Robert Rankin - Necrophenia

‘Heaven forbid,’ I said. ‘You don’t think that can be true, do you?’

‘Probably not. But we could try it out. Check passers-by, see if our descriptions of them tally.’

‘What about Mum?’ I said. ‘We could start with her.’

Mother entered the room to top up the coal scuttle. And as she emptied coal from the pockets of her apron into it, Andy and I sized her up and committed her description to memory.

Which, upon her departure, we shared. And it tallied.

‘I think it’s just him,’ I said. ‘I think he has a special gift.’

‘Perhaps he doesn’t even know that he has it.’

‘Or perhaps he has just acquired it, through his alchemical experiments or something. Which would explain why his sister doesn’t think that he’s the real him. A family member would have an instinctive intuition thing going, wouldn’t they?’

‘That’s very good,’ said Andy. ‘I like that. By the by, I don’t recall you discussing money with this Lola Perbright. Money, to whit, our fee.’

‘We haven’t earned it yet,’ I said.

‘So how do you propose that we do?’

‘Well,’ I said to Andy, ‘I have been thinking about that. And I have come up with a bit of a plan. I think you will like it because it will involve you putting on a disguise. And you do like doing that, don’t you?’

And Andy nodded.

‘So you and this Pongo character, whoever or whatever he might prove to be, have something in common. Lean over here and I’ll whisper my plan.’

‘You will whisper?’

‘I will.’

And I did.

Now, as this was before I had perfected the Tyler Technique, I was still going in for the proactive, hands-on school of private detection. And if you are hands-on, you are quite likely to find yourself getting your hands dirty.

And this I soon found out, to my cost.

We returned to the Perbright residence. At midnight. I wore my trench coat and fedora, but in order to disguise myself (as I did not have a tweed jacket) I also wore a pair of sunglasses.

Andy, in his turn, had taken a great deal of trouble to get his disguise ‘just so’. And ‘just so’ it most certainly was, and I congratulated him upon it.

There were no Number 65s at midnight, so we had to walk. And I recall commenting that it was a very great shame that the Bedford van that was The Sumerian Kynges’ gig bus had not been discovered along with all the music gear. And that, as detectives, we really needed a car.

And Andy said that he would take care of the car business. And that he had not forgotten that he was to be the new lead singer of The Sumerian Kynges (although I remain unsure as to how he got this idea in his head) and how I should call Mr Ishmael and ask when rehearsals would recommence.

And we trudged on through the night. Although the snow was beginning to melt. Which made the way now slushy.

We trudged and tromped and slopped and when we arrived at the Perbright residence we searched its façade for lights.

But lights were there none. Which we hoped meant that all within had gone to bed. In separate beds, of course.

We entered the front garden with stealth and crept towards the house. Once there, we flattened ourselves against the front door and I instructed my brother as to what should happen next.

‘You swarm up the wall and enter by an attic window,’ I whispered to him. Then creep down through the house, open this door and let me in.’

‘Swarm?’ my brother whispered back.

‘Swarm,’ I agreed and mimed, with my fingers, swarming motions.

‘No.’ And Andy shook his head. ‘We’ll both go in by the front door.’ And with no further words spoken, he took out a roll of tools and applied himself to the front door’s lock. And presently we were inside.

I offered no comment on this. And my brother tucked away his tools and offered, in return, no explanation.

Now, houses look all different in the darkness, don’t they? They lose all their colour, of course, and the everyday becomes untoward and the mundane outré and suchlike. I had to take off my sunglasses because I couldn’t really see very much.

I had brought a torch (or flashlight, as our colonial cousins like to call it) and I now switched this on and flashed its beam all about. ‘Weren’t there portraits on these walls?’ I whispered to Andy.

‘All down the hall,’ he replied. ‘We are in the right house, aren’t we?’

I tippy-toed along the tiled floor. I felt certain that it had been carpeted earlier.

I flashed the torch up stairs.

‘Those stairs look different, too,’ said Andy. ‘We are in the wrong house.’

‘We’re not. It’s the same. But it’s changed, somehow, that’s all.’

‘Changed its staircase?’

I shrugged and followed Andy, who was now heading upstairs.

The stairs didn’t creak, which surprised me, and no lights flashed on to reveal some fellow in a nightshirt with a blunderbuss in his hands. But then, perhaps the nightshirt-wearing blunderbuss-toter was now a thing of the past.

I followed Andy along a pleasantly furnished hallway and up another flight of steps. And so we eventually found ourselves on the top floor in a corridor of fair-to-middling widthness, before a door marked Pongo’s Lab. Keep Out.

‘Do your stuff,’ I whispered to Andy. And he took out his tool roll.

And after some minutes of twiddling about, he sprang the door’s lock and together we entered Pongo’s Lab. And with the door closed behind us I switched on the light and we, together, beheld.

And Andy whistled. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’

The room, though still circular, was otherwise thoroughly unlike the one we had entered but a few short hours before. There was no evidence at all of any alchemical involvement. No cross-threaded nurdlers or electric toggle-flangers or even a bit of litmus paper. Here was only a comfy bedsitting room kind of affair, with a bed and a chair to sit upon, and a table to sit at it with, and a sink to wash your hands in when you’d tired of sitting.

Andy raised his palms and said, ‘Where did everything go?’

‘I don’t believe it was ever here,’ I said. ‘I believe that we saw what we were intended to see, but not what was really there to be seen.’

‘Oh,’ said Andy. ‘Really?’ said Andy. ‘So what does that mean?’ said Andy. ‘And why?’

‘All a charade,’ I said, ‘designed for one purpose.’

‘And that purpose might be…?’

‘I intend to find out,’ I said. And I sat myself down on the bed. ‘I suggest we switch off the light and settle ourselves down to await the return of the room’s occupant.’

‘And why would we want to do that?’

‘Well, it might be instructive to find out who he really is.’

Andy gave me the queerest of looks. ‘You think you know what’s going on here, don’t you, Tyler?’

‘I do, Andy. I do.’

‘And would you care to share this with me?’

‘What, and ruin the surprise?’

And then we both heard sounds from outside the door.

And Andy switched off the light.

And we waited there, crouched in the darkness.

Waiting for something to happen.

And suddenly something did.

But, I have to confess, it wasn’t quite the something I had been expecting.

It is a fact well known to those who know it well that very bright lights presage trouble. The arrival of aliens and booger men and bogey-beasts from the bottomless pit. Those ghostly things that come out of the television set. And dawn raids by the police.

Bright lights mean trouble, they do. Very bright lights, much trouble.

And this light was a bright’n. It wasn’t helicopters, although it came from above, and it wasn’t flying saucers either. Although it might well have been, because it did come to the accompaniment of some stonking great chords of the Albert Hall organ persuasion.