James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

They followed the Hatter’s short beckoning arm as he led them back to the counter, behind the velvet drapes, and into a hot, squalid room suggesting a laboratory from which nothing beneficial ever issued. Detached human heads were suspended over steaming vats of what looked like liquid flesh. Disconnected limbs swam in tanks of purple fluid. Skeletons dangled from the ceiling as if waiting to make their entrances in some demented marionette show. George felt that he was about as far from a fertility clinic as he could get.

‘This is where Victor Frankenstein did his post-graduate work,’ said Theophilus. Rusty surgical instruments and corroded technological bric-a-brac filled a dozen cabinets. ‘This is where Thomas Edison invented the burned-out light bulb.’

The Hatter, George decided, had lost his mind. Was it possible for a lunatic to go mad?

Tea things overran a linen-swathed table. Hungry and thirsty from their dash across the island, the fugitives sat down and indulged themselves, gulping hot tea, gobbling their way through a heap of stale rolls and crumpets. The Hatter joined them.

‘Every night, corpses float through the city,’ he explained merrily, smearing butter on a bran muffin.

‘War victims?’ A silly question, George thought. Of course they were war victims.

‘No, they died long before the war, centuries before in some cases. I pull them from the river. I dress them. I perform surgery. No problem finding spare parts. The whole world is made of spare parts now. Out go the shriveled organs and the dehydrated blood. In go the relays, motors, microprocessors, voice synthesizers, and spark plugs. But does that do it? Of course not. What is history without hopes, ideals, neuroses, illusions? Hence – my Z-1000 computer over there. Isn’t it wonderful what a man can do with a little technology and some free time?’

‘Oh, I get it – they’re robots!’ said Brat. ‘It’s like Walt Disney.’

‘If admitted,’ said Theophilus, ‘I would have lived in the early twenty-first century, turning out automatons as efficiently as a cobbler turns out shoes.’ He went to his work table and began transferring eyeballs from one glass jar to another, tossing the rejects into a teacup.

‘This can’t be the shop you had back in Boston,’ said George. How far the Hatter had sunk – from designing scopas suits to desecrating war victims.

‘My humble establishment is like the submarine from which you escaped,’ Theophilus explained. ‘It flits about from place to place. More twenty-first century know-how.’

‘I must say, Carter, you’ve got an impressive project under way here,’ said Brat. ‘My hat goes off to you.’

‘First I have to sell you one.’

‘Probably not the best way to keep civilization afloat, but still ingenious.’ The MARCH Hare grabbed a crumpet, slammed it into his tea.

‘Brat, those aren’t people in that parade!’ said George. ‘Don’t you understand?’

The Hatter cackled.

Brat ate the soggy crumpet. ‘In any event, it’s this flying shop of yours that really interests me. I’m trying to hook up with the other survivors. Can you run me over to the mainland?’

‘Most ambitious, General,’ said Theophilus. ‘You can’t make deals with extinction, but you can make deals with me. To wit – help us with tonight’s labors, and I shall fly you wherever you want.’

A hospital gurney displayed the topography of a sheeted female corpse. Approaching, the Hatter uncovered her. She was Oriental and, considering her water-logged condition, quite beautiful.

‘Born in the twelfth century. Southeast Asia, the Khmer Empire. These eyes once beheld the Angkor Wat temple complex for the royal phallic cult. Imagine – a royal phallic cult once existed in medieval Cambodia!’

‘Have you no respect for the dead?’ snapped George, restoring the sheet.

‘I have nothing but respect for the dead,’ said the Hatter. ‘Why do you think I work so hard on the parade? Night and day – my monument to the invalidated past. You know about monuments.’

‘This is lunatic’s business!’ said George. He made a fist but could not decide what to do with it. ‘Disgusting! She isn’t from the twelfth century, she’s just another victim of radiation or hunger or—’

‘Actually, I find the whole thing rather sane,’ said Brat.

‘Sane? Sane? Call me sane, will you?’ screamed the Hatter. ‘They called the Joint Chiefs of Staff sane! They called the National Security Council sane!’

He went to his Z-1000 computer, arching his fingers over the keyboard as if playing a concerto.

‘Mostly it’s the supporting cast of history who wash up here, but sometimes we get a star. On Sunday I found Nostradamus, that brilliant, courageous, plague-fighting scholar of the Renaissance. What I wouldn’t give for Hitler. I can change the past, you see – I can improve it. Last night Joan of Arc burned ten priests at the stake. If I had Hitler, I’d make him Jewish. Spermatids, George? Was that your wish? Little baby sperm? You’ve come to the right place.’

‘I have to see a fertility expert.’

‘I am one. I can make you as fertile as an alley cat.’

The Hatter dashed into a dark alcove, its entrance flanked by two dressmaker’s dummies, headless and skinny. Seconds later he emerged holding a crumbling, mossy hunk of bark. A white mushroom – robust, symmetrical, and shaped like a church bell – clung to the wood. ‘Behold your friend and mine, Agaricus cameroonis .’

‘Toadstools can be poison, I hear,’ said George.

‘Thermonuclear mushrooms cause sterility, Cameroon mushrooms cure it. Or, to be technical, Cameroon mushrooms promote spermatid production in irradiated seminiferous tubules. This fact has been known since 2015 AD.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Have you a choice?’

George’s bullet wound was thumping crazily now. Why couldn’t Mrs Covington’s magic lantern show have been more explicit on this matter? A simple slide of him devouring a Cameroon mushroom – was that too much to ask? Why did the post-exchange environment involve so damn many decisions?

‘Walk through our forest on a moonlit night,’ said the Hatter, ‘and with luck you’ll spot Agaricus cameroonis lifting his wan head through the crevice in a rotting log. But don’t expect to see him there the next day, for at the first blush of dawn he slips back into his palace of decay and hides. You’re looking at a rare one, George, a collector’s item. You aren’t going to find this fellow in your local drug store.’

‘All right. I’ll eat it.’

‘Nope. Sorry. Bad idea.’ Theophilus thrust the Agaricus cameroonis under his morning coat. ‘You don’t really want children. They make a lot of noise, they spill their milk, they leave their crayons all over the place.’

‘Please…’

‘First you must answer the question.’ He rubbed the concealed fungus.

‘What question?’

‘Ah – what question? Good question.’

‘Maybe he means the question about the raven and the writing desk,’ said Brat.

‘Yes! That’s it!’ said the Hatter. ‘Nobody has figured that one out!’

Nobody except Dr William Randstable, thought George, struggling to avoid a grin.

‘Beyond their expertise in spermatid production,’ said the Hatter, ‘Cameroon mushrooms make marvelous soup and terrific—’

‘A raven is like a writing desk,’ said George, ‘because Poe wrote on both.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said a raven is like a writing desk’ – he paused for dramatic effect – ‘because Poe wrote on both.’

The Hatter huffed and puffed like Rumpelstiltskin hearing the miller’s daughter say, ‘Is your name Rumpelstiltskin?’ He did a manic little dance, smashing his high-button shoes into the floor.