Retromancer

by Robert Rankin

  I then climbed from my hideaway and did certain things, which seemed appropriate to do. And then I followed the two would-be stealers of the nation’s treasure, in that ducking, diving, skulking, creeping-along fashion that is greatly favoured by the ninja.

  And I did it with considerable style.

  I crept into the mighty castle keep kind of jobbie and along stone corridors, my heart pounding fiercely and my head all swimming with fear. I did not know quite what would happen if I found myself in confrontation with these criminal types. But I supposed that it would be nothing nice for me.

  And then I heard them once again.

  ‘Mumble mumble mumble,’ they went. ‘Drugged all the real beefeaters mumble mumble. And told the public to **** *** mumble mumble mumble. So let’s get this done and hump the jewels into the fake beer barrels on the dray. Mumble mumble mumble.’

  ‘They might think that they have all the loose ends tied up,’ I whispered to myself, ‘but they have not reckoned with Rizla.’

  And then I felt something cold at the nape of my neck. And then I heard those words that I had no wish to hear.

  And that something cold was the mouth of a pistol.

  And those words were, ‘Put up your hands.’

  16

  At a gun-muzzle’s end I was urged along stone lanes.

  The treasure house itself proved to be smaller than I had imagined. A simple circular room with an armoured showcase at its centre. Within this showcase treasure twinkled. And without, the bogus beefeater and the duplicitous drayman worried at the glasswork with big sledgehammers.

  ‘Comrades,’ called the scoundrel who muzzled me forwards. ‘See what I ’ave ’ere. A young toff who’s wandered far from ’is ’ampshire ’ome.’

  The bogus eater of beef did growlings.

  As did the dodgy driver of the dray.

  ‘I sent that young ***** packing!’ growled the beef-eating one. ‘But now as he’s back and smelling strongly of horses, we’d best slit his throat.’

  ‘No, hold on, hold on there,’ I said, raising my hands even higher than they were already. ‘There is no need for any throat-slitting. No need at all.’

  ‘And I’ll agree to that,’ said he that drove the dray.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I appreciate you doing so.’

  ‘And we’ll appreciate you. It’s a long haul to our destination by steamer. You’ll provide us with entertainment.’ And he winked most lewdly and licked at his lips. ‘And then you’ll be meat for our bellies.’

  ‘What?’ went I, in an outraged manner, and one not lacking for terror. ‘This is not the way things are done in Boy’s Own Adventure books. I recall no mentions of homosexual gang-rape and cannibalism.’

  ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ said the villain with the gun at my neck. ‘It’s all bestiality and phlebotomy nowadays.’

  ‘And chezolagnia,’ said the drayman. ‘Not to mention emetophilia and coprolagnia.’

  ‘And hierophilia and mammagymnophilia,’ said the bad beefeater in a tone that suggested he actually knew what those words meant.

  ‘Hm,’ I went. And I took another tack. ‘I would not want to be remembered like that,’ I said. ‘Not if I were making history.’

  The drayman gave me a bit of a stare. The beefeater just went, ‘Eh?’

  ‘You are revolutionaries, are you not?’ I said. ‘Your names will go down in history as the brave comrades who liberated the symbols of the monarcho-capitalist tyranny. I would not want my grandchildren to read that I had performed such noble deeds for the people, then rounded them off with a session of bum-banditry followed by a nosh-up of human hamburger.’

  There was a pause, then a pause for thought. With each man alone with his own, as it were.

  ‘There’s truth in what ’e says,’ said the holder of the gun. And his comrades nodded their heads.

  ‘So we’d best not mention it when we get interviewed by the ’acks from the local newspaper.’

  ‘What?’ went I. And, ‘But,’ as well. But all to no avail.

  ‘Pick up an ’ammer,’ said the gun-toting anthrophagus pervert, ‘and get stuck in to the treasure case.’

  And so, downcast and shoulders slumped, I slouched over to the treasure case, hauled up a spare sledgehammer and took to the swinging of it.

  Which, as it happened, I rather enjoyed. But then, after all, who would not have? For it was also a childhood dream of boys of my generation to be involved in a really big crime. A Great Train Robbery. The snatching of gold from the Bank of England. The Kidnapping of Diana Dors. I was playing a part in the making of history here. If these monsters actually escaped with their booty and I did not wind up feeding their fetishistic fancies or their grumbling guts, then I would go down in the history books as one of the super-criminals.

  But then another thought struck me and did so with some force. I had lived up until a month ago in the nineteen sixties. And although I had never been a particular fan of history, I had read about the Crown jewels. And I had not read that they had ever got stolen during the war, especially not by me as one of the robbers. They had not.

  But then another thought struck me, which rubbished the former. The history that I had been taught did not record that America had been reduced to a nuclear desert and that Germany had won the war.

  But—

  And then I received a clip around the ear.

  ‘Stop standing there staring into space with your mouth open, you *** ****** *,’ shouted the beastly beefeater, ‘and get stuck into that showcase!’

  And so I did and they did too and soon the glass was flying. And no alarms went off, for these were the days before pressure-sensitive pads and laser trips and all that kind of hi-tech security caper.

  Soon we were all dipping in through the holes we had smashed and pulling out crowns and sceptres and orbs and things of a right royal nature. And the drayman placed Queen Victoria’s diamond crown upon his head and his comrades guffawed, and I found myself holding King Charles the Second’s Sceptre with the dove, which was originally made for his coronation in sixteen sixty-one. Which was rather special and I knew in my heart that this was all very wrong. Whatever one felt about the monarchy, stealing the Crown jewels was wrong. And surely it was heresy or treason, or something, and did they not hang you for that?

  ‘Give me George the Fourth’s State Diadem, once worn by Princess Alexandria,’ said the drayman to me. ‘And empty your pockets too. I saw you slip the One Ring of PowerTM, otherwise known as Isildur’s BaneTM, into your trousers.’

  ‘I never did,’ I said. But I had.

  They crammed the golden regalia into sacks. The drayman fetched a wheelbarrow from his dray and they had me load it up. ‘Now push it to the dray,’ he said and I did not have any choice.

  The sun was already going down, which came as some surprise. I did not know that we had been in the treasure house for such a length of time. But darkness was falling and searchlights were windscreen-wiping the sky. I gazed up at the barrage balloons that hung above the Tower. What exactly was the purpose of those?

  And I sniffed at the air of wartime London and that air smelled grim.

  ‘You will not get away with this,’ I told my captors. ‘You should just make good your escape and have done with it. I will put back the jewels and we can just pretend that none of this ever happened.’

  And the wielder of the gun clipped me hard on the head with it and counselled speediness of action in favour of unrequested jaw-motion. ‘Move it and shut it,’ he told me.

  ‘But—’ But I was wasting my time.

  But then I heard the air-raid sirens sound.

  ‘Aha!’ I went in an I-told-you-so fashion. ‘Now you will have to stay put. You cannot drive this dray through the streets during an air raid.’

  And then the blighters laughed at me. And the drayman, who seemed now to be doing most of the talking, told me that brewers’ drays always had free passage during these otherwise publicly restricted pe
riods.

  ‘I am appalled,’ I said and I truly was. But they hastened me onto the dray and the drayman whipped at his horses.

  And then those certain things that I had done before I followed the drayman and beefeater became manifest. And the drayman suddenly flew from the dray and was dragged at the ends of his reins across the courtyard by his horses.

  For I had disconnected them from the dray. Which I, at the time, had thought rather clever. Although not quite so much at this particular moment, because at this particular moment both the beefeater and the gun-wielder set about me something wicked. Reasoning, quite rightly, that I was to blame for the painful fate of their comrade.

  And when, at length, they were done with venting their collective spleen upon my person, they left the dray, gathered up their fallen partner in crime, led back the horses and reconnected them to the dray.

  Which left me thinking that amongst the certain things that I had done, telephoning for the police should have been included.

  ‘What else?’ demanded the scuffed-up drayman now looming over me. ‘What else did you do?’

  ‘I loosened all the barrels so they would fall off when you went over a bump,’ I managed to say, though it pained me in many ways to do so.

  I received a bit more kicking while the drayman retightened the stays that held the barrels in place. And then we set off.

  Which would have been nice, I suppose, a jaunt on a horse-drawn brewer’s dray. Had my own circumstances not been quite so dire at that particular moment. And had not this dray been conveying the stolen Crown jewels away through the streets of London.

  The drayman and the gunman sat up front.

  The bogus beefeater sat upon my head at the back.

  And the horses all went clip-clop-clip.

  And searchlights beamed in the sky.

  Presently we reached the East India Dock Road. Which led to the East India Docks. And unmolested we travelled with naught to be seen of folk on the streets but for the occasional group of firefighters loading crates of beer onto their tenders, or members of the Home Guard stripping lead from the roof of St Stigmatophilia’s Church.

  And I sighed beneath the big bum bearing down upon my head and I felt quite disillusioned about the Blitz Spirit and hands holding hands and a nation united in a time of crisis.

  ‘This is a rotten world and a rotten age,’ I mumbled, ‘filled with rotten people doing rotten things and I hate it.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said the sitter and he farted on my head.

  London’s docks had taken a brutal pounding from the Luftwaffe bombs. How anything could function now was well beyond me, but somehow it did, and a small tramp steamer lay at anchor somewhat out from the shoreline.

  The villains, myself and the stolen booty were soon in a rowing boat and this was soon out into the river and alongside the steamer. Then we were shortly up and aboard and off down the night-shrouded river. They tossed me through a hatchway into a stinking hold and locked that hatchway upon me.

  Which left me alone, to muse upon matters generally and draw my own conclusions as to how I felt about them. Specifically.

  But I did not have too long to dwell upon man’s inhumanity to man and the unfairness of it all, because the hatchway suddenly opened and I found myself being hauled forth onto the darkened deck. I was most saddened by this hauling forth, as I feared that the fate awaiting me was that fate which had befallen many a cabin boy aboard a pirate brig.

  But not as yet, or so it seemed, because I then found myself in the company of a rather pretty lady, who held up a ship’s lantern before me and asked me politely whether I would care to join her in her stateroom.

  Which I did.

  It was a rather well-appointed stateroom as it happened, done up in a somewhat antique style that put me in mind of illustrations I had seen of Captain Nemo’s sitting room in the Nautilus.

  The rather pretty lady sat me down in a leather-bound captain’s chair and poured me a glass of red wine from a ship’s decanter. I viewed her as she did this and I have to say that there was something not altogether right about this beautiful creature. Which is not to say that there was something wrong, just something different. She had an ethereal quality about her. An other-worldly quality. And had I believed in such things, which as a rationalist I naturally did not, I might well have supposed that she was one of the fairy folk.

  ‘I really must apologise for the behaviour of the beastly men who captured you,’ she said. ‘I had not given them my permission to do so. They were simply to retrieve what is ours and return it to me. They will be punished for their transgressions.’

  ‘Right,’ I said and I nodded my head. ‘I have no idea at all what you are talking about,’ I continued.

  ‘You held the ring in your own hand,’ she said to me. ‘You know exactly what I am talking about.’

  ‘The Ring of PowerTM?’ I asked. ‘Also known as Isildur’s BaneTM?’

  ‘The very same. A great sorrow exists in the land from which I come. A sorrow that can only be lifted when that which was stolen from us is returned. The Ring of Power TM.’

  And I nodded once more, most thoughtfully. ‘I did think it was a little out of place amongst all the other jewels,’ I said, ‘them being real and it being the fictional creation of J. R. R. TolkienTM. But then what do I know? Because after all, there is a war on.’

  ‘I am Princess Roellen of Purple Fane,’ said this lady to me. ‘My realm extends from the Mountains of Ffafiod to the Sea of Garmillion, encompassing the forests of Caecomphap and Pemanythnod.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘and pardon me for mentioning it, but none of these names, including your own, would appear to be trademarked.’

  ‘The meaning of your words is lost to me,’ said Princess Roellen, without the trademark.

  ‘The Lord of the Rings™,’ I said. ‘Although, now that I come to think of it, I do not believe it was published until the nineteen fifties. But if push comes to shove, I can always blame it on the Chevalier Effect. Could I have some more wine, please?’

  And the princess poured me more wine.

  ‘You understand,’ said she, ‘that now I have told you of these matters, I cannot allow you to return to London.’

  ‘Oh dear oh dear,’ I said. ‘And just when I thought that things were looking up. So the future that awaits me is that of the sex toy and the sandwich?’

  And at this the princess grinned somewhat coyly. ‘We have only just been introduced,’ she said. ‘Such forwardness is not our natural way in Purple Fane. Although I am never averse to a bit of hobbitophilia. ’

  ‘I am now truly confused,’ I said. ‘Am I to be rogered and eaten by the jewel robbers, or not?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said the princess. ‘Unless that is what “tugs your elfin bell”, as it were.’

  ‘It is not,’ I said. ‘So what are you talking about?’

  ‘If you wish,’ said the princess, ‘you may return with me to Purple Fane, a land of great beauty untouched by war. Where our people exalt in their liberty. Where justice is the foundation upon which our society rests. And where women outnumber men by twenty to one. What say you to this prospect?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I will have to give the matter some thought.’

  17

  Have to give the matter some thought?

  I perhaps lied about this.

  ‘You are asking,’ I said, ‘whether I would care to leave war-torn London and come with you to what can surely be described as nothing less than an Earthly paradise?’

  ‘I think you will find it to your liking,’ said the princess. ‘Would you care for more wine? And have some sweeties too. You will be a hero in our land, for returning that which was stolen from us.’

  ‘A hero,’ I said and I sipped at my wine and accepted a sweetie too. The prospect of returning with this beautiful creature to NarniaTM, or wherever it was that she had come from, leaving the horror of London behind was certainly tempting.

  To put it mildly.


  And of course—

  But then there was a terrible

  WHOOMPH!

  And things went black for me.

  18

  And I awoke to find myself aching in places that I never even knew that I had, in the sitting room of Mr Hugo Rune.

  ‘Oh no!’ I went and tears leaped to my eyes. ‘I dreamed it, I know I did. None of it was real.’

  And Mr Rune did pattings at my shoulder and offered me whisky to drink. And although I have never been particularly good with whisky, as it tends to catch on the back of my throat and I find myself spitting it all down my front, on this occasion I took it gratefully and poured it into my mouth.

  ‘She was so beautiful,’ I said. ‘I should have known it was too good to be true.’

  And Mr Rune now took my glass and filled it up once more. ‘The tramp steamer was torpedoed,’ he said. ‘You have Lord Jason here to thank for saving your life.’

  ‘Hi de ho,’ went Lord Jason, grinning over Mr Rune’s shoulder and waggling fingers at me. ‘We asked the Royal Navy to hold fire until I’d rescued you, but they got a tad trigger-happy.’

  ‘But how did you—’ And I looked from the one to the other of them and asked just what had happened.

  ‘To be frank with you, Rizla,’ said Hugo Rune, ‘I was not entirely frank with you.’

  ‘Now this does surprise me,’ I said, as it did not surprise me at all.

  ‘Firstly, Lord Jason and I did not really get tiddly in the rear of the Roller. We only acted that way—’

  ‘So you could be a hero,’ Lord Jason put in.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Hugo Rune. ‘We were looking out for you, of course, so that no harm came to you.’

  ‘But they beat me up,’ I protested, ‘on the brewer’s dray. And a bogus beefeater sat on my head. And farted too, as it happens.’

  ‘No lasting harm,’ said Hugo Rune. ‘I would have stepped in if they’d actually decided to kill you.’

  I did not say, ‘Well, that is a relief,’ because frankly it was not.