The Garden of Unearthly Delights

by Robert Rankin

  Maxwell took a smart step backwards. ‘This is a theological discussion,’ said he. ‘There is no cause for violence.’

  ‘The violence is all of your making. You began it.’

  Good point also, thought Maxwell. ‘Now see here,’ he said, as the two women began to sort amongst the stones. ‘Now see—’

  ‘Stone the heretic!’ cried the old woman. Maxwell weighed up his chances. They weren’t good. He could strike the surly young man, but hardly the two women. And if he simply turned tail and ran there was the strong possibility that he might be brought to book by a well-aimed stone to the skull.

  Well, thought Maxwell, if you’re going down in flames, try to hit something big. ‘Cease this behaviour at once,’ said Maxwell, in no uncertain voice. ‘Do you not recognize me?’

  ‘No!’ agreed the three, hefting their missiles.

  ‘I am The Inspector.’ Maxwell uttered this with such authority that he almost surprised himself.

  ‘You are who?’ The old woman halted in mid swing.

  ‘The Inspector,’ said Maxwell. ‘Surely you have heard of The Inspector.’

  Heads nodded. They had indeed heard of The Inspector.

  The young man’s head ceased to nod first. ‘Hah,’ said he. ‘If you are The Inspector, where is your uniform?’

  ‘This is my uniform.’ Maxwell straightened the lapels on his Oxfam zoot suit.

  ‘He lies.’ Kevin raised his stone once more.

  ‘You have seen an Inspector’s uniform before?’ Maxwell ventured. ‘How, then, does it differ from my own?’

  ‘I . . .’ Kevin did not have a ready answer to this question.

  ‘And let me ask you this: do you know the role of The Inspector?’

  ‘Of course He judges all who enter Terminus.’

  ‘Thus and so,’ said Maxwell, who had been hoping for such a reply. ‘And thus you are judged.’

  ‘Judged?’ Young Kevin almost raised his stone once more.

  Almost, but not quite.

  ‘Judged,’ said Maxwell. ‘And not found wanting. I, The Inspector, came to test your faith. Ask yourself, would any ordinary man dare what I have dared?’

  ‘Well . . . no . . .‘ said Kevin. ‘I suppose . . .’

  ‘No indeed.’ Maxwell thrust out his chest. ‘I mocked your beliefs. I blasphemed the holy name of Varney. I cast you down onto the sacred tary-mac. And why did I do this?’

  ‘To test our faith?’ asked the old woman.

  ‘Correct,’ said Maxwell. ‘And I am greatly pleased. Pleased with how well you have tended the shrine. Pleased with how stoically you bear your penances. Pleased that you would not be moved from your faith. And as such I now reward you.’

  ‘We shall be taken at once to Terminus?’ The old woman thrust out her arm towards the road. Her son and the lady with the non-foldaway foldaway thrust theirs out also.

  ‘Hold very tight please,’ they chorused. ‘Ding ding.’

  Maxwell raised a hand as in benediction. ‘All will be rewarded in Terminus,’ he said kindly. ‘Varney will call for each of you when the time is right. You have no further need to wait here. Return to your homes. Live useful and caring lives. Tell others of the faith that The Inspector came unto you and that no longer need any serve at the shrines.’

  ‘What? No more waits?’ A look of transcending relief appeared upon the old woman’s face. ‘No more must we stand throughout the wind, rain and chill?’

  ‘No more. I hereby relieve you of all such obligations. And through my relief of you, so also all others of the faith. No more waits for anyone. Any more. Ever.’

  ‘We can just go home and live caring lives? This is enough?’

  ‘More than enough. You have kept the faith well. Such is your reward.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said the lady with the non-foldaway fold-away.

  ‘Such is as Varney wills it.’ Maxwell mimed a little steering-wheel motion. ‘Now be gone.’

  The queuers looked at Maxwell, looked at each other, opened their mouths to speak, closed them again and began to sink to their knees.

  ‘No kneeling,’ Maxwell told them. ‘No more worshipping of any kind. Varney has had worshipping enough. This is his message that I pass on to you.’

  ‘Thanks be. Thanks be,’ was the general feeling all round.

  Kevin said, ‘What of you, Inspector? Will you not come with us? Spread the word to all yourself?’

  Maxwell gave this a moment of thought. As a visiting god he might expect to receive a great deal of hospitality at the tables of his worshippers. Comfy beds would be offered and possibly young maidens to share them with. Maxwell came within a gnat’s organ or saying, ‘Yes indeed,’ but did not.

  It occurred to him also that a visiting god would like as not be expected to show some proof of his divinity, such as turning water into wine, for instance, or munching hot coals. A god who failed to perform such trifling feats might well find himself called upon to demonstrate his invulnerability to shotgun shells.

  ‘No,’ said Maxwell firmly. ‘I must travel on. To other shrines.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Kevin. ‘I’d have liked to have seen you swallowing hot coals.’

  ‘Another time perhaps,’ Maxwell breathed an inward sigh of relief. ‘So farewell. Farewell. And don’t forget what I have told you.’

  The lady offered Maxwell her non-foldaway. Maxwell took it. ‘Go in peace,’ he said.

  And so they drifted off across the wretched moorland. Maxwell watched them, waved when they turned to wave to him, then flung away the non-foldaway and resumed his trudge to the north.

  The troubled sun was heading down the sky as Maxwell struck off once more along the ruined road. But it didn’t detract from the curious sense of wellbeing he felt.

  True, he was all alone in this strange new world and true and terrible the knowledge that his loved ones were now nothing more than memory. And the anger he felt towards Sir John had not died away.

  For surely it was he who had somehow bucketed Maxwell into the future by nearly one hundred years, a somewhat drastic course of action to insure that Maxwell did not get home and change the ending of the book. An efficient one also.

  But, of course, that was all now in the past. Considerably so in fact. Sir John would now be long dead, but here was he, Maxwell, in the present. And, if he was to be honest with himself, well pleased to leave the past behind him. Especially the wife behind him. He was here, now, in the new world, with everything to look forward to and not very much to look back on. And he felt very much alive. He, Max Carrion, Imagineer. He had performed his first noble deed, freed a group of people from the yoke of superstition. He’d done well and it was only his first day on the job.

  Maxwell drew back his shoulders, stuck out his chest and put a new spring into his step.

  He had just begun to whistle when he heard it: a low rumble. Not thunder? thought Max. That’s hardly fitting.

  The rumble grew into a growl.

  Not some wild beast?

  Max turned in his tracks and stared back along the ruined road. Something large was heading his way. Something large and red, swelling in size as it drew nearer and nearer.

  Maxwell’s eyes widened.

  It was a bus!

  It was a big red London bus!

  Maxwell’s eyes became very big and wide indeed. The bus bore down upon him. Accelerating. Maxwell dithered, knowing not which way to flee. Certainly not forward. To the side then. Into a ditch. Maxwell made to take that dive, but tripped over an untied bootlace and fell once more onto his face.

  The bus rushed forward, nearer and nearer. As Maxwell fell he caught a fleeting glimpse of the driver’s face. For a split second they faced each other, eye to eye. The driver had a smiley face. There was no doubt at all in Maxwell’s mind as to whom that face belonged.

  ‘Reg . . .’ Maxwell screamed and tried to roll himself into a ball. But the big red bus was on him.

  Maxwell held his breath and awaited the hideous life-stopping
crunch.

  But the hideous crunch didn’t come.

  Maxwell opened his eyes and looked up.

  And up.

  The bus had risen from the road and was sailing into the sky.

  And there wasn’t just one bus.

  There were three of them. One behind the other.

  And they were all empty!

  Maxwell gaped, open-mouthed, and watched as they ascended into the heavens, bound, no doubt, for Terminus.

  ‘Well I’ll be . . .’ But Maxwell said no more, for to his ears there now came shouts and screams. Glancing once again along the way that he had come, Maxwell spied three figures running towards him. One old, one young and one of middle years. They were picking up stones as they ran.

  ‘Bastard!’ they cried, and names far worse. ‘You made us miss it! You made us miss it!’

  Sensing that further theological debate would probably serve no positive purpose at this time, Maxwell took to his substantial heels and fled towards the north.

  4

  The travelling TV was a large and histrionic affair, solidly constructed of worthy oak and elaborately embellished in alliterative découpage. Sundry smiles smothered its sides. Scandalized statesmen and seductive super models. Sensational sports folk and sullen serial killers. Scathing satirists and sedentary scientists. Sober scholars and the scabrous singers of scatological songs.

  A somewhat staggering sight.

  This whole was mounted upon four sturdy wheels and furnished with a towing bar and ox harness. A zany, done up in the multi-hued costume of his calling — long-billed cap of tawny red, green felt tunic with slashed sleeves and blue silk cummerbund, pink tights and blue suede brothel creepers — pranced about amongst the viewing public who had gathered in the town’s square, soliciting alms and acting the warm-up man.

  Having finally satisfied himself that he had wrung from the gathering all he was likely to wring, he pranced up to the travelling TV and made much of polishing the screen and carefully adjusting the knobs.

  Now he hushed the crowd to silence with a finger to his lips, counted down the seconds on a Goliath pocket watch, flipped the set’s on button and, bowing, backed away.

  The screen cleared and lit up to reveal the face of Dayglo Hilyte, news teller. Dayglo wore a pale grey skin toner, dark eye shadow and black lip gloss. His bald head had stencilled curls snaking down each cheek. The widow’s peak which began an inch above his pencilled eyebrows made his face appear an ungodly chimera of Mickey Mouse and Bela Lugosi.

  At the sight of Dayglo Hilyte, several small children amongst the viewing public began to weep and bury their faces into their mothers’ laps.

  Dayglo Hilyte opened his mouth, spoke words, but said nothing. The zany hastened to adjust the sound control.

  Dayglo made himself heard. ‘. . . in a heated exchange during Prime Minister’s question time today, the leader of the opposition, Pasha Ali Ben Jumada described the Government’s devolution policy as ill-conceived and indefensible. The granting of home rule, not only to Scotland and Wales but also The Isle of Wight, each separate county, each borough, city, town and village, each street, shop and individual home, was, he said, a move taken to confuse the general public and distract them from noticing that the Government had now lost all control and was utterly incapable of maintaining any rule whatsoever over anything.

  ‘The Prime Minister responded to this allegation by stating that he had pledged himself to the policy of home rule. That home rule should exist in every home, especially his own, and that the leader of the opposition, Pasha Ali Ben Jumble Sale, was an unscrupulous mischief-maker with the libido of a March hare.

  ‘The leader of the opposition, Pasha Ali Ben Jumbo Jet responded by describing the Prime Minister as a pot-walloping parvenu and drew the analogy that, as water always found its own level, so too did scum, which inevitably rose to the very top.

  ‘At this point swords were drawn on both sides of the House and the speaker cried out for order. Lord Peter Harrow, the member for Brentford North elicited much laughter by calling back that “his was a pint of Large please”. The speaker, through tears of laughter, demanded that the leader of the opposition, Pasha Ali Ben Jump Suit, apologize at once to the Prime Minister. Pasha Ali Ben Jock Strap declined to do so and said that, for the record, if it wasn’t for the vacuum in the Prime Minister’s head, his bowels would fall out of his bottom. And that if the Prime Minister was a quarter of the man the Prime Minister’s wife knew the leader of the opposition to be in bed, he would step outside and settle the matter with his sleeves rolled up. Highlights from the fight will be brought to you during our evening broadcast.

  ‘Science news now and Greenwich Observatory has confirmed the findings of the Royal Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, that the earth is no longer revolving about the sun, nor spinning on its axis. Sir Patrick described the planet as being in stasis, with the sun now orbiting it once every twenty-four hours. He also endorsed the statement recently made by the Archbishopess of Canterbury, that the sun was not a great big ball of fire, because, if it was, then where was all the smoke? The Archbishopess’s pronouncement that the sun was, in fact, a very large lens, which focused the radiance of heaven onto the earth, was, Sir Patrick said, probably not far off the mark.

  ‘And now the weather.’ A little hatch opened in the side of the travelling TV and Dayglo Hilyte stuck his hand out. ‘Dry,’ said he. ‘And that is the end of the news.’

  The crowd in the town square clapped enthusiastically, then dissolved into its component parts and drifted away.

  Dayglo Hilyte climbed through a doorway to the rear of the travelling TV, stretched, cursed and then set to examining the contents of the contributions sack.

  ‘Mostly parsnips again, I’m afraid,’ said his zany.

  ‘Parsnips, bloody parsnips.’ The news teller made and raised fists. ‘Back in the days of the station, it would have been account lunches at Soho Soho. Pigging it out on Italian designer dishes. A starter of sun-dried tomatoes and focaccia, with lashings of fresh basil and virgin olive oil. Then—’

  ‘Spare me,’ said the zany. ‘It is parsnips again today, and that’s all there is to it. Had you not elected that we eat the ox, we would not be trapped in this godless hole, living on naught but parsnips.’

  ‘I cannot survive upon a diet of vegetables,’ whinged the news teller. ‘They are affecting my metabolism, I find myself leaning towards the sun.’

  ‘Get a fire going,’ said the zany. ‘Unless you would prefer to eat them raw.’

  ‘Outrageous.’

  A pale shadow, cast by the troubled sun, fell across the zany causing him to look up from his parsnip-sorting and offer a curt, ‘What of you?’

  The owner of the shadow inclined his head and grinned a cheersome grin. ‘Pardon me,’ said this body, ‘but I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.’

  ‘You are pardoned,’ said the zany. ‘Now be on your way.’

  ‘The name is Carrion,’ said Carrion. ‘Max Carrion, Imagineer.’

  The zany looked Max up and down. ‘You look like a beggar man to me and you twang like a cow’s behind.’

  Max examined the soles of his substantial boots. ‘Pardon me once more,’ he said, scraping something smelly from the left.

  It had been a month since Maxwell’s unfortunate encounter with the followers of Varney. An instructive month, and one which had determined him upon a course of action.

  Maxwell had travelled north, seeking refuge where he could amongst the hamlets he chanced upon. He earned victual and shelter by entertaining his hosts with antique songs of the ‘doo wop’ persuasion and tales of days gone by. The story telling was well received and with an unlimited fund of movie plots to draw upon and the entire Walt Disney catalogue at his disposal, Maxwell had left more than one farmstead with a well-stocked rucksack on his back and a tuneless rendition of ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ harassing his ears.

  He had learned to avoid the use of words which provoke
d looks of stupefaction and bafflement. Among these were ‘electricity’, ‘telecommunications’ and any reference to the internal combustion engine and what was now considered its improbable applications.

  As he moved from place to place, Maxwell sought to tease from his hosts what histories had been passed down to them, regarding the time of the great change. Those who would speak muttered only of terrors and tribulations that were better left beyond the reach of memory. They then demanded to hear once more the adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

  Maxwell’s wanderings, though ever north, were aimless and he was irked by the lack of purpose. Although in his former life he had been content to summer his time reading fantasy in the public library, now he was an adventurer himself, cast adrift in a fantastic realm, and he just wasn’t making the best of it. He had to find some goal. Some raison d’être.

  Some noble cause.

  Any noble cause!

  And so, in search of this, Maxwell’s wanderings had brought him at length to Grimshaw, the largest town in the principality.

  Grimshaw was a market town, home to some nine hundred souls, and raised in the nouveau-medievalist style which prevailed everywhere. Maxwell had seen little or nothing in the way of extant twentieth-century architecture and he surmised, correctly enough, that without electricity, most twentieth-century habitation soon became uninhabitable.

  In Grimshaw Maxwell determined that he would set himself up as Solver of Problems Supremo, accepting any challenge that would offer him scope to flex his mental muscles. Discarding modesty and bashfulness with the ease of one casting out those nasty advert enclosures that clog-up the pages of a new Radio Times, Maxwell envisioned himself as some kind of twenty-first-century consulting saint. A cross between Sherlock Holmes and Gandhi, slicing through Gordian knots, bringing succour to the downtrodden, deftly defogging the most mysterious of mysteries, innovating social reform and, in short, sorting out all the problems of the new world.