The Antipope

by Robert Rankin

  ‘A bit of a stinker indeed,’ said Pooley, ‘but a man of his time.’

  The Professor had been silent, but now he raised himself upon his elbows and looked deep into the Irishman’s eyes. ‘I believe now that my previous proposition was incorrect. The Dark One does not have form, he assumes the form of others by recalling their ambitions and increasing their powers to his own ends. This alien force is capable of acting upon a powerful ego, adding to it and enlarging it until it becomes a power of diabolic magnitude. Alexander VI died before his time, and I suggest that he has returned to carry on where he left off. Only now he is more powerful, he is no longer a mere human, now he can fully realize his ambitions unburdened by the fear of retribution. He thinks himself to be invulnerable. Let us pray that he is not.’

  Omally shrugged. ‘So what chance do we stand?’

  ‘This is Earth and we are alive. Anything that encroaches upon us must by definition be alien. It may appear to have the upper hand, but its unnaturalness puts it at a disadvantage.’

  ‘He didn’t look much at a disadvantage.’

  ‘What puzzles me,’ said the Professor, ‘is why he did not kill us. He knows us to be a threat to him, yet he allowed us to live.’

  ‘Good old him.’

  ‘It is possible,’ the old man continued, ‘that his powers are limited and that he can only expend a certain amount of energy at one time. Certainly the destruction of the cellar door must have required enormous force, the creatures alone could never have accomplished that. It was reinforced with steel.’

  ‘What about the light which surrounded him?’ queried Omally. ‘It was blazing when he entered but it had quite dimmed away when last I set eyes upon his accursed form.’

  ‘What happened after I blacked out?’ Pooley asked.

  Omally turned away. ‘Nothing,’ said he in a bland voice, but the violent shaking of his hands did not go unnoticed by Jim or the Professor.

  ‘It looks like another sunny day,’ said Jim, changing the subject.

  ‘Will you gentlemen take breakfast with me?’ asked the Professor.

  There is little need to record the answer to that particular question.

  18

  As September neared its blazing end, the heat showed no sign of lessening. Now the nights were made terrible by constant electrical storms. Omally had penned Marchant up in his allotment shed, having read of a cyclist struck down one night by the proverbial bolt from the blue.

  There could now be no doubt of the location of the Church of the Second Coming. Nightly its grey-faced flock stalked through the tree-lined streets of the Butts Estate en route for its unhallowed portals. Father Moity was going through agonies of self-doubt as his congregation deserted him in droves.

  The Professor stood at his window watching them pass. He shook his head in sorrow and pulled down the blind. Many had seen the five red monks moving mysteriously through the midnight streets. It was rumoured that they attended at the rites of the new church. The Professor felt the hairs on the nape of his neck rise when he thought of the alien monstrosities which inhabited those saintly crimson robes. He had seen them again only the night before, clustered in a swaying group outside his very garden gate, murmuring amongst themselves. A streak of lightning had illuminated them for a moment and the Professor had seen the ghastly mottled faces, muddy lustreless masks of horror. He had slammed shut his doors and drawn down the iron screen he had fitted for security. His house was almost in a state of siege now, and he was certain that his every move was closely observed.

  Omally had been acting as messenger and delivery boy, freighting quantities of thaumaturgical books which arrived daily in wax-paper packages at Norman’s corner shop. The old man rarely slept now, and his hours were spent committing to memory vast passages of obscure Latin.

  ‘Every day draws us nearer,’ he told the struggling Irishman as Omally manhandled another half dozen weighty tomes into the study.

  ‘You must surely have half the stock of the British Library here by now,’ said the perspiring John.

  ‘I have almost all I need,’ the Professor explained, ‘but I have another letter for you to post.’

  ‘Talking of books,’ said Omally, ‘I have loaned your Dimac training manual to Archroy.’

  The Professor smiled briefly. ‘And what became of yours?’

  ‘I never owned one,’ said Omally, ‘it was a rumour put about by Pooley. It kept us out of fights.’

  ‘Well, good luck to Archroy, he has suffered more than most over this affair. I hear that as well as losing his car, his magic beans and the use of his thumb, he was also unlucky enough to have had his arm broken and his head damaged by a lunatic in a Fair Isle jumper.’

  Omally, who now no longer adopted that particular mode of dress, nodded painfully. ‘I am grateful that my companions at the Swan have been discreet over that particular matter and I must thank my good friend Jim for the permanent loan of his second suit.’

  The Professor whistled through his teeth. ‘Two suits Pooley, a man of means indeed.’

  Omally sipped at his drink thoughtfully and knotted his brow. ‘Will all this soon be over?’ he asked. ‘Is there any end in sight?’

  The Professor stood at the open French windows, the setting sun casting his elongated shadow back across the room. ‘Great forces are at work,’ he said in a distant voice, ‘and as it is said, “The wheels of God grind slowly but they grind exceedingly small”.’

  If that was intended as an answer to Omally’s question the Irishman failed to understand it, but as the old man’s back was turned he took advantage of the fact and poured himself another very large scotch.

  ‘Woosah!’ An enormous scream and a startling figure clad in silk kimono, black trousers fastened tightly at the ankles and grimy plimsolls leapt from the allotment shed, clearing the five-foot bean poles in a single bound to descend with a sickening crash amongst a pile of upturned bell cloches.

  ‘Damn it!’ The figure stepped from the wreckage and straightened its wig, then, ‘Banzai!’ The figure strutted forward, performed an amazing Kata and drove the fingers of his right hand back through the corrugated wall of his shed.

  The figure was Archroy, and he was well on the way to mastering the secrets of the legendary Count Dante.

  The area around his shed was a mass of tangled wreckage, the wheelbarrow was in splinters and the watering can was an unrecognizable tangle of zinc.

  Archroy strode forward upon elastic limbs and sought things to destroy. The Dimac manual lay open at a marked page labelled ‘The Art of the Iron Hand’.

  ‘Aaaroo!’ Archroy leapt into the air and kicked the weathervane from the top of Omally’s shed, returning to the ground upon bouncing feet. He laughed loudly and the sound echoed over the empty dust bowl, bouncing from the Mission wall and disappearing over his head in the direction of the river. ‘Iron Hand,’ he said, ‘I will show them.’

  He had read the Dimac manual from cover to cover and learned it by heart. ‘The deadliest form of martial arts known to mankind,’ it said, ‘whose brutal tearing, rending, maiming and mutilating techniques have for many years been known only to the high Lamas of Tibet, where in the snowy wastes of the Himalayas they have perfected the hidden art of Dimac.’ Count Dante had scorned his sacred vow of silence, taken in the lofty halls of the Potala, never to reveal the secret science, and had brought his knowledge and skill back to the West where for a mere one dollar ninety-eight these maiming, disfiguring and crippling techniques could be made available to the simple layman. Archroy felt an undying gratitude to the black-masked Count, the Deadliest Man on Earth, who must surely be living a life of fear lest the secret emissaries from Lhasa catch up with him.

  Archroy cupped his hand into the Dark Eagle’s Claw posture and sent it hurtling through the padlocked door of Omally’s shed. The structure burst asunder, toppling to the ground in a mass of twisted wreckage and exposing the iron frame and sit-up-and-beg handlebars of Marchant.

  ‘Luc
k indeed,’ said Archroy, sniggering mercilessly. He lifted the old black bicycle from the ruins of the allotment hut and stood it against a heap of seed boxes which had escaped his violent attentions.

  ‘You’ve had it coming for years,’ he told Marchant. The bicycle regarded him with silent contempt. ‘It’s the river for you, my lad.’ Marchant’s saddle squeaked nervously. ‘But first I am going to punish you.’

  Archroy gripped the handlebars and wrenched them viciously to one side. ‘Remember the time you tripped me up outside the Swan?’ Archroy raised his left foot to a point level with his own head, spun around on his right heel and drove it through Marchant’s back wheel, bursting out a dozen spokes which spiralled into the air to fall some twenty feet away.

  Marchant now realized his dire predicament and began to ring his bell frantically. ‘Oh no you don’t.’ Archroy fastened his iron grip about the offending chime and tore it free from its mountings. Crushing its thumb toggle, he flung it high over his shoulder.

  The bell cruised upwards into the air and fell in a looping arc directly on to the head of John Omally, who was taking a short cut across the allotment en route to the post box on the corner of the Ealing Road.

  ‘Ow! Oh! Ouch! Damn!’ screamed Omally, clutching at his dented skull and hopping about it pain. He levelled his boot at what he thought must surely be a meteorite and his eyes fell upon the instantly recognizable if somewhat battered form of his own bicycle bell. Omally ceased his desperate hopping and cast his eyes about the allotment. It took hardly two seconds before his distended orbs fixed upon Archroy. The lad was carrying Marchant high and moving in the direction of the river.

  Omally leapt upon his toes and legged it towards the would-be destroyer of his two-wheeled companion.

  ‘Hold up there!’ he cried, and ‘Enough of that! Let loose that velocipede!’

  Archroy heard the Irishman’s frenzied cries and released his grip. Marchant toppled to the dust in a tangle of flailing spokes. Omally bore down upon Archroy, his face set in grim determination, his fists clenched, and his tweed trouser-bottoms flapping about his ankles like the sails of a two-masted man-o-war. ‘What villainy is this?’ he screamed as he drew near.

  Archroy turned upon him. His hands performed a set of lightning moves which were accompanied by sounds not unlike a fleet of jumbo jets taking off. ‘Defend yourself as best you can,’ said he.

  Omally snatched up the broken shaft of a garden fork, and as the pupil of the legendary Count advanced upon him, a blur of whirling fists, he struck the scoundrel a thunderous blow across the top of the head.

  Archroy sank to his knees, covering his head and moaning piteously. Omally raised his cudgel to finish the job. ‘No, no,’ whimpered Archroy, ‘enough!’

  Omally left him huddled in the foetal position and went over to survey the damage done to his trusty iron steed. ‘You’ll pay for this,’ he said bitterly. ‘It’ll mean a new back wheel, chain set, bell and a respray.’

  Archroy groaned dismally. ‘How did you manage to fell me with that damned stick?’ he asked. ‘I’ve read the manual from cover to cover.’

  Omally grinned. ‘I had a feeling that you were not being a hundred per cent honest with me when I lent it to you, so I only gave you volume one. Volume two is dedicated to the art of defence.’

  ‘You bastard.’

  Omally raised his stick aloft. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’

  ‘And you’ll pay for the restoration of my bicycle?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  Omally caught sight of the heap of splintered wood and warped iron that had once been his second home. ‘And my shed?’

  ‘Yes, anything you say.’

  ‘From the ground up, new timbers, and I’ve always fancied a bit of a porch to sit in at the end of a summer’s day.’

  ‘You bas––’

  ‘What?’ Omally wielded his cudgel menacingly.

  ‘Nothing, nothing, leave it to me.’

  ‘Good, then farewell. All my best to you and please convey my regards to your dear wife.’

  Omally strode off in the direction of the post box, leaving the master of the iron fist on the dusty ground thrashing his arms and legs and cursing between tightly clenched teeth.

  The Professor’s letter duly despatched, Omally set his foot towards the Flying Swan. He looked up at the empty sky, blue as the eyes of a Dublin lass. He would really have enjoyed this unusual summer had it not been for the sinister affair he had become involved in. As he approached the Swan he ran into Norman. It was early closing day and like Omally he was thirsting for a pint of cooling Large and the pleasures of the pot room. The two men entered the saloon bar and were met by a most extraordinary spectacle.

  Captain Carson, on whom none had laid eyes for several months, stood at the counter evidently in a state of advanced drunkenness and looking somewhat the worse for wear. He was clad in pyjamas and dressing-gown and surrounded by what appeared to be his life’s possessions in bundles and bags spread about the floor. ‘Thirty bloody years,’ he swore, ‘thirty bloody years serving the troubled and down-at-heel, doing the work that should have won me a Nobel Prize, never a complaint, never a word said against me, and here I am, out on my ear, penniless, banjoed and broken.’

  Omally followed Norman to the polished counter and the lad ordered a brace of Large. ‘What’s all this then?’ Omally whispered to the part-time barman.

  Neville pulled upon the pump handle. ‘He’s got his marching orders from the Mission. It’s been converted into a church now and he’s no longer required.’

  Omally, who felt somewhat emboldened after his recent encounter with Archroy, wondered if now might be the time to broach the subject of his wheelbarrow, but the sheer wretchedness the Captain displayed drove any such thoughts from his mind. ‘Who kicked him out then, the Mission Trust?’

  ‘No, the new vicar there, some high Muck-a-Muck it seems.’

  High Muck-a-Muck, thought Omally, if only they knew the truth. But the fates must surely be with him, for the Captain must know a good deal about the cuckoo he had harboured within his nest. ‘Get him a large rum on me,’ said Omally, ‘he looks as if he needs it.’

  The Captain took the rum in both hands and tossed it back down his open throat. ‘God bless you, John Omally,’ said he, wiping his mouth on his dressing-gown sleeve. ‘You are a good man.’

  ‘I take it that the times are at present against you,’ said John.

  ‘Against me? What do you think I’m doing here in my bloody jim-jams, going to a fancy-dress party?’

  ‘It has been known.’

  ‘Listen.’ Captain Carson banged his empty glass upon the bar. ‘That bastard has driven me from my home, evicted me, me with thirty years serving the troubled and down at heel, me who should have won a Nobel bloody Prize for my labours, me who––’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Omally, ‘I can see you are a man sorely put upon, but who has put you in this dire predicament?’

  ‘That bloody Pope geezer, that’s who. Came into my Mission as a stinking old tramp and look what he turned out to be.’

  Neville pricked up his ears. ‘Tramp?’ said the part-time barman. ‘When was this?’

  ‘About three months ago, called at my door and I extended him the hospitality that was expected of me, should have kicked him out on his bloody ear that’s what I should have done.’

  Neville leant closer to the drunken Sea Captain. ‘What did he look like?’ he asked.

  ‘ ‘Oribble, filthy, disreputable, evil creature, ragged as a Cairo cabbie.’

  ‘And is he there now?’ Neville continued.

  ‘Well.’ The Captain hesitated, swaying somewhat on his slippered feet, and held the bar counter for support. ‘You could say he is, but then again he isn’t. He was little when he came,’ he made a levelling gesture at about chest height, ‘small he was, but now, huge, bloody big bastard, bad cess upon him.’ His hand soared into the air high over his head and the eye
s of the assembled company travelled with it.

  ‘Aw, get out of here,’ said Neville, returning to his glass polishing, ‘no-one can grow that big in a few months.’

  ‘I should bloody know,’ screamed the Captain, shattering his glass upon the bar counter, ‘I should bloody know, I’ve fed him, cleaned and swept for him, treated him like some Holy God all these months. He had me like a ship’s rat in a trap, no-one can stand against him, but now I’m out, he’s kicked me out of my Mission, but I’ll finish him, I’ll tell all I know, things he’s done, things he made me do––’ Here his voice trailed off and his eyes became glazed.

  ‘Yes?’ said Omally. ‘What have you done?’

  Captain Carson spoke not a word. Neville, who had taken shelter beneath the counter, rose again, wielding his knobkerry. ‘Get out!’ he shouted. ‘You’re barred.’

  The old man stood unblinking. His mouth was open as if in the formation of a word, but it was a word which never came.

  ‘What’s happened to him?’ said Neville. ‘He’s not dead is he?’

  Omally walked slowly about the paralysed figure in the dressing-gown. He snapped his fingers and waved his hands in front of the staring eyes. But the Captain would not move, he was frozen to the spot. Those drinkers who had made vague attempts at private conversation or the perusal of the sporting press during all this, now came slowly forward to view the strange tableau. Suggestions were forthcoming.

  ‘Flick your lighter, that brings them out of it.’

  ‘Bucket of water, that’s your man.’

  ‘Ice cube down his neck.’

  ‘Make a grab at his wallet, that will bring him round.’

  Omally held an empty wine-glass to the Captain’s lips. He turned it between his fingers then held it up to the light. ‘He’s stopped breathing,’ he said, ‘this man is dead.’