Mary glared at him, then smiled sweetly towards Guntrick and friends. “I don’t suppose you boys would fancy a bit more action, would you?” The heathens conferred briefly, and then confirmed that a bit more action would be something to which they would be most amenable.
Just a short time later, Staveley-Down could not believe that he had fallen twice for the same persuasive ability. Earlier, he had been hit just below the eye with what he thought may well have been a well-aimed spleen. Given that his diet for the last four years of his life had been scrawny root vegetables and the odd worm-ridden biscuit, he could well have identified the particular internal organ incorrectly. Now, he stood next to his persuader, a bearded man in a stovepipe hat, in front of someone who would in his future, he was assured, become one of the coldest killers the world would know.
It possibly explains why Lincoln became the leader of one of the biggest nations of the world and the airman ended up in a Stalag trying to make a glider out of matchsticks. For the life of him he couldn’t think why it fell to him to accompany the ex-President in his determined attempt to persuade Capone to release his prisoner.
The Italian, flanked by two very nasty looking individuals, laughed loudly at the assertion of the man in black that he should find his inner good and allow Geoffrey to walk away unharmed without the legitimately won money being returned. Staveley-Down scoured the room for likely places to start a tunnel.
“I understand,” Lincoln’s voice had a timbre which demanded attention, “that you must be upset that your tax evasion resulted in your arrest and ultimate death. I understand that this must create some bitterness, but you have to understand that taxes are for the greater good. It cannot be fair to vent your ire on an old man who has unwittingly ruined your schemes to seek ever greater wealth and power.”
It didn’t sound convincing to Staveley-Down and Capone’s thunderous face suggested a mutuality of feeling.
“I think,” said Capone, “that because of you I had to pay for my housekeeping. The only free coloured anyone wanted, buddy, was in the kitchen. Now you better get out of here before I get angry. Only reason you ain’t slaughtered already is because I’m a patriot.”
Lincoln looked at Staveley-Down, who did his best to effect a disappointed look and raised his hands palms upwards.
“Well, Mr Capone,” said Lincoln, eyeing the enforcers on the gangster’s flanks, “since this a gambling establishment. Your two and raise you two.”
Capone couldn’t take his eyes from the spear protruding from Adrael’s chest, which was probably good, because two of the other three Visigoths who had entered the room on Lincoln’s cue were significantly bigger and of more threatening appearance. Staveley-Down was feeling significantly more comfortable with the enormous warmongers behind him than he had a few moments ago. It took the gangster a few moments to regain his calm, but then he tipped his head and one of his minders walked back to open a door, which allowed four further muscle-bound goons to align themselves with his team.
He smirked. “Don’t matter what you got, Abe. I got more. I call.”
Lincoln looked at Staveley-Down, who in turn looked at the Visigoths, who were adopting fierce looks. He raised his hand.
“We’ll go all in.”
It was like an eclipse. The shadow of the gathering Visigoths crept over Capone’s face, wiping the self-satisfied smile as it went. His protectors first stared up at the gathering gloom and then at their leader. Capone’s face twitched as Marcel strolled into the room, still holding his bag of loot, and attached himself to the end of the German line (scented handkerchief held to his nose).
“Where’s Geoffrey?” demanded Marcel. Capone twitched his head to indicate the door behind him. The Frenchman, positively enjoying the situation after some of the treatment meted out to him by Capone over the years, strolled past him. Capone leaned towards and whispered from the corner of his mouth.
“Yer gonna die for this you know.”
“It’s worse than that, Al. If this works, you’re going to where you should be already.”
The heat was unbelievable. The entire wall behind where Geoffrey was tethered to the chair was alive with flame, and a layer of smoke pushed itself into the top of the room. The target of their rescue attempt was slumped in the chair, chin on his chest; Marcel accelerated across the room, lifted Geoffrey’s head and slapped him around the face.
“Geoff! Geoffrey! Wake up!”
Geoffrey did. He looked up through slit eyes. An unwholesome crust had formed around his lips, and he stared blearily at Marcel.
“You came back! You came to save me!” He croaked.
“Not exactly.” Marcel struggled with ropes around Geoffrey’s chest. “I was passing.”
“Thank God.” Geoffrey shook himself free of the bonds. “You came back.”
“Well, I had some help.”
“I knew you’d come back, Marcel. That’s what kept me going”
“Really? Thin premise.”
Marcel hauled Geoffrey from the chair, aware that in his immediate vicinity there was an aroma of things cooked, eaten, spilt, regurgitated over decades and now being re-cooked. It smelled like a Mexican restaurant. He pushed the old man in front of him towards the door, looked up.
As Geoffrey headed to the door, still burbling his gratitude to his saviour, Marcel saw the result of the old boy’s proximity to the blaze in the private room. The hair on the back of Geoffrey’s head had gone, and the skull was a blistered pink/brown mess. The cardigan had not so much burned as melted, and lumps hung in man-made globs beside the strip of pallid skin of the turnip-puller’s back. Marcel thought of interrupting Geoffrey’s recitation of thanks but, as he watched him walk through to the anteroom, where Germany had Italy under its huge thumb (not for the first time), thought better of it. What he didn’t know, after all, could never hurt him, although his head might well be a bit sore when it stopped smoking.
Capone was still cursing when they left, his premises in the grip of an inferno and his coffers significantly lighter after Marchant’s performance at the card table. In fact, it was a happy, if incongruous, crowd which left the conflagration and began to make its way out of the dockside. Marcel was swinging the bag of winnings with some glee, allowing himself just for the moment to believe that perhaps they could really fix the Afternet and he might not be boiled in buffalo offal for millennia; the Visigoths were swapping stories of their focussed brutality in the waterside fight; Ron and Ethel were arm in arm, feeling confident that this misguided excursion was coming to a satisfactory end; Staveley-Down had managed to convince himself that he had played a crucial role in the dramatic rescue; Mary felt the time growing closer when she could return home and to some kind of sanity, Marchant was naturally believing that without his brilliant poker they would all be doomed.
Geoffrey hadn’t noticed that no-one, not even the Germans in their stinking pelts, was prepared to get too close to him, irrespective of their happiness at his being saved. The combination of soft, strong-smelling smog rising from his clothes and body did not encourage closeness, and the strange stripe of nakedness and blistered skin up his back gave him the aura of an upright skunk. In general, skunks don’t have a lot of close mates.
He was happy though, telling anyone who would listen (which after a while was nobody, not that he noticed), about the awful situation in which he had been, and how it had been Marcel who had come to save him. Only Lincoln seemed troubled, pleased of course to be still in one piece after having come under such clear and present danger, but for all that aware of the sinking feeling of having been confronted by his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, who not being content with having murdered him once, threatened to do so again. Most of all, he despaired at his failure to negotiate either in front of the rabble or with Capone. He had lived in turbulent times, but none like this place, where respect for anyone, including oneself, appeared to have disintegrated.
Once out of the teeming backstreets of the wharf, the houses threat
ening in their overhang of dark alleys, the going became less worrying, fewer glances were cast behind, less often did they check the windows above for hidden threat.
“I don’t mean to cause any trouble,” said Ron, “but where are we going?”
“We are going back to the Control Room, and then we are going to fix the Afternet.” Marcel didn’t even look back as he spoke. “You lot are probably going back to whichever rocks you were inhabiting before you decided to incite insurrection. And then? Who knows?”
The group stopped almost as one, but Marcel was oblivious and continued marching onward, swinging the bag of cash and jewels. Mary coughed, to no response, but her louder attempt managed to stop the Frenchman, who turned to face the motley crowd.
“What?” he said.
“I think you owe them an explanation.” Said Mary.
“Aren’t we a bit short of time? That lion-man thingy said we had twenty-four hours.” said Marchant, who was feeling a bit chilly and looking enviously at the animal furs surrounding him.
“Oh shut up.” Mary looked furious. “Marcel, these people just saved you and Geoffrey. You owe them an explanation about what’s happening and what comes next.”
“I think she’s right Marcel.” Geoffrey looked at his saviour. Marcel knew the look. It was mainly spaniel, with a touch of ‘Dumbo abandoned by his mother’. He sighed deeply.
“We don’t have long. When we find somewhere to stop, we will. I’ll fill you in then.”
The Pint and Prejudice Inn may not have been in the heart of the disreputable Dockside neighbourhood, but its atmosphere would almost certainly, with a little bloodshed, have fitted quite well. The main bar was filthy, and the lingering aromas of rancid fat, tobacco, and roadkill made Geoffrey’s pungent aura fade into insignificance. What it did offer, though, was enough room for a really large group and the opportunity for Marcel to begrudgingly educate his new-found comrades about the meaning of death.
Arranging enough seats for the twenty-odd souls was relatively easy compared with persuading Marcel that he should give up some of his gains to fund the round; in both cases a few threatening grunts from Adwahl achieved the required aim. Tall glasses of dun-coloured liquid with crusty foam on top were placed in front of the clients. Marcel watched suspiciously as first Ron, then Geoffrey and the others took a drink and pulled faces which were not entirely linked to extreme pleasure.
He picked up his glass with no great expectations and having taken a gulp found them entirely met.
“What does that taste like to you?” he asked Marchant, who was squeezed between him and Hansi, whose boil appeared to be pulsating.
“Shit.” Said the internet entrepreneur.
“Thought so.” Said Marcel, pleased that at last he had a drink which tasted no worse to him than to others.
To a rapt audience, the Frenchman gave a very brief history of how they came to be in this place, drinking something that tasted very much like poo. He ran through a description of the massive computer system (refusing all requests to explain the meaning of ‘computer’), the overload and subsequent failure, the threatening deadlines from various minor deities, and their ramifications for him and Geoffrey, the respectively untimely and accidental murders of Mary and Justin, and the road trip to Devil’s Dock to win money to fix The Afternet.
“What we are doing,” he said, gazing around the faces of the rapt audience, “is trying to fix the management of the Afterlife so that you all can be sent to your final resting places.” He looked from the small Englishman in the nylon jacket to the hulking German wearing the exterior of a bear, “Wherever that may be.”
The Visigoths began shouting questions, Lincoln looked ruminative, Ron, being Ron, raised his hand.
“Woah, woah! Quiet.” He pointed to Ron. “You. What’s your question?”
“Where do we actually go? Our friends here-” he gestured around the rapt Visigoths, “spent some time in a Derbyshire tea shoppe.” Murmurs of memory of delicious cakes emanated from Guntrick’s tribe.
Geoffrey intervened. “That shouldn’t have happened. If they hadn’t been so benign, as marauders go, you could have really unbalanced someone’s Heaven. You, for example, “ he gestured towards Staveley-Down, who had been wondering whatever happened to beer since he had bought the farm, “what would your Heaven be?”
“I love flying.” The airman’s face took on a calm, and his eyes fell distant. “I would love to be above the clouds, in a Hurricane, blue sky above, the fields of England patchworked below through the white, sunshine on the cockpit. Swooping, rolling, diving.” He looked at the silent crowd. “Sorry, been a long time since I did that. I could do it forever.”
“Well,” said Geoffrey, “if the system works, it looks at who you’ve been and what you’ve done, and if the balance is right, that’s what you get. Just that at the moment it doesn’t work.”
“So Heaven is what you want it to be?” Ethel gripped Ron’s hand tightly. “What if you don’t get Heaven?”
Marcel squirmed in his seat at the memory.
“It’s anything from endless pain to being stuck in a lift with a group of Jehovah’s witnesses. Or a combination of both.”
They watched the information sink in. Through each mind wafted a view of bliss counterpointed by the possibility that some small misdemeanour (or in the case of the Visigoths a series of bloody slaughters) might tip the balance from blue skies to lightning in every orifice.
They were awakened from the reverie by a hubbub at the bar. A crowd had surrounded a new entrant and they could see the barman gesture in their direction. After a moment the small crowd parted and a figure walked towards the area they had commandeered. She was small, and wearing a high-bodiced dress which may once have had some room but was now veering towards figure hugging. Her bosoms heaved upwards from the bowed revealing neck, and greasy ringlets hung onto her bare shoulders. As she minced towards them she was preceded by a pall of smoke from the enormous cigar clenched between her teeth. The suspicion of a moustache shaded her upper lip.
“ Hello,” she said gruffly, “I’m Jane, and this is my place. Whaddya think?” The crowd variously muttered ‘very nice’, stared at their glasses of mud and smiled blankly.
“Don’t get many big parties in. Probably think it’s going to be a bit stuffy, but hey, they can just sod off. Let me get you a round on the house.” She ignored the various protestations that one pint of brown filth may just be enough and signalled to the barman, then pulled up a chair and sat on it back to front, skirt pulled to the thighs and one grubby stocking sliding weakly below her left knee.
“So, what’s the story with you lot?” she said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke, “You look like some kind of sociological experiment. Mind you,” she took a deep draught of her own beer, belched loudly, and looked lasciviously at Marcel, “I could run a few tests on you given half the chance.” She reached out and grabbed at his groin. As Marcel flapped her away, Lincoln decided to try to generate some conversation, if only to save the Frenchman from the unwanted attention.
“Well miss, er-”
“Austen, but call me Jane, everyone does, if they can’t think of anything worse.” She slapped him on the shoulder and cackled.
“Miss Austen. Nice establishment you have here. Was this your line of business during your life?”
“I was a high-class prostitute.” She observed the stunned silence, then shrieked again.
“Joking! I was writer. Fat lot of good that did me. If I’d known how much fun you could have in a pub I wouldn’t have been poncing around with that pathetic folkie dancing and failing to cop a feel of anyone for twenty years.” She made another, defended, foray towards Marcel’s trousers. “Made up for it since though. Where’ve you lot been, anyway?”
“Capone’s.” said Justin.
“Tosser.” She said, “He came round here bigging himself up and sayin’ he didn’t want anyone else openin’ up on his manor. Blew him out, though.”
“How
did you do that?” asked Geoffrey, shuddering slightly at the memory of his own warm reception from the Italian. The woman took a long drag on the cigar, and then looked towards the bar, where a group of what looked like lumberjacks were engaged in deep discussion.
“Persuasion. Just a little bit of Persuasion.” She paused, as though remembering the event with some wistfulness, then jumped back into her cheery landlady persona. “Anyway, what are you lot possibly doing around here? Sorry about the hair, by the way, washed it a decade ago and can’t do a thing with it.” Raising her hand to stroke the slick mess had exposed an unfortunate luxuriance of black growth in her armpit.
Ron gave the abbreviated version, including the roles of Marcel and Geoffrey, the former hoping the adventurous tale didn’t add to his apparent attractiveness, the latter soaking up the imagined respect. Jane was less delighted by the prospect of judgement than Ron had imagined.
“Hold it, hold it! Do we get allocated on what we did when we were alive, or what we might have done since?”
Geoffrey looked at Marcel as everyone looked at the pair of them. Geoffrey pulled a non-committal face and shrugged.
“Don’t know,” said Marcel, “it’s never occurred to us to find out. Does it matter?”
“I should think so.” said Jane, raising one buttock to unleash some trapped wind, “When I was alive I spent all my time simpering in the presence of dragoons, perfecting Greensleeves on the harpsichord and ruining my eyesight writing by candlelight. I’ve sharpened a few quills since, if you get my drift.” She leered towards Marcel.
“We’d better go,” said Mary, increasingly aware of the clock ticking on her return to normality, “or we’ll never find out the answer.”
The pub owner seemed remarkably distraught to see the departure of such brief acquaintances; at least if her writhing cigar-breathed farewell to Marcel was anything to go by. The farewells between the Afternet foursome and the others were much more subdued.
They stood by a rocky outcrop, a cool wind beginning to zip through the evening air, a shimmer in the landscape the only telltale sign of the entrance to another place. Geoffrey was emotionally saying his goodbyes, the shiver down his spine possibly only partially caused by the scorched gaps in his clothing, as Guntrick gently took Mary’s arm and took her to one side.
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 18
