My tyres are large and wide enough to propel me across the most rugged and unhappy terrain with relative ease and I am fit and healthy, a fine figure of a hybrid, and I still recall with joy the commotion I caused near Aberystwyth in the dusk as I raced down the beach with a flaming pine torch held high in one hand, honking my rubber horn and scattering lovers and other night-strollers. It was fun. I’m a creature of fun, make no mistake. Dark and nasty fun.
The country of Wales is my territory, the entire land with its mountains and valleys and forests, lakes, marshes and rain. I have explored nearly every nook and cranny of this ancient realm, threaded my way down every obscure road and lane, crossed crumbling stone bridges and coasted the banks of forgotten canals and parked in the ruins of castles buried by shifting dunes. It has been an education, the only one that an entity in my condition can ever really hope for, though I did once formally apply to become a student at Lampeter University.
I was rejected, of course. They had already filled their quota of monsters and other weirdlings and didn’t need any more anomalies. I wasn’t too disappointed, as I had no real desire to waste years of my life reading books and revising for exams, especially as I would have to spend a good proportion of my time indoors, which is something that has never appealed to me. The Dean came to offer his condolences in person and I think he must have been embarrassed and anxious not to be branded a racist or grotesqueophobe or similar bully.
“I am sorry, Mr Raleigh, but we don’t have the facilities.”
“Call me Sadulsor,” I said sweetly.
“Yes, well, the failure of your application has nothing to do with any tactical or political reasoning on the part of this august institution but is simply a reflection of the fact that extensive structural rearrangements would have to be made in order to give a bicycle access to the full range of services available to undergraduates. To put it another way, you wouldn’t thrive here.”
“August institution? But it’s only June!”
“Monsters are rarely or never happy in academic circles, that’s a simple fact. I am not judging you at all. I’m helping you.”
“You took a werewolf as a student last year, I know.”
“That’s true. I’m glad you have read our prospectus. But with lycanthropes it is different; there’s a tradition. Perhaps in years to come we will be able to accept a wider range of mutants and abominations than we currently do. Sadulsor, please do not take any of this personally, dear chap.”
“Are you going to pull your long nose at this point?”
He blinked. “What do you mean?”
“In stories, when two characters in a superficially polite but inherently tense conversation reach an impasse, one of them generally tugs his nose. I could tug my own but feel no desire to. So it’s your call.”
“I won’t,” he said, suddenly defiant. Then he glowered.
“Farewell,” I answered simply.
“Will you come back one day?” he asked.
“Yes, yes.” I honked twice and accelerated away from the college grounds. I had no intention of ever returning to Lampeter and would avoid it assiduously if my random wandering ever returned me to this region. And this resolution of mine was the main cause of the bizarre adventure that happened a few seasons later, which it is my intention to recount in the following few pages. Why don’t you brew yourself a cup of tea while I oil my bearings and chain?
I stopped at a lonely crossroads for a rest and to exchange news with any other odd wayfarers who might be about, which is one of our customs. The view was bracing but bleak, moorland with mountains in the distance shrouded in thick fog like warts and bunions looming out of the foam of a hag’s bubble bath. A small fire was going on the verge and tea was being brewed. Some vile wanderers were squatting nearby and waiting patiently for a cuppa. I joined them.
Damon Nomad, king of the travelling palindromes, was there, but I found it difficult to decipher what he told me. It was all clever, doubtless, but too strained and contrived for my taste. I can’t recall a single thing he said to me, so I won’t try to give examples. I prefer one-directional talk. I was pleasant enough to him all the same, as it never pays to be rude to a monster. They know how to bear a grudge for a lifetime or longer, depending on whose life it is.
More comprehensible and forthcoming was Cassius Befuddle, a close pal of mine from way back. We had knocked about together a lot in our youth, whenever that was, for neither of us could ever be sure. Possibly the most unique entity in the known world, Cassius was an apricorn, in other words, half apricot, half leprecorn; and a leprecorn, as you probably know, is already half leprechaun, half unicorn, so his genetic mix was deeply profound and unusual.
Cassius informed me that eldritch lights had been seen over a narrow valley not too far from Lampeter. He hadn’t gone to investigate them personally, nor did he know anyone who had, but at night the lights in question danced in a way utterly unlike any known artificial illumination but they didn’t seem natural either, and this fact could be deduced from a distance. He had no agenda for confiding in me and I don’t think he was expecting me to go forth to look.
“Ignis fatuus,” he declared.
I turned my head, misunderstanding him, thinking he was calling the name of an acquaintance, a monster that had just arrived.
“There’s no one there,” I said.
“Sadulsor, my gullible and charming chum, I wasn’t hailing an individual but referring to the official name of those mysterious lights sometimes seen in marshes and abandoned graveyards by lost or unlucky travellers. Ignis fatuus. I was about to explain that the lights spotted over that valley aren’t like those but utterly different and therefore doubly or triply peculiar.”
“Forgive me.” The truth is that I didn’t truly care about the lights. They were just part of an unresolved minor anecdote to be exchanged at a crossroads while tea leaves were flavouring water in a gigantic teapot nestled among the daisies. I would forget about the story within five minutes of leaving this little gathering. I am much more interested in my own lights, my twin headlamps, which are like surplus eyes that work in reverse, throwing beams out.
Cassius knew this. “You are always forgiven.”
Something else that Cassius Befuddle told me before I departed was that he too had lately sought admission to Lampeter as an undergraduate and had also been politely but firmly repelled by the Dean, who told the apricorn that the university had filled and exceeded its quota of monsters not only for the coming academic year, or even for the foreseeable future, but for all time.
I found this to be extraordinary news and my suspicions were aroused, not in an erotic way, as the word ‘aroused’ might suggest, for that never happens, but in a honest and clean manner. Yet stronger than my suspicions was my distaste and for a second time I silently pledged never to pass through Lampeter; for in my mind the little town had become a symbol of bigotry.
Do monsters require a formal education anyway?
They don’t. Ask Medusa or anyone.
But then one evening, many months later, I happened to be on the road to Lampeter again, and as I looked up and saw a sign announcing that the town lay only a short distance ahead I remembered my vow never to revisit the place. Stale anger welled up in me and turned fresh in a curious reversal of the usual decay process but I had no desire to turn back the way I had come. I hate retracing my steps, not that I have feet to make steps, but you know what I mean.
So I took a detour down the first side road I encountered.
It wasn’t really a road but a rough track that obviously hadn’t been used for a generation or more, but a generation of what kind of creature I couldn’t say. As the sun began to set, the path faded away to nothing and I found myself bouncing over lumpy ground littered with small stones. Then I entered a forest of stunted oaks and elms that grew denser the further I penetrated it.
I had no intention of going back. “I may have to camp here.”
There was no moon and the s
ky was overcast and my headlamps did a rather poor job at showing me the way, partly because of the mist that swirled around the twisted roots and partly because there wasn’t any way to speak of anyway. I judged it to be a peaceful and uneventful forest, a place of minimal evil, until a distant and oddly guttural roar shattered my complacency on this score. It may seem laughable that a monster can be scared, but that’s how it is.
My terror encouraged me to move at greater speed despite the discomfort of the uneven terrain and the danger of a collision.
Abruptly I broke out of cover and skidded to a halt on the edge of a cliff, of a precipice that overhung a narrow valley. The length of this valley was intermittently bathed with flickers and bubbles of pale light.
I say ‘pale’ but in fact the hue was indescribable.
The colours of the flashes were somehow simultaneously within and outside the spectrum of visible light, like a rainbow that was experimenting with meditation and psychedelic drugs and cranial electrotherapy. I was acutely aware even then, as I am now, that words are inadequate to describe this light. Why then do I persist in making an attempt? Because you expect me to try.
It quickly occurred to me that I had accidentally stumbled on the location of Cassius Befuddle’s anecdote, the valley of weird lights. The roar had propelled me towards it. Later I learned the sound had issued from the maw of a saurian, a beast which this region was still infested with; but at that instant I had only one desire, a perverse urge to learn the secret of these lights, to know their true nature and report back to Cassius, thereby earning his admiration.
The admiration of an apricorn is not easily acquired.
I trundled carefully along the rim of the precipice in the hope of finding some safe way down; and eventually I did discover a path that had been cut into the sheer stone wall of the cliff. My sense of balance is good and I had few problems making my way to the bottom of the gorge, the eerie flickering washing my face in photons as decadent as any emitted by the most satanic star in any galaxy in the universe. In less than half an hour I had reached the bottom.
Or maybe the bottom reached me first.
I don’t mean to be obscure. I’m a bicycle-centaur and therefore not noted for an aptitude for word games. It just seemed to me that I was on the valley floor long before I should have been, as if the ground below had risen up to meet me coming down, a gesture of geological courtesy truly disturbing in its seismic implications. I rested for a minute before proceeding. And then—
The figure that greeted me was half statue, half slime mould.
“You may not pass,” it said.
“That is true, but on the other hand I may,” I answered.
“On the other hand?” A sneer.
“The other handle.” I corrected myself.
“No, I will prevent you.”
“You might prevent me, and then again you might not.”
“I’m sure I will, very sure.”
And it opened its jaws extremely wide like a snake trying to eat a rugby ball and shouted the following irrelevant words, “I had a really good wash followed by a thorough scrub, but my nose still smells.”
Not only were these words irrelevant and humorous, mildly so, but they were harmless too, and yet I found myself recoiling in alarm as every separate syllable of what he uttered burst into fire while my ears were digesting them. The sound waves became visible, sheets of peculiar flame that alternately contracted and expanded in mid air and rushed up the valley and took off into the sky, the afterglow lingering a long time like some sort of evil aurora borealis.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“When I was at school I was a milk monitor. A milk monitor lizard,” said the figure, and these words also turned into pale flames that crackled and hissed around me and photographed the grimacing rocks.
“Your joke caught fire,” I announced lamely.
“A pun went to a theatre to see a play, a wordplay. ‘The performance was a joke,’ it said afterwards,” cried the figure.
These words also flared and glittered and dazzled.
“Who said afterwards?” I wailed.
“The pun did,” replied the figure, then it snarled, “I used to be lazy but since I acquired a chauffeur I’ve been a driven man.” More flames. “I was told to ‘show my feelings’ so my anger did a tap-dance.”
“You are roasting the entire valley,” I rebuked him.
“During a recent insurrection I was condemned to be ‘shot on the spot’ but I had unblemished skin that day so I survived...”
“Please stop it!” I chattered.
“I sometimes feel that my efforts in the factory that makes work surfaces for kitchens are counter-productive,” came next.
I knew that whatever the melting point of my chassis was, the melting point of my mind was lower. Already my thoughts were turning sticky; soon they would turn to liquid and trickle down inside each other and blend into a chaotic mess that would be the end of my consciousness, my soul. I lowered my head in a gesture of total submission and shut my eyes tight; and the figure seemed to accept this as the signal to cease combusting the night so weirdly.
“I am the new guardian of Lladloh,” he explained.
“No idea what that means,” I said.
“The village of Lladloh lies at the far end of this valley and my job is to stop strangers entering. This is the only easy approach, so I have been posted here like a sentry. I deter intruders with flaming quips.”
“Ah, so that is what they are. It’s an unusual technique.”
The figure nodded and sighed.
“To be perfectly frank, I think the inventor who created me made a mistake. I believe he intended to arm me with a flaming whip but the specification was written down incorrectly in his blueprints. When he came to the task of putting me together he didn’t bother to adjust the error. It’s not the first time he has done something like this. That’s exactly the kind of lunatic he is.”
“The quips are ferociously effective deterrents anyway.”
He shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“May I have the pleasure of knowing your name?”
“I have already told you. It is Perfectly Frank. My inventor is none other than the great Dr Karl Mondaugen, the finest non-biological father a monster could ever hope to have! He is in the middle of conducting an abstruse ritual in the village and outsiders would surely disrupt the delicate procedure. Thus I must repel all attempts to enter Lladloh, whether by men, dinosaurs or other beings. Now I will urge you to turn around and go back the way you came.”
“Mondaugen, you say? Dr Mondaugen! He is my father too!”
And I honked my horn twice.
Perfectly Frank regarded me with the cold granite stare of a statue that knows how wicked are the ways of all sentient entities, how treacherous and deceitful, and he lifted a slimy arm to point at me. “Truly?”
“I think so. It’s a possibility at least! Let me through, please, that I may visit him and ask the question directly and put my weak mind at rest, for I am but a poor velocipede-human hybrid, an orphan with twelve gears and no prospects who wants only to establish his origins so that when he finally dies, weary and rusty, he can at least say to himself, ‘Yes, I was the son of a mighty man, the brainchild of the fine Mondaugen, an inventor rarer than the element technetium, which certainly isn’t to be had in large quantities at all anywhere.’”
Perfectly Frank rubbed his flinty chin in thought.
“I don’t know,” he said at last.
There was an uncomfortable silence that needed to be broken. I decided, like a mallet striking a plate, to do the breaking.
“What is the abstruse ritual he is engaged upon?” I asked.
“He hopes to summon OOTOO.”
“I have not heard of this personage. Is he a celebrity?”
“OOTOO is an acronym. It stands for One of the Old Ones. You know what the Old Ones are, I take it? There are very many of them. I won’t try to list all their na
mes or we will be here for many weeks.”
“Yes, I know. Which of the Old Ones does he plan to call?”
“I would prefer not to say.”
“Is it Cthulhu himself? Is it Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Ithaqua, Aphoom-Zhar, Dagon, Zoth-Ommog, Tsathoggua, Yig, Shub-Niggurath, Plonker, Ghatanothoa or Hastur the Unspeakable?”
Perfectly Frank actually shuddered!
“Well, coincidentally, the name of the one he has chosen is Ootoo. What are his motives for doing such a perverse thing? I think he is tired of the duplicity of men and women and wants to teach them a lesson, to punish them, humiliate them. The arrival of Ootoo will achieve that aim.”
I was compelled to agree that it would, absolutely.
Somehow I persuaded Perfectly Frank to let me pass and I trundled onward into the village. I think he must have recognised something about me that proved to his own satisfaction that we were brothers. He was taking a big risk doing this, certainly, for it meant dereliction of duty; and there was no judging how agonisingly the inventor might decide to punish a slime mould statue.
I’ll always remember Perfectly Frank as a good sort.
As I left, he shouted out a last quip, a joke or warning. “I was sold down the river in the current financial crisis and I’m not sure weir I’ve ended up.” The flames of that crackle-danced around my back wheel.
And then I was accelerating down a narrow road and crossing a stone bridge to the sound of a lonely saxophone, for there was a musician who dwelled under it, a cannibal by the name of Toby, but he plays no further part in this story. Not sure why I even mentioned him, but it was melancholy music, the jazz he played on that bloodstained sax, and it did influence my mood.
Suffused with sweet woe, I skidded into the main square.
I suppose I was half mad at that particular instant, rushing to discover if the rumour of my parentage was true or not. It scarcely mattered where I came from, to be blunt, for I was incapable of producing any descendants. There were no female bicycle-centaurs anywhere else in the world.
Cthulhu Cymraeg Page 4