Bigot Hall

MISTER HIERONYMUS

In fact there was a real bogeyman which my family had been seeing for generations and which they called Mister Hieronymus. Supposedly it appeared at moments of dangerous portent, such as my own birth — everyone asserted Hieronymus had delivered me. Its blurred image appears in a murky sepia-tint of my great grandfather, who is sat blithe on a bicycle — behind him a gaunt figure stands like a human pterodactyl.

But the first encounter I recall was caused by Professor Leap. He was culturing a sample of his nerves and the result was a tangle of microthin wires like an industrial art exhibit. It almost became potbound and Leap removed it to the hothouse, where he had set up a nutrient vat. ‘No sense experimenting with nerves or anything else when they’re in my body,’ he explained, flushed with laughter. ‘But these beauties? Look at ’em!’

This was all fine and dandy until he decided to run a nerve bundle from the hothouse, across the yard and into his arm. ‘This way,’ he said, bedding down in the dining room, ‘I can feel things when I’m not even there.’ We told him he wouldn’t feel anything but the tickle of greenfly but he didn’t care — he liked the idea of having a conscious process occurring outside of his body.

The experiment was carried out at night to reduce the likelihood of someone kicking through the nerve lead. But it seemed the family phantom was never far from the Hall — it blundered into the hothouse and became entangled, making itself known like a chicken snagged on a barbed-wire fence. Professor Leap was shot through with horror vibes, his hair turning instantly white. Mister Hieronymus was wired into his system, filling him with visions of spinelight, subterranean scabgardens and yellow voltaic pain. Leap saw children lost spectacularly in nursery forges. Hieronymus thrashed in the nerve net, firing images of blown ghost and the unravelling dead. Leap yanked the suture-plug from his arm and lay trembling, veins hammering like fists.

In the morning the snow-haired Leap couldn’t stop shaking. He pointed at a window and said he saw tatters of devil flapping there. Snapper was unsympathetic and appalled. ‘This nerve farm of yours has served as a betsy lamp — we’ll have moaning glowheads converging on us from miles around. God almighty!’

‘Mind you,’ began Father.

‘Don’t encourage him!’ yelled Snapper, astonished and exasperated.

The dense mesh in the hothouse had been warped by the intrusion. ‘What if it’s still in there?’ whispered Leap, trembling. ‘I daren’t plug in again.’

‘This ganglia should be destroyed by fire,’ bellowed Snapper. ‘Verger, back me up on this — nerves?’

The Verger pulled up the hood of his robe, his face extinguishing in shadow.

‘Well I for one think it’s the spice,’ I said, barely registering Adrienne’s slow, stern, meaningful shake of the head. ‘And I’ll plug into this mess like the fierce one I am.’

‘There’s no guarantee my nerves won’t cause a rejection,’ said Leap eagerly.

‘Won’t be the first time, Leap,’ said Father amiably, and we all laughed.

All except Snapper, who couldn’t believe what I can only describe as his ears. ‘You can joke about this eh? You can stand and roar. Well by god you’ll know the full extent when the Artless Dodger here has a meeting of minds. He may have been delivered by the bastard but a special relationship? With that thing?’

I really didn’t know what I was doing — mainlining a spectre isn’t wise. But I’d been having end-of-the-world dreams since I was three — if anyone could take it, I could. Hooked into the nerve cable I lay awake in a sleeping bag. ‘Break a leg, laughing boy,’ said Father, going off to bed. ‘And take a gander at the marrow if you get a chance — looks like pepperoni.’

Hours passed like night clouds. I had become forgetful and sleepy. Then the atmosphere shifted. There was a gust of wind — a door slammed like a menu being returned to a waiter. I was approaching the jump ledge of Hieronymus’s sidelong world. The room exploded in my face. I suppose being young I was more tolerant of having my brain torn like a paper bag and after a few preliminary horrors I was sat on the shore of an electrocutive river, my body anchored to the land by a muscle web reminiscent of melted pizza string. Mister Hieronymus was beside me and believe me it was weird. Brows like shoulderblades. Sternum and ribspread like a crab’s underside. Soul flooded with poison. ‘That beak of yours,’ I said and, realising I had been whispering, bellowed as though at a foreigner. ‘That beak of yours. Iconoclastic. Max Ernst. Mythological Woman. I like it.’

‘Many have,’ it said, ‘and lived.’

‘Broken skin,’ I said. ‘Nice one.’

‘Laughing boy, we go back a long way — I delivered you. And I was worried when the Professor felt willing to use you for his experiment — he has a forehead like a dirigible and for a few bob he’d flog his aunt and shadow. But I know how stubborn you are so we may as well get this over with.’

‘What’s the deal?’

‘Things occurring behind the freakshow scenes of the Hall. Things in which you are not included.’

‘You mean Nan’s funerals? I’m going to the next one though I don’t care to — I’ve told them in every bloody language but improvisational mime.’

‘I know — but it’s not that. I daresay it’ll cause a rift but I’ll be judged by god and my peers — none of whose existence I have been able to verify. Fact is, laughing boy, the Hall is building a quantum of energy to be released subsequently in an audacious crescendo. Pulling out the stops as it were. Getting uncomfortable?’

Every atom of the landscape hurt — each man has his share of pain but searing agony smacks of decadence. ‘I want to hear it.’

‘So we have a transcendence operation,’ it continued. I realised that it was fishing — a thread trailed from the high-voltage river into Hieronymus’s mouth and it was hauling in the line by swallowing periodically. Whatever it had caught was nearing the surface. ‘Live and let live, laughing boy. Keep your head down if you have to dig a hole to do so. You sense your own importance far beyond the human range. Life’s a carousel with skeleton horses. And you’re aware the motivating force behind the universe is —’

A burst of static and I was back in the dining room — Snapper stood before me with a flaming torch in one hand and the pulled plug in the other. Behind him was a fiery glow. ‘If god wanted us to cultivate our nerves,’ he roared, ‘he would have told us not to.’

I pushed past him and he followed across the yard. The hothouse was a halloweenhead. Windows popped and the roof exploded, flames belching through. Inside, nerves curled and burnt like nettles.