Robert Rankin - East of Ealing

Soap wriggled like a maggot on a number nine hook.

“Stick your head down here, Jim. I want to whisper.”

Soap thrashed and struggled, but his movements were becoming weaker by the moment.

“I can’t do that to Soap!”

“It only takes a second. Take my word for it, it will do the trick.”

“But it’s not decent.”

“Do it to Soap or I’ll do it to you.”

Pooley closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. Reaching up he performed a quick vicious action.

“EEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW! ”

A few moments later three men lay puffing and panting in the entrance to the loading bay at Meeks Boatyard on the bank of the Grand Union Canal. A few feet away a wall of impenetrable turquoise light rose from the water and spread away to either side and ever above.

“Too much to hope that we’d come up on the other side,” sighed Pooley.

Soap Distant, red-faced and clutching at himself, looked daggers at him. “I’ll have you for that,” he said painfully.

Jim smiled sickly. “What could we do? Look on the bright side, at least we all got out alive.”

“Not all,” said John Omally.

“Eh?”

Omally gestured towards the open manhole through which they had just emerged. “And then there were three,” he said in a leaden tone.

“Holmes,” cried Pooley. “In all the excitement…” he scrabbled over to the manhole and shouted the detective’s name into the void. His voice came back to him again and again, mocking his cries.

“Leave it, Jim.” Omally put his hand to his best friend’s shoulder. “He never had a chance.”

“I didn’t think.” Pooley looked up fearfully. “I didn’t think.”

“None of us did. We only thought of ourselves and our own.”

“We left him to…”

“Yes.”

“The poor bastard.”

“The poor noble bastard. He saved our lives at the expense of his own.”

Pooley climbed slowly to his feet and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. He looked up to where the Lateinos and Romiith building rose, filling the skyline. “Oh shit!” he said, kicking at the toppled manhole cover. “Oh, that’s me finished. Those bastards are going to pay for this.”

“Oh yes,” said John Omally. “They are definitely going to do all of that.”

Professor Slocombe withdrew a goose feather quill from the inkwell, and scratched out the fifth day from the June calendar. From beyond the shuttered French windows sounds as of merriment reached him. The Brentford Festival had begun. Throughout the night, the floats had been assembling upon the Butts Estate; lumbering through the darkness, heavy and ponderous. Through a crack in the shutters he had watched their slow progress and viewed their silhouettes, stark against an almost white sky. He had presided over many Festivals past and judged many a float competition, but he had never seen anything such as this. The shapes which rolled onward through the night upon their many wheels were totally alien, even to he who had seen so much. They were the stuff of nightmare, the dreams of the delirious and dying sick. If human hand had wrought these monstrosities, then it was a hand far better stricken from the arm.

A shiver ran up the long spine of the ancient scholar and his mottled hand closed about a crystal tumbler, half-filled upon his desk. Sleep had not touched him in more than a week and could offer nothing to soothe the ache which filled his heart and the very marrow of his bones. The great clock upon the mantelshelf was even now ticking away mankind’s final hours. The prophecies were being fulfilled and the helplessness, to one who knew, but was yet unable to act, was beyond human endurance.

Professor Slocombe raked his hand across the desk and tumbled a stack of magazines to the carpeted floor. Computer Weekly , Softwear Review , Micro Times , Popular Processor : the poison fruits from the new technology’s tree of life. Mankind had finally reached its own level of super incompetence, and made itself obsolete. It had promoted itself into extinction. Uncomprehending, it had made a science out of the thing; established a new order, laid the foundation for a new culture, and ultimately created a god. Or more accurately, aided the reinstatement of one previously superseded. Computer technology had given mankind the opportunity to regress, to cease thinking and in so doing cease to be. Why bother to add? The machine can do it for us. Mankind had been subtly tricked into believing that sophistication was progress. That godhead technology could cure man’s ills at the flick of a switch, or if not that, then after a few more years of further sophistication. Man had lost sight of himself. Darkness was soon to triumph over the light, and the real means of confounding it were fading before the Professor’s eyes. It was progress. Mankind had made so much progress that it no longer had any hope of survival. The miracle of science had become a chamber of horrors.

Somewhere in the dark tower which pierced the Brentford sky, the bleak temple of technology, the dragon lay curled in its lair. Its moment of release drew nigh, and who was there to plunge the sword of truth into its black heart?

The old man drained his glass and refilled it. He watched the gilded pendulum endlessly carving its arc. Where was Holmes? He was to have returned at daybreak, having followed up certain of his own leads, but he was hours overdue. The Professor had put into his keeping certain documents which he felt might hold an ultimate solution; but where was he now? Crowds were gathering in the street and it was an invitation to disaster to venture out of doors.

The sound of rumbling wheels and wild applause drew his eyes once more towards the shuttered windows. Should they choose now to make an assault upon the house the Professor knew he would be powerless to stop them. If ever there was a time to rally the troops beneath the banner of truth, now was definitely it.

At the present time, the Legion of Light was holed up in an outside privy in Moby Dick Terrace. There was more than just a little of the Lost Patrol about these three particular stalwarts.

“Can you see anything?” asked Jim, as Omally put his eye once more to the door’s half-moon.

“I can see a good deal,” the brave Sir Knight replied, “and to be perfectly frank, I like not a bit of it.”

“Let’s have a squint,” said Soap Distant. “And you keep your hands to yourself, Pooley.”

“They’re in my pockets. Have a care where you step, it’s crowded in here.”

Soap’s pink eye rose to the carved crescent. “My God,” said he.

“Not mine,” said John Omally.

Beyond the broken trelliswork which topped the garden fence, the great Festival floats were moving in slow procession. The thin dawn light, now tinting their silhouettes, brought them form and solidity. They were vast, towering to fill the streets, extending outwards within inches of the house walls. But what were they? They had something of the look of great bloated sombre reptiles, with scaled flanks and rudimentary limbs. All gill slits and hulking slabby sides. But they were too large, too daunting, too top-heavy. They did not fit. How many of these monstrosities had already passed and how many more were yet to come? The three men skulking in the evil-smelling dunny chose not to make bets.

Soap tore his eye from the hole with difficulty. Already the terrible compulsion to watch each movement of the swaying behemoths had become all but overwhelming. “What are they?” he gasped, pressing his hands across the hole that he might see no more.

“The work of the Devil.” Omally’s voice, coming from the darkness, put the wind up even himself. “We have to get out of here. At least to the Professor’s, then I don’t know what.”