The Garden of Unearthly Delights

by Robert Rankin

‘Mr Hilyte was taken sick,’ whimpered Maxwell. ‘I am standing in for him.’

  ‘Hilyte promised that he would recommend my beef. Give me back my money. I paid out ten pieces of gold for my commercial.’

  ‘Only ten?’ This voice came from Leibwitz who, although not quite so large as Bulgarth, was respected for his hams. ‘Hilyte told me the fee was fifteen, for the exclusive recommendation of my beef alone.’

  ‘I paid seventeen,’ shouted Grimshaw’s third butcher.

  ‘Shut up, the lot of you!’ Rushmear pushed folk to either side. ‘Get that prossie out of the box and install my daughter at once.’

  ‘Do nothing of the kind,’ ordered Bulgarth. ‘Hilyte’s zany promised that the news crumpet would be singing the praises of my beef without her top on. No offence to your daughter, Rushmear, but if she’d lived in old India she would have been sacred.’

  As Rushmear’s daughter raised a fist the size of a Leibwitz prize ham, yet another voice rose to join the others.

  ‘Where are my fireworks?’ this one wanted to know.

  ‘Fireworks?’ gagged the sweating, shaking Maxwell.

  A pale thin man had been allowed to push his way forward. ‘I am Clovis the banker. My guards and staff were all invited here to witness the spectacular firework display that would emblazon my name across the sky. For the fortune I paid, it had better be worth it. I—’

  But he said no more. The mighty fist of Rushmear’s daughter caught him by accident and felled him to the ground. A bit of a rumpus then occurred.

  Maxwell eased himself back in his seat and sought to take his leave. He pressed upon the rear doors, but they seemed disinclined to open. Maxwell pushed harder. The doors held fast. With heart now sunken into his substantial boots, Maxwell recalled that one of the additional features Mr Hilyte had insisted upon the previous night was a big sturdy bolt that fastened from the outside.

  As he watched the fists beginning to fly, Maxwell viewed yet another large man forcing his way forward. ‘What is this abomination that bears my name?’ he barked.

  ‘Who?’ managed Maxwell.

  ‘Futtock, the carpenter,’ came the reply. ‘Who designed this atrocity?’

  ‘Well . . . you see—’

  ‘Outrageous! I offered to have my finest craftsmen construct a beautiful cabinet at no cost. But Hilyte told me that he had an imagineer whom he personally wished to take charge of the project. Now I return from my holiday to find this . . .’

  Maxwell made further groanings. It all fell so neatly into place, he wondered just how he had failed to see it coming.

  But now others were coming.

  The first of these was a pale thin man, the dead spit of Clovis the banker. He looked somewhat battered and the worse for wear.

  ‘Robbery,’ he cried, pushing into the circle that was widening about Rushmear’s daughter who was laying into Bulgarth with a vigour.

  ‘Help, help, robbery.’

  ‘What has happened, brother?’ shouted Clovis, struggling to his feet.

  ‘Two masked men entered the bank shortly after you and the guards left. They tied me up and beat me. They have taken everything.’

  ‘What?’ wailed Clovis. ‘Everything?’

  ‘And they rode away on a pair of fine white horses.’

  As Maxwell had a further groan left in him, he used it now.

  And it was well timed for into the growing mêlée came the sound of chanting. Maxwell could make out robed figures armed with flaming torches, marching through the crowd. Now who might these be? he asked himself.

  ‘And who might you be?’ demanded Rushmear.

  The leader of the advancing legion was an old woman who looked vaguely familiar to Maxwell. ‘We are the Queuers who wait upon Varney!’ she bellowed. ‘We have paid our bounty and now we demand the head of the iconoclast in a bucket.’

  ‘Whose head is this?’

  ‘His!’ A young man with a torch, pointed the accusing finger towards Maxwell. ‘Disguised, though locked in the box, as Mr Hilyte promised when we paid him the bounty.’

  ‘You can damn well wait your turn for his head,’ bawled Rushmear buffeting the young man in the ear.

  ‘How dare you hit my Kevin!’ shrieked the old woman, clouting Rushmear with her flaming torch.

  ‘Guards. Arrest the malcontents in the travelling TV,’ ordered Clovis the banker.

  ‘Not till the tart’s got her bits out,’ called Zardoz the baker. ‘I paid for an exotic dance involving a pair of baps and a french stick.’

  ‘So did I!’ called one of his rivals.

  ‘And me!’ called another.

  Maxwell was now in the foetal position, chewing his nails to the knuckles. ‘For Goddess sake, whip out your charlies before we’re both killed,’ he told Miss Tailier.

  ‘How dare you.’ Miss Tailier kicked Maxwell in the head. ‘I’m a star of the small screen now and—’

  It was good night from her.

  The crowd surged forward. The followers of Varney set to smiting all about them with their flaming torches. Butchers, bakers and no doubt the manufacturers of candlesticks, drew out all manner of concealed weapons and entered into the fray.

  The arrival of several more large men with equally large and star-struck daughters, to whom much had been promised in return for large sums received, did nothing to quiet the riot. Spleens were being vented, old scores settled. Anarchy prevailed.

  The maelstrom of struggling bodies swept into the glorious Rock-Ola-style two-person wide-screen travelling TV set, overturning it and bursting it asunder. In pandemonium the mob fell upon Maxwell and Miss Tailier. Many seemed particularly anxious to fail upon Miss Tailier . . .

  These who fell upon Maxwell had a more violent intent. Dragged from the wreckage of his masterwork, he was yanked this way and that. Maxwell struck out with his substantial boots, shattering shinbones, knackering kneecaps. The howls of the wounded were lost in the hullabaloo.

  Kevin rose up before him. ‘So die, idolater,’ said he, raising a mattock.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Maxwell, punching Kevin’s lights out, then diving low to scramble through the shambles.

  Certain images of mayhem would remain to haunt young Maxwell and disturb his sleep for many months to come.

  There are few things quite as frightful as the madness of a mob and, as brother beat on brother and the butcher struck the baker and the Varneyites and carpenters and traders and their daughters raged and rampaged, fought and forayed, beat and bludgeoned, mashed and mangled . . .

  Maxwell quietly quit the scene and slipped away.

  He ran for several miles along the road that led north out of Grimshaw before he dared to stop, draw breath, drink from a stream and wash the make-up from his face and scalp.

  The sun was setting now, its bloated red orb wallowing on the horizon to the west. Sounds of violence and carnage drifted across the barren landscape and looking back, Maxwell could see that much of Grimshaw was now fiercely ablaze.

  With a rueful shake of his shaven head and a deep and heartfelt sigh of regret, Maxwell gathered wits and breath together and fled once more.

  7

  Maxwell marched north.

  He slept in ditches and maintained the communion of body and soul through a meagre, though nourishing, diet of fruit and berries. Once he snared a rabbit, but the beast did the dirty and stared at him with big brown reproachful eyes. Maxwell let it hop upon its way.

  His vegan repasts left him in no need of the apothecary’s laxative that Dayglo had recommended and hourly bush-squats punctuated each day’s journey.

  It was during one of these, that he viewed riders pounding from the south. Peeping from the safety of his gorse privy, he glimpsed the face of the turbulent Rushmear, bruised but determined, as the riders thundered by. Ahead the road forked and they took the left. His ablutions completed, Maxwell took the right.

  He felt hollow inside, and it wasn’t just for the lack of food. The appalling devastation wrought upon Grimshaw ha
d been of his making. In his zeal to bring enlightenment to this new world, he had unleashed horrors from the old upon it.

  No news was good news here, and as for advertising . . . Maxwell shuddered. Certainly Hilyte and his zany had brought new meaning to the words treachery and deceit, but Maxwell still felt wholly to blame. If he hadn’t interfered, none of it would have happened.

  His vision of being written up in future history books had now acquired a nightmare aspect. He envisioned generations to come pointing to engravings of a Rock-Ola-style TV set from which sprang all the evils of the world and speaking not of Pandora’s infamous casket, but of Maxwell’s Jukebox.

  ‘I shall make amends,’ Maxwell told himself. ‘But through small acts of charity rather than grandiose gestures.’

  And with this said he pressed on. His wish was to put many miles between himself and Grimshaw. Let no grass grow beneath his feet, while the hair grew back on his head.

  The landscape was dull as a duffle-coat, sardine-grey and just went on and on and on and on and on and on.

  Once he viewed the ruins of a village, which lay shattered beneath what appeared to be a gigantic golden toothbrush, but other than that, he didn’t see much of anything.

  After a week of thin feeding, gorse-bush visiting and troubled nights, Maxwell’s substantial footwear carried him to a low range of hills, beyond which rose a mighty forest. Without the aid of a map to guide him, or a destination for it to guide him to, Maxwell left the moorland track, which probably wasn’t even on a map, and entered the forest, which probably was, but not in any great detail.

  It is said that travel broadens the mind. But not whether it lengthens it also.

  Somewhere in the forest Maxwell lodged for several days at the hut of a charcoal burner. Here he earned his keep by chopping wood. And, through the exercise of almost super-human self-control, resisted the temptation to advise the humble forest dweller how, by means which sprang immediately to Maxwell’s mind, he might increase his scope of operation and branch out into other fields of enterprise, that would, in due time, see him at the head of a major nationwide logging industry.

  Maxwell kept his mouth shut and his chopper sharp and when his hair had risen to a My-Boy-Flat-Top, he bid the charcoal burner goodbye, accepted a satchel of food and the generous gift of a fine woollen cloak and set out once more on whichever was his way.

  A day later, or it may have been two, Maxwell left the forest and joined a rugged road that led towards a village.

  As he approached its outskirts he passed between two stone columns, each surmounted by a metal sphere. These evidently marked a boundary, because there were others at regular intervals leading off in either direction encircling the rich cultivated fields that surrounded the village. The folk here evidently took great pride in their horticulture, as the fields were impeccably kept and flourished with exotic fruit and vegetables, many varieties of which were completely foreign to Maxwell. There wasn’t a parsnip in sight.

  The village itself presented an equally respectable face. The high street, cobbled over, led between shops, houses and inns, almost twentieth century in appearance. To Maxwell’s amazement there was even a Budgen’s supermarket. The plastic sign had been weathered down to blurry indistinction but it was still recognizable as the shopper’s paradise it had once been.

  As Maxwell drew near he spied through the plate-glass window that the supermarket had been stripped of its once proud shelving and now housed booths and stalls. Which seemed reasonable enough.

  As Maxwell gazed in, the door to this emporium swung open and a young man, wearing a cloak not dissimilar to Maxwell’s, issued into the street. He was a handsome fellow, spare framed, brown eyed, with drapes of yellow hair swinging to his shoulders.

  He carried a pair of shopping bags and offered Maxwell a toothy grin as he passed him by. He had not gone two steps further, however, when a small animal, appearing as if from nowhere, darted between his legs, causing him to sprawl headlong into the road.

  Maxwell hastened to assist the young man to his feet and help rescue the shopping that was now liberally distributed about the cobbles.

  ‘My thanks,’ said the young man, dusting himself down.

  ‘You’re not injured?’

  ‘No. I’ll survive. I always do.’

  ‘Can you tell me the name of this village?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘Of course I can, I live here.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘Oh, I see. It’s MacGuffin.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Maxwell. ‘Then perhaps I am in Scotland?’

  ‘No,’ said the young man. ‘You are in MacGuffin.’

  ‘Yes, but where is MacGuffin?’

  ‘You have me puzzled now,’ said the young man. ‘I always thought it was here.’

  ‘Then you’re probably right.’

  The young man weighed this up. ‘Have you ever seen me before?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Maxwell.

  ‘Then how do you know it’s me?’

  ‘I think I should be going now,’ said Maxwell.

  ‘Are you looking for work?’

  ‘Yes, I am actually.’

  ‘Then come with me while I drop my shopping off.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Maxwell.

  ‘Oh, it’s not all that. I drop my shopping off every day.’

  The young man, who, after much prompting with specific questions, revealed that his name was Dave, led Maxwell to a cottage which huddled at the rear of the bygone Budgen’s. They arrived by a somewhat circuitous route, but Maxwell made a point of not asking why.

  Within, a cosy sitting-room showed a fire in its hearth, a comfy box ottoman, a carpet bare of thread, but with a nice pattern, a few sticks of furniture and a few extra sticks for the fire. Maxwell hung his cloak upon a cloakhook and sat down in a rocking-chair.

  ‘Be careful on that,’ Dave advised. ‘It has a tendency to move back and forwards in an arc.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Maxwell, shaking his head.

  Dave tossed both bags of shopping straight into a cupboard, then turned to Maxwell. ‘I have trouble with my trousers,’ he said. ‘Every time I shake them, something flies out.’

  ‘What, moths, do you mean?’

  ‘No, sea fowl, curlew, birds of the air.’

  ‘That sounds somewhat unlikely,’ said Maxwell.

  ‘But nevertheless it’s so.’ Dave gave his left trouser turn-up a shake. ‘There you go,’ he cried. ‘That’s a sparrow hawk, if ever.’

  Maxwell stared up at the bird, now flapping about the ceiling. ‘Looks more like a kestrel to me,’ he ventured. ‘By the plumage.’

  ‘But you see what I mean?’

  Maxwell nodded dubiously. ‘They are without doubt most unusual trousers.’

  Dave pulled gingerly upon the knees of his trews and sat down on the box ottoman. ‘It is the curse of the Wilkinsons,’ he explained. ‘Some say that one of my forefathers fell out with whichever god was then in fashion. Some say.’

  Maxwell asked, ‘Why don’t you just get rid of the trousers?’

  Dave laughed a hollow laugh. ‘If only it was that easy. You didn’t come to my wedding, did you, Maxwell?’

  ‘I’ve only just met you, I thought we’d established that.’

  ‘Well, it was a grim day for the Wilkinsons, I can tell you.’

  ‘Really?’ said Maxwell, wishing he hadn’t. Dave now sighed a sigh. ‘I had postponed putting on my wedding suit until the very last moment. Then, feeling it was safe to do so, foolish foolish me, I togged up and set off to the church. All went well for a while. I stood at the altar, my fragrant Mary at my side. The sky pilot read the service. The choir sang, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful”.’

  ‘It was a Christmas wedding then?’

  ‘Christmas? What’s Christmas?’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Maxwell. ‘You’ve started, so you might as well finish.’

  ‘Yes, well, the choir sang. The sun beamed rouge rays through the old aeon s
tained-glass windows, lit upon the gilded ornamentation of the rood screen, brought forth mellow hues of—’

  ‘And?’ Maxwell asked.

  ‘And I was about to slip the ceremonial wedding sprout into the head band of my fair one’s bonnet—’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When okapi!’

  ‘Okapi?’

  ‘Okapi! Dirty great okapi came roaring out of my waistcoat.’

  ‘Okapi don’t roar,’ said Maxwell. ‘But otherwise it was not a bad yarn.’

  Dave looked defeated (but he wasn’t). ‘No yarn, my friend. No yarn. Here, take a look at the wedding photo.’

  ‘Photo?’ Maxwell leaned forward in his rocker. A smile appeared on his face. ‘There is still photography?’

  Dave tugged a well-thumbed item from his trouser pocket and thrust it into Maxwell’s hand.

  Maxwell’s face fell. ‘This’, he said, ‘is a photograph of the March of the Wildebeest. Cut, if I’m not mistaken, from a now ancient copy of The National Geographic.’

  ‘So how do you explain that?’ Dave indicated the top of a church spire, clearly visible in the background. ‘That’s St Wilko of Feelgood’s in the high street, you must have seen it when you entered the village.’

  Maxwell parted with the photo. ‘They used to do that sort of stuff with something called a computer. You have my admiration none the less.’

  ‘And the sparrow hawk?’ Dave pointed to the bird, now quietly roosting on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Kestrel, you mean.’

  ‘The kestrel then?’

  ‘It’s a conjuring trick. You’re winding me up. An uncle of mine could poke a pencil up his nose and make it come out of his ear. That was a conjuring trick also.’

  ‘We have a woman in the village who can . . .’ But Dave left the sentence unfinished. ‘This kestrel business is no trick, I can assure you of that.’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘I have heard of ferrets in the trousers. But of okapi in the waistcoat, I remain unconvinced. Sorry.’

  Dave threw up his hands in despair. Two squirrels emerged from his left shirt cuff and scrambled onto the curtain pelmet.

  ‘There,’ Dave cried. ‘Explain that, if you can.’

  ‘You might perhaps open a zoo,’ said Maxwell, who still had his doubts.