Robert Rankin - The Brightonomicon

'Well, you say that,' said the student type, 'but of course you might well be lying. You might well be a spook.' 'A spook?' I said. 'What is a spook?'

'A CIA agent. Probably a member of MK Ultra, the mind-control programme.' 'I can assure you that I am no such thing.' 'Yeah, well, you would say that'

'Let's have order now, please,' called Danbury. 'I haven't got to the exciting part of my lecture yet. You see, it is indeed possible to reach through time – in either direction, in fact – and I have actual living proof of this here with me. Something brought forward through time from the past. From the distant past, the Age of Myth. A mythical beast and it's here.' And Danbury held aloft the Aladdin's lamp that had been standing on the table named Peter.

'A centaur!' cried Danbury. 'Now, please let's have a little order while I give the lamp a rub.'

'I am not having this bloke calling me a spook,' I protested.

'You look like a spook,' said the personable young woman with the nimbus of orange hair and the dress that barely covered her costs at all now that she was sitting down. 'That ID his big fat friend flashed me on the door looked like a CIA Above-Top-Secret security pass to me.' 'It is a library ticket,' I said.

'There,' said the personable young woman, becoming somewhat less personable. 'He has access to the American Library of Congress. They're both spooks.' 'You are bl**dy mad,' I said.

'Bl**dy?' said the increasingly more unpersonable young woman. 'He speaks in Esperanto, which we all know is an alien tongue. He's definitely a spook. The CIA are in cahoots with the aliens in Area Fifty-One. In exchange for alien technology, they allow the aliens to abduct one hundred human beings each year for their hybridisation programme.' 'You should get yourself a boyfriend,' I suggested.

'There!' screamed the now extremely unpersonable young woman. 'He wants to hand me over to the aliens to be part of their hideous crossbreeding programme.' 'Could we have a little order, please?' called Danbury.

'Oh,' said another student type, one with the kind of goatee beard that I was hoping soon to grow. 'Siding with the CIA-Proto-Zionist-Illuminati-Bilderberg-New-World-Orderists, are you, Collins? You're part of the misinformation programme, too, aren't you?'

'I'm a paranormal investigator,' cried Danbury. 'It's my job to get to the bottom of this kind of thing.'

'Get to the bottom?' The young woman rose to her feet, with her dress all most pleasingly rucked up at the back. 'The bottom, did you hear that? He wants to hand me over to the aliens, too. For rectal probing.'

'That sounds like fun,' I said. 'Do you think the aliens are taking on apprentices?' Now, I probably should not have said that. In fact, looking back, I definitely should not have said that.

It transpired that the student type who had asked the original question about travelling in time was the orange-nimbus-young-woman's boyfriend, who apparently had a bit of a thing about anal sex because the nimbus woman was avidly refusing ever to give him any. And one thing led to another. And the other thing involved punches being thrown.

And as I recall mentioning in the opening chapter of this bestseller, I do know how to handle myself. But once again I found myself to be substantially outnumbered.

But then they were not all actually hitting me. Several of them were hitting Danbury Collins, who was doing his best to put up a spirited one-handed defence. And a small grey chap with a big bald head and shiny black eyes was hitting on the nimbus woman. But a lot of them were hitting me.

Chairs were overturned. And raised and used as projectiles and weapons. The blackboard was torn from its precarious stand and went the way of all flesh. The beer crates were raised and hurled, some through the windows.

If there was a haven of peace and quietude in the midst of this maelstrom, an eye in the hurricane, as it were, then this haven and eye was to be found in the person of Mr Hugo Rune.

The Guru's Guru, the Logos of the Aeon, the Hokus Bloke, the Lad Himself slept on, untouched by the chaos that reigned all about him, surrounded, it seemed, by a protective cocoon. A cone of power? A psychic force field? Or just the plain luck of the draw?

Luck was not on my side and I went down beneath a torrent of blows and buffets.

Which all seemed rather unfair, really. After all, I was definitely not a CIA spook.

'You are all bl**dy nutters!' I cried, as I did my best to fight back.

'Once more he speaks the alien tongue.' And nimbus woman put the boot in. Now, I recall this as clearly as if it was yesterday, because it is often funny the way things work out. In fact, it is always funny, but mostly only from a detached point of view, but I do recall that it was Danbury Collins that set The Rampant Squire on fire.

I do not think he meant to do it. I do recall him shouting something about peace and love, although it was difficult to tell exactly what, with all the noise of breaking furniture and the boots going in and everything. And I do recall Danbury up on what was left of the stage, rubbing away at his magic lamp. And then flames coming out of the spout. Which had me thinking that the thing was probably a table lighter. But it really was not his fault. He was hit, fell against the curtains and the curtains took fire. And I suppose that all the noise must have attracted the attention of all the other folk in the bar downstairs, because suddenly, it seemed, there were many more folk in the room upstairs and all fighting and coughing, what with the smoke, and panicking also, and stampeding. And I do recall something altogether strange. Something monstrous.

In the midst of the conflagration and the screaming (of which there was much) and the violence and all of the rest, I saw something.

It rose above me, huge and menacing and terrible, a mighty primal force, so it seemed. An atavistic something from a mythical time long past.

Its upper parts were manlike and naked, too, its lower parts those of a horse. And it reared up and then it stamped down with its hideous hooves. And I swear to you, yes, I swear that at that very moment, amidst all the flames and chaos, that I surely stared death in its face. And spat into its cavernous eyeholes.

Although whether or not I did the actual spitting, I am unsure.

I am at least sure that I saw Mr Hugo Rune, stout stick in hand and defiant.

And he struck out at the atavistic something and once again saved me from death.

I awoke to find myself blinking up towards a glossily painted ceiling. I was in hospital. I did not have to think too much about this, because it is only in hospitals that they paint the ceilings with gloss. In fact they paint everything with gloss in hospitals because it is so much easier to wash blood and guts off gloss paint. I believe that all military establishments are also painted with gloss, but this is only my belief, as I have never personally entered any of them. Especially not Area Fifty-One.

The fact that I now found myself in hospital was somewhat alarming, because I had not been aware that I was ill. So why had I woken up in hospital?

'Doctor Proctor.' I heard the voice of a nurse – Nurse Hearse, I would later discover. 'Doctor Proctor, this is the patient.'

'Patient X,' said Doctor Proctor and suddenly he loomed over me and did pullings about with my eyelids. 'Looks like a hopeless case.' Well, I was certainly not having that. I sought to protest. And to my absolute horror found that I could not. I was paralysed.

'Apparently he started a fight in The Rampant Squire and a female student knocked him out,' I heard the nurse say. 'He's in a coma.'

'No, I certainly am not,' I sought to say, but also could not.

'And he has no identification,' said Doctor Proctor. 'Another one of the same, I suppose.' 'The same, Doctor?' queried Nurse Hearse.