The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter

chair so tightly up to the scrupulously denuded desk that it looked as though it were denying admittance there to any future body. The Mayor’s pink blotter was thickly furred with mildew and his dried-out water flask, topped with an inverted tumbler, had grown hunched shoulders of settled dust. The indefatigable spiders had woven a canopy across a photograph of the late President on the wall. The clerk opened a cupboard to reveal half a decanterful of mayoral sherry, now grown viscous as treacle, groped on a lower shelf and produced the fur-collared overcoat the Mayor had left behind him on the snowy morning he vanished. The pockets contained only a single balled glove and a dirty handkerchief, nothing of significance.
    But after only the briefest search through the other offices, I found evidence that a certain peep-show proprietor had filed an official request to open a booth on the pier in the preceding month of April; this form, signed with a tentative cross, still waited for the official stamp so my ramshackle friend had clearly gone ahead on his own and set up shop regardless. It was, at least, a connection. I tucked away this form to take back to the Minister, took the clerk’s name and briefly checked his reality rating with my information. It appeared satisfactory. Then I asked him to ring the Mayor’s home, where his daughter still lived with a housekeeper. The clerk got through after only seven or eight minutes and I noted the services were still functioning satisfactorily though the clerk told me the telephone switchboard could neither take nor receive calls outside the immediate neighbourhood while even these local calls were constantly interrupted by voices in unknown languages. After a good deal of country town chat with the Mayor’s house, he ensured me some nights’ lodging there, at the probable source of my bureaucratic mystery.
    ‘It’s all got very run down since the Mayor left,’ he said dubiously. ‘Just the old woman and the, er, girl…’
    Something in his voice indicated a strangeness in the girl. I pricked up the ears of my mind, briskly jotted down the directions he gave me and went to my car. It was now early evening and, since I stopped on my way to eat a supper of meat pies in a fly-blown café too squalid to be illusory, I did not reach the house until it was almost dark. It lay some way out of town at the end of an old-fashioned, rutted lane, where there were no other habitations than one abandoned barn. The sky was the tender, transparent blue of a late summer’s night and a slender intimation of the moon hung above a copse of fir although the tiger lilies of the setting sun still growled in the west. I parked my car in the road and, once the engine ceased to throb, there was no other sound but a faint shimmer of birdsong and the rattle of the quilled boughs of the pines.
    Although I knew it was inhabited, at first I thought the house was quite forsaken for the extensive garden which surrounded it was sunk in the neglect of years. Whoever made the garden first must have loved roses but now the roses had quite overrun the garden and formed dense, forbidding hedges that sent out such an overpowering barrage of perfume that my head was soon swimming. Besides, roses sprayed out fanged, blossoming whips from cupolas which almost foundered under their weight; roses reared up in groves of sturdy standards now the size of young oaks; and roses sent vine-like tendrils along the sombre branches of yew trees, of ornamental rowans, of cherry trees and apple trees already half-suffocated with mistletoe so this summer, which had suited roses so well, seemed to have conspired with the gardener to produce an orgiastic jungle of all kinds of roses, and though I could not distinguish any of their separate shapes or colours, their individual scents all blended into a single, intolerably sweet essence which made every nerve in my body ache and tingle.
    Roses had climbed up the already luxuriantly