for their confrontation. Those audience members who had not fallen asleep held their breath.
“Shall we fight?” asked Gilda of Enid.
Enid shrugged. “What about?”
Now it was Gilda’s turn to shrug (so she did). “I’m not sure. I guess I’m supposed to defend traditional morality, and you’re supposed to fight for the freedom to wrench from God, Prometheus-like, the right to self-determination.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” asked Enid with a wry smile. “I hadn’t realised.”
“I think so,” said Gilda, before admitting, “I’m not really sure myself.”
“It’s a lovely theatre,” Enid observed, looking around.
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“I imagine you’ve played far posher ones, in your trade.”
“Well, yes, but never before so select and appreciative a gathering.”
They both giggled. They proceeded to chat about costumes and plays they’d both seen, while nearby, Voot and Mifkin clowned around, their teams milling together into one joshing group, and the audience chatted unconcernedly, when the stage cracked open and lava inexplicably began to boil out of it, followed by the ascension of a glimmering woman in a white gown, with a horned tiara, what appeared to be ears of mouldy grain stuck thereupon, unfurled hair rippling, with her gown, like a jellyfish in a peaceful sea, unpupiled eyes, and a crescent moon burnt upon her brow.
“Who the fuck are you?!” Gilda wanted to know.
“A sensible question,” the goddess judged, in an admirably well-enunciated voice which sounded inside each observer’s head. “You may call me ‘Nisaba’. You might also know me as ‘Seshat’. Or ‘Trixie the Rainbow Pony’, in a few obscure myths designed more, to be fair, for children.”
Gilda was a little envious of her costumier, whoever it might have been, but thought the time unsuited to inquiry. Instead, she turned to the others and declared, “She’s come to avenge righteousness and punish the debauched!”
“No, not really,” Nisaba demurred. “It’s not quite as clear-cut as all that. You stupid humans are always misproportioning things.”
“What do you mean?” someone called out.
“I was starting to tell you, before that pointless interruption,” Nisaba sighed, then went on: “What you don’t see is that you don’t see things. You can’t see things—because you’re just stupid humans, as I’ve already mentioned. Am I making any sense?”
Some people looked to each other in befuddlement. A couple tentatively nodded. One man slept, imagining himself a mayfly.
“Look,” she continued, “you’re not smart enough—as individuals or as a species—to know what’s right or wrong. Or even to be certain that there are such things as right and wrong. Or to know if what’s right and wrong, if such concepts legitimately apply, varies from place to place, time to time and person to person. And if you concluded that they did, then if you were crass enough to choose to ride atop a moral pendulum, you wouldn’t be at a vantage from which to see where it swings. Capisce?”
She surveyed her audience to assess whether she’d gotten through to them. She concluded she had not.
“It’s all a little hazy,” Enid admitted.
“All right. Look. I’m going to put it one way, but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s necessarily the right way, or the only way. All right? Every deed you do damns you. Every ant you don’t bother to perceive before setting down your foot—damns you. Every feeling you hurt—damns you. Every thing you covet—damns you. Every thought you hoard for yourself rather than devote to others—damns you. Even the impudence to cling to a threadbare hope of salvation in this your hopeless existence—yes, even this damns you.”
Her auditors did not exactly welcome this concept with open arms, but appeared, rather, a trifle downcast.
“And as for sex?” Nisaba went on. “As you can imagine, all sex—any sex—damns you. But then, you’re pretty much damned anyway, aren’t you? So go on—you’re damned if you do, and, hey, damned if you don’t.”
The spectators who had arrived in the theatre in good faith in order to witness a wholesome and edifying duel were a little irked to be confronted with so much damnation. It was enough to put one off one’s lunch.
“Why have you come?” asked Sri Gangakanta, who, shaking like a suicidal engineer on a runaway locomotive, climbed onto the stage.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Nisaba, though many present privately felt it unlikely she had not heard.
“Why have you come?” Gangakanta repeated. “Was it just to snap the last fragile flower-stalk of hope in our lives?”
“Not at all. At first I came to kill that idiot Snede,” she explained.
“Why?” asked Enid.
“Isn’t it obvious?” asked Nisaba.
“Not really,” Enid answered, truthfully.
Nisaba shrugged a glorious shrug. “Basically, he gave up a very respectable position as a clerk for a well-run grain exporter. He retired, and came out here to go hiking in the mountains, of all things. I mean, can you imagine a bigger waste of time? I can’t.”
“And that’s it?” Enid asked.
“Well, it was the turning from me in his heart, you know.”
“Did he deserve death?” Gangakanta demanded.
“Well, do any of you deserve death?” she replied. “Given the fact that all of you end up dead, I’d say—yes.”
“So what about the others?” asked Enid. “What did they do, precisely, to annoy you? They were never clerks, so far as I know.”
“You’ll have to remind me,” Nisaba replied. “I can’t remember the names of all the people I kill, you know.”
Enid racked her thoughts. Who had they been, again? She turned to the others in the audience—a few people looked on, stunned, while others were chatting about other things, and a few still snored. “Hey, somebody! Who else died?”
“Snede!” someone shouted out.
Enid shook her head. “No, we’ve already accounted for him. Who else?”
“Snede?” someone asked.
“They just said that,” someone else answered.
“Oh,” said the person who’d just volunteered “Snede” again, then was silent.
“Snede!” somebody else, who had been half-paying attention, called out, but they ignored him.
“Wasn’t there that general fellow?” somebody asked.
“Do you mean, ‘a general fellow’, like, a regular person?” Voot asked.
“No, no—I mean, in the military. A general, or whatever.”
“The coronel!” Enid cried. “That’s right! We had a coronel here, a—what’s-his-name. From Italy.”
“I think it was Spain,” Gangakanta, nitpicking at the end of the world, corrected.
Enid scoffed, “Whatever!”
Nisaba seemed to remember. “That rings a bell. Old fellow? Never smiled?”
“That’s right!” said Voot. “That’s the man.”
“Oh, well, he harboured angry thoughts about other countries. When he was a soldier. Idolatry of his nation, deification of dirt into a fatherland, and so on. He’d had it coming.”
“What about Sanns?” someone called out from the peanut gallery.
“Sanns?” Enid looked to Gilda, then to Voot, Mifkin, and Nisaba. “Who was Sanns?”
“Wasn’t he the annoying one?” asked Mifkin.
“That’s right,” Voot agreed. “He played stupid tricks on people.”
“Oh-h-h-h-h,” Enid recalled. She turned to Nisaba, and asked: “What about him?”
“That’s right. He had really bad taste in music.”
“Really? Like what?”
“Just rubbishy music hall stuff. He’d go to the loo whenever a trained singer came on, or hang out in the bar till someone started a comedy song.”
“What about her highness?” Sniggly called out.
Nisaba looked offended. “Aren’t I my highness?”
“He means the duchess,” Voot explained.
“What’s a duchess?”
“Marie-Adélaïde,” Sniggly called out.
“Who the hell was that?” Nisaba asked.
“She was a guest here.” Enid tried to describe her: “Tall, a little plump. Mid-fifties, I should think.”
“Her highness never surpassed the age of twenty-nine!” Sniggly lied.
Enid whispered to Nisaba, “Mid-fifties.”
“Oh, yes, right. I gotcha.” Nisaba chuckled. “The one who put on airs?”
“That’s right.”
“To which she was entirely entitled!” Sniggly hastened to add.
“She kept thinking about clothes all the time,” Nisaba yawned. “I couldn’t stand it.”
“And Senhor La Paiva?” demanded Philip, who had gotten out of his seat and walked round to stand in front of the stage. “My father? The kindest man in the world?”
“Well, I know you’re upset, dear boy, seeing how he’s your father and all, and don’t blame me, but we had a kind of little survey amongst all the gods, just last year, and your father didn’t even come up in the top five hundred million kindest people—and that’s just Earth!”
“Regardless—why did he have to die?”
“Oh, well, he didn’t have to, I suppose. But then again, it was much better both for the universe and for him that he did.”
“He knew too much,” Gangakanta guessed.
Nisaba turned to him. “Clever boy!”
“So what’s going to happen now?” Gilda inquired. “Have you come to save us?”
“Save you? From what? From your earthly vessels?”
“I meant, this hotel,” Gilda specified.
“Oh! No, no, I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you all, too.”
There were some muted exclamations of disagreement.
“I’m sorry, I really am, but there’s nothing for it but to punish you all.”
“Why?” someone asked.
“All right, look—just forget everything I’ve said. Your human words are too imprecise, even the simplest of them too clogged with ambivalence, to keep the truth from sloshing over the brim. I’ll try to put it another way, a completely contradictory way: use your brains, and look into your hearts. If you look into your hearts, I think you’re smart enough to see. In fact, if you try hard enough—if you strain your li’l ol’ noggins to breaking point—I can pretty much guarantee that every man and woman has been granted just the right amount of brains to see their own iniquity. Otherwise, it would hardly be fair, would it?”
“Is none of us worthy of being saved?” asked someone from the audience—someone who had, it must be said, a pretty high opinion of himself.
Nisaba held her chin and tried to think. “Well, there was Pluck. He was the best among you.”
“Really?” Enid asked.
Nisaba nodded. “Yeah. He really tried hard. He was a good detective, I think. I mean, he didn’t figure me out, of course, but that would have been pretty hard. Don’t you think?”
All agreed that it would have been.
“Anyway, if anybody deserved to be spared my wrath, it would have been him. But, look: you lot killed him yourselves. That wasn’t very nice, now was it?”
No one could say with any sincerity that it was. Only one anonymous guest, toward the back, called out that in his opinion, it actually was a fairly nice thing to do, but he was roundly ignored.
Then no one spoke, for a time. Everybody waited patiently. People looked from Nisaba to each other, then back again. Nobody was really sure what to do.
“. . .So, ah. . .” That was Frau Hühnerbeinstein sticking her toe into the water—conversationally speaking—again.
“Yes?” asked Nisaba.
“What happens now?”
“Oh! Good of you to remind me. I was enjoying this old theatre so much that I almost forgot why I’d come. So, then, without further ado—” Nisaba pointed at Frau Hühnerbeinstein, who shrieked maniacally, hopelessly, and burst into flame.
Some people panicked, some watched it as a good bit of fun, and some droopily blinked their eyes.
Nisaba pointed left and right, annihilating guests and staff. Limbs burnt to a crisp, skulls erupted into flame, chests cracked open and boiling eyes peered down at their own hearts melting away.
Aloysius and Missus Drig made an attempt to flee the goddess, but were both struck down.
Herra Brotherus, on the other hand, sprinted directly toward Nisaba, pleading for the ultimate pain of annihilation. This was he granted. He ejaculated when he died, some of it spraying onto Nisaba’s gown, who snatched the theatre curtain and wiped it away in revulsion, barking, “You disgusting little pig! I ought to bring you back to life so I might kill you again!”, then resumed her slaughter.
Mister Stoupes, stood in the centre of the stalls, watching men and women be destroyed by the goddess, was hit by an epiphany:
All men aspire to the condition of lesbian; therefore do all men fail.
He was drunk, but he was certain he’d hit upon the truth. He turned to Nisaba, and begged her: “Glorious goddess—use your might to metamorphose me into a woman, then bed me, I beg you!”
She killed him instead.
But in his death, his past came racing back: an All-American prep school type whose heart was shredded by his college love. Daphne, her name was. He never forgot her. Any other girl he met, he searched in her for echoes of Daphne. Even the whores, of whom there were many, and on whom he frittered away his allowance, were ranked by him according to the sole criterion of resemblance, in appearance, voice, or personality, to her. He was absorbed into the family business, but, though it could hardly be said he expended much effort, he burnt out, so was packed off on a tour of Europe. He’d been due back a year ago, but, reluctant to settle into the groove which led through soul-killing tedium into retirement and finally to a death steeped in regret, kept extending his trip. He didn’t know why he’d fallen for Enid—she was much too old and unattractive, but there was something, on which he couldn’t put his finger, of Daphne within her.
He was already on the precipice of death due to a drowned liver before the goddess cut him down. And he’d been miserable—he hadn’t found a substitute for Daphne, he hadn’t got over her and, while through every other area of his life he’d slid aimlessly, prosperously, on vacuity and charm, he’d feared that he’d peaked. He’d feared he was too weak for this world. The hint that his weakness could be a strength hadn’t landed on him, his being just a tad too dull-witted. Thus, his death was not wholly unwelcome.
Monsieurs Bartoff and Mifkin died clinging to one another, barking profanity as one. Madame Tautphoeus, witnessing this, ran off into the stalls—packed now as they were with flaming corpses—to reclaim Millicent, her beloved Pekingese who was suddenly fatherless. She was there—she grabbed her, hugged her to her breast, and soaked her lovely one’s fur with her tears.
Herr Voot and Sniggly died in each other’s arms.
As did Misters Drig and O’Herlihy.
When it was her turn—when the goddess turned to her—Modeste turned round, bent over and shat a huge, repellent stream of shit which knocked Nisaba down. Nisaba popped right back up and destroyed Modeste and Philip with two fiery blasts from her palms, screaming curses over the state of her gown.
All the guests and staff your author has been negligent in mentioning died too, you may rest assured, Reader. Some were chatting about the weather, on point of death; some were mentally itemising which of their socks had gone missing; and some merely shrugged resignedly.
When Madame Tautphoeus perceived her death was calling her, she dropped Millicent to the floor and shooed her away, then turned to face her fate with stoical brow. Forever stifled and frustrated, she finally orgasmed upon her annihilation, at which point, her backstory was revealed:
She’d led a pampered life, inheriting her parents’ wealth after their early deaths. She chose never to marry; she rejected all suitors as beneath her. Instead, throwing her governess’s moral instruction to the wind, she paid gigolos to attend to her rough sexual cravings. But while her body could withstand such brutal dealing, her emotions were moth-wing-fragile. She locked herself in her mansion, which was run without interference from her by her dedicated, lightly thieving staff. Often debilitated by panics and regrets, she didn’t leave her bedroom for weeks at a time. She kept a menagerie of usual and unusual creatures, on whom she showered all her affection. When the devilish urge struck her, she would rouse her coachman from his drunken slumber, trek to town and, though she hardly needed the money, allow herself to be photographed in the nude for limited circulation amongst discerning gentlemen collectors for small change. Immediately shamed, she would blubber all the way back to her estate, scream at the gardener for the slightest misalignment of barrenwort, and brick herself up even tighter in her cloister. Only now, in the twilit years of her life, had she made a last effort to break free from her fear of the world, and her ungovernable compulsions, and set off on this holiday, only to have been overcome with despair at how it had turned out. And still, one regret loomed paramount over all the rest in her dying thoughts: she had never paid back Curtis/Thaddeus for his ill-treatment of her. With her final thought, she begged the goddess to rectify this.
Sri Gangakanta watched the violent death of all these people around him. The logician in him dismissed it as preposterous; the statistician in him scoffed at calculating the odds. But the Hindu in him, whom he had sought to smother into non-existence for so long, nodded with understanding. He decided, in any event, that he was too old for this wo