The Less Lonely Planet

by Rhys Hughes

  Lester saw a bottle of wine standing at the far end of the table. Crypto filled an empty glass and raised it to his mouth. Before he could taste it, a dreadful creature appeared from nowhere and inserted a vile paw between his mouth and the rim of the glass. This paw was covered in slime. So was the rest of the creature. Lester realised the beast was a female dog but its thick luminous coating of mucus, goo and gunk turned it into something diabolical.

  Crypto lowered the glass to the table, but the creature remained by his feet until he poured the wine back into the bottle. Then it was gone and Lester cried in amazement:

  “Why was it so intent on stopping you from drinking?”

  “That was the Ooze Hound,” said Crypto. “I bet you thought the Ooze Puss was awful enough? The Ooze Hound is worse. Her bark is runnier than her bite! No drop of wine will pass my lips while she exists to prevent it. Nor am I able to spill any on the ground. That vintage is destined to remain inside the bottle!”

  “But why?” Lester repeated.

  Crypto smiled thinly. “Are you not aware of the proverb? In this bar all proverbs come true.”

  “Which proverb?” Lester asked.

  “A bitch in slime saves wine!” recited Crypto.

  Lester digested this carefully. “I’ve heard something along those lines,” he admitted. “In the light of what has just occurred, I think I’ll order some ale instead.”

  Crypto blinked. “Ale in Turkey? Wouldn’t you prefer a crisp lager beer to the soapy dark kind?”

  “But ale is the only kind on offer,” replied Lester, nodding at the bar. “There are no lagers on display. I suppose the proprietress imports ale from a country like England.”

  “Not from there,” said Crypto ominously.

  “Are you trying to dissuade me from drinking it?” Lester asked.

  Crypto reached into a pocket and withdrew a bottle of the same ale that stood in rows behind the bar. From his other pocket he pulled out a clean glass. Then he unscrewed the top of the bottle and swiftly poured the contents into the glass. Childish and sarcastic giggles issued from the thick liquid. Lester frowned as he listened. No doubt about it, the drink was laughing at him! In sober fury he reached for the gleeful ale and began swallowing it down.

  A second later he yelped and spat it all back into the glass, his tongue hanging out, steam issuing from the gaps between his teeth. “It scalded me! It’s too hot!”

  “Almost at boiling point,” agreed Crypto.

  “Then I’ll wait for it to cool,” gasped Lester.

  “That will never occur. It will retain its heat indefinitely,” said Crypto above the incessant giggles.

  “But why? And how?” hissed Lester.

  “Because of the proverb,” declared Crypto.

  “Which proverb?” Lester croaked.

  “Ale that titters is not cold!” recited Crypto.

  Lester glared at the ale as he waited for the pain in his mouth to subside. Eventually his tongue felt more normal but the giggles of the beverage continued to torment him and he was glad when Crypto returned the contents of the glass to the bottle and sealed the cap very tightly, muffling the malty mirth.

  “I’ll drink rum instead,” he announced.

  At this Crypto shook his head sadly. “That’s a bad idea indeed. If you peer under the table you will immediately see why I can’t recommend rum in this bar to anyone.”

  Lester looked as he was bidden and beheld a long man with excessive sideburns and an orange shirt and trousers fast asleep in the dirt. His head rested on the taut skin of a small drum and his peace was profound, for his snores were blatant, unashamed and mighty. Turning his attention back to Crypto, Lester said:

  “I did wonder what that noise was.”

  “This man will surely snore for the remainder of eternity and it’s my worse luck if he does,” Crypto grumbled, “for he is the Drummer of My Life and it’s a little known fact that every person alive has a drummer like this, rather in the manner of a guardian angel with a better sense of rhythm, and if you are lucky enough to meet your destined drummer, he will play for you an infectious beat and your feet shall dance like they have never danced before.”

  “I rarely dance,” sniffed Lester, “even at weddings.”

  “But the Drummer of Your Life will play irresistibly and you will dance against your will at first, then with abandonment, and when your dance is finally finished you will regard it as the finest expression of joy possible. Not everyone is fortunate enough to encounter their chosen drummer. Indeed, most people never do. But I met mine one dark night and knew he would play for me until the morning, so I drank a glass of rum to fortify myself for the long dance ahead but he instantly fell asleep never to awaken again!”

  Lester replied with vigour, “I can rouse him and you will have your dance of dances despite everything!” And he started kicking the drummer in the orange attire, each foot taking its turn to brutally connect with the man’s skull or ribcage.

  Crypto did his best to restrain Lester by shaking his head at high speed and blurting, “Such treatment might serve to awaken a drummer who is enjoying natural slumber, but the Drummer of My Life is doomed to his perpetual supernatural nap because of the drink I consumed all that time ago. Remember the proverb!”

  “Which proverb?” Lester demanded.

  “Rum swallow does not wake a drummer!” recited Crypto.

  “This is becoming intolerable!” Lester moaned.

  “A fair summary,” agreed Crypto.

  “I’ll order a glass of absinthe. It will hardly slake my thirst but my options are running low. First let me enquire if the drinking of such a liquid is free of odd incident?”

  “Alas!” sighed Crypto. “It is not.” And he unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a pale chest with a small door embedded in it. “I also made the error of drinking absinthe here!”

  He grasped a miniature handle on the door and turned it. The hatch swung open to expose a cavity. Inside this cavity were his beating heart and a tiny pot of melted cheese. Even as Lester frowned at these objects the heart slowly turned to display a mouth with a pair of puckered lips. Then this mouth blew on the hot cheese so that scrumptious steam writhed and the cavity became opaque.

  “Explain this to me,” Lester demanded.

  “Absinthe makes the heart blow fondue!” recited Crypto.

  Lester held his face in despairing hands. “I’m not free to consume wine, ale, rum or absinthe at this bar! Is there any drink that has no warped proverb connected with it?”

  “You could try the coffee,” answered Crypto.

  Lester straightened. “Are you confident there are no proverbs that exploit a pun on the word ‘coffee’?”

  “None that I know of,” said Crypto.

  “Are you certain?” persisted Lester.

  “Absolutely positive!” came the answer. “I swear on everything I hold dear, including my wife.”

  Lester stood and approached the bar, covering the distance in five easy strides. He called for coffee and when the proprietress prepared it for him, he drank it all down in one gulp. Then he wiped his lips with a triumphant wink at Crypto.

  “That was a bad thing to do,” said Crypto.

  “What do you mean?” Lester cried.

  “If you drink coffee in this bar you turn into an octopus. Nothing to do with proverbs, warped or otherwise, it’s just what happens. You have a minute before the change.”

  Lester staggered back to the table. “An octopus! What good will I be with eight arms? How will I drive my camels now? Sure I’ll be able to steer and operate the clutch, accelerator, brake and many other controls simultaneously, but I’ll look terribly silly. Has anyone ever not mocked an octopus riding a camel?”

  “I’ll undoubtedly laugh,” conceded Crypto. “You should have ordered orange juice. That’s the one safe drink in this place. If you had framed your question properly, orange juice would have been my recommendation, but it’s far too late now.”

  “Orange
juice!” snorted Lester. “I have a terrible story about that drink. I’ll tell it to you now. Are you sitting comfortably?”

  “No,” answered Crypto.

  “Why not?” asked Lester.

  “My secret humps,” muttered Crypto.

  “In that case, tell me one more thing while I’m still human,” said Lester. “Why do you remain at this bar? Why have you stayed for twelve years? Why don’t you leave?”

  Crypto sighed. “I do miss being able to drink fluids without weird things happening. But I can’t depart. I’m joint owner of this place. The proprietress is my wife. Not long after I arrived I proposed to her and she accepted. So here I am and here I must stay!”

  Lester nodded. “That reminds me. I should write a letter to my own wife, to break the bad news gently. If I just turn up as an octopus she might faint in terror. I have some paper but I don’t have a pen. Do you have one I can borrow?”

  “I do but it has run out of ink.”

  “I’ll have plenty of that in a moment,” said Lester.

  Sir Cheapskate

  “Let me get this straight,” said the Dragon Queen with a frown. “You ordered a knight to do some work for us? What sort of work?”

  “Oh, in the outer world.” The Dragon King was dismissive.

  “Questing for the Holy Grail, you mean?”

  “No. That has probably already been found, and if it hasn’t I doubt it ever will. Nothing major like that, just basic knightly stuff.”

  “Slaying trolls and other monsters?”

  The Dragon King shivered. “Not that. No slaying.”

  “Returning with treasure then?”

  The Dragon King smirked. “More in that line, yes.”

  “Where did you order him from?”

  “Budget Heroes Ltd. A new company based in Glastonbury, Somerset. They provide paladins of all sizes and natures for customers. I requested one of the loyal, silent and simple types. Not very bright but a good worker all the same. Beautiful.”

  The Dragon Queen pouted. “I see.” She moved to the cave mouth and watched the mounted figure canter off in his low quality armour. She kept her expressionless reptilian eyes on his form until he turned a bend in the road and was lost behind a crag. Then she returned to polishing her claws on a whetstone and forgot about the knight. But he remained true to those who had hired him and kept riding all day without a rest.

  He paused at nightfall and made camp in a forest glade without removing his armour and slept clangingly until dawn. Then he was back on his horse, passing out of the forest and approaching a town by midday. He rode down the streets with the beak of his helmet raised high, for he had caught a scent of the objects he had been told to seek. Following his nose he came to a house and then he spurred his horse forward.

  Anna and Gareth never guessed what charged through their kitchen and they found it difficult in the coming weeks to turn the incident into an anecdote for their friends. Anna was preparing to make jam on the stove, Gareth was vainly attempting to help her. Suddenly the back door collapsed inwards and something flashed past, making off with the main ingredients for the jam and battering an exit through the front door. When the couple rushed out, all they saw was a cloud of dust. But their carefully picked fruit had most definitely been stolen!

  The knight rode hard all the way back to the cave. The Dragon Queen was the first to see him coming. “He’s got something under his arm!” she called.

  The Dragon King slithered up hungrily and licked his thin lips. “Is it in distress?” he drooled.

  “Hardly. It’s a basket of small dark plums.”

  The Dragon King moved out of the gloom of the cave, lashed the ground angrily with his tail and cried: “Damsels, you fool! Damsels!”

  Playing Impossible Instruments

  ‘In little gardens at the desert’s edge men beat the tambang and the tittibuk, and blew melodiously the zootibar.’

  Lord Dunsany, Bethmoora

  My name is Og. Minding my own business one morning during the Stone Age, I was approached by a strange man who gave me the power to roam randomly through time. My first impressions of him were not very favourable and I assumed he was ugly and deformed because he walked without stooping and wasn’t hairy enough and didn’t slobber much. Later I learned he was from the future and that one day all men will look like him, apart from the occasional throwback.

  He represented a cabal of musicologists from some important institute that will come to occupy the site of my hut one hundred millennia after my death. He wanted to recruit me and in return for my services he offered me enough woolly mammoth milk to make sufficient yoghurt to satisfy my appetites for the whole of my calculated life span. “Yoghurt until I’m thirty five!” I cried in wonderment and immediately accepted his terms and conditions of employment.

  In the afternoon of that same day I commenced my first task for him. I travelled forward in time three hundred years to record the unsure but blistering twang of the nugurrugh.

  This is what my new employer told me:

  “Music is generally played on instruments. There are two kinds of instrument, possible and impossible, but it’s simply not possible for men of the future to hear the impossible kind. Our modern ears are too attuned to possible music. We needed to contact someone from an age before the invention of music, a man who has no assumptions about what music should sound like. You are that man!”

  “I am intrigued by this news,” I replied.

  “Will you work for us? Will you roam time with a recording device collecting the sounds of impossible instruments? We still won’t be able to hear anything on your recordings but you can use them to create an audio archive that you may constantly refer to as you write reviews for us. We will be able to read your reviews!”

  I shrugged. “Sure I will. I’m excited by the prospect of hearing this thing called ‘music’ myself.”

  “Here is the time machine,” he said.

  “Will it convey me through space as well?” I asked.

  “Nope. Just through time. You’ll have to make your own arrangements regarding space. Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t worry,” I answered with a shrug.

  “Off you go then,” he said.

  I returned his farewell wave. “Bye!”

  It seems that music was invented a dozen generations after my death. The first instrument was the handclap, but that’s not impossible so I didn’t record it. The second instrument was the saxophone, which was forgotten about soon after and had to be reinvented at a much later date, but it was perfectly possible even back then, so of no real interest to me. The third and fourth instruments were the drum and flute. I was beginning to wonder if any impossible instrument would ever be invented when the nugurrugh appeared in an adjacent valley.

  I remember entering that valley with blisters all over my feet and my tongue hanging out. It was a long distance from my hut, maybe two miles or more. Before you ridicule my apparent lack of stamina, please bear in mind that walking in the Stone Age was much more difficult than in later times. We didn’t have boots or socks or thermos flasks or sandwiches or ordnance survey maps or cagoules or hostels or backpacks or woolly hats or mittens or matches wrapped in cellophane. Sometimes we had to take lengthy detours to avoid sabre toothed tigers.

  Once I had to make an extra lengthy detour to avoid the inventor of the wheel, a tedious fellow who wanted to talk about circumferences and diameters all day. On another occasion I made a triple length detour to avoid the sabre toothed tiger that was devouring him. And on yet another occasion... But I’m digressing.

  The man playing the nugurrugh was called Lok. He played it by rubbing its ningums with a grunga. The result was certainly impossible. That’s not a recommendation, by the way.

  I didn’t find another impossible instrument until the end of barbarism and the dawn of civilisation. To celebrate the building of the very first city somewhere in Ancient Sumer (Future Sumer to me) the ruler of that strange tangle of houses and
streets decided to hold a party. And where there are parties there is usually music.

  Birhurturra his name was, not the name of the ruler, but of the musician who appeared with an impossible instrument. It was a long sort of ghunky with a protruding vacal and two tightly strung eckogs. He operated it not just with his fingers but with his beard. It sounded like a cross between itself and itself (there being nothing else to compare it with) and I wasn’t sure if I liked it, hated it, felt indifferent, liked and hated it simultaneously, liked it and felt indifferent, hated it and felt indifferent, or liked it and hated it and felt indifferent. Maybe none of those. Maybe all of them.

  Naked girls danced to the tunes he played. They danced in a sloobry style with lots of farby contact. One whispered sweet nothings in my ear, the other whispered sour everythings. I can’t recall what any of the other naked girls said or did.

  In Imperial Rome I chanced on the sound of Vulcan’s Limp in a subterranean temple dug into the side of Rome’s secret eighth hill. It wasn’t strictly an instrument, more of an awkward walk that made an impossible noise, but it was capable of being recorded and the priests and acolytes who joyously performed it for me regarded it as a legitimate melody maker. After hours of exposure to all those strange people stumbling up and down in the gloom of that foul smoky carved cavern, knees asqueak, I couldn’t bear one note more and I fled into the light.

  To walk in the same way in the comfort of your own home, if you have a home and aren’t a chronic nomad like me, straighten your right leg, keep your left mildly bent and imagine you are stepping on reticulated zogboos as you proceed forward. You have to really visualise the little faces of those zogboos as your feet come down and squash them, their expressions of futile alarm have to be absolutely correct, otherwise your limp won’t be a Vulcan’s Limp and thus won’t produce an impossible noise. It helps if the reticulated zogboos are sooty.