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‘Darling, this is an original Drexel.’ I took one of the files. ‘I just want to convince myself that I’m going insane.’
I started cutting a series of small notches all over the statue, making sure they were exactly the width of the file apart. The metal was soft and worked easily; on the surface there was a lot of rust but underneath it had a bright sappy glint.
‘All right,’ I said when I had finished. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’
We sat on the veranda and waited. I fixed my eyes on the statue and could have sworn that it didn’t move. But when we went back an hour later the gondola had swung right round again, hanging down over us like an immense metal mouth.
There was no need to check the notch intervals against the file. They were all at least double the original distance apart.
‘Mr Hamilton,’ Carol said. ‘Look at this.’
She pointed to one of the spikes. Poking through the outer scale of chrome were a series of sharp little nipples. One or two were already begi
Carefully I examined the rest of the statue. All over it new shoots of metal were coming through: arches, barbs, sharp double helixes, twisting the original statue into a thicker and more elaborate construction. A medley of half-familiar sounds, fragments of a dozen overtures and symphonies, murmured all over it. The statue was well over twelve feet high. I felt one of the heavy struts and the pulse was stronger, beating steadily through the metal, as if it was thrusting itself on to the sound of its own music.
Carol was watching me with a pinched and worried look.
‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘It’s only growing.’
We went back to the veranda and watched.
By six o’clock that evening it was the size of a small tree. A spirited simultaneous rendering of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture and Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto trumpeted across the garden.
‘The strangest thing about it,’ Raymond said the next morning, raising his voice above the din, ‘is that it’s still a Drexel.’
‘Still a piece of sculpture, you mean?’
‘More than that. Take any section of it and you’ll find the original motifs being repeated. Each vane, each helix has all the authentic Drexel ma
‘Not to mention all five piano concertos — played at once,’ I said sourly. Raymond’s loquacious delight in this musical monster out in the garden a
Carol handed Raymond another scotch. ‘What do you think we ought to do?’
Raymond shrugged. ‘Why worry?’ he said airily. ‘When it starts tearing the house down cut it back. Thank God we had it dismantled. If this had happened in Vermilion Sands…’
Carol touched my arm. ‘Mr Hamilton, perhaps that’s what Lorraine Drexel expected. She wanted it to start spreading all over the town, the music driving everyone crazy—’
‘Careful,’ I warned her. ‘You’re ru
‘Why don’t you, then?’
‘I want to see how far it’ll go,’ I said. In fact my motives were more mixed. Clearly, before she left, Lorraine Drexel had set some perverse jinx at work within the statue, a bizarre revenge on us all for deriding her handiwork. As Raymond had said, the present babel of symphonic music had no co
I watched the statue reaching slowly across the lawn. It had collapsed under its own weight and lay on its side in a huge angular spiral, twenty feet long and about fifteen feet high, like the skeleton of a futuristic whale. Fragments of the Nutcracker Suite and Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony sounded from it, overlaid by sudden blaring excerpts from the closing movements of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. The selection of these hack classics seemed deliberately designed to get on my nerves.
I had been up with the statue most of the night. After Carol went to bed I drove my car on to the strip of lawn next to the house and turned on the headlamps. The statue stood out almost luminously in the darkness, booming away to itself, more and more of the sonic cores budding out in the yellow glare of the lights. Gradually it lost its original shape; the toothed grille enveloped itself and then put out new struts and barbs that spiralled upwards, each throwing off secondary and tertiary shoots in its turn. Shortly after midnight it began to lean and then suddenly toppled over.
By now its movement was corkscrew. The plinth had been carried into the air and hung somewhere in the middle of the tangle, revolving slowly, and the main foci of activity were at either end. The growth rate was accelerating. We watched a new shoot emerge. As one of the struts curved round a small knob poked through the flaking chrome. Within a minute it grew into a spur an inch long, thickened, began to curve and five minutes later had developed into a full-throated sonic core twelve inches long.
Raymond pointed to two of my neighbours standing on the roofs of their houses a hundred yards away, alerted by the music carried across to them. ‘You’ll soon have everyone in Vermilion Sands out here. If! were you, I’d throw an acoustic drape over it.’
‘If I could find one the size of a te
Using the hacksaw, I cut off a two-foot limb and handed it to Dr Blackett, an eccentric but amiable neighbour who sometimes dabbled in sculpture himself. We walked back to the comparative quiet of the veranda. The single sonic core emitted a few random notes, fragments from a quartet by Webern.
‘What do you make of it?’
‘Remarkable,’ Blackett said. He bent the bar between his hands. ‘Almost plastic.’ He looked back at the statue. ‘Definite circumnutation there. Probably phototropic as well. Hmm, almost like a plant.’
‘Is it alive?’
Blackett laughed. ‘My dear Hamilton, of course not. How can it be?’
‘Well, where is it getting its new material? From the ground?’
‘From the air. I don’t know yet, but I imagine it’s rapidly synthesizing an allotropic form of ferrous oxide. In other words, a purely physical rearrangement of the constituents of rust.’ Blackett stroked his heavy brush moustache and stared at the statue with a dream-like eye. ‘Musically, it’s rather curious — an appalling conglomeration of almost every bad note ever composed. Somewhere the statue must have suffered some severe sonic trauma. It’s behaving as if it had been left for a week in a railroad shunting yard. Any idea what happened?’
‘Not really.’ I avoided his glance as we walked back to the statue. It seemed to sense us coming and began to trumpet out the opening bars of Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ march. Deliberately breaking step, I said to Blackett: ‘So in fact all I have to do to silence the thing is chop it up into two-foot lengths?’
‘If it worries you. However, it would be interesting to leave it, assuming you can stand the noise. There’s absolutely no danger of it going on indefinitely.’ He reached up and felt one of the spars. ‘Still firm, but I’d say it was almost there. It will soon start getting pulpy like an over-ripe fruit and begin to shred off and disintegrate, playing itself out, one hopes, with Mozart’s Requiem and the finale of the Gotterdammerung.’ He smiled at me, showing his strange teeth. ‘Die, if you prefer it.’