The Brightonomicon

by Robert Rankin

  Which is not to say the Art, for this was no Art installation brought in for the Festival.

  Whilst chaps in white work-coats fussed at the computers, other chaps in black suits, white shirts, black ties and sunglasses fussed at them and did occasional pointings towards the sky above.

  The sky this night, although moonless, was altogether clear of cloud and I was able to make out the constellation of Orion (which put me in mind of spaniels) and vaguely the Crab Nebula (which put me in mind of Bartholomew’s brother who had perished hereabouts in a platypus-skin crab suit).

  ‘What is this place?’ I whispered to my companion.

  ‘A window area,’ said Mr Rune, ‘which is to say, a very special place where the line between what we believe we understand to be real and what we believe to be unreal is very thin indeed.’

  ‘You must feel right at home here, then.’

  ‘Just observe, whilst doing your best to remain unobserved. Do you think you can do that for me?’

  ‘I will try,’ I said and I patted the General Electric M135 7.62mm minigun. It really was a most remarkable-looking weapon, with its six rotating barrels and everything. And the big belt of bullets and …

  Well, you know how it is for boys. Or at least you will if you are a boy. There is something strangely compelling about guns, especially great big machine-guns. It is like fire, really – how small boys play with matches and big boys have barbecues and bonfires. There is something about the excitement and danger of it all. Firing guns is wrong. Guns are all wrong. But there is still something terribly compelling about them.

  ‘Am I right in thinking,’ I whispered to Mr Rune, ‘that the men down there are baddies?’

  Hugo Rune nodded his naked dome. ‘Baddies of the baddest persuasion.’

  ‘Do you want me to shoot them?’ I asked.

  The Guru’s Guru turned his head towards me. ‘Whatever has brought this on?’ he asked.

  ‘Well …’ I patted the minigun.

  ‘Ah,’ said Hugo Rune, ‘too close a proximity to a weapon. I once wrote a most erudite monograph upon the subject of the car crash in relation to metallurgy, to whit how certain metals are capable of absorbing the psychic essence to which we refer, most lightly, as good luck or bad luck. Allow me to elucidate.

  ‘The alchemists believe that gold is the purest metal, that all other “base” metals aspire to be gold and can in fact be transformed into gold by the addition of a catalysing agent known as the Philosopher’s Stone. This stone is, in essence, the very quintessence of purity.

  ‘People love gold – worship gold, in fact; they are unconsciously drawn to its purity. Gold pleases them upon a psychic level, above that which they are able to comprehend. Gold, you might say, is good luck. Iron, however, and the steel it is converted into, are quite another matter. Here we have the basest of metals, a primitive atavistic brute of a metal. Weapons are not fashioned from gold; jewellery that beautifies is fashioned from gold. Which brings me back to the subject of my monograph. It is my contention that the motorcars that crash, as opposed to those that do not, do so because a portion of the iron of which they are constructed has been recycled from a piece of iron that in the past absorbed bad luck. It might have once been a sword, or a knife or some other weapon. The cycle continues. Evil inevitably befalls the user.

  ‘Now please remove your hand from that weapon lest its evil contaminate you further.’

  ‘I was only asking,’ I said and I grudgingly removed my hand from the General Electric M135 7.62mm minigun.

  ‘When I do ask you to start shooting,’ said Mr Rune, ‘and be assured that I will, it will not be towards those particular baddies that I will request you to direct your firepower.’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ I said. ‘This is all rather exciting. In a sort of I-wonder-what-will-happen-next kind of way. If you know what I mean.’

  Mr Rune sighed deeply. ‘Just remain alert,’ said he.

  And I remained alert, although chilly, and I watched the fellows below us, the ones in the white and the ones in the black. And there were some in colourful camouflage, too. And they were all keeping busy. Then a van arrived from somewhere.

  And it was a Royal Mail van.

  ‘Look at that,’ I whispered to Mr Rune. ‘A Royal Mail van. What do you think that is doing here?’

  ‘What do you think it’s doing here?’

  ‘Delivering letters? Although—’

  ‘Although?’ Mr Rune took out a silver hip flask, removed its cap and drank from it.

  ‘Although, as you know, I recently had a most alarming experience in a Royal Mail van. You do not think it could be that evil Doctor Proctor, do you?’

  ‘Observe,’ said Mr Rune.

  ‘Give me a sip from your hip flask.’

  ‘Observe,’ said Mr Rune once again. And he did not give me a sip. The rear doors of the Royal Mail van opened. And it was that evil Doctor Proctor.

  ‘That f*cker!’ I whispered.

  Mr Rune had no comment to make.

  And that f*cker climbed down from the Royal Mail van and Nurse Hearse climbed down from it also. And then they reached up and helped another f*cker down.

  And this f*cker was—

  ‘A crab!’ I whispered, though harshly. ‘Some f*cker dressed up as a crab.’

  ‘Enough f*ckers now,’ said Mr Rune. ‘Such language does not become you. But what do you make of it?’

  ‘No sense at all,’ I replied. ‘But I can see his head sticking out of the top of the crab suit – Bartholomew the bog troll.’

  ‘It’s his brother,’ said Mr Rune. ‘His twin brother, to be precise.’

  ‘But I thought his brother had been murdered. You said his brother had been murdered.’

  ‘He was.’

  ‘Well, clearly he was not, because he is right there.’

  ‘You misunderstood me.’ Mr Rune had pulled a bar of chocolate out of his pocket now and was munching upon it. ‘That is the twin brother of Bartholomew’s twin brother. The identical twin. It is, in fact, a clone of Bartholomew’s twin brother.’

  ‘And what is a clone?’ I asked.

  ‘A genetically engineered duplicate wrought from the DNA of a subject.’

  ‘That is science fiction,’ I said. ‘We cannot do things like that yet.’

  ‘We can’t. But they can.’

  ‘Would you care to enlighten me, please?’ I pleaded. ‘Clearly you know what is going on here.’

  ‘All the clues were back at the house of Bartholomew’s brother – you saw them with your own eyes – but now is not the time for explanations. Look on and learn and be prepared to employ the weaponry if and when the need arises.’

  I made exasperated sounds, but I looked on, because let us face it, whatever was going on was not the sort of thing that you see every day. Whatever it was that was going on.

  And then …

  ‘Ah,’ whispered Mr Rune, ‘if I am not mistaken, the show is about to begin.’

  And then I heard those big electrical clunking sounds that are only made by searchlights when you switch them on. And sure as sure can be, around and about the encampment below, searchlights that I had not previously noticed because they were all in darkness blinked on and shone up into the sky.

  They crisscrossed and arced in the sky and then appeared to focus upon something.

  Something large.

  ‘What is that?’ I enquired of Mr Rune.

  ‘A scout-craft,’ said himself.

  I could hear a low, distant humming. And this grew louder to such a degree that I had to cover my ears. And down from the sky dropped this scout-craft.

  This scout-craft was—

  A flying saucer, no less.

  ‘Mister Rune!’ I shouted above the din. ‘Mister Rune, it is a flying saucer!’

  Mr Rune clamped a big, fat hand over my mouth. With his other hand, he raised a finger to his lips.

  Down and down came the flying saucer. I saw some kind of glowing undercarriage fold ou
t, and I do have to say that it was with a certain elegance, almost balletic, that it set down within the crater below.

  The terrible humming died away.

  A terrible stillness followed.

  ‘The sound of silence,’ whispered Mr Rune.

  I recalled that I had once seen photographs, purported to be of flying saucers, taken by an American chappie by the name of George Adamski. I had considered them to be fakes at the time, but now I was of a different opinion. George’s photos were dead on the nail, conning tower, portholes and all.

  An entrance port in the saucer eased open and a metal gangway slid down towards Earth. And then an occupant of the craft appeared in the doorway.

  And that occupant looked like a crab.

  But it was a simply spiffing crab, and I am not being flippant here.

  It came down the gangway sideways, as is the manner of crabs. But it was decked out in a silver spacesuit.

  Which is what made it look so simply spiffing.

  For those who pay attention to such matters, it would have been noticed that in the early days of the NASA programme, the astronauts all wore silver spacesuits, unlike the white ones that they wear today. Why? Because silver was the colour that spacesuits should be, wasn’t it? Everyone in those days knew that a spacesuit had to be silver. Until of course it crossed the mind of some spacesuit designer at NASA that spacesuits did not really have to be silver just because everyone naturally assumed that all spacesuits had to be silver. Spacesuits could be white. In fact, they would actually look more chic if they were white.*

  Well, everybody is entitled to their opinion, I suppose, but for me, a simply spiffing spacesuit has to be silver. To Hell with modern trends.

  ‘That is one simply spiffing space crab,’ I whispered.

  ‘I have to agree,’ said Mr Rune, ‘so I trust that you won’t take it too badly when I call upon you to shoot it.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I replied. ‘After all, it is a space crab.’

  The space crab was now at the bottom of the gangway. It had sort of scuttled around, because scuttling is what crabs do – as opposed to shifty fellows. Who sidle. Although there seemed to me to be a degree of sidling in the space crab’s scuttling, for it scuttled in a sinister fashion. I would not have trusted it at all.

  And then I heard a kind of fanfare coming through loudspeakers that I had also failed to notice earlier. And I noticed a chap with a StylophoneTM, of the type that was presently being advertised by Rolf Harris on the television. This chap had a microphone set up and was scraping away at the StylophoneTM with a will and a vigour. And then he spoke into the microphone, speaking words that sounded to me like absolute gibberish.

  ‘That would be Cosmoranto,’ Mr Rune explained, ‘the universal tongue.’

  The gibberish went on and on and then it stopped.

  And the space crab must have said something in reply.

  Because it then went on and on again.

  And then stopped.

  And then the chaps in the black suits with the white shirts, black ties and sunglasses took hold of the twin brother of Bartholomew the bog troll’s twin brother and started dragging him towards the space crab and the flying saucer. And it quickly became clear that the twin brother of the bog troll’s twin brother had come to the conclusion that he did not want to be dragged anywhere, especially there, and he began to put up a spirited struggle. Which was not easy as he was somewhat encumbered by his platypus-skin crab suit.

  ‘Should I shoot someone now?’ I asked Mr Rune.

  ‘You’ll shoot no one at all.’

  ‘I am impressed by that,’ I said, ‘because even though I can only see you vaguely in this uncertain light, you really did appear to say that without moving your lips.’

  ‘That’s because I said that,’ said someone who was not Mr Hugo Rune. And I glanced up to see who this was. And someone clubbed me all but unconscious.

  PART III

  Now, I felt reasonably certain that I had never been marched along at gunpoint before. And I do have to tell you that I did not like it one bit. In fact, I would not recommend the experience to anyone. It is a very frightening experience, having a loaded gun poking in your back and knowing that on the trigger end is a nutcase who seems quite prepared to use it.

  I was scared. Well and truly scared. And I felt dizzy and sick in equal part, because the nutcase with the gun – and he was a nutcase, you could see it in his eyes – this nutcase with the gun had hit me with his gun and damn near knocked my lights out.

  ‘Get a move on,’ demanded this nutcase, poking me harder with his gun. ‘And you, too, fatso,’ he said to Mr Rune, ‘or I’ll shoot your boyfriend here.’

  The Hokus Bloke glared daggers at the nutcase and I expected him to employ his Dimac at once and dispatch this malcontent. Mr Rune, however, demurred, no doubt for reasons too inscrutable for me to fathom. And so he and I were ushered down into the crater.

  And all too soon we were down in the encampment.

  And other guns were being trained upon us.

  And I found myself face to face with the evil Doctor Proctor. And he now had a gun in his hand.

  ‘Well, well, well, well, well,’ said this man, looking me both up and down. ‘If this isn’t the transplant patient. You put me to no little inconvenience and caused me considerable grief. I’m still rather bruised, you know.’

  I raised my fists to strike at the doctor. The increased pressure of a gun barrel in my back, however, removed such thoughts of violence from my mind. For the time being, anyway.

  ‘But,’ the doctor continued, ‘matters adjust themselves. Nurse, do we have the spare crab suit in the van?’

  ‘We do, Doctor, we do.’ Nurse Hearse smiled a terrible smile, made all the more terrible by the fact that she lacked for her two front teeth. ‘You’re going to get yours now,’ she told me.

  Mr Rune made clearings of the throat preparatory to speech. ‘If I might have a word or two,’ he began.

  ‘You certainly may not,’ said Doctor Proctor. ‘I recognise you well enough – you’re the rider of that hideous horse. What was that, by the way – a little bit of your own genetic engineering? Well, regardless, I have you now and I’ll have your skin for a duvet cover, you see if I don’t.’

  I looked at the doctor and looked at the nurse and then I looked towards the simply spiffing space crab. And I do have to tell you that, right up close, he did not look all that spiffing after all. Terrifying is what he looked, too large and too wrong and too menacing. He clicked his oversized claws and glared horribly at me with his horrible eyes on their horrible stalks.

  ‘Nurse, the suit,’ said Doctor Proctor.

  ‘Now hold on,’ I said. ‘I do not know what is going on, but it is nothing to do with me. Just let us go free and we will say no more about it.’ I have no idea why I said that, really – it did not make a lot of sense. But when you are as scared as I was scared then, you too would talk all manner of rubbish.

  ‘Look,’ I shouted, ‘over there – Zulus, thousands of them.’

  Well, it might have worked.

  Doctor Proctor laughed, and he did it in that terrible mad-scientist manner. It was most disconcerting.

  ‘I feel,’ said Hugo Rune to Doctor Proctor, ‘that a deal might possibly be struck between us, for although my companion remains ignorant of what is going on here, I do not.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ said the doctor, in a sneery kind of way. ‘So what do you think is going on, baldy?’

  Mr Rune fairly bristled at this and I quite expected him to employ the Dimac Death-Touch. But he did not.

  ‘I am not without connections,’ said Mr Rune. ‘My name is known to those in high office. I am acquainted with the workings of the Ministry of Serendipity.’

  ‘This is new,’ I remarked.

  ‘The Secret Government,’ said Mr Rune. ‘Those who control the controllers. Those who govern the government. This project bears all their hallmarks and will surely end in calamity for
all of us.’

  ‘Well, certainly for you,’ said Doctor Proctor.

  And the space crab gave his claws a further clicking, in a rather irritable way, I felt, a rather impatient way. And words came from the space crab’s nasty mouthparts. Words that were not spoken in Cosmoranto, the universal tongue.

  ‘Hugo Rune,’ the space crab said in a voice that was all clicks and grunts and very unappealing.

  ‘I am that man,’ said Mr Rune. ‘And you are Captain Ahab, I presume.’

  ‘Ahab the space crab?’ said I.

  Ahab the space crab nodded his eyestalks. ‘You are correct,’ said he.

  Doctor Proctor gawped at Mr Rune. ‘You two know each other?’ he said.

  ‘I know all,’ said Mr Rune. ‘I am Rune, whose eye is in the triangle, whose nose cuts through the ether, whose ear takes in the music of the spheres. Rune, who—’

  ‘Someone shoot this stone-bonker,’ said Doctor Proctor.

  ‘I think not,’ said Mr Rune and he delved into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew his pocket watch. Perusing its face, he declared, ‘You have by my reckoning approximately two minutes before the heavily armed unit that I summoned earlier to meet me at this location lays waste to the lot of you. I would recommend a rapid withdrawal. Any violence visited upon my person or that of my companion will be dealt with in the severest manner.’

  I glanced about at all and sundry. The scientific types in the white coats. The Men in Black, for such they were, in their black suits, white shirts, black ties and sunglasses. The psychedelically camouflaged military personnel. The twin brother of Bartholomew’s twin brother, still putting up a bit of a struggle. And Ahab the space crab, let us not forget him.

  To say that there was a certain degree of unreality about the situation would be to say that there is more to a Russian spaniel than most folk generally know.