The Brentford Chainstore Massacre

by Robert Rankin

  Today was New Year’s Eve.

  John Omally glanced at his gold Piaget wristwatch. (Well, he had been able to wangle one or two expenses.) ‘Nearly four,’ said he. ‘Where is Jim?’

  Norman Hartnell hurried up.

  ‘Any word of him?’ John asked.

  ‘No,’ said Norman. ‘It’s the same all over. You were the last person to see him, John. The night before last.’

  ‘What about his girlfriend? He said he was going there.’

  ‘She’s not home. I’ve phoned loads of times, but I don’t get any answer. And I don’t have the time to keep doing this for you. Do you think the two of them have––’

  ‘What?’ Omally stiffened. ‘Run off together? Eloped or something?’

  ‘It’s more than possible. He’s well smitten, that Jim.’

  ‘No.’ Omally made fierce head-shakings. ‘He wouldn’t have done that. Not without telling me.’

  ‘Perhaps he was afraid you might talk him out of it.’

  ‘Oh no.’ Omally glanced once more at his wrist-watch. If he himself had been able to hive off enough expenses to purchase this, Jim might well have been salting away sufficient cash to do a runner. His need was the greater of the two.

  John suddenly felt quite empty inside. Somehow the thought that he and Jim would not remain best friends for ever had never really entered his mind.

  They were a team. They were the lads. They were individuals.

  ‘I have to get back to my brewery,’ said Norman. ‘I’ve got crates of ale coming out of the de-entropizer and I have to get them over to the Swan. I’ll see you later at the fireworks, eh?’

  But John did not reply.

  In that house in Moby Dick Terrace, where the old folk died from most unnatural causes, Dr Steven Malone paced up and down. In the sparsely furnished sitting room, with its curtains drawn and a single low-watt ceiling bulb creating gloom, the floorboards creaked beneath his feet and the two tall men sat in armchairs regarding him in silence.

  ‘Tonight,’ said Dr Steven, ‘we return to Kether House. I have made all the preparations. Tonight you will learn my purpose and I will learn all––’

  Cain opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘No, Cain, only listen. I brought you into being just for this. Do you know who you really are?’

  ‘I am Cain,’ said Cain. ‘And you are my father.’

  ‘And you, Abel? What of you?’

  ‘I am part of Cain,’ said Abel. ‘He is part of me. The two of us are one.’

  ‘This is so. And tonight you shall be joined. The two made truly one and at the moment of this joining––’

  ‘We shall die,’ said Cain.

  ‘For we belong dead,’ Abel said. ‘Is that not so, father?’

  But Dr Steven did not reply.

  Professor Slocombe’s study had been cleared of every antique book, every glass-cased creature, every precious artefact, each table, chair and couch. The sconces from the walls had gone, the curtain rails. The carpets, rugs and dhurries. And the walls and the ceiling and the floor and all the woodwork and the very panes of glass in the French windows had been painted black. And on the blackened floor, wrought in white, the sacred circles had been drawn enclosing the hexagram, that six-pointed Star of Solomon, the great seal of the mysteries. And the names of power had been inscribed between the outer circle and the inner.

  ADONAI and MALKUTH and AUM and TETRAGRAMMATON.

  And at the very centre of the hexagram, wrought in red, the sacred symbol Om.

  There were no candles in this room, no lamps of any kind, but an astral light illuminated all.

  Gammon knelt in silent prayer as Professor Slocombe, in the seamless floor-length robe of white, the robe of the Ipsissimus, intoned the words to cleanse the temple, and begin the operation.

  The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram

  And touched his forehead, saying Ateh (Unto Thee)

  And touched his breast while saying Malkuth (The Kingdom)

  And touched his right shoulder, saying ve-Gaburah (And the Power)

  And touched the left, saying ve-Gedulah (And the Glory)

  And clasping hands upon the breast, he said le-Olahm, Amen. (To the Ages, Amen).

  Gammon rose and, bowing to the East, the South, the West and then the North, he said, ‘I will leave you now, sir. Blessed be.’

  Professor Slocombe did not reply.

  Fred sat in his office with his feet up on the desk. The dust sheets had gone and the scaffolding was down. The paintings were up again and so were Fred’s spirits.

  Derek and Clive stood to either side of Fred. Derek had a nice new gun. A small but useful-looking weapon. An Uzi nine-millimetre. Clive held a little black bag. Something wriggled uncomfortably within it.

  Before Fred’s desk stood Jim Pooley. And Jim didn’t look very well.

  ‘You’ve got a bloody nose again, Jim,’ said Fred.

  Derek giggled. ‘He got a bit boisterous. I had to give him a little slap.’

  Jim trembled and knotted his fists.’Where is she?’ he spat through gritted teeth. What have you done with her?’

  ‘She’s safe enough for now,’ said Fred. ‘Although I know that Derek is just dying to get to know her a little better.’

  ‘I’ve filled up my fridge,’ said Derek. ‘I’ve got some real prize-winning fruit and veg.’

  Jim turned on Derek.

  Derek just held up his gun.

  ‘You’ll do exactly what we want you to do, won’t you, Jim?’ Fred smiled a smile of such pure wickedness that even Dr Steven Malone would have been hard pressed to match it.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘A small act of sabotage, nothing more.’

  ‘Where is Suzy?’

  ‘Nearby. Safe for now.’

  ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘Well, you can’t. Now what was I saying? Ah yes, a small act of sabotage. Clive here has a little bag. Did you notice Clive’s little bag?’

  Jim said nothing.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to look inside. There’s something deeply unpleasant in there. Something unworldly.’

  ‘Go on, show him,’ said Derek. ‘It frightens the dung out of me.’

  ‘Derek did a dung in the Suzy woman’s bed,’ said Clive. ‘And he didn’t wipe his bum afterwards.’

  Pooley’s knuckles clicked.

  ‘What you are going to do, Jim, is to take Clive’s little bag to the house of Professor Slocombe and at the stroke of midnight, as he is bringing his ritual to its climax, you are to open the little bag and release what is inside.’

  ‘Never,’ said Jim.

  ‘Jim, you will do this, or the next time you see Suzy there will only be certain pieces you recognize. Now, in case you are thinking of getting up to any monkey business, let me introduce you to this.’ Fred opened a drawer and took out a small black electronic item. He extended its aerial and pressed a tiny red button.

  Pain exploded in Jim’s head. He sank to his knees and screamed.

  Fred touched the button again. Pooley looked up, fear and hatred in his eyes.

  ‘Have a little feel of your right temple, Jim.’

  Pooley felt with a shaking hand.

  ‘Feel that little lump?’

  Pooley nodded.

  ‘An implant, a tracking transmitter. We put it in you during your stay at the Cottage Hospital. We know exactly where you are at any time. And if you’re not where you’re supposed to be at midnight, we will be terribly upset. Derek and Clive will be waiting outside in the car with your girlfriend. Be a good boy and you can have her back unharmed. Play me false and I’ll know.’ Fred touched the button and Jim collapsed once more.

  Fred touched the button again and Pooley looked up.

  ‘You are going to be a good boy, aren’t you, Jim?’

  But Pooley did not reply.

  Old Pete sat at the bar counter of The Road to Calvary, a most miserable look upon his face.

  ‘What troubles you, Ol
d Pete?’ asked Neville the part-time barman. ‘This is a day for celebration, half-priced beer until midnight.’

  Old Pete sniffed. ‘Take a look at this,’ he said, and reaching down he brought up a carrier bag and placed it on the counter.

  ‘What’s in there?’ asked Neville.

  Old Pete rooted in, lifted out what looked to be a toy piano and a toy piano stool. Rooting again he lifted out what appeared to be a tiny man in a dress suit.

  Old Pete placed the tiny man upon the bar top. The tiny man bowed, clicked his fingers, sat down upon the stool and rattled out ‘Believe It If You Like’ on the piano.

  Neville stared, his good eye wide.

  When the tiny man had finished, Old Pete snatched him up and thrust him, the piano and the stool back into the carrier bag.

  ‘That’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ said Neville.

  ‘Huh!’ said Old Pete, in a depressed tone.

  ‘What do you mean, “Huh”?’

  ‘Well, let me tell you what happened. I was walking down by the canal earlier and I saw this woman drowning. I pulled her out and she said to me, “Thank you, sir, for saving my life.” I said, “No problem,” and then she said, “I am a witch and to thank you properly I will grant you a single wish.” ’

  ‘She never did?’ said Neville.

  ‘She did,’ said Old Pete. ‘But she was either a bit deaf or had water in her ears, because I now possess this ten-inch pianist.’

  ‘I’ve heard it before,’ said Neville.

  ‘Everyone’s heard it before,’ said Old Pete. ‘But it’s a blinder of a joke, isn’t it?’

  ‘A classic. Same again?’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Old Pete.

  ‘But surely––’ said Norman. ‘I mean, you have...I mean––’

  ‘What?’

  Norman Hartnell shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’ll figure that out, given time.’

  ‘Amber bottle tops,’ said Neville.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Norman.

  ‘Amber bottle tops this week, red last week, green the week before.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Norman. ‘Amber this week. Don’t serve anything else, will you?’

  ‘I am a professional,’ said Neville. ‘Do I have to keep on telling you? And what would happen if I did make a mistake? It would hardly be the end of the world, would it?’

  Norman did not reply.

  The big brass band played the theme tune from Blue Peter. The world-famous Brentford Girls’ School Drum Majorettes high-stepped and baton-twirled; carnival floats manned and womanned by Brentfordians, who had actually spent their Millennium grant money on what they said they would, followed behind.

  These fine-looking floats were constructed to display tableaux from Brentford’s glorious past. Here was a great and garish Julius Caesar, fashioned from papier mache, dipping his toe in the Thames, prior to crossing it down by Horseferry Lane. Here were the king’s men, ready to hammer the parliamentarians at the historic Battle of Brentford. Here too the Bards of Brentford, the poets and playwrights, the literary greats, born to the borough and now beloved the world over.

  And there was, well, there was – er ...

  Moving right along, here come the all-ladies over-eighties synchronized paragliding team. And the band played ‘Believe It If You Like’.

  30

  Tour trucks rolled into Brentford. Mostly Bedford vans they were, all knocked and knackered about. They had the names of the bands who travelled within them spray-painted on the sides. There were also one or two of those VW campers. You know the ones, the old lads with the two-tone orange and cream colouring. The ones that German terrorists always drive in movies that have German terrorists in them. It’s always two-tone VW campers. And if that’s not a tradition or an old charter, or something, then gawd knows what it is.

  Hollywood again, probably.

  A big bad black Bedford van drew up outside the football ground and a man with considerable hair, considerable piercings, considerable tattoos and a bulge in his leather pants which merited considerable consideration stepped down from it.

  He flexed his arms, which did not have particularly considerable muscles on them, and cried out to the groundsman who was lounging outside smoking a cigarette.

  ‘We are the Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death,’ he cried out. ‘And we have come for your daughters. Those we can’t screw, we eat.’

  ‘It’s a shame Jim couldn’t get the Spice Girls,’ said the groundsman. ‘Park your old van round the back, mate. There’s booze laid on in the bar.’

  A two-tone VW camper pulled up behind. It was driven by an Aryan type in a roll-neck sweater and denim cap. His name was Axel and he was a member of an organization known as the Black Umbrella Militant Faction Underground Communist Killers. Which was the kind of acronym that didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘You round the back too, mate,’ called out the groundsman. ‘Park in the bay marked Terrorists.’

  The big parade kept on parading by and a carnival atmosphere was beginning to grow. Jim and John had splashed out on vast quantities of bunting and balloons to decorate the streets and the town looked a treat. And what with there being a free rock concert in the evening, and the free beer festival all day and night, and the free fireworks sometime later on, the numbers were swelling, as out-borough types arrived to lend their heartfelt support. There was even a hippie convoy on the way, with a chap called Bollocks driving the lead bus.

  It certainly looked like being a night to remember.

  At the Hartnell Millennial Brewery (two lock-up garages knocked into one, near the clapped-out trading estate down by the old docks), Norman tinkered happily away at his mobile de-entropizer.

  It was constructed mainly from Meccano and mounted upon pram wheels. There was a conveyor belt running through it and the general principle was that you put the item you wanted de-entropized in at one end and it came out of the other – well, de-entropized.

  Of course there was no end to the complications of gubbinry crammed inside. Lots of old valve-radio parts, whirring cogs and clicking mechanisms, all beavering away at the ionization of beta particles, thus creating a positronic catalyst, which bombarded an isotope with gamma radiation, giving rise to galvanic variations and the trans-perambulation of pseudo-cosmic anti-matter.

  The way these things do.

  Norman twiddled with his screwdriver and whistled an old Cannibal Corpse number. He set the dial to repeat, placed a long-defunct penny banger onto the conveyor belt, watched it pass into the de-entropizer and smiled hugely as, one after another, bright new reconstituted clones of the former firework poured out of the other end.

  ‘I must get around to patenting this,’ said Norman Hartnell.

  By eight o’clock The Road to Calvary was filling nicely. The beer festival proper was in a big marquee in the Memorial Park. On the very spot, in fact, where the John Omally Millennial Bowling Green had been planned. And beneath the very tree where Jim had done his travelling in time. But what the marquee didn’t have, but the Swan did, was Hartnell’s Millennial Ale.

  ‘Another bottle, Neville, please,’ said Old Pete, as he stood at the bar chatting with an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman.

  ‘You were saying’, said the Scotsman, ‘about your family.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Old Pete. ‘I come from a very musical family. Even the dog hummed in the warm weather.’

  ‘How interesting,’ said the Englishman.

  ‘Oh yes, very musical. When I was only three I played on the linoleum. We had a flood and my mum floated out on the table. I accompanied her on the piano. Talking of pianos, the cat sat down at ours once and played a tune, and my mum said, “We must get that orchestrated,” and the cat ran out and we never saw it again. Now my father, my father died from music on the brain. A piano fell on his head.’

  ‘Was that the same piano?’ asked the Irishman.

  ‘Same one,’ said Old Pete. ‘I never
played it myself. I was going to learn the harp, but I didn’t have the pluck.’

  ‘Might I just stop you there?’ asked the Scotsman.

  ‘And I was thinking of becoming a homosexual,’ said Old Pete. ‘But I was only half in earnest.’

  ‘I really must stop you there,’ said the Scotsman.

  ‘Oh yes, and why?’

  ‘Because you’re telling such shite jokes.’

  ‘Here, look at that,’ said Old Pete, pointing to a nun riding by on a jester’s back. ‘Is that vergin’ on the ridiculous, or what?’

  Omally pushed his way up to the bar. ‘Has Jim been in, Neville?’ he asked.

  The part-time barman flipped an amber cap from a bottle of Hartnell’s finest and shook his Brylcreemed head. ‘Haven’t seen him since the night before last,’ he said. ‘But shouldn’t he be at the football ground organizing the free rock concert?’

  ‘I’ll go and see.’

  Like The Road to Calvary, the football ground was filling nicely. All traffic in the Ealing Road had come to a standstill as crowds milled pavement to pavement. Omally pushed his way into these crowds and into the floodlit stadium.

  At the far end, flanked by mammoth speakers, Sonic Energy Authority were already on stage. The lead singer, the now legendary Cardinal Cox himself, was giving a spirited solo yodelling rendition of the Blue Peter theme.

  ‘Far out,’ said a lady in a straw hat. ‘And in C.’

  ‘A minor,’ said Paul.

  ‘Have you seen my friend Jim?’ John asked the lady.

  ‘My name isn’t Jim,’ the lady said.

  ‘No, I meant have you seen my friend whose name is Jim?’

  ‘The one whose kitchen you blew up?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Omally in a dismal tone. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Actually, yes,’ said the lady. ‘I saw him down at the Butts Estate about half an hour ago.’

  ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘He was being thrown out of a long black limousine.’

  ‘Ah,’ said John Omally.

  Jim Pooley sat all alone in a corner of the Shrunken Head. But for Sandy the sandy-haired barman, Jim was the only person in the place. (Well, the Memorial Park was only a beer can’s throw away, and there the beer was free.)