He listened to it for a few seconds and realized that it was just his heart beating.
He listened for a few seconds more and realized that it wasn’t his heart, it was somebody down the corridor beating on a bass drum.
Beads of sweat formed on his brow, tensed themselves and leaped off. He put out a hand onto the floor to steady his alert crouch, which wasn’t holding up very well. The sign changed itself again. It said:
DO NOT BE ALARMED.
After a pause, it added:
BE VERY, VERY FRIGHTENED, ARTHUR DENT.
Once again it flicked off. Once again it left him in darkness. His eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. He wasn’t certain if this was because they were trying to see more clearly, or if they simply wanted to leave at this point.
“Hello?” he said again, this time trying to put a note of rugged and aggressive self-assertion into it. “Is anyone there?”
There was no reply, nothing.
This unnerved Arthur even more than a reply would have done, and he began to back away from the scary nothingness. And the more he backed away, the more scared he became. After a while, he realized that the reason for this was that in all the films he had seen in which the hero backs farther and farther away from some imagined terror in front of him, he then manages to bump into it coming up from behind.
At this point it suddenly occurred to him to turn round rather quickly.
There was nothing there.
Just blackness.
This really unnerved him, and he started to back away from that, back the way he had come.
After doing this for a short while it suddenly occurred to him that he was now backing toward whatever it was he had been backing away from in the first place.
This, he couldn’t help thinking, must be a foolish thing to do. He decided he would be better off backing the way he had first been backing, and turned around again.
It turned out at this point that his second impulse had been the correct one, because there was an indescribably hideous monster standing quietly behind him. Arthur yawed wildly as his skin tried to jump one way and his skeleton the other, while his brain tried to work out which of his ears it most wanted to crawl out of.
“Bet you weren’t expecting to see me again,” said the monster, which Arthur couldn’t help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing that he had never met the creature before. He could tell that he hadn’t met the creature before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights. It was … it was … it was …
Arthur blinked at it. It stood very still. It did look a little familiar.
A terrible cold calm came over him as he realized that what he was looking at was a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly.
He wondered why anybody would be showing him a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly at this time. He wondered whose voice he had heard.
It was a terribly realistic hologram.
It vanished.
“Or perhaps you remember me better,” said the voice suddenly, and it was a deep, hollow, malevolent voice that sounded like molten tar glurping out of a drum with evil on its mind, “as the rabbit.”
With a sudden ping, there was a rabbit there in the black labyrinth with him, a huge, monstrously hideously soft and lovable rabbit—an image again, but one on which every single soft and lovable hair seemed like a real and single thing growing in its soft and lovable coat. Arthur was startled to see his own reflection in its soft and lovable unblinking and extremely huge brown eye.
“Born in darkness,” rumbled the voice, “raised in darkness. One morning I poked my head for the first time into the bright new world and got it split open by what felt like some primitive instrument made of flint.
“Made by you, Arthur Dent, and wielded by you. Rather hard as I recall.
“You turned my skin into a bag for keeping interesting stones in. I happen to know that because in my next life I came back as a fly again and you swatted me. Again. Only this time you swatted me with the bag you’d made of my previous skin.
“Arthur Dent, you are not merely a cruel and heartless man, you are also staggeringly tactless.”
The voice paused while Arthur gawked.
“I see you have lost the bag,” said the voice, “probably got bored with it, did you?”
Arthur shook his head helplessly. He wanted to explain that he had been in fact very fond of the bag and had looked after it very well and had taken it with him wherever he went, but that somehow every time he traveled anywhere he seemed inexplicably to end up with the wrong bag, and that, curiously enough, even as they stood there, he was just noticing for the first time that the bag he had with him at the moment appeared to be made out of rather nasty fake leopard skin, and wasn’t the one he’d had a few moments ago before he arrived in this whatever place it was, and wasn’t one he would have chosen himself and heaven knew what would be in it as it wasn’t his, and he would much rather have his original bag back, except that he was of course terribly sorry for having so peremptorily removed it, or rather its component parts, i.e., the rabbit skin, from its previous owner, viz., the rabbit whom he currently had the honor of attempting vainly to address.
All he actually managed to say was “Erp.”
“Meet the newt you trod on,” said the voice.
And there was, standing in the corridor with Arthur, a giant green scaly newt. Arthur turned, yelped, leaped backward, and found himself standing in the middle of the rabbit. He yelped again, but could find nowhere to leap to.
“That was me, too,” continued the voice in a low menacing rumble, “as if you didn’t know.…”
“Know?” said Arthur with a start, “know?”
“The interesting thing about reincarnation,” rasped the voice, “is that most people, most spirits, are not aware that it is happening to them.”
He paused for effect. As far as Arthur was concerned there was already quite enough effect going on.
“I was aware,” hissed the voice, “that is, I became aware. Slowly. Gradually.”
He, whoever he was, paused again and gathered breath.
“I could hardly help it, could I?” he bellowed, “when the same thing kept happening, over and over and over again! Every life I ever lived, I got killed by Arthur Dent. Any world, any body, any time, I’m just getting settled down, along comes Arthur Dent, pow, he kills me.
“Hard not to notice. Bit of a memory jogger. Bit of a pointer. Bit of a bloody giveaway!
“ ‘That’s funny,’ my spirit would say to itself as it winged its way back to the netherworld after another fruitless Dent-ended venture into the land of the living, ‘that man who just ran me over as I was hopping across the road to my favorite pond, looked a little familiar.…’ And gradually I got to piece it together, Dent, you multiple-me murderer!”
The echoes of his voice roared up and down the corridors. Arthur stood silent and cold, his head shaking with disbelief.
“Here’s the moment, Dent,” shrieked the voice, now reaching a feverish pitch of hatred, “here’s the moment when at last I knew!”
It was indescribably hideous, the thing that suddenly opened up in front of Arthur, making him gasp and gargle with horror, but here’s an attempt at a description of how hideous it was. It was a huge palpitating wet cave with a vast slimy, rough, whale-like creature rolling around in it and sliding over monstrous white tombstones. High above the cave rose a vast promontory in which could be seen the dark recesses of two further fearful caves, which …
Arthur Dent suddenly realized that he was looking at his own mouth, when his attention was meant to be directed at the live oyster that was being tipped helplessly into it.
He staggered back with a cry and averted his eyes.
When he looked again the appalling apparition had gone. The corridor was dark and, briefly, silent. He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and he would rather have had a chaperon.
The next noise, when it cam
e, was the low heavy roll of a large section of wall trundling aside, revealing, for the moment, just dark blankness behind it. Arthur looked into it in much the same way that a mouse looks into a dark dog kennel.
And the voice spoke to him again.
“Tell me it was a coincidence, Dent,” it said. “I dare you to tell me it was a coincidence!”
“It was a coincidence,” said Arthur quickly.
“It was not!” came the answering bellow.
“It was,” said Arthur, “it was …”
“If it was a coincidence, then my name,” roared the voice, “is not Agrajag!!!”
“And presumably,” said Arthur, “you would claim that that was your name.”
“Yes!” hissed Agrajag, as if he had just completed a rather deft syllogism.
“Well, I’m afraid it was still a coincidence,” said Arthur.
“Come in here and say that!” howled the voice, in sudden apoplexy again.
Arthur walked in and said that it was a coincidence, or at least, he nearly said it was a coincidence. His tongue rather lost its footing toward the end of the last word because the lights came up and revealed what it was he had walked into.
It was a Cathedral of Hate.
It was the product of a mind that was not merely twisted, but actually sprained.
It was huge. It was horrific.
It had a statue in it.
We will come to the statue in a moment.
The vast, incomprehensibly vast chamber looked as if it had been carved out of the inside of a mountain, and the reason for this was that that was precisely what it had been carved out of. It seemed to Arthur to spin sickeningly round his head as he stood and gaped at it.
It was black.
Where it wasn’t black you were inclined to wish that it was, because the colors with which some of the unspeakable details were picked out ranged horribly across the whole spectrum of eye-defying colors, from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Burnt Hombre and Gan Green on the way.
The unspeakable details that these colors picked out were gargoyles that would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch.
The gargoyles all looked inward from the walls, from the pillars, from the flying buttresses, from the choir stalls, toward the statue, to which we will come in a moment.
And if the gargoyles would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch, then it was clear from the gargoyles’ faces that the statue would have put them off theirs, had they been alive to eat it, which they weren’t, and had anybody tried to serve them some, which they wouldn’t.
Around the monumental walls were vast engraved stone tablets in memory of those who had fallen to Arthur Dent.
The names of some of those commemorated were underlined and had asterisks against them. So, for instance, the name of a cow that had been slaughtered, and of which Arthur had happened to eat a fillet steak, would have the plainest engraving, whereas the name of a fish that Arthur had himself caught and then decided he didn’t like and left on the side of the plate had a double underlining, three sets of asterisks and a bleeding dagger added as decoration, just to make the point.
And what was most disturbing about all this, apart from the statue, to which we are, by degrees, coming, was the very clear implication that all these people and creatures were indeed the same person, over and over again.
And it was equally clear that this person was, however unfairly, extremely upset and annoyed.
In fact it would be fair to say that he had reached a level of annoyance the like of which had never been seen in the Universe. It was an annoyance of epic proportions, a burning, searing flame of annoyance, an annoyance that now spanned the whole of time and space in its infinite umbrage.
And this annoyance had been given its fullest expression in the statue in the center of all this monstrosity that was a statue of Arthur Dent, and an unflattering one. Fifty feet tall if it was an inch, there was not an inch of it that wasn’t crammed with insult to its subject matter, and fifty feet of that sort of thing would be enough to make any subject feel bad. From the small pimple on the side of his nose to the poorish cut of his dressing gown, there was no aspect of Arthur Dent that wasn’t lambasted and vilified by the sculptor.
Arthur appeared as a gorgon, an evil, rapacious, ravening, bloodied ogre, slaughtering his way through an innocent one-man Universe.
With each of the thirty arms that the sculptor in a fit of artistic fervor had decided to give him, he was either braining a rabbit, swatting a fly, pulling a wishbone, picking a flea out of his hair, or doing something that Arthur at first look couldn’t quite identify.
His many feet were mostly stamping on ants.
Arthur put his hands over his eyes, hung his head and shook it slowly from side to side in sadness and horror at the craziness of things.
And when he opened his eyes again, there in front of him stood the figure of the man or creature, or whatever it was, that he had supposedly been persecuting all this time.
“HhhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!” said Agrajag.
He, or it or whatever, looked like a mad fat bat. He waddled slowly around Arthur, and poked at him with bent claws.
“Look …!” protested Arthur.
“HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!” explained Agrajag, and Arthur reluctantly accepted this on the grounds that he was rather frightened by this hideous and strangely wrecked apparition.
Agrajag was black, bloated, wrinkled and leathery.
His bat wings were somehow more frightening for being the pathetic broken floundering things they were than if they had been strong muscular beaters of the air. The most frightening thing was probably the tenacity of his continued existence against all the physical odds.
He had the most astounding collection of teeth.
They looked as if each came from a completely different animal, and they were ranged around his mouth at such bizarre angles it seemed that if he ever actually tried to chew anything he’d lacerate half his own face along with it, and possibly put an eye out as well.
Each of his three eyes was small and intense and looked about as sane as a fish in a privet bush.
“I was at a cricket match,” he rasped.
This seemed on the face of it such a preposterous notion that Arthur practically choked.
“Not in this body,” screeched the creature, “not in this body! This is my last body. My last life. This is my revenge body. My kill-Arthur-Dent body. My last chance. I had to fight to get it too.”
“But …”
“I was at,” roared Agrajag, “a cricket match! I had a weak-heart condition, but what, I said to my wife, can happen to me at a cricket match? As I’m watching, what happens?
“Two people quite maliciously appear out of thin air just in front of me. The last thing I can’t help but notice before my poor heart gives out in shock is that one of them is Arthur Dent wearing a rabbit bone in his beard. Coincidence?”
“Yes,” said Arthur.
“Coincidence?” screamed the creature, painfully thrashing its broken wings, and opening a short gash on its right cheek with a particularly nasty tooth. On closer examination, such as he’d been hoping to avoid, Arthur noticed that much of Agrajag’s face was covered with ragged strips of black Band-Aids.
He backed away, nervously. He tugged at his beard. He was appalled to discover that in fact he still had the rabbit bone in it. He pulled it out and threw it away.
“Look,” he said, “it’s just fate playing silly buggers with you. With me. With us. It’s a complete coincidence.”
“What have you got against me, Dent?” snarled the creature, advancing on him in a painful waddle.
“Nothing,” insisted Arthur, “honestly, nothing.”
Agrajag fixed him with a beady stare.
“Seems a strange way to relate to somebody you’ve got nothing against, killing them all the time. Very curious piece of social interaction, I would call that. I’d also call it a lie!”
“But look,” said Arthur, “I’m very sorry. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding. I’ve got to go. Have you got a clock? I’m meant to be helping save the Universe.” He backed away still farther.
Agrajag advanced still farther.
“At one point,” he hissed, “at one point, I decided to give up. Yes. I would not come back. I would stay in the netherworld. And what happened?”
Arthur indicated with random shakes of his head that he had no idea and didn’t want to have one either. He found he had backed up against the cold dark stone that had been carved by who knew what Herculean effort into a monstrous travesty of his bedroom slippers. He glanced up at his own horrendously parodied image towering above him. He was still puzzled as to what one of his hands was meant to be doing.
“I got yanked involuntarily back into the physical world,” pursued Agrajag, “as a bunch of petunias. In, I might add, a bowl. This particular happy little lifetime started off with me, in my bowl, unsupported, three hundred miles above the surface of a particularly grim planet. Not a naturally tenable position for a bowl of petunias, you might think. And you’d be right. That life ended a very short while later, three hundred miles lower. In, I might again add, the fresh wreckage of a whale. My spirit brother.”
He leered at Arthur with renewed hatred.
“On the way down,” he snarled, “I couldn’t help noticing a flashy-looking white spaceship. And looking out of a port on this flashy-looking spaceship was a smug-looking Arthur Dent. Coincidence?!!”
“Yes!” yelped Arthur. He glanced up again, and realized that the arm that had puzzled him was represented as wantonly calling into existence a bowl of doomed petunias. This was not a concept that leaped easily to the eye.
“I must go,” insisted Arthur.
“You may go,” said Agrajag, “after I have killed you.”
“No, that won’t be any use,” explained Arthur, beginning to climb up the hard stone incline of his carved bedroom slipper, “because I have to save the Universe, you see. I have to find a Silver Bail, that’s the point. Tricky thing to do dead.”
“Save the Universe,” spat Agrajag with contempt. “You should have thought of that before your started your vendetta against me! What about the time when you were on Stavromula Beta and someone …”
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Page 45
