The Third Policeman

by Flann O'Brien

  ‘I thought you were dead!’

  The great fat body in the uniform did not remind me of anybody that I knew but the face at the top of it belonged to old Mathers. It was not as I had recalled seeing it last whether in my sleep or otherwise, deathly and unchanging; it was now red and gross as if gallons of hot thick blood had been pumped into it. The cheeks were bulging out like two ruddy globes marked here and there with straggles of purple discolouration. The eyes had been charged with unnatural life and glistened like beads in the lamplight. When he answered me it was the voice of Mathers.

  That is a nice thing to say,’ he said, ‘but it is no matter because I thought the same thing about yourself. I do not understand your unexpected corporality after the morning on the scaffold.’

  ‘I escaped,’ I stammered.

  He gave me long searching glances.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  Was I sure? Suddenly I felt horribly ill as if the spinning of the world in the firmament had come against my stomach for the first time, turning it all to bitter curd. My limbs weakened and hung about me helplessly. Each eye fluttered like a bird’s wing in its socket and my head throbbed, swelling out like a bladder at every surge of blood. I heard the policeman speaking at me again from a great distance.

  ‘I am Policeman Fox,’ he said, ‘and this is my own private police station and I would be glad to have your opinion on it because I have gone to great pains to make it spick and span.’

  I felt my brain struggling on bravely, tottering, so to speak, to its knees but unwilling to fall completely. I knew that I would be dead if I lost consciousness for one second. I knew that I could never awaken again or hope to understand afresh the terrible way in which I was if I lost the chain of the bitter day I had had. I knew that he was not Fox but Mathers. I knew Mathers was dead. I knew that I would have to talk to him and pretend that everything was natural and try perhaps to escape for the last time with my life to the bicycle. I would have given everything I had in the world and every cashbox in it to get at that moment one look at the strong face of John Divney.

  ‘It is a nice station,’ I muttered, ‘but why is it inside the walls of another house?’

  ‘That is a very simple conundrum, I am sure you know the answer of it.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘It is a very rudimentary conundrum in any case. It is fixed this way to save the rates because if it was constructed the same as any other barracks it would be rated as a separate hereditament and your astonishment would be flabbergasted if I told you what the rates are in the present year.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sixteen and eightpence in the pound with thruppence in the pound for bad yellow water that I would not use and fourpence by your kind leave for technical education. Is it any wonder the country is on its final legs with the farmers crippled and not one in ten with a proper bull-paper? I have eighteen summonses drawn up for nothing else and there will be hell to pay at the next Court. Why had you no light at all, big or small, on your bicycle?’

  ‘My lamp was stolen.’

  ‘Stolen? I thought so. It is the third theft today and four pumps disappeared on Saturday last. Some people would steal the saddle from underneath you if they thought you would not notice it, it is a lucky thing the tyre cannot be taken off without undoing the wheel. Wait till I take a deposition from you. Give me a description of the article and tell me all and do not omit anything because what may seem unimportant to yourself might well give a wonderful clue to the trained investigator.’

  I felt sick at heart but the brief conversation had steadied me and I felt sufficiently recovered to take some small interest in the question of getting out of this hideous house. The policeman had opened a thick ledger which looked like the half of a longer book which had been sawn in two to fit the narrow table. He put several questions to me about the lamp and wrote down my replies very laboriously in the book, scratching his pen noisily and breathing heavily through his nose, pausing occasionally in his blowing when some letter of the alphabet gave him special difficulty. I surveyed him carefully as he sat absorbed in his task of writing. It was beyond all doubt the face of old Mathers but now it seemed to have a simple childlike quality as if the wrinkles of a long lifetime, evident enough the first time I looked at him, had been suddenly softened by some benign influence and practically erased. He now looked so innocent and good-natured and so troubled by the writing down of simple words that hope began to flicker once again within me. Surveyed coolly, he did not look a very formidable enemy. Perhaps I was dreaming or in the grip of some horrible hallucination. There was much that I did not understand and possibly could never understand to my dying day – the face of old Mathers whom I thought I had buried in a field on so great and fat a body, the ridiculous police station within the walls of another house, the other two monstrous policemen I had escaped from. But at least I was near my own house and the bicycle was waiting at the gate to take me there. Would this man try to stop me if I said I was going home? Did he know anything about the black box?

  He had now carefully blotted his work and passed the book to me for my signature, proffering the pen by the handle with great politeness. He had covered two pages in a large childish hand. I thought it better not to enter into any discussion on the question of my name and hastily made an intricate scrawl at the bottom of the statement, closed the book and handed it back. Then I said as casually as I could:

  ‘I think I will be going now.’

  He nodded regretfully.

  ‘I am sorry I cannot offer you anything,’ he said, ‘because it is a cold night and it would not do you a bit of harm.’

  My strength and courage had been flowing back into my body and when I heard these words I felt almost completely strong again. There were many things to be thought about but I would not think of them at all until I was secure in my own house. I would go home as soon as possible and on the way I would not put my eye to right or left. I stood up steadily.

  ‘Before I go,’ I said, ‘there is one thing I would like to ask you. There was a black cashbox stolen from me and I have been searching for it for several days. Would you by any chance have any information about it?’

  The instant I had this said I was sorry I had said it because if it actually was Mathers brought miraculously back to life he might connect me with the robbery and the murder of himself and wreak some terrible vengeance. But the policeman only smiled and put a very knowing expression on his face. He sat down on the edge of the very narrow table and drummed upon it with his nails. Then he looked me in the eye. It was the first time he had done so and I was dazzled as if I had accidentally glanced at the sun.

  ‘Do you like strawberry jam?’ he asked.

  His stupid question came so unexpectedly that I nodded and gazed at him uncomprehendingly. His smile broadened.

  ‘Well if you had that box here,’ he said, ‘you could have a bucket of strawberry jam for your tea and if that was not enough you could have a bathful of it to lie in it full-length and if that much did not satisfy you, you could have ten acres of land with strawberry jam spread on it to the height of your two oxters. What do you think of that?’

  ‘I do not know what to think of it,’ I muttered. ‘I do not understand it.’

  ‘I will put it another way,’ he said good-humouredly. ‘You could have a house packed full of strawberry jam, every room so full that you could not open the door.’

  I could only shake my head. I was becoming uneasy again.

  ‘I would not require all that jam,’ I said stupidly.

  The policeman sighed as if despairing to convey to me his line of thought. Then his expression grew slightly more serious.

  Tell me this and tell me no more,’ he said solemnly. ‘When you went with Pluck and MacCruiskeen that time downstairs in the wood, what was your private opinion of what you saw? Was it your opinion that everything there was more than ordinary?’

  I started at the mention of the other policemen and
felt that I was once more in serious danger. I would have to be extremely careful. I could not see how he knew what had happened to me when I was in the toils of Pluck and MacCruiskeen but I told him that I did not understand the underground paradise and thought that even the smallest thing that happened there was miraculous. Even now when I recalled what I had seen there I wondered once more whether I had been dreaming. The policeman seemed pleased at the wonder I had expressed. He was smiling quietly, more to himself than to me.

  ‘Like everything that is hard to believe and difficult to comprehend,’ he said at last, ‘it is very simple and a neighbour’s child could work it all without being trained. It is a pity you did not think of the strawberry jam while you were there because you could have got a barrel of it free of charge and the quality would be extra and superfine, only the purest fruit-juice used and little or no preservatives.’

  ‘It did not look simple – what I saw.’

  ‘You thought there was magic in it, not to mention monkey-work of no mean order?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘But it can all be explained, it was very simple and the way it was all worked will astonish you when I tell you.’

  Despite my dangerous situation, his words fired me with a keen curiosity. I reflected that this talk of the strange underground region with the doors and wires confirmed that it did exist, that I actually had been there and that my memory of it was not the memory of a dream – unless I was still in the grip of the same nightmare. His offer to explain hundreds of miracles in one simple explanation was very tempting. Even that knowledge might repay me for the uneasiness I felt in his company. The sooner the talking stopped the sooner I could attempt my escape.

  ‘How was it done, then?’ I asked.

  The Sergeant smiled broadly in amusement at my puzzled face. He made me feel that I was a child asking about something that was self-evident.

  ‘The box,’ he said.

  ‘The box? My box?’

  ‘Of course. The little box did the trick, I have to laugh at Pluck and MacCruiskeen, you would think they had more sense.’

  ‘Did you find the box?’

  ‘It was found and I entered into complete possession of it in virtue of section 16 of the Act of ‘87 as extended and amended. I was waiting for you to call for it because I know by my own private and official inquiries that you were the party that was at the loss of it but my impatience gave in with your long delay and I sent it to your house today by express bicycle and you will find it there before you when you travel homewards. You are a lucky man to have it because there is nothing so valuable in the whole world and it works like a charm, you could swear it was a question of clockwork. I weighed it and there is more than four ounces in it, enough to make you a man of private means and anything else you like to fancy.’

  ‘Four ounces of what?’

  ‘Of omnium. Surely you know what was in your own box?’

  ‘Of course,’ I stammered, ‘but I did not think there was four ounces.’

  ‘Four point one two on the Post Office scales. And that is how I worked the fun with Pluck and MacCruiskeen, it would make you smile to think of it, they had to run and work like horses every time I shoved the readings up to danger-point.’

  He chuckled softly at the thought of his colleagues having to do hard work and looked across at me to see the effect of this simple revelation. I sank back on the seat flabbergasted but managed to return a ghostly smile to divert suspicion that I had not known what was in the box. If I could believe him he had been sitting in this room presiding at four ounces of this inutterable substance, calmly making ribbons of the natural order, inventing intricate and unheard of machinery to delude the other policemen, interfering drastically with time to make them think they had been leading their magical lives for years, bewildering, horrifying and enchanting the whole countryside. I was stupefied and appalled by the modest claim he had made so cheerfully, I could not quite believe it, yet it was the only way the terrible recollections which filled my brain could be explained. I felt again afraid of the policeman but at the same time a wild excitement gripped me to think that this box and what was in it was at this moment resting on the table of my own kitchen. What would Divney do? Would he be angry at finding no money, take this awful omnium for a piece of dirt and throw it out on the manure heap? Formless speculations crowded in upon me, fantastic fears and hopes, inexpressible fancies, intoxicating foreshadowing of creations, changes, annihilations and god-like interferences. Sitting at home with my box of omnium I could do anything, see anything and know anything with no limit to my powers save that of my own imagination. Perhaps I could use it even to extend my imagination. I could destroy, alter and improve the universe at will. I could get rid of John Divney, not brutally, but by giving him ten million pounds to go away. I could write the most unbelievable commentaries on de Selby ever written and publish them in bindings unheard of for their luxury and durability. Fruits and crops surpassing anything ever known would flower on my farm, in earth made inconceivably fertile by unparalleled artificial manures. A leg of flesh and bone yet stronger than iron would appear magically upon my left thigh. I would improve the weather to a standard day of sunny peace with gentle rain at night washing the world to make it fresher and more enchanting to the eye. I would present every poor labourer in the world with a bicycle made of gold, each machine with a saddle made of something as yet uninvented but softer than the softest softness, and I would arrange that a warm gale would blow behind every man on every journey, even when two were going in opposite directions on the same road. My sow would farrow twice daily and a man would call immediately offering ten million pounds for each of the piglings, only to be outbid by a second man arriving and offering twenty million. The barrels and bottles in my public house would still be full and inexhaustible no matter how much was drawn out of them. I would bring de Selby himself back to life to converse with me at night and advise me in my sublime undertakings. Every Tuesday I would make myself invisible –

  ‘You would not believe the convenience of it,’ said the policeman bursting in upon my thoughts, ‘it is very handy for taking the muck off your leggings in the winter.’

  ‘Why not use it for preventing the muck getting on your leggings at all?’ I asked excitedly. The policeman looked at me in wide-eyed admiration.

  ‘By the Hokey I never thought of that,’ he said. ‘You are very intellectual and I am certain that I am nothing but a gawm.’

  ‘Why not use it,’ I almost shouted, ‘to have no muck anywhere at any time?’

  He dropped his eyes and looked very disconsolate.

  ‘I am the world’s champion gawm,’ he murmured.

  I could not help smiling at him, not, indeed, without some pity. It was clear that he was not the sort of person to be entrusted with the contents of the black box. His oafish underground invention was the product of a mind which fed upon adventure books of small boys, books in which every extravagance was mechanical and lethal and solely concerned with bringing about somebody’s death in the most elaborate way imaginable. I was lucky to have escaped from his preposterous cellars with my life. At the same time I recalled that I had a small account to settle with Policeman MacCruiskeen and Sergeant Pluck. It was not the fault of these gentlemen that I had not been hanged on the scaffold and prevented from ever recovering the black box. My life had been saved by the policeman in front of me, probably by accident, when he decided to rush up an alarming reading on the lever. He deserved some consideration for that. I would probably settle ten million pounds upon him when I had time to consider the matter fully. He looked more a fool than a knave. But MacCruiskeen and Pluck were in a different class. It would probably be possible for me to save time and trouble by adapting the underground machinery to give both of them enough trouble, danger, trepidation, work and inconvenience to make them rue the day they first threatened me. Each of the cabinets could be altered to contain, not bicycles and whiskey and matches, but putrescent offals, insupporta
ble smells, unbeholdable corruptions containing tangles of gleaming slimy vipers each of them deadly and foul of breath, millions of diseased and decayed monsters clawing the inside latches of the ovens to open them and escape, rats with horns walking upside down along the ceiling pipes trailing their leprous tails on the policemen’s heads, readings of incalculable perilousness mounting hourly upon the –