Avram Davidson - Dr. Bhumbo Singh

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2024-11-24 0 0 71.46KB 11 页 5.9玖币

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Dr. Bhumbo Singh

AVRAM DAVIDSON

Trevelyan Street used to be four blocks long, but now it is only three,

and its aft end is blocked by the abutment of an overpass. (Do you find the

words Dead End to have an ominous ring?) The large building in the 300

block used to be consecrated to worship by the Mesopotamian Methodist

Episcopal Church (South) but has since been deconsecrated and is

presently a glue warehouse. The small building contains the only

Bhuthanese grocery and deli outside of Asia; its trade is small. And the

little (and wooden) building lodges an extremely dark and extemely dirty

little studio which sells spells, smells, and shrunken heads. Its trades are

even smaller.

The spells are expensive, the smells are exorbitant, and the prices of its

shrunken heads — first chop though they be — are simply inordinate.

The studio, however, has a low rent (it has a low ceiling, too), pays no

license fee — it is open (when it is open) only between the hours of seven

p.m. and seven a.m., during which hours the municipal license

department does not function — and lacks not for business enough to keep

the proprietor, a native of the Andaman Islands, in the few, the very few

things, without which he would find life insupportable: namely curried

squid, which he eats — and eats and eats — baroque pink pearls, which he

collects, and (alone, and during the left phase of the moon) wears; also live

tree-shrews. Some say that they are distantly cognate to the primates and,

hence, it is supposed, to Man. Be that as it may. In their tiny ears he

whispers directions of the most unspeakable sort, and then turns them

loose, with great grim confidence. And an evil laugh.

The facts whereof I speak, I speak with certainty, for they were related

to me by my friend Mr. Underhand; and Mr. Underhand has never been

known to lie.

At any rate, at least, not to me.

“A good moonless evening to you, Underhand Misterjee,” says the

proprietor, at the termination of one lowering, glowering afternoon in

Midnovember, “and a bad evening indeed to those who have had the

fortune to incur your exceedingly just displeasure.” He scratches a filthy

ear-lobe with a filthy finger.

—Midnovember, by the way, is the months which was banished from

the Julian Calendar by Julian the Apostate; it has never appeared in the

Gregorian Calendar: a good thing, too—

“And a good evening to you. Dr. Bhumbo Singh,” says Mr. Underhand.

“As for them — Ha Ha!” He folds his thin and lilac-gloved hands over the

handle of his stalking-crutch. Even several so-called experts have declared

the handle (observed by light far less dim than that in the shop of Bhumbo

Singh) to be ivory: they are wrong: it is bone, purely bone… Or perhaps

one would better say, impurely bone…

“Ha Ha!” echoes (Dr.) Bhumbo Singh. He has in fact no right at all to

this distinguished family name, which he has assumed in dishonor of a

certain benevolent Sikh horse-coper who in a rash and malignly

constellated hour took the notion to adopt him.

Now to business; “A spell, Underhand Sahib?” he next asks, rubbing his

chin. His chin bears a dull-blue tattoo which would strike terror to the

hearts and loosen the strings of the bowels of the vilest ruffians in

Rangoon, Lahore, Peshawar, Pernambuco, and Wei-hatta-hatta yet

unhanged, save, of course, that it is almost always by virtue of dust, the

inky goo of curried squid, and a hatred of water akin to hydrophobia,

totally invisible. “A spell, a spell? A nice spell? A severed head?”

“Fie upon your trumpery spells,” Mr. Eevelyn (two es) Underhand says

easily. “They are fit only for witches, warlocks, and Boy Scouts or Girl. As

for your severed heads, shrunken or otherwise: Ho Ho.”

He puts the tip of his right index finger alongside of the right naris of

his nose. He winks.

Dr. Bhumbo Singh attempts a leer, but his heart is not in it. “They cost

uncommon high nowadays, even wholesale,” he whines. And then he drops

commercial mummery and simply waits.

“I have come for a smell, Doctor,” Underhand says, flicking away with

the tip of his stalking-crutch a cricket scaped from the supply kept to feed

the tree-shrews. Dr. Bh. Singh’s red little eyes gleam like those of a rogue

ferret in the rutting season.

Underhand gives his head a brisk, crisp nod, and smacks his pursed

lips. A smell, subtle, slow, pervasive. A vile smell. A puzzling smell. A smell

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