The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

by Brian Stableford

  Carlsen hated the gawpers who had never read any of his work and never would. He hated the moralists who thought that he ought to be ashamed of himself for writing such vile and disgusting stuff. Most of all, though, he hated the fans from hell. They were the ones who liked his stuff, or pretended to, for all the wrong reasons: not because they appreciated the deftness of his prose, or the subtlety of his symbolism, or the propriety of his metaphors, or the bleak profundity of his insight into the murkier depths of he human condition, but simply because they got off on descriptions of people being messily done to death. Any descriptions of people being messily done to death would do, because they always consumed them devoid of any context, skipping the meaningful bits in between. Carlsen didn’t enjoy being confronted by his enemies, but at least he wasn’t ashamed to have them for his enemies. It was the wrong kind of fans that he really didn’t like to be seen with.

  Not that he was expecting fans from hell, of course, when the girl from his publisher’s publicity office rang up and asked if he’d be prepared to do an after-dinner reading at a club just off Piccadilly. The possible difficulties that sprang to mind were of a very different kind.

  “I don’t do dirty jokes,” he said, dubiously. “I thought people always booked rugby players or weathermen as after-dinner speakers, if they couldn’t afford a real comedian. Besides which, I don’t have a dinner-jacket or a black tie, and I don’t suppose you’d be willing to spring for overnight accommodation in London as well as the train fare.”

  “They’ll pay your expenses, including accommodation,” the girl assured him, in the earnestly sweet fashion that all publicists learn at their mentor’s knee. “They’ll lend you a dinner suit if you let me know your measurements, and a black tie if you need one. They’re offering a fee of three hundred pounds, on top of first-class return train fare and taxis back and forth, and there’s the free dinner too. I know that Rory Bremner gets three thousand and even Michael Fish gets two, but you’re not quite in that league, although they did ask for you especially. They’re fans, you see. Connoisseurs. They’d like you to read from your work-in-progress, if possible, so that it’ll be new to them. The Club Secretary said when he phoned that he just knows that your next book will be your best.”

  There was something about it that didn’t quite ring true, even though Carlsen had been told by a book-dealer that there were a lot of rich young men in the City who fancied themselves as book collectors and thought horror was the thing to collect—but three hundred pounds was a lot of money to a writer, if not to a weatherman, and Carlsen had never traveled first class on a Virgin train.

  “Okay,” he said, trying his best to sound like a temperamental artist doing his publisher a big favor. “I’ve nothing else on that day—United are playing away.”

  He didn’t suppose that he’d enjoy the reading itself, but he figured the trimmings ought to make up for any gawping or patronizing questions that might materialize on the night.

  The girl promised to mail him the Club’s address, a timetable and the train tickets. She was as good as her word, and he was as good as his.

  He didn’t take much notice of where the black cab went after it turned off Piccadilly, although the destination seemed to be slightly further away than “just off”, but the Victorian square in which the vehicle stopped seemed top-of-the-market to Carlsen.

  He was met in the plush vestibule by a flunkey, who whisked him off to a dressing-room. Carlsen hadn’t expected them to take much notice of the measurements he’d sent, but it turned out that the dinner suit they’d laid on fitted him so perfectly that the typescript he’d brought to read didn’t spoil the line when he’d stowed it in an inside pocket of the jacket. The bow tie practically tied itself.

  “Would you like to freshen up before we go down, sir?” the flunkey asked.

  Carlsen wondered about the “down”, but guessed that the upper classes probably went “down” to dinner all the time, even if the dining-room happened to be upstairs. He washed his hands, even though they weren’t dirty, for the sake of putting on a good show.

  “Down” turned out to have been meant literally. The flunkey put him in a lift, leaned in to press the bottom button, and then withdrew with an obsequious bow. The lift went down. And further down. And, seemingly, even further down. It seemed to go so far down, in fact, that Carlsen was absolutely convinced that the whole trip must be an illusion. After all, the button that was second to bottom was clearly marked G for ground. The antique system was obviously very slow, and the fact that the lift seemed to be dropping so swiftly must be a figment of his slightly overwrought imagination.

  The dining hall was vast. At first, Carlsen thought it might go on forever, but then he realized that the walls were mirrored, so that sections of the room were duplicated at the sides and the back, then duplicated again, and again.

  He was guided to his seat at the top table by a tall man with slick black hair and a neatly-pointed goatee beard, who introduced himself merely as “the Club Secretary”. The person seated to Carlsen’s right was introduced as “the Chairman” and the person seated to his left as “the Toastmaster”. They were tall men too, and their hair was equally black, but the Chairman had a thicker beard than the Club Secretary and the Toastmaster was clean-shaven except for a pencil-thin moustache.

  The soup was served immediately, and the first wine. It was a dry white, unidentifiable as to source because it was poured from a crystal decanter.

  The Chairman and the Toastmaster took turns to engage Carlsen in conversation. Any lingering intimidation imposed by the alien setting evaporated rapidly as he realized that they were, indeed, connoisseurs of horror fiction. They seemed to have read it all—including all the stuff that Carlsen had never found time to read—and they had a real appreciation for the subtleties of the genre. Their taste in fiction, like their taste in food and wine, was very highly developed.

  Carlsen had never had the opportunity to develop a truly luxurious taste for the finest foods and wines, but he knew a nice piece of veal when it melted in his mouth and he appreciated a full-bodied claret. He had always prided himself on making up for his inability to dabble in alimentary luxury with the keenness of his appetite for piquant fiction. He only read horror stories, but of horror stories he was a true connoisseur—so true, in his own opinion, that he had never met his match until he sat down between the Chairman and the Toastmaster.

  The Chairman and the Toastmaster kept Carlsen so busy with questions about his art and his inspiration that he didn’t have an opportunity to slip in a query of his own until he was half way through his second glass of something that looked and tasted like Alsace pinot noir and well into the core of his Baked Alaska. “I’ve been wondering what the name of the club is,” he said, politely. “The piece of paper the publicity girl sent me only had an address and a schedule.”

  The Chairman tutted sympathetically. “She really ought to have told you,” he said, “although you might have guessed by now. This is the Hellfire Club.”

  “I thought that met at Medmenham,” Carlsen joked. “Two hundred years ago.”

  “That was Dashwood’s pathetic parody,” the Chairman told him, with a slight frown, almost as if he were faintly insulted by the suggestion. “This is the Hellfire Club.”

  Carlsen studied the bearded man carefully. It would have been stupid as well as insulting to say “And I suppose you’re Lucifer?” so he didn’t. It would have been ingenuous as well as ridiculous to say “You mean a Club for Demons, in Hell,” so he didn’t say that either. What he actually said was: “Oh, the Hellfire Club. Right.”

  And that was when he began to worry, just a little, about whether they were really the kind of fans he ought to want to have, even if they did know even more than he did about the genre he loved so well.

  By the time the last of the Baked Alaska had gone to meet its alimentary destiny, the Toastmaster was already on his feet, introducing Carlsen to the diners. They applauded thunderously, and
the applause seemed to go on forever—although that, of course, had to be an illusion, presumably caused by echoes from the mirrored walls.

  Carlsen began to read from his current novel, of which he’d written three-quarters of a first draft. He began at the beginning, because he always liked to start with a melodramatic hook before getting down to the painstaking work of building settings and characters.

  The diners were as quiet as mice. Not a fork tinkled, and not a wine-glass chinked. They seemed utterly rapt. They did not cough or wheeze, or shuffle in their seats, or purse their lips, or cluck their tongues. They listened, and they seemed to love what they heard.

  Carlsen had brought along eight thousand words of his text, just in case. He had intended to read about five thousand—which would take about forty minutes—and then to pause to see how things were going before deciding whether to put in an extra ten minutes. Three hundred pounds was, after all, a good fee for a mere writer. As things were, though, he felt not the slightest need to pause. He carried straight on, reading all the way to the end of the typescript...and then he carried on a little further, astonishing himself by his new-found capacity to recite from memory.

  He seemed to go on forever—although that had, of course, to be an illusion. He became even more delighted when he realized that he was rewriting as he went, turning first draft into final draft, and thought that there was no end to his powers when he ploughed straight through the point at which the typescript he had left at home had broken off, surging into the as-yet-unformulated wilderness of the narrative crescendo that ascended the ladder of suspense towards his climax.

  Carlsen had always known how his novel was going to end, but only in an approximate and sketchy sort of way. Whenever in the past he had come to write passages whose contents he had only anticipated, he had had to fill in all the detail and color by slow degrees—a process that usually took several drafts, lurching unsteadily towards the full maturity of the text. He had never tried to dictate his work, and had never imagined that he might be able to do so with such awesome certainty as this.

  The diners remained rapt. They did not shuffle their feet, nor did they turn their chairs squeakily sideways. No one left to visit the toilets, in spite of all the wine they had consumed. No mobile phones rang. No waiters hurried back and forth collecting plates and glasses.

  As he neared his denouement, Carlsen began to wonder why he had always taken it for granted that there was an unavoidable risk in confronting his audience. The lights in the vast dining-hall were bright, but their brightness did not compromise his narrative in the least. He was addressing a crowd larger than any he had ever addressed before, all its members formally dressed and set upright in stiff-backed chairs, but he knew that the effect his words were having could not have been greater had every one of them been utterly alone and unprotected in a dark and formless void.

  Here, if nowhere else, the power of Carlsen’s prose seemed absolute, independent of circumstance.

  He could not doubt that this audience appreciated to the full the deftness of his prose, the subtlety of his symbolism, the propriety of his metaphors and the bleak profundity of his insight into the murkier depths of the human condition. These gentlemen were, he believed and understood, connoisseurs of all such matters.

  When he finally sat down, having reached the end of his as-yet-unwritten masterpiece, the applause was even more thunderous than that which had greeted him. The diners came to their feet offering him a standing ovation. That clamorous ovation was still going on as the Club Secretary guided Carlsen to the lift, after the Chairman and the Toastmaster had taken turns to shake him warmly by the hand.

  He was glad, though, that nobody had asked him to sign anything. He would have signed anything they put before him, because he owed it to them, but he was glad that they had not tested the entire spectrum of his pet hates.

  The lift seemed to take far longer going up than it had coming down, but he got to G in the end. The flunkey helped him off with the dinner-jacket and the trousers. For one horrid moment Carlsen thought that the tie with a will of its own might not be disposed to let him go, but after tightening suggestively for a fleeting moment it obligingly untied itself.

  “The taxi will be a few moments, sir,” the flunkey said.

  “Thanks very much,” said Carlsen, conversationally, as he tucked his manuscript into the inside pocket of his own jacket. “You’ve been very kind. Have you worked here long? Seen many changes?”

  “It seems like forever, sir,” the flunkey said. “Some things change, some stay the same. The membership is remarkably stable, but the gentlemen aren’t as active as they used to be. There was a time when they were more interested in doing than in listening, but we all mellow as we grow old, don’t we, sir? Nowadays, they take most of their pleasures vicariously, in the comfort of the Club—but they’re still connoisseurs, very devoted to their amusements. I believe that’s your taxi, sir. May I wish you goodnight?”

  “You certainly may,” Carlsen said. He got into the black cab and settled back into the leather seat while the flunkey gave discreet instructions to the driver.

  It wasn’t until the cab slid silently to a halt, in an unfamiliar street whose lights seemed exceptionally vivid, that Carlsen remembered, with a slight twinge of panic, that no one had bothered to tell him the name of the place where he’d be staying.

  THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE PROPHETS OF ATLANTIS

  The 999th annual conference of the prophets of Atlantis was held in the new seafront Conference Centre in Leigh-on-Esse. The delegates were all accommodated in the four-star Lemuria Hotel, the luckier ones being those who had rooms looking out over the blue waters of the Boundless Ocean.

  The usual air of excitement was much enhanced by the anticipation of the Millennial Event to come, and even the routine business of electing members to the organization’s many committees was tackled with an unaccustomed enthusiasm.

  The conference proper opened with a statement from President Dee, in which he welcomed the assembled delegates warmly, and expressed his faith that this year’s conference would be conducted in a good spirit now that the controversies that had dogged the prophethood in recent years had finally been laid to rest. When he went on to extend a special welcome to the female delegates who were in attendance for the first time there were a few catcalls, but these were quickly drowned by a round of applause from all corners of the hall.

  Professor Madden presented the opening paper, which turned out to be a relatively low-key affair. He attempted to identify a number of prophetic themes which, he said, were not only in grave danger of becoming clichés but which had caused problems. Plagues of bat-winged toads had been so popular of late, he observed, that the bat-winged toad was now an endangered species, while uneasy premonitions about the long-extinct volcano fondly known as Crackertower had resulted in a collapse of property prices within a ten-mile radius.

  “Prophets,” he said, “have a social responsibility to all strata of society, and to the natural world as well. We must strive at all costs to be fair in our prognostications.”

  This was generally deemed to be a dull speech, and the words “has-been” and “boring old fart” were heard to be muttered in more than one corner of the conference hall even while the usual cadre of Politically Correct neo-Maddenians added their support in the form of flattering rhetorical questions.

  The venerable Dr Blair followed up with a much wittier address, on the subject of optimism. It was all very well for the younger generation to indulge their angst in imagery of blight and desolation, he said, but it was not what the public wanted and, if carried to extremes, could only bring the entire profession of prophecy into disrepute. What the man on the Clipham ox-cart wanted, he opined, was a little bit of sweetness and light to brighten up a dull day; something to boost morale and give him that extra bit of zip that was so necessary to productivity, especially at harvest-time.

  “Dramatic tension is all very well in its place,” he sa
id, “but its place is the middle of a well-wrought prophecy, not the climax. One should always end on an uplifting note. The moaning minnies must remember that we are competing for the punters’ mead-money.”

  Dr Blair was roundly cheered by the older members of the audience, although it was noted even before the desultory question-and-answer session that the hall was nearly half-empty, presumably because the avant garde had retired en masse to the bar for a pre-prandial pint. It might have been even emptier had the attractions of the seafront been more powerful, but the weather had taken a distinct turn for the worse and the sky had become unseasonably overcast. The attending official of the Amalgamated Union of Weather Forecasters cheerfully accepted the blame for his members’ failure to produce a sunnier day and promised that the dark clouds would soon blow over.

  The Conference Centre soon filled up again after a leisurely and conversation-packed lunch, and every seat in the Great Hall was taken by the time that Dr. Sybil Shipton took the podium. The first paper ever to be given by one of the newly-admitted lady members was a significant occasion by anyone’s standards, and no one wanted to miss it—not even those prophets who had fought to the last ditch against the admission of women to the prophethood. The demonstration that had been widely anticipated turned out to be something of a damp squib; the chorus of “sit downs” and “women outs” soon died into a mere whimper as curiosity got the better of principled adherence to a lost cause.