“Oh,” said Thor. “I see. Well. I don't know what to do now. Blast. Blast everything.”
“Thor —”
“Yes, yes, what is it?”
“Thor, it's very simple what you do about your father and the Woodshead,” said Kate.
“Oh yes? What then?”
“I'll tell you on one condition.”
“Oh really? And what's that?”
“That you tell me how many stones there are in Wales.”
“What!” exclaimed Thor in outrage. “Away from me! That's years of my life you're talking about!”
Kate shrugged.
“No!” said Thor. “Anything but that! Anyway,” he added sullenly, “I told you.”
“No you didn't.”
“Yes I did. I said I lost count somewhere in Mid-Glamorgan. Well, I was hardly going to start again, was I? Think, girl, think!”
Chapter 33
Beating a path through the difficult territory to the north-east of Valhalla — a network of paths that seemed to lead only to other paths and then back to the first paths again for another try — went two figures, one a big, stupid, violent creature with green eyes and a scythe which hung from its belt and often seriously impeded its progress, the other a small crazed creature who clung on to the back of the bigger one, manically urging him on while actually impeding his progress still further.
They attained at last a long, low, smelly building into which they hurried shouting for horses. The old stable master came forward, recognised them and, having heard already of their disgrace, was at first disinclined to help them on their way. The scythe flashed through the air and the stable master's head started upwards in surprise while his body took an affronted step backwards, swayed uncertainly, and then for lack of any further instructions to the contrary keeled over backwards in its own time. His head bounded into the hay.
His assailants hurriedly lashed up two horses to a cart and clattered away out of the stable yard and along the broader thoroughfare which led upwards to the north.
They made rapid progress up the road for a mile, Toe Rag urging the horses on frantically with a long and cruel whip. After a few minutes, however, the horses began to slow down and to look about them uneasily. Toe Rag lashed them all the harder, but they became more anxious still then suddenly lost all control and reared in terror, turning over the cart and tipping its occupants out on the ground, from which they instantly sprang up in a rage.
Toe Rag screamed at the terrified horses and then, out of the corner of his eye, caught sight of what had so disturbed them.
It wasn't so terrifying. It was just a large, white, metal box, upturned on a pile of rubbish by the roadside and rattling itself.
The horses were rearing and trying to bolt away from the big white rattling thing but they were impossibly entangled in their traces. They were only working themselves up into a thrashing lather of panic. Toe Rag quickly realised that there would be no calming them until the box was dealt with.
“Whatever it is,” he screeched at the green-eyed creature, “kill it!”
Green-eye unhooked his scythe from his belt once more and clambered up the pile of rubbish to where the box was rattling. He kicked it and it only rattled the more. He got his foot behind it and with a heavy thrust shoved it away down the heap. The big white box slithered a foot or so then turned over and toppled to the ground. It rested there for a moment and then a door, finally freed, flew open. The horses screamed in fear.
Toe Rag and his green-eyed thug approached the thing with worried curiosity, then staggered back in horror as a great and powerful new god erupted from its innards.
Chapter 34
The following afternoon, at a comfortable distance from alI these events, set at a comfortable distance from a well-proportioned window through which the afternoon light was streaming, lay an elderly one-eyed man in a white bed. A newspaper sat like a half-collapsed tent on the floor, where it had been hurled two minutes before.
The man was awake but not glad to be. His exquisitely frail hands lay slightly curled on the pure white linen sheets and quivered very faintly.
His name was variously given as Mr Odwin, or Wodin, or Odin. He was — is — a god, and furthermore he was a confused and startled god.
He was confused and startled because of the report he had just been reading on the front page of the newspaper, which was that another god had been cutting loose and making a nuisance of himself. It didn't say so in so many words of course, it merely described what had happened last night when a missing jet fighter aircraft had mysteriously erupted under full power from out of a house in North London into which it could not conceivably have been thought to have fitted. It had instantly lost its wings and gone into a screaming dive and crashed and exploded in a main road. The pilot had managed to eject during the few seconds he had had in the air, and had landed, shaken, bruised, but otherwise unharmed, and babbling about strange men with hammers flying over the North Sea.
Luckily, because of the time at which the inexplicable disaster had occurred, the roads were almost deserted, and apart from massive damage to property, the only fatalities to have occurred were the as yet unidentified occupants of a car which was thought to have been possibly a BMW and possibly blue, though because of the rather extreme nature of the accident it was rather hard to tell.
He was very, very tired and did not want to think about it, did not want to think about last night, did not want to think of anything other than linen sheets and how wonderful it was when Sister Bailey patted them down around him as she had just now, just five minutes ago, and again just ten minutes before that.
The American girl, Kate something, came into his room. He wished she would just let him sleep. She was going on about something being all fixed up. She congratulated him on having extremely high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels and a very dicky heart, as a consequence of which the hospital would be very glad to accept him as a lifelong patient in return for his entire estate. They didn't even care to know what his estate was worth, because it would clearly be sufficient to cover a stay as brief as his was likely to be.
She seemed to expect him to be pleased, so he nodded amiably, thanked her vaguely and drifted, drifted happily off to sleep.
Chapter 35
The same afternoon Dirk Gently awake, also in hospital, suffering from mild concussion, scrapes and bruises and a broken leg. He had had the greatest difficulty in explaining, on admittance, that most of his injuries had been caused by a small boy and an eagle, and that really, being run over by a motorcycle courier was a relatively restful experience since it mostly involved lying down a lot and not being swooped on every two minutes.
He was kept under sedation — in other words, he slept — for most of the morning, suffering terrible dreams in which Toe Rag and a green-eyed, scythe-bearing giant made their escape to the north-east from Valhalla, where they were unexpectedly accosted and consumed by a newly created, immense Guilt God which had finally escaped from what looked suspiciously like an upturned refrigerator on a skip.
He was relieved to be woken at last from this by a cheery, “Oh it's you, is it? You nicked my book.”
He opened his eyes and was greeted by the sight of Sally Mills, the girl he had been violently accosted by the previous day in the café, for no better reason than that he had, prior to nicking her book, nicked her coffee.
“Well, I'm glad to see you took my advice and came in to have your nose properly attended to,” she said as she fussed around him. “Pretty roundabout way you seem to have taken but you're here and that's the main thing. You caught up with the girl you were interested in did you? Oddly enough, you're in the very bed that she was in. If you see her again, perhaps you could give her this pizza which she arranged to have delivered before checking herself out. It's all cold now, but the courier did insist that she was very adamant it should be delivered.
“I don't mind you nicking the book, really, though. I don't know why I buy them reall
y, they're not very good, only everyone always does, don't they? Somebody told me there's a rumour he had entered into a pact with the devil or something. I think that's nonsense, though I did hear another story about him which I much preferred. Apparently he's always having these mysterious deliveries of chickens to his hotel rooms, and no one dares to ask why or even guess what it is he wants them for, because nobody ever sees a single scrap of them again. Well, I met somebody who knows exactly what he wants them for. The somebody I met once had the job of secretly smuggling the chickens straight back out of his rooms again. What Howard Belt gets out of it is a reputation for being a very strange and demonic man and everybody buys his books. Nice work if you can get it is what I say. Anyway, I expect you don't want to have me nattering to you alt afternoon, and even if you do I've got better things to do. Sister says you'll probably be discharged this evening so you can go to your own home and sleep in your own bed, which I'm sure you'll much prefer. Anyway, hope you feel better, here's a couple of newspapers.”
Dirk took the papers, glad to be left alone at last.
He first turned to see what The Great Zaganza had to say about his day. The Great Zaganza said, “You are very fat and stupid and persistently wear a ridiculous hat which you should be ashamed of.”
He grunted slightly to himself about this, and turned to the horoscope in the other paper.
It said, “Today is a day to enjoy home comforts.”
Yes, he thought, he would be glad to get back home. He was still strangely relieved about getting rid of his old fridge looked forwand to enjoying a new phase of fridge ownership with the spanking new model currently sitting in his kitchen at home.
Then was the eagle to think about, but he would worry about that later, when he got home.
He turned to the front page to see if there was any interesting news.
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The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul Page 23
