The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions

by Robert Rankin

  ‘Come, come, George,’ said the professor. ‘All will be well. But you are out of sorts. I have something here that will raise your spirits.’ And he dipped into his waistcoat pocket to draw out a slim glass phial.

  ‘Oh no,’ croaked the professor. ‘It is gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ asked George. ‘What is gone?’

  ‘Something rather special. Something that I felt might aid our escape from here. In all of our comings and goings it must have fallen from my pocket.’

  ‘Tell me of this something,’ said George Fox.

  ‘It does not matter now,’ said the professor.

  ‘No,’ said George, ‘for we are soon to die most horribly. So where would be the harm in you telling me?’

  ‘It was something I acquired whilst on board the airship. Something called the Scent of Unknowing.’

  George did noddings of his head and stroked his striking chin.

  ‘A perfume that I thought to be of myth. One sniff and the sniffer becomes totally compliant. Whatever the sniffer is told to do, or told to think, so shall it be for the sniffer.’

  Professor Coffin might have added more, but of a sudden was quite unable to speak. George’s hands were fastened around his throat and George was glaring fiercely and shaking the showman about.

  ‘You thoroughgoing swine!’ shouted George. ‘At last all falls into place. My periods of missing time. Ada’s most dramatic change of opinion concerning you.’

  Professor Coffin floundered about. Though sprightly he, for the age of himself, no match was he for George.

  Darwin the monkey set up a shrieking. Became a self-appointed referee.

  ‘All right,’ said George. ‘All right.’ He elbowed aside the chattering ape and let the showman fall.

  ‘I am sorry, George,’ croaked the professor, when he could once more find a voice to speak with. ‘You might think me wrong. But I did it for the best of motives—’

  ‘Your own financial advancement,’ said George Fox.

  ‘And yours too. Fifty-fifty.’

  ‘Or at least until you had what you wanted. At which time you would most likely have had me take a little sniff of the scent and confess that I no longer had any interest at all in taking my fifty per cent.’

  Professor Coffin tried very hard indeed to make the words ‘I swear that I had no such thing in mind’ sound convincing.

  George was not convinced.

  ‘We are finished, you and I,’ he said. ‘Our partnership is no more. If somehow I survive and somehow I find Ada, I will return with her, somehow, to England and take a respectable job.’

  ‘Ha,’ said the professor, with some difficulty because it hurt his throat. ‘Do not give me any of that, my boy. You have loved every minute of this. The thrills and high adventure.’

  ‘Loved every minute?’ George was all but speechless. ‘I have lost all count of how many people died on the Empress of Mars. Then the natives. Then the flying monkeys and now this.’

  ‘But you still live,’ said the professor. ‘And have you ever felt so truly alive before? You will find your love, George. I just know that you will and if you do return to England and take a respectable job, you will constantly recall our adventures and hanker after such excitement again.’

  George Fox folded his arms in a huff and took to a sulking silence.

  They did not get an evening meal, nor indeed a breakfast.

  Which George felt the dying man deserved. And after all, if they were going to the cooking pot, then fattening them up was surely logical.

  A Martian’s slidy foot did slurpings in the corridor outside. Intricate brass coggery was set into motion, and bolts slid back upon the grim cell door.

  ‘About time,’ said Professor Coffin. ‘No doubt some letter of apology from some high muckamuck at the Ministry of Immigration. Or possibly our breakfast.’

  George Fox ground his teeth and knotted his fists.

  The muzzle of a Martian terror weapon entered the cell. Gargly shouts of an urgent nature entered with it.

  ‘Time, it seems, to go,’ said George. ‘And Darwin,’ he said to the monkey butler, ‘you have my most sincere apologies. You saved my life and I in turn threw it away. Taking yours with it, I regret.’

  Darwin the monkey shook George by the hand.

  The three then left the cell.

  There was something of a carnival atmosphere upon the streets of Lemuria. Bunting swagged from building to building.

  Somewhere music played.

  Unrecognisable was this to an Earthly ear, appearing more a discordant jangle, accompanied by rattlings. But it had the desired effect upon the considerable crowd that lined the streets. Martians jigged their nips and tentacles and street-side vendors with colourful carts sold bottles of Martian beer.

  Professor Coffin waved gaily. Some of the crowd waved back.

  Professor Coffin did not, however, consider it politic to tell George that he still retained a degree of confidence that all would end happily.

  George Fox stalked and Darwin scampered. Behind them the well-armed Martian slid along.

  It came as absolutely no surprise at all to either George or the professor to find that their final destination was the pyramid of skulls in the central plaza.

  George did desperate glancings all about. There had to be some way he could make his escape. Well, some way they could make their escape. As George wanted no harm to come to Darwin. Perhaps some low-flying aircraft might be leapt onto. Perhaps the surviving Jupiterians would arrive in the very nick of time to rescue them. Perhaps Darwin might have something up his hairy sleeve.

  Perhaps.

  Or, perhaps, simply, George would die here. Die in this subterranean city. Die and be eaten, or other-ways about. But have his head bone join the hill of skulls. Be just another unnamed victim, dead in a faraway place.

  George wished for Ada.

  George wished he was back in England.

  George Fox thought of his parents.

  George missed his mum.

  Up the shallow steps went George at the urge of an alien gun. Step after step and up and up, skulls to either side.

  Upon the very summit, flat-topped, plateaued, stood a Martian of considerable stature. Before him a table and this spread with instruments designed for nothing but torture.

  Except, perhaps, for meat butchery.

  And serving up.

  George glanced back. The professor joined him, Darwin too.

  The Martian with the gun made further garglings.

  ‘Interlopers, insurgents, iconoclasts—’

  The words boomed from the wonderful translating machine, which had been wheeled to the foot of the pyramid.

  Amplified garglings followed, which George considered were probably a Martian translation of the words of English. Then—

  ‘We speak to you in your own tongue, that you may understand the error of your ways. And that your flippancy and casual attitude to official paperwork has led you to receive just punishment.’

  A gargled Martian version of all this followed.

  ‘It is tragic that at a time such as this, when the prophecies are being fulfilled, that you did not come amongst us as penitent pilgrims armed with all the necessary correctly filled application forms and officially endorsed visas.’

  Professor Coffin sighed and shrugged.

  George said, ‘Prophecies fulfilled?’

  ‘Now is our time of great rejoicing,’ the voice continued. ‘And as such it is fitting that you should serve as part of our feast of celebration. Bow now and hide your faces from the Marvel that you are not fit to gaze upon.’

  ‘What of this?’ asked George.

  But ask nothing more would he. Other than perhaps that God should forgive him all his trespasses. And recall the deal that George had formerly suggested, regarding the sparing of Ada’s life in exchange for his own.

  The very large Martian with the table-load of tortures cast his tentacles about George and dragged him from his feet. Oth
er tentacles ensnared Darwin and the professor. Curled about their mouths, stifling their cries for mercy, holding them with a hideous strength.

  ‘Death to the infidels!’ cried the mechanical voice. And then took once more to ghastly gargles.

  A blur of tentacles scooped up horrible cutting tools, fiendish things a-dazzle with corkscrew blades.

  The Martian crowd made free with joyful cheerings.

  The instruments of torment swept down upon the joyless three.

  33

  A mighty cry rose up above all. A hideous gargling shriek.

  It stilled the Martian crowd to silence. The torture weapons halted in mid-swing.

  A further gargled torrent of words and tentacles retracted.

  George was suddenly free and gasped for air. His ears seemed to pop from the all-consuming silence. Gingerly George climbed to his feet. The professor, he observed, was doing likewise. Darwin was up upon his haunches.

  The Martian executioner was replacing his terrible implements.

  Professor Coffin offered George a shrug.

  More amplified garglings issued forth. The huge executioner flung himself down to the paved plateau and set free plaintive moanings.

  From his vantage point upon high, George could see that the countless Martians below were now sinking to the knee-like parts of themselves and bowing their horrible heads.

  Further commands, for such these obviously were, poured from the translating machine. Uncomfortably, on its knees, the crowd did backings away.

  And George looked down at the being who spoke the commands into the wonderful translating machine and George beheld a great wonder.

  George beheld the Marvel to which the previous speaker had alluded. The Marvel that they were ‘not fit to gaze upon’.

  The Marvel that had been made manifest at this time ‘when the prophecies are being fulfilled’.

  The Marvel was clothed in robes of gold and silver, bronze and copper and lapis lazuli. She wore the wings of an angel and a helmet likened to that of a samurai. Upon this was a crescent moon and a most distinctive image.

  The being’s face was golden, Her eyes of the purest green, and burnished copper ringlets framed Her lovely upturned face.

  ‘It is Her,’ cried Professor Coffin, and he bowed extravagantly. ‘It is the Japanese Devil Fish Girl Herself.’

  George found that he was bowing too and swaying slightly also. Dizzy from hunger and half-gone with madness for fear of it all, George could manage but three brief words, before he fainted away.

  ‘It is Ada,’ said George Fox, as blackness closed about him.

  He awoke upon a bed of many comforts, with pillowings of swansdown and cushionings of silk. The air was rich with exotic perfumes, trays of rare confectionary were near at hand, and to George it all appeared most heavenly.

  ‘I have died,’ cried George as he woke to this vision of loveliness. ‘And I have not gone to the bad place, thank you, God.’

  ‘You have certainly found religion,’ said a voice.

  And George looked to the speaker and tears came into his eyes and George said, ‘Ada, Ada – it is you.’

  ‘It certainly is.’ Ada, who had evidently been leaning over George, mopping at his brow with lavender water, straightened, twirled and went slowly through one of those provocative dances that never lose their popularity at the music hall.

  George looked on appreciatively and would probably have clapped when she was done and called for an encore, but for the nausea that he felt and the growling of his stomach.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Ada, ceasing her voluptuous motions. ‘You must be very hungry. I will attend to that.’ She turned and swept away, a veritable fairy queen in all her marvellous raiments and trappings, a veritable Goddess indeed.

  George heard words barking and gargling from the translating machine. Ada Lovelace returned to him and settled down on the fantastic bed.

  ‘Breakfast soon,’ she said to George. ‘And over it I will tell you all. For it is a wonderful story.’

  The breakfast was delicious, of course. For how could it have been otherwise? For surely it was ambrosia. That food consumed by the Gods.

  Ada Lovelace tasted this and that from the golden salvers set before her on a low carved table of the Turkish persuasion.

  George sat opposite her. They both sat on tapestried cushions.

  ‘Is Darwin all right?’ George asked.

  Ada Lovelace nodded, then made a pained expression. ‘This helmet is somewhat tight,’ she said, ‘but I thought it imprudent to mention that it really isn’t my size.’

  George continued with his eating.

  ‘You’re not going to ask how the professor is?’ asked Ada.

  George shook his head and munched on. ‘I could not care less,’ said he.

  ‘An evil man,’ said Ada Lovelace.

  George looked up. ‘Thank God you have come to your senses,’ he said. ‘I know what he did to us.’

  ‘Poisoned us somehow,’ said Ada.

  ‘Poisoned us with this.’ George drew from his waistcoat pocket the slim glass phial with the screw-on cap. ‘The Scent of Unknowing. I had Darwin liberate it from the professor’s pocket. And the professor confessed to me as to what it did when he thought it was lost for ever.’

  ‘I do not remember at all,’ said Ada, and she shivered slightly. ‘And I fear for what that terrible man might have chosen to do to me when he and I were alone.’

  George Fox made a ferocious face.

  ‘It is all right,’ said Ada. ‘He has no more power over us. We are safe from him.’

  George poured out something and sipped at it. ‘Are you sure that I am not dreaming this?’ he asked.

  ‘I did wonder if I was,’ said Ada, ‘but no. Would you like to hear the story?’

  ‘Very much,’ said George Fox, and he settled back to listen.

  ‘This island is a sacred island,’ began Ada Lovelace. ‘Sacred to every religion, on this planet and off it. The statue of the Goddess in the temple above is as old as time itself. It is the most sacred object in all of the universe. The Book of Sayito the Goddess is here and I have read from this book.

  ‘Allow me to explain all. The flying monkey creatures carried me away – not to do me harm, but to rescue me from amidst the battle. The natives are not allowed to climb so near to the temple. They protect the lower slopes, that is their job. The monkeys protect the temple.

  ‘The Martians here see all, you see. All about this island anyway. They have camera devices hidden all over the island that relay images here. They saw me. And they recognised me to be Sayito, the Japanese Devil Fish Girl.’

  ‘But you are not really Her,’ said George. ‘Or are you?’

  ‘Of course I am not,’ said Ada Lovelace. ‘Although I do, it seems, somewhat resemble Her. My eyes, my hair. And remember, no woman has set foot upon this island for one thousand years or more. Their prophecies said that Sayito would come. An easy mistake to make.’

  George went, ‘Hm,’ quite loudly. Sometimes things can be just too convenient to be altogether likely.

  ‘The flying monkeys carried me to a tower and I was brought down here in a lift. And George, I have to tell you, I was terrified, I cried for you, I truly did. A city full of Martians right here beneath the surface of our world? How fearful a thing is this? But I was led to the translating machine and told that I was the Goddess and that all was mine, for my return had fulfilled part of the prophecies.’

  ‘Incredible,’ said George Fox, and not, he felt, without reason. ‘And what of these prophecies?’

  ‘I was taken to the inner temple. There is a great temple above that I did not visit.’

  ‘I did,’ said George. ‘It is very large, with a fine big statue that really does look like you.’

  ‘Then I would like to see that. But, as I say, I was led to the inner temple. Ritually bathed, which I did not like much, because those smelly Martians were rather too intimate with their washings. Then I was clothed in t
he raiments of the Goddess, which I really did like. But then who wouldn’t? Then made up in golden cosmetics, and shown the sacred book, The Book of Sayito.’

  ‘I am most confused about this,’ said George. ‘This and so many other things besides. When we first met, I recall you telling me that The Book of Sayito was the Venusian Bible. What are the Martians doing with it?’