The Brightonomicon

by Robert Rankin

  ‘How fortuitous,’ said Mr Rune. ‘And you personally witnessed this phenomenon?’

  ‘Not me, mister, but a mate of mine said he knows a bloke what seen it.’

  ‘You can’t argue with evidence like that,’ said Mr Rune.

  ‘Are you taking the piss?’ asked the Cockney.

  ‘No, I assumed that you were giving it away.’

  Mr Rune and the Cockney eyed one another. The Cockney was short and well knit. Mr Rune was large and carried a stout stick. The Cockney muttered something dialectal with asterisks in it, turned and shuffled away.

  Hugo Rune took a glass phial from his waistcoat pocket and uncorked it. ‘We shall take a sample of the tears to test,’ said he.

  ‘To test for what?’ I asked.

  ‘To see whether Her Majesty weeps real Earl Grey.’

  ‘And what will that prove?’

  ‘Whether we are dealing with a hoax or what I fear to be in fact something I have been dreading.’

  ‘Have a word with yourself,’ I said. ‘That will not prove anything.’

  ‘It will to me.’ And Hugo Rune reached out to take a sample of the anomalous tears.

  But he found to his complete disgust that his way was suddenly barred by several burly members of the Sussex constabulary.

  ‘Stand aside, there,’ ordered the Perfect Master.

  ‘Go back behind the line, please, sir,’ said a constable.

  ‘Line?’ said Mr Rune. ‘What line?’

  ‘The one that the officer there is marking upon the grass.’

  ‘I require a sample of this liquid.’ Hugo Rune did squarings of his shoulders. ‘I am an eminent scientist working for the Ministry of Serendipity.’

  ‘There’s no such ministry,’ said the constable. ‘That’s just myth, like trouser imps, or the Oxford Don with the luminous nose.’

  ‘Or the Singing Maggot of Salisbury,’ said another constable.

  ‘Or the Laughing Lamppost,’ said the first constable.

  ‘Isn’t that a pub in Penge?’ asked the other constable.

  ‘No, you’re thinking of The Smiling Handbag.’

  ‘I’m always thinking about that,’ said the other constable. ‘But the Ministry of Serendipity is a myth, like the Battenburg cake that can breathe underwater, or—’

  ‘Or the peanut that surpasses all understanding,’ said a lady in a straw hat. ‘Although my husband had one of those.’

  ‘I’m sure he did, madam,’ said the first constable, ‘but I’ll have to ask you to step back behind the line also, please.’

  ‘Why?’ asked the lady.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Rune. ‘Why?’

  ‘I asked first,’ said the lady.

  ‘Because I am telling you to, madam,’ said the constable.

  The other constable nodded. ‘I will back the first constable on that,’ he said. ‘It’s outrageous, I know, the way we policemen can throw our weight about these days, but you have to move with the times, I suppose. So do as the nice constable tells you, madam, or we’ll employ the tear gas.’

  ‘I love employing the tear gas,’ said the first constable. ‘It really makes me laugh.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re using the can the wrong way up,’ said the lady. ‘Which reminds me of the one about the Irish Guinness bottle.’

  ‘The Irish Guinness bottle?’ I asked, for I had said nothing in a while.

  ‘Yes,’ said the lady. ‘What do you think is printed upon the bottom of an Irish Guinness bottle?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Open other end,’ said the lady, and she laughed.

  ‘That is a racist joke,’ said the first constable. ‘Give the lady in the straw hat a little squirt from the tear-gas canister, fellow officer.’

  ‘Are you talking to me?’ asked another constable. ‘I thought I was “the other constable”.’

  ‘Now look!’ said Mr Rune, in a commanding tone, ‘I require a sample of the dripping liquid.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said the first constable, ‘sorry, sir, please move back behind the line or I will be forced to run you in for causing a breach of the peace, or some similar trumped-up charge, such as trespass, loitering with intent—’

  ‘Flying without a licence,’ said the other constable.

  ‘Being drunk in charge of a butcher’s bicycle,’ said the first constable.

  ‘Taking coals to Newcastle,’ said the other constable.

  ‘Good one,’ said the first constable. ‘And bringing the good name of the regiment into disrepute by rogering the mascot.’

  Now, I have said little about the crowd – the growing crowd, as it happened. The crowd that was pressing closely around us, with those at the front of it listening intently to the conversation that was being carried on between Mr Rune, the two constables and the lady in the straw hat. Who now, it appeared, had decided to side with the constables and have Mr Rune run in for indecent exposure and her husband’s failure to get BBC2 on the television set.

  And there was still much talk from the constables of ‘moving back behind the line’, which had now been completed, although in a somewhat ragged fashion, by a third policeman with nothing whatever to say.

  And to say that I could see what was coming is to say that only a fool wears a blue suit in Lincoln when there is an ‘M’ in the month.

  ‘He did what?’ asked Fangio, as I sat upon my favourite barstool in The Quail That Can See Through Concrete.

  ‘Struck down the constable with his stout stick,’ I said. ‘And your pub’s present name is particularly foolish.’

  ‘I’ve given up caring,’ said Fangio. ‘And seeing, too, as it happens. What do you think of my eyebrow extensions?’

  ‘Very fetching,’ I said. ‘I like the beads – although I think the ribbons are somewhat ostentatious.’

  ‘It’s the last time I barter with a gypsy,’ said Fangio. Which explained everything to my satisfaction. ‘So where is Rune now?’

  ‘In police custody,’ I said. ‘He put up quite a struggle. I would have helped, but he instructed me to get a sample of the statue’s tears while he caused a diversion. Which I did.’ And I held up the phial, now filled with liquid.

  ‘I’ve heard that the tears cure baker’s bosom,’ said Fangio ‘A Cockney bloke was in here earlier.’

  ‘The whole thing is bound to be a hoax,’ I said, as I sipped my pint of Texaco. ‘A stunt to attract more visitors to the town. There are already stalls there selling souvenirs to the gullible.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh,’ said Fangio. And I viewed his souvenir T-shirt. ‘Bought it off the Cockney bloke,’ the barlord explained. ‘I thought it was a Hawaiian shirt. Curse these eyebrow extensions.’

  I sipped more ale and nodded as if I cared in the slightest.

  ‘So what about Rune?’ asked Fangio. ‘You’re not going to leave him to rot in some rat-infested cell, surely.’

  ‘He informed me, just before he struck down a lady in a straw hat, that no lock on Earth could hold him. He taught Houdini everything he knew, apparently.’

  ‘And the Jackson Five,’ said Fangio. ‘Their father was all for them going into his bicycle-repair business, but Rune suggested that they have a bit of a sing-song instead.’

  ‘He is certainly one of a kind,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Fange. ‘They broke the mould before they made him.’

  And I drank awhile in silence and helped myself to the complimentary peanuts, while Fangio blundered about behind the bar, bumping into everything.

  Presently he tired of this, and so did I, as it happened.

  ‘So when Rune escapes,’ said Fangio, ‘does that mean he will have to go on the run? That you will have to leave your rooms at number forty-nine? That he might pay off his enormous bar bill here?’

  ‘Interesting questions,’ I said, as I filled my pockets with peanuts. ‘The answers to the first two might be “yes”. But as to the last one …’

  ‘Such I feared,’ said Fangio. ‘I’m serious
ly thinking of signing on with Bartholomew Moulsecoomb for a life of piracy. I hear he plans to pillage the aggregates depot in Portslade in the galleon that he now rents from Hugo Rune. The Saucy Spaniel, I believe it’s called.’

  ‘The Sound of Silence’ was to be heard.

  ‘I’d switch that jukebox off,’ said Fangio, ‘if I could find it.’

  ‘Well, I have to go,’ I said. ‘Mr Rune instructed me to go to a certain address and deliver this phial to a certain Professor Nessor.’

  ‘Would that be Professor Nessor the funambulist analyst?’

  ‘It would,’ I said. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Never heard of the fellow,’ said Fangio. ‘It was just a lucky guess.’

  I did not have to travel far to find the rooms of Professor Nessor. He occupied those that were above the rooms that Mr Rune and I occupied, which were below his, which were, in turn, above ours.

  I knocked on the door to avoid any further confusion.

  Professor Nessor answered my knockings.

  ‘Aha,’ he said, ‘young Rizla. You have brought the phial of the statue’s tears?’

  ‘You were expecting me?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it was just a lucky guess.’

  I really liked the professor. He looked just the way a professor should look, all gaunt and angular and old and clad in tweed with lots of mad white hair.

  And I really liked his rooms. I had visited them before, upon many occasions, to borrow sugar. Or milk. Or coffee. Or tea. Or cocoa. Or a fill for Mr Rune’s pipe. Or …

  ‘Step carefully,’ said the professor. ‘Don’t trip over the wires.’

  I stepped very carefully. I had tripped on the wires before.

  The wires, as might well be imagined considering that the professor was a funambulist analyst, were tightrope wires. They – and there were many of them – criss-crossed the room nine inches above the floor. Professor Nessor was a member of a religious cult that took its sacred texts from the works of the science-fiction writer Kilgore Sprout.

  Sprout states, in The Earth Dies Belching, that it is contact with planet Earth that is the cause of man’s mortality, and that if a man could remain above the surface of the planet throughout his life, if only by nine inches, he would become immortal. The planet Earth itself, according to Sprout, sucks the vital juices of humans out through the soles of their feet to reinvigorate itself as a compensation for all the ill that Mankind has wrought upon it over the ages. Sprout himself is claimed by many to be the inventor of the platform sole and throughout his remarkably long life touched the planet on as few occasions as were humanly possible. His followers believe that he would have lived for ever had he not died tragically in a freak stilt/ banana-skin accident.

  The professor lived upon the top floor of forty-nine Grand Parade, rarely venturing out, and only then upon two Castrol GTX tins strapped beneath his feet. And to be on the safe side, his rooms were crisscrossed with tightropes, upon which he walked with considerable skill without the assistance of a tightrope-walker’s pole.

  ‘You take your life in your hands upon those floorboards,’ he told me, as he had done on many previous occasions, the last being when I had come up to borrow a half-ounce of Moroccan black and three condoms, as Mr Rune was going out clubbing. ‘The boards may be above the Earth, but they are constructed of wood, which grows from the Earth.’

  ‘I thought trees are made out of air,’ I said. ‘I have heard that if you grow a tree in a pot, the earth you plant it in weighs exactly the same even after the tree has grown big. So the tree must be made out of air. And water, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t know who puts these mad ideas into your head. But let’s see what this phial of tears has to tell us.’

  He bounced along a wire to a raised worktable and performed raised work upon it. Work involving Petri dishes, a microscope, a Bunsen burner, some litmus paper, a retort stand, a number of test tubes and several alarm clocks of the old-fashioned sort with great big gong jobbies on the top. And a bell jar.

  And at length he was done with his experimentation.

  ‘So what do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s real Earl Grey,’ he said. ‘There’s no doubt about it. Crawford’s of Piccadilly, by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen. The real McWindsor.’

  ‘Well,’ said I. ‘Now there is a thing.’

  ‘Where?’ cried the professor, raising the lid of his chemistry set to strike the thing down.

  ‘Not an actual thing,’ I said. ‘It was just a figure of speech. But it is real Earl Grey. So what?’

  ‘It does have some outré qualities,’ said the professor.

  ‘Oooooh,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It is not present-day Earl Grey. It is Victorian Earl Grey. The tears this statue is shedding come from the past.’

  I gave the professor a suitably old-fashioned look. ‘What are you telling me?’ I asked.

  ‘I have carbon dated the residues of the tea. They come from eighteen fifty-one, the year of the Great Exhibition.’

  ‘You do not have a carbon-dating machine,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t try and baffle me with science, young man. I can positively date the tea residues to eighteen fifty-one, to the very day that the Great Exhibition opened. Oh, and there are also residues of Reekie oaks. Those trees only grew in Hyde Park during that period. They were levelled by the great Reekie oak blight of eighteen fifty-two. Don’t bandy words with me, silly boy. I know what I know what I know.’

  I shook my head. I confess that I was quite confused. ‘So you are telling me,’ I said, ‘that a bronze statue in Lansdowne Gardens is weeping tears of Earl Grey tea that come from eighteen fifty-one?’

  ‘The year that the statue was erected,’ said the professor. ‘Suggestive, no?’

  ‘I wish I had the vaguest idea where this is leading,’ I said, ‘because if I did, then when I was led to it, I would know what it was and then would not be the least surprised.’

  ‘I couldn’t have put that better myself,’ said the professor. ‘Unless, of course, I’d given it a moment’s thought.’

  ‘Well, I am sure that Mr Rune will be pleased.’

  ‘Delighted,’ said the voice of Hugo Rune.

  I did not ask him how he had escaped from the police cell. In fact, I did not broach the subject at all. Nor whether he was now on the run. Or whether we would have to quit our rooms. Or whether he would be paying off his bar bill at Fangio’s.

  I was just glad to see him back.

  ‘It never ceases not to amaze me,’ said Mr Rune, ‘the power of a Masonic handshake.’

  Which no doubt explained everything. But was not going to get Fangio his owings.

  Back in our rooms beneath the professor’s, which were above ours, Mr Rune said, ‘Suggestive, no?’

  ‘The professor said that also,’ I said.

  ‘And he knows which way up is a sixpence,’ said Mr Rune. ‘We will have to prepare ourselves for what is to come, both mentally and physically.’

  ‘And what is to come?’ I asked, hoping that I might be granted some small explanation.

  ‘Bad things,’ said Mr Rune. ‘And when they come, as come they will, then it will be for you and me to beat them back.’

  ‘You would not care to be a little more specific, I suppose?’

  ‘What, and spoil the surprise? The clues are all there, Rizla. Can you make nothing of them?’

  ‘Of course I cannot,’ I said. ‘And I will tell you for why. It is because there will be some metaphysical twist to all this involving something that you knew all about anyway and I could have no possible way of knowing.’

  ‘Why don’t you pop upstairs,’ said Mr Rune, ‘and borrow some beer from the professor?’

  The mental and physical preparations that Mr Rune had alluded to appeared to consist mostly of him thinking of things he needed and me running about all over Brighton trying (and for the most part, succeeding, I hasten to add) to acquire them without payment.

  B
y the end of the day, I was thoroughly exhausted.

  I had acquired all manner of diverse whatnots. Mr Rune’s list had been long, and it had also been specific. I viewed all the whatnots laid out all over the study/sitting/dining/drinking room.

  ‘I would really appreciate it,’ I said, ‘if you would give me some clue as to what is going on. I would be a lot more use to you if you did.’

  Mr Rune stroked at one of his chins. ‘This is indeed true,’ said he. ‘And so, upon this particular occasion, I will tell you what we are up against. Witchcraft, young Rizla. Witchcraft.’

  ‘Witchcraft?’ I said. ‘As in magic? You claim to be a magician yourself, although you have never shown me proof of these claims.’

  ‘Magic indeed,’ said he, and he opened one of the cans of beer that I had borrowed from the professor. ‘In eighteen fifty-one, the Great Exhibition opened in the original Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. There, the very state of the art of all Victorian technology was exhibited. But there was technology exhibited there of which no record exists in the history books of today, technology created by a genius called Charles Babbage.’

  ‘The father of the computer,’ said I. ‘I have heard of him – he invented the Difference Engine, the first computer. But it was never taken up and he died in poverty.’

  ‘According to accepted history. But that is not true. His computer was exhibited at the Great Exhibition. I saw to that. And it was taken up, and with the aid of another genius called Nikola Tesla it revolutionised the Victorian age. Electric automobiles, the wireless transmission of electricity – even a space programme. But it was all wiped from the face of the Earth as if it had never existed at the dawn of the new century. I know, young Rizla. I was there.’

  ‘My head is swimming,’ I said. ‘Is this really true?’

  ‘All of it – and everything you may have read in science fiction of H. G. Wells’s Time Machine, of the Invisible Man, and of the Nautilus of Jules Verne. All true.’

  ‘And what has this to do with a weeping statue?’

  ‘Time,’ said Mr Rune. ‘Always time – the manipulation of time, the displacement of time. The Chronovision, that technology was originally formulated by Mister H. G. Wells, with no little assistance from myself, I might humbly add. Time is not a straight line. It’s bumpy and it has holes in it, holes into which things fall in and out – like those unfortunates who enter fairy mounds and tumble out centuries later, thinking that only moments have passed.’