‘Quite so,’ said Pooley, spitting upon his palms and stepping once more to the video screen.
Small Dave backed away from Edgar Allan Poe, his tiny hands a flapping blur. ‘What is all this?’ he demanded. ‘I don’t like the look of you one bit.’
The Victorian author approached upon silent, transparent feet. ‘You conjured me here,’ he said, ‘and I came willingly, thinking you to be a disciple. But now I find that I am drawn into a position from which I am unable to extricate myself. That I must serve you. That cannot be!’
‘So leave it then,’ whined Small Dave. ‘I meant no offence to you, I only wanted a little assistance.’
‘You realize who I am? I am Poe, the master of terror. The greatest novelist ever to live. Poe, the creator of Dupin, the world’s original consulting detective. Dupin who was not, I repeat not, a dwarf. You involve one such as myself in your trivial vendettas. I have spoken with Professor Slocombe, there is only one way I can find release. You vindictive grudge-bearing wee bastard!’
Small Dave backed towards the floating camel. Simon was floundering amongst the rafters, bawling now at the top of his voice, loosening slates and splintering woodwork.
‘Stay away from me,’ shrieked Small Dave.
‘Stay away from me!’ shrieked Simon influent dromedary.
Edgar Allan Poe stalked onwards, his patent leather pumps raising dust upon another plane, but leaving no footprint upon the Earth.
‘Stay away from me!’
Simon gave a great lurch and burst out of the rafters of the lock-up garage. As he rose through the shattered opening towards the stars, Edgar Allan Poe lunged forward and, in a single movement, bound the trailing halter line firmly about Small Dave’s wrist.
‘Oh no!’ wailed the dwarf as he was dragged from his feet to follow the wayward camel through the open roof.
Edgar Allan Poe watched them go. ‘I will be off now,’ he said, and, like Small Dave, he was.
In Norman’s kitchenette all sorts of exciting things were happening. Dials were registering overload to all points of the compass, lights were flashing, and buzzers buzzing.
The great brain-hammering hum had reached deafening point and a hideous pressure filled the room, driving Norman’s head down between his shoulder blades and bursting every Corona bottle upon his shop shelves. With superhuman effort he thumped down another fist full of switches, clasped his hands across his ears, and sank to the floor.
Every light in Brentford, Chiswick, Hounslow, Ealing, Kew, and, for some reason, Penge went out.
Lombard Omega squinted through a porthole. ‘Blackout!’ he growled. ‘Wrastlinging blackout, the wily flug-slusherss. Mr Navigator, how many of us left?’
The navigator looked up from his controls. ‘We are it,’ he said.
What Lombard Omega had to say about that cannot possibly be recorded. It must, however, be clearly stated in his defence that it was one of his ancestors who had invented the Anglo-Saxon tongue.
‘Take us in low,’ he said. ‘We will strafe out the entire area. Stand by at the neutron bomb bays and make ready the Gamma weapon.’
‘Not the Gamma weapon?’ said all those present.
‘The Gamma weapon!’ ‘Scrornch me,’ said the navigator.
Pooley, Neville, and Professor Slocombe peered around in the darkness. The only light available flickered through the Swan’s front windows from a roaring inferno which had once been much of Brentford.
‘What now?’ Pooley asked. The Professor shook his head.
‘You’ve done it, you’ve done it! Crack the champagne.’ Neville performed a high-stepping dance before the now darkened and obviously defunct Captain Laser Alien Attack machine.
‘Free beer for a year,’ moaned a voice from the deck.
‘For a century,’ sang Neville. ‘Oh bliss, oh heaven, oh no!’
From the distance came a faint whine of unearthly engines. Something large and deadly was approaching, and all means of confounding its destructive intent had vanished away.
‘Oh dear,’ said Professor Slocombe, ‘anybody care for the last rites?’
‘Prepare the Gamma weapon,’ ordered Lombard Omega.
‘Gamma weapon prepared, sir.’
‘Take out the entire quadrant, spare not an inch.’
‘Not an inch, sir.’
‘Fire the Gamma weapon.’
The navigator flinched and touched a lighted panel upon the master console. A broad beam of red raw energy leapt down from beneath the ship and struck home upon the Kew side of the river Thames.
The five-hundred-year-old oaks of the Royal Botanic Gardens took fire and half a millennium of history melted away in a single moment. The beam extended over a wider area and tore into the river. The waters thrashed and boiled, like a witches’ cauldron, hissed and frothed beneath the unstoppable power of the deadly Gamma weapon.
And the beam moved forward.
The mother ship ground on over the river, a vast chromium blimp filling a quarter of the sky. Along the length of its mirrored sides, lights glittered and twinkled like oil beads. Above it, great dorsal spines rose shark-like and menacing.
The hideous beam moved up from the churning waters and ripped into the river bank, hewing out a broad and ragged channel into which the old Thames gushed in a billowing flood tide.
Ahead lay the Brentford Quadrant, the Ealing Road, and the Flying Swan.
Brentonians fled from their shelters out into the streets. They shielded their faces against the all-consuming heat and took to their heels. The world was coming to an end and now was not the time to take the old Lot’s wife backward glance.
In the Swan the lads cowered in terror as the ghastly rumble of falling masonry and the death-cry of splintering glass drew ever nearer.
Outside, the Ealing Road, crammed with screaming humanity, pouring and tumbling in a mad lemming dash away from the approaching holocaust. Behind them the blinding red wall of fire pressed on, destroying everything which lay in its path.
Omally was upon his knees. ‘Stop it!’ he screamed at Professor Slocombe. ‘Do something, in the name of our God. Only you can.’
The Professor stood immobile. The cries of terror rang in his ears and stung at his soul. The town he had for so very long cared for and protected was being razed to ashes and he was powerless to stop it. He turned a compassionate face towards the Irishman and tears welled in his eyes. ‘What can I do?’ he asked, in a choked voice. ‘I am truly sorry, John.’
Lombard Omega stared down upon the carnage, with a face of hatred and contempt, ‘Run, you loshpits!’ he shouted, as the ant-like figures beneath scattered in all directions. ‘I will have every last one of you, look at that, look at that.’
The crew of the mother ship craned their necks to the portholes. Below, the destruction was savage and sickening. The streets were being cleaved apart, the houses and shops, flat blocks and places of worship driven from existence.
More than thirty Morris Minors, some even priceless collectors’ models with split windscreens, suicide doors and hand-clap wiper arms, had already been atomized, never again to sneak through the dodgy back street MOT.
Professor Slocombe closed his hands in prayer. As the wall of fire moved relentlessly forward and the buildings fell into twisted ruination, he knew that only a miracle could save Brentford.
‘What’s that, sir?’ asked a Cerean deckhand, pointing through a porthole.
‘What’s what?’
‘That, sir.’
Lombard Omega strained his eyes through the rising smokescreen of burning Brentford. ‘Clabnaths!’ he screamed, catching sight of a floating object directly in the ship’s path. ‘It’s a crarking camel! Hard to port! Hard to port!’
‘You are at the controls,’ the cringing navigator informed his captain.
Lombard swung the wheel and the craft veered sharply to the left, avoiding the drifting Simon by a hairbreadth.
Caught in the slipstream, a certain small postman let fly with
a volley of obscenity which would have caused even the ship’s captain to blush.
‘That was snabbing close,’ said Lombard Omega, wiping creosote from his brow. ‘Those blappurds don’t miss a trick, do they? A snurping camel could have messed up the windscreen. Give me more power, Mr Navigator. More power!’
The navigator upped the ante and covered his eyes. A great vibration filled the air. A fearsome pressure driving everything downwards. The flood waters ceased their frenzied rush and hung suspended, as if touched by Moses’s staff. The scattering Brentonians tumbled to the pavements, gasping at the superheated air and clutching at their throats. The Captain Laser Alien Attack machine lurched from its mountings and toppled into the Swan, bringing down the side-wall and exposing the horrors of Archie Karachi’s kitchen to Neville, who, borne by the terrible force, vanished backwards over the bar counter, losing the last of his fillings.
As Pooley and Omally struck the fag-scarred carpet, their last glimpse of anything approaching reality was of Professor Slocombe. The old man stood, the hell-fire painting his ancient features, hands raised towards the burning sky now visible through the Swan’s shattered roof, his mouth reciting the syllables of a ritual which was old before the dawn of recorded history.
Above came the deadly whine of engines as Lombard Omega and the crew of the Starship Sandra moved in for the kill.
‘Finish them!’ screamed the Captain. ‘Finish them!’
The ship rocked and shivered. Needles upon a thousand crystal dials rattled into the danger zone. A low pulsating hum set the Captain’s teeth on edge and caused the navigator, who had suddenly found Christianity, to cross himself. ‘Finish them!’ screamed Lombard.
The ship’s engines coughed and faltered. The air about the craft ionized as a vague image of something monstrous swam into view. It wavered, half-formed, and transparent, and then, amid a great maelstrom of tearing elements, became solid.
Lombard Omega stared in horror through the forward port. ‘What’s that?’ he cried drawing up his hands. ‘What in the name of F . . . ‘
His final words, however obscene, must remain unrecorded. For at one moment he was steering his craft through empty air above Brentford Football ground and at the next it was making violent and irreconcilable contact with the capping stone of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
Whoosh, wham, crash, and bitow went the Starship Sandra as it lost a goodly amount of its undercarriage and slewed to one side. It plummeted downwards, a screaming ball of fire, narrowly missing the roof of the Flying Swan, cartwheeled over the Piano Museum, and tore down towards the allotments, the last men of Ceres, who were standing around looking rather bemused, a very great deal of carefully-laid explosive, and the few sparse and dismal remnants of a former postman’s prize-winning cabbage patch.
There was a moment of terrible silence and then an explosion which rocked the seismographs at
Greenwich and had the warlords of a dozen nations reaching towards the panic buttons.
A very great silence then fell upon what was left of the Brentford Triangle.
Epilogue
The sun rose the next morning at three a.m.
This came as a great surprise to those folk of Brentford who felt in the mood to enjoy the dawn chorus, but no more so than it did to the peoples of the Nile delta who, somewhat bewildered at the sudden disappearance of their greatest tourist attraction, noticed also that the nights were definitely drawing in a bit.
Had the Memorial Library clock been still extant, it would just have struck the hour when an impossibly long low-loader turned up the Ealing Road, demolishing Brentford’s two remaining lampposts, and cracking a hundred paving-stones beneath its many-wheeled assault.
High in the cab, illuminated by the green dash-lights and the first rays of the rising sun, sat a bald-headed man in a saffron robe. He puffed upon a Woodbine and stared through the tinted windscreen at the blackened wreckage which had once been the town of his birth.
There had been more than a few changes while he had been away, this was clear. Another council housing project, he assumed, or road-widening scheme, although it appeared a little drastic. He pulled the five-hundred- foot vehicle up through the gears and rolled it over the railway bridge, whose girders groaned beneath the strain. Where had the New Inn gone, and surely the council would not have demolished two of their cherished flat blocks?
The great vehicle’s front wheels plunged into a bomb crater, dislodging the driver’s Woodbine into his lap. He would have harsh words to say about all this and no mistake. Here he was, delivering the greatest archaeological discovery in the history of mankind, and they had let the roads go to ruin.
And what in Count Dante’s name was that? Archroy brought the mammoth loader to a shuddering halt. Retrieving his fallen Woodbine, he climbed down from the cab. In considerable awe he stared up at the vast structure which now stood upon the site formerly occupied by Brentford’s football ground. That was the Great Pyramid of Giza or he was a clog-dancing Dutchman.
The man of bronze ground out his cigarette with a naked heel and scratched at his hairless pate. Whatever had been going on around here?
He climbed back into his cab and put the mighty vehicle into gear. He was rapidly losing his temper. Where was the reception committee? Where was the bunting and the Mayor? Had he not written to Neville detailing the time of his arrival? This was all a bit much.
Ahead, in the distance, faint lights showed in a window: the Flying Swan, surely, but candle-lit?
Archroy applied the brakes and brought the low-loader to a standstill outside the smoke-blackened and shrapnel-pocked drinking house. He fumbled in his dashboard for another packet of cigarettes, but could find nothing but a bundle of picture postcards displaying now inaccurate rooftop views of Brentford.
He climbed down from his cab, slammed shut the door and, kicking rubble to left and right of him, strode across the road to the Swan’s doorway. With a single curling backward kick he applied his bare foot to the door, taking it from its hinges and propelling it forwards into the bar.
Four startled men looked up in horror from their drinks at the bar counter. Jim Pooley, John Omally, Professor Slocombe and Neville the part-time barman.
‘Archroy?’ gasped Neville, squinting towards the terrific figure framed in the Swan’s doorway. ‘Archroy, is that you?’
Archroy fixed the part-time barman with a baleful eye. ‘I have the Ark of Noah outside on my lorry,’ he roared. ‘I don’t suppose that any of you after-hours drinkers would care to step outside and give it the once-over?’
Omally struggled to his feet. ‘The Ark of Noah, now, is it?’ he said. ‘Could I interest you at all in a guided tour around the Great Pyramid of Brentford?’
THE END
Also by
ROBERT RANKIN
The Antipope
The Brentford Triangle
East of Ealing
The Sprouts of Wrath
Armageddon: The Musical
They Came and Ate Us
The Suburban Book of the Dead
The Book of Ultimate Truths
Raiders of the Lost Car Park
The Greatest Show Off Earth
The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived
The Garden of Unearthly Delights
A Dog Called Demolition
Nostradamus Ate My Hamster
Sprout Mask Replica
The Brentford Chainstore Massacre
The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag
Apocalypso
Snuff Fiction
Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls
Waiting for Godalming
Web Site Story
The Fandom of the Operator
The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse
The Witches of Chiswick
Knees Up Mother Earth
The Brightonomicon
The Toyminator
The Da-da-de-da-da Code
Necrophenia
Retromancer
The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions
The Mechanical Messiah and Other Marvels of the Modern Age
The Educated Ape and Other Wonders of the Worlds
Illustrated works:
The Bumper Book of Ficts written by Neil Gardner
EMPIRES
E-book edition cover illustration by Robert Rankin
Art direction by Rachel Hayward
Table of Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Epilogue
The Brentford Triangle Page 21
