Hugh Cook - The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers

‘The temple. Temple of Elasmokarcharos. There was zen, zen, burning, huge amphorae, you know, drugs in smoke, in clouds, clouds of it. And… I don’t have to argue with you. You’re a flashback. You don’t exist.’

‘I wish I didn’t!’ said Log Jaris. ‘It would make life that much simpler. All right, come along, boy. Indulge an old hallucination for a bit and let your story keep him company till he’s got the truth out of you.’

Chegory looked hard at Log Jaris. He was in sharp focus. The yellow candlelight shining shining through the lantern’s windows wavered ever so slightly but the shadow-mass bulk of the bullman did not. Tentatively Chegory dared his fingertips forward. The bullman grunted with displeasure as Chegory fingered the black bullhair. Chegory flattened his hand against the coarse hairs. Felt the warmth of living meat beneath. Pushed. Encountered unyielding mass, bulk, weight, inertia.

The bullman was huge.

A huge unyielding mass smelling of bullsweat. Hot breath outsnorted across Chegory’s face as he withdrew his hand from the bullman’s hide. Gold gleamed bright in the quivering moistness of the bullman’s nostrils. The outthrust ears, which looked a little like black tubes of hair with their ends sliced off along a diagonal, twitched as the bullman attended to some distant sound. Chegory raised his gaze to the huge ivory horns uplifted high.

For a hallucination, the thing was impressively detailed and uncommonly stable.

‘Are you quite finished?’ said the bullman. ‘My patience is great, but not infinite.’

‘You look real,’ said Chegory slowly. ‘I mean, you’re not wavery at the edges or anything. You feel real. You smell real. You talk as if you were real. But, if you are real — how do you explain yourself?’

The bullman snorted.

‘You’re the one who’s got some explaining to do,’ said the monster. ‘This is my cellarage, after all. So I suggest you get on with it, lest I obtruncate your loathsome corpse without ceremony further.’

Chegory had no wish to be obtruncated, whatever obtruncation was, since it sounded as if it might be painful. He had already learnt that the pain of hallucinations can be at least equal to that of physical existence. So he had best placate the monster whether it was a free-willed entity in its own right or merely a projection of his own psyche.

‘I, well, I’m here because I got lost, basically,’ said Chegory. ‘Lost underground.’

‘How?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Doubtless,’ said the bullman. ‘A story which you will tell in my torture chamber. Gome!’

So saying, the bullman overturned a barrel and began rolling it out of the room in which Chegory had been caught sleeping. The young Ebrell Islander was bitterly disappointed to realise he had not evaded another ordeal of pain, but nevertheless followed without protest. Torture, torture! Thus he helplessly mindsaid, silently wailing with despair as he followed his massively muscled captor. Drump-thrump echoes rolled into the darkness ahead of them as the bullman kicked the barrel over flagstones and cobblestones then up a series of ramps.

Then the bullman stopped.

‘Here,’ he said, passing Chegory the lantern. ‘Hold this.’

Chegory held it. This was his chance! To smash the lantern, punch the bullman on the snout and then go haring off into the darkness. But he did not seize that chance. He had at last run up against one challenge too many. His resources of courage, initiative and daring were exhausted entirely.

Of course, he should have dared. He should have tried. He should have attacked — then fled. Since the alternative was to endure monstrous horror in the bullman’s torture chamber he had nothing to gain by cooperating with the hideous thing. Yet cooperate he did, holding the lantern while the bullman bullhandled the heavy barrel up through a bullhole, grunting bullfully as he did so. Then he hauled himself up through the same hole, reached down for the lantern and uplifted it.

Run!

Thus spoke Chegory’s last reserve of daring. But already the bullman was reaching down, and Chegory, helpless to resist, found himself extending his own hand to the monster. The bullman hauled Chegory into the darkshadowed room above then closed a heavy trapdoor on the bullhole and bolted it.

Chegory was trapped.

A prisoner in the bullman’s lair!

‘Through here,’ said the bullman, opening a door to reveal a small room lit by bright and cheerful light flooding in through skylights. Blue sky! Blue sky! A startlement of colour pure and bright. So beautiful that Chegory almost wept to see it.

‘What day is it?’ he said.

‘Today,’ answered the bullman. True, but unhelpful. Then: ‘Come,’ said the bullman, ‘in through here.’

So saying, he opened another door and rolled the barrel into a room much larger. By the light flooding in through a dozen latticework windows (more sky, a courtyard view, a wall, no hope of escape, not yet, not that way) Chegory saw all. A huge stove at the near end of the room, and a woman cooking at that stove. A dozen tresde tables with benches set before them. Two dozen assorted fishermen and such seated on those benches, all those fishermen busy talking, eating, and drinking from pewter tankards. Doubtiess there was liquor in those tankards, for this was surely a speakeasy, a house of degradation built to cater for the depraved tastes of helpless drug addicts, the addicts in question being the fishermen yattering-laughing over their breakfasts.

‘You’ll stay for breakfast,’ said the bullman.

‘Oh, of course,’ said Chegory, hoping that he himself would not be one of the courses at that breakfast.

Then he caught the smell of a well-spiced cassoulet and realised he was hungry, very hungry, famished, starved, ravenous, a cat among mice, a dog among cats, a dragon amidst lambs, a fire in a heap of paper, so short commoned it was miraculous he was more than dwarfish, his skeleton clad with ghost and fast demanding man, mass, heat, weight, blood, nerve, sinew, bone, kidney, liver, heart, lung. He was ready to grab, claw, eat, bite, suck, gnaw and swallow, hungry enough to shark it out with the sea’s mobsters for a bucket of offal, possessed of hunger such that he was ready to beg for his mother-in-law’s paps then feed from her twat as well, as the proverbial saying has it, or squeeze a stone for blood, or peel the stone itself then cook it and eat it.

‘Here,’ said the bullman.

So saying, the monster caused a miracle to manifest itself in the form of a bowl of hot, steaming cassoulet. Beans! Meat! Pieces of cassava! A bit of baked banana on the side!

‘Well, boy,’ said the monster. ‘Don’t just gape at it. Sit down. Get into it!’

Moments later young Chegory was sitting at table gulleting into the cassoulet.

‘Slowly, young Chegory,’ said one of the fishermen sitting at the same table. ‘Slowly, or you’ll do yourself an injury.’

‘Oho!’ said the bullman. ‘You know this lad, do you?’

‘No lad, Log Jaris. This is a man in the prime of youth. Isn’t it just, Chegory? You got into that sweet Olivia yet?’

‘Working on it,’ said Chegory.

‘Oh, I bet you are! More meat on that than a chicken, hey?’

‘Leaving aside this question of Olivia chickens,’ said the bullman Log Jaris, ‘what’s the rest of your name, Chegory?’

‘Chegory Guy,’ said Chegory Guy.

‘Oho! Not the son of Impala Guy, by chance?’ said the bullman. ‘Not the son of old man Impala, Japone’s beloved stillmaster?’

‘The same,’ said Chegory.

So saying, he managed a crooked smile.

A crooked smile? Let us be more exact. Chegory Guy experienced a certain degree of discomfiture but was loathe to make this known; hence he tried (but without complete success) to make pleasure rather than displeasure express itself on his face. Following convention, we say therefore that he smiled a crooked smile, though in point of literal fact he did not.