The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “Thanks, Harry.”

  “You didn’t hear it from me. Right?”

  “Right.” Markham stood, ready to leave. Then he paused. “There’s another piece of information you might have.”

  Harry shrugged. “Sure. A man’s got to earn a crustacean.”

  “You know how wedding anniversaries are associated with certain things? Coral, silver, that sort of stuff.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “What’s a fourth?”

  Harry creased his brow. “I’ll put out the word,” he promised.

  “And you say you have a lead on the item’s whereabouts?”

  “Yes, Mister Fairfax.”

  “But you’re not going to say where.”

  “Not on an open line. Sorry.”

  “Your next move?”

  “A reconnaissance. To try and make sure the third party really has it.”

  “Very wise. Have a care, Mister Markham, and keep me informed.”

  The line went dead. Eddie hung up.

  From the other side of her desk, Shirley had displeasure written all over her face. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Ray Blythe’s not the sort to tangle with lightly.”

  “I’m not going to tangle with him, just take a look.”

  “Your funeral.”

  He was only half listening. Her PC screen showed stock prices on the Internet. He thought they were looking a bit heated.

  “Here.” Shirley handed him a mobile phone.

  “What’s this? You know we can’t afford—”

  “It’s pre-pay, and I’ve charged it with three stoats. After that you can fork out for it yourself.”

  Grumbling, he slipped it into a pocket.

  “And keep it turned on,” she commanded.

  He left her making more calls to catering companies.

  Markham took a devious route, in case he was being followed.

  An hour later he parked in a lay-by off a country lane and proceeded on foot, alert for guards. There seemed to be nobody about, so he eased himself over the two-bar fence surrounding the farmhouse. Approaching furtively, he noted that the doors were firmly closed and all the windows were shuttered.

  A lorry appeared on the road, horn tooting. Markham dived behind a stone trough. Peeking over it, he watched as three men emerged from the farmhouse and opened the gates. Then they set to unloading a quantity of sacks bearing the logo of a birdseed company.

  Once the cargo was dragged in and the truck had left, Markham crept from his hiding place. By the wall stood a row of dustbins. He went to them and began carefully lifting their lids. The first two were empty. But the third held several jumbo-size Frobisher’s cuttlefish wrappers, and in the bottom of the bin he found a mass of millet husks, picked clean.

  A distant, eerie noise froze him. Unless he was very much mistaken, it was a hearty squawk. Markham reckoned that clinched it.

  He was halfway to the fence when shouts rang out. Looking back, he saw men spilling from the house. He ran, vaulting the fence, and made off down the lane. The cries followed, and he was fighting for breath when he reached the car and fumbled with his keys.

  Pulling away as the first of his pursuers came into sight, waving their fists, he thanked goodness that dogs were too valuable to use these days.

  Later, killing time while he waited for Blythe to get in touch, Markham took a walk and bought a sandwich. He went by a cinema showing the new spaghetti western everybody was talking about, A Fistful of Dormice, then came to a TV shop with a small crowd outside gaping at the screens. About to investigate, he stopped when he noticed that his trousers appeared to be ringing. Fishing out the forgotten mobile, he took a frantic call from Shirley.

  No sooner had he taken it in – he was still reeling – than somebody laid a hand on his shoulder. He looked up at the expensively suited tough who had hold of him, then down a bit at the other two.

  “You’re coming with us,” the giant announced.

  Markham dropped his sandwich as they bundled him into a stretch limo with smoked windows.

  They wouldn’t tell him where they were going. Wouldn’t speak at all, in fact. So he spent the time trying to listen to the car radio they’d left on low volume.

  “Less than eighteen months after Penhaligon presented his historic cheque, the UK went over to the Bulldog standard. Before long, Bulls and Bears on the Stock Exchange were trading in bulls and bears.” The goons weren’t paying any attention. Markham strained to hear. “The global implications were profound. Japan adopted the Goldfish standard, France the Snail and America the Eagle. Soon, every nation had based its currency on animal reserves. But now—”

  The driver snapped off the radio as the car swept into the underground garage of a swish tower block. Markham recognized it, and wasn’t surprised.

  Five minutes later he was hustled out of a private elevator for an audience with Lonnie Fairfax.

  “You only had to call if you wanted a meet,” Markham told him.

  “I needed to be sure you’d come,” Fairfax replied dryly.

  “Now I wonder what you want to talk about. I don’t think.”

  “I had a brilliant idea. I thought, why pay you to negotiate the purchase of the Macaw now that you’ve found out where it’s being hidden? It should be a simple matter for me to arrange its . . . liberation and cut out the middleman.”

  “I’m sure that was never your plan from the outset,” Markham returned sarcastically.

  “So all that now remains is for you to reveal the location.”

  Markham started laughing.

  “Bravado is very commendable, but it won’t stop you telling.” He nodded at his henchmen. “My colleagues can be very persuasive.”

  But Markham carried on guffawing. “You haven’t been keeping in touch, have you, Fairfax?” he spluttered. “None of it matters now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Markham dabbed at his watering eyes and pointed to the TV. “See for yourself.”

  Scowling, Fairfax snatched up the remote. A news report flicked on.

  “. . . Events came to a head. The international money markets have nose-dived. United Aardvarks has crashed. Konsolidated Koalas went down sixty points in the last fifteen minutes. Investors have withdrawn support from the Australian Roo and the Transylvanian Bat, and the European Cuckoo is under extreme pressure.” The newsreader was passed a sheet of paper. His expression grew sterner. “There has been a run on the Swiss Poodle.”

  Ashen-faced, Fairfax punched through the channels. All showed scenes of financial chaos. Mobs stormed the banks, making off with herds of antelope and flocks of ewes. There was a brief vox pop of a man sporting the apron, peaked cap and shovel that marked him out as an accountant. People were pushing wheelbarrows full of white mice into baker’s shops.

  “You’re wiped out, Fairfax,” Markham smirked. “You, me, everybody.”

  Fairfax wasn’t listening. Sweat-sheened, he had two phones to his head at the same time as barking orders to his goons. Frenzy prevailed.

  Nobody noticed, or didn’t care, when Markham slipped away.

  He braved anarchy in the streets. It was a little easier without the cart. Shirley was in the office, but she wasn’t alone. Ray Blythe and a cohort of heavies were waiting too, and they barred his exit.

  The bantam-sized crime boss moved closer. A couple of goons backed him. Markham braced himself for a duffing-up, or worse.

  Blythe loomed below him, his expression severe. “It seems we have some unfinished business,” he intoned.

  “Do we?” Markham responded in what he hoped was a casual manner but knew wasn’t.

  “Oh, yes.” Blythe lifted a well-manicured hand and snapped his fingers.

  Markham flinched. There was an intake of breath from Shirley.

  But no onslaught ensued. Instead, another tough entered, bearing a large wicker basket draped with a blanket.

  “Looks like we’re all ruined now,” Blythe said. “So I won’t be need
ing this.” The blanket was whipped away, revealing the head and neck of a massive, disputatious-looking bird with unusual markings. “Give that to your boss.”

  “I think Mister Fairfax has troubles of his own right now.”

  Blythe smiled sardonically. “Good.” Then he beckoned his entourage. The bird was set down and they all trooped out.

  Shirley and Markham vied for biggest sighs of relief.

  “Well, you kind of cracked the case,” she ventured, making the best of it. “Pity the thing’s worthless.”

  “Bit of a drawback, isn’t it? But we’ve got bigger fish to fry now. Probably literally.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “Have a party. Brenda and Osbert’s do is still on, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so. I mean, we might as well. Though I never did find a catering company. Or a present, come to that.”

  “There’s just one thing that’s been bothering me.”

  “About the case?”

  “No, about your sister’s wedding anniversary. You found out what a fourth is, right? What represents it.” A tone of desperation edged his voice. “Tell me!”

  “What? Oh, that. No, I never did. Doesn’t matter though, does it?”

  He slumped, head in hands. A screech from the basket brought him out of it. He looked at the bird. The bird stared back, its beady, mean eye unwavering.

  Markham hefted the basket and plonked it on Shirley’s desk. The beast squawked belligerently. “There you go, for Brenda and Osbert.”

  “I hardly think devalued currency is appropriate as a present, Eddie,” she sniffed.

  “Who said anything about a present? This is the catering.”

  A Trove of Oldies

  FERDIE

  F. Anstey

  F. Anstey was a well-known writer and humorist for over fifty years. His real name was Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934) and he intended to use the pen-name T. Anstey but the printer couldn’t read his writing and he ended up as F. Anstey. In the end this was rather apt, since the name almost sounds like “fantasy” and Anstey was one of the pioneers of the genre. He wrote the still-popular Victorian novel Vice Versa (1882) in which a father and son exchange identities. Amongst his other novels are The Tinted Venus (1885) and The Brass Bottle (1900). You can find a bumper offering of his works in the omnibus Humour and Fantasy (1931). The following story, however, seems to have been forgotten. So far as I can tell this is its first reprinting since it was collected in The Last Load (1925).

  I HAD better say at once that I don’t set up to be literary. I get quite enough of pen and ink all day at the bank, and when I am free, I like to be out in the fresh air as long as I can.

  So you will not expect “style” or “literary composition” or anything of that sort in this; it is just an account, as exact as I can make it, of a very unpleasant experience I had last Christmas, and you must let me tell it in my own way. If you think, as very likely you may, that I cut rather a poor figure in the course of it, all I ask is that you will kindly suspend your judgment of me till you come to the finish. Because you will see then – at least, I hope you will – that I couldn’t very well have behaved any differently.

  My name is Filleter – Lionel Alchin Filleter, if you want it in full – I am about twenty-four, and unmarried. My elder sister Louisa and I share a semi-detached villa in Woodlands Avenue, Cricklebury Park, within easy reach of the City by rail or motor-bus. Our house is called “Ullswater”, and next door is “Buttermere”; why, I don’t know, as neither boasts so much as a basin of gold-fish. But the name was painted on the gate when we came, and as we couldn’t think of anything better, we stuck to it.

  We have quite a decent back garden for the size of the house, and when there was nothing doing in the way of games, I spent most of my spare time in it. In fact, I got rather keen at last, and my bank being in the City, I used to look in as often as possible at Messrs. Protheroe and Morris’s well-known auction rooms in Cheapside, on the off-chance of picking up a bargain. Sometimes I did; in March of last year, for instance, I happened to drop in while they were selling a consignment of late Dutch and Cape bulbs and roots, and secured a bag of a hundred miscellaneous anemone roots for half a crown. The lot was described in the catalogue as “Mixed. All fine sorts, including St. Brigid, Fulgens, etc. Believed to contain some new varieties.”

  If you have ever seen any anemone roots you will know what black, dried-up-looking things they are, so queerly shaped that one can never be sure which end up to plant them. I planted mine the day after I got them home, along my S.E. border, where they would get plenty of sun, and make a good show in front of the phloxes the following June. Or rather I planted all but one there, that one being so much larger and more fantastically shaped than the rest that I thought it might possibly turn out to be a quite unique variety, like, as I told Louisa at the time, the celebrated “Narcissus Mackintoshi Splendescens,” which was bought in a mixed lot at an auction for a few shillings, and now fetches as much as five pounds a bulb!

  So I put in this particular root by itself, just under the drawing-room window, with a labelled peg to mark the spot. Louisa rather jeered at my expectations: she has very little faith in me as a gardener, and besides, she takes no proper pride in the garden itself, or she would never have persisted as she did, in letting Togo out for a run in it the last thing at night. Togo is Louisa’s black dachs, and, as I understand the breed was originally trained to hunt for truffles, you could hardly expect such things as bulbs and roots to get a fair chance if there is any truth in hereditary instinct. But Louisa objected to his running about in front, because of motor-cars.

  Still, I’m bound to say that he did not seem to have interfered with any of the anemones, all of which came up well – except the root I had had such hopes of, which never came up at all. And, as I couldn’t fairly blame Togo for that and Louisa seemed to have forgotten all about the subject, I didn’t think it worth while to refer to it.

  I soon forgot my disappointment myself, until I was clearing up my beds in November and came upon the peg. Then I decided to leave the root undisturbed, just in case it might be some variety that took a considerable time to flower. And then I forgot it once more.

  Things went on as usual until it was Christmas Eve: Louisa. I remember, had been putting together our Christmas presents, among which were some toys for little Peggy and Joan Dudlow.

  The Dudlows, I should mention, are far the most important and influential people in Cricklebury Park, where the local society is above the usual suburban level. They live at “Ingleholme”, a handsome gabled house standing in its own grounds at the end of the Avenue. Dudlow is a well-to-do silk merchant, and his eldest daughter Violet is – but I simply can’t trust myself to describe her – I know I should never get hold of just the right words. Well, Louisa had gone up to her room, leaving me alone in the drawing-room with an injunction not to sit up late.

  It was getting late – very nearly twelve o’clock, indeed – and I was thinking of turning in as soon as I had read another page or two of a book I was dipping into. It was a rum old book which belonged to Anthony Casbird, our curate at St Philip’s. To look at Casbird, you wouldn’t believe he was bookish, being so ruddy in the face, but he has a regular library at his lodgings, and is always at me for only reading what he calls “modern trash”. So, as I happened to let out that I had never heard of a writer called Sir Thomas Browne, he had insisted on lending me one of his books, with some notes of his own for a paper he was going to read at some Literary Society.

  It had a jaw-breaking title: “Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into very many received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths,” and had been published so long ago as 1646.

  Now when I do take up a book, I must say I prefer something rather more up-to-date, and this was written in such an old-fashioned, long-winded way that I didn’t get on with it.

  But I had come to a chapter which seemed more promising, being headed, “Of su
ndry tenents concerning vegetables or plants, which examined, prove either false or dubious.” I thought I might get a tip or two for the garden out of it.

  However, it was not what I should call “practical.” It began like this: “Many mola’s and false conceptions there are of Mandrakes, the first from great Antiquity, conceiveth the Roote thereof resembleth the shape of man” . . . and, further on, “a Catacresticall and farre derived similitude, it holds with man, that is, in a bifurcation or division of the roote into two parts, which some are contente to call thighes . . . The third assertion affirmeth the roots of Mandrakes doe make a noyse or give a shreeke upon eradication, which is indeed ridiculous, and false below confute! . . . The last concerneth the danger ensuing, that there followes an hazard of life to them that pull it up, that some evill fate pursues them,” and so on.

  I found a loose note of Casbird’s to the effect that, to guard against this danger, a black dog was usually employed to pull up the root, which apparently was fatal to the dog: while its owners “stopped their own eares for feare of the terreble shriek or cry of this Mandrack.”

  Somehow all this vaguely suggested something, though for a while I could not remember what. Everyone knows how worrying that is, and I could not bring myself to get out of my chair and go to bed until I had found the missing clue. And at last I hit on it. The anemone root, of course! I recollected now that Louisa, who had had a low opinion of it from the first, had remarked that it was shaped “exactly like a horrid little man.” Not that I saw much resemblance myself, though it certainly was forked, and even had excrescences on each side which, to a lively imagination, might pass for arms. But no doubt in old Sir Thomas’s time a good many fairly intelligent people would have sworn it was a Mandrake, and been terrified out of their lives at it!

  Now I came to think over it, I was rather hazy, even then, as to what kind of creature they supposed a Mandrake to be exactly – though I gathered that it must be some peculiarly malignant sort of little demon.

  I was amusing myself by these speculations when I was startled for the moment by a succession of short sharp shrieks, ending in a prolonged and blood-curdling yell. Only for the moment, because I remembered at once that, though we are some distance from the railway line, you can hear the trains distinctly when the wind happens to be in the right quarter. At the same time I could not help fancying that the noise had seemed nearer than usual – that it sounded as if it might almost have come from my own garden.