by Rhys Hughes
“Amen!” cried Twisthorn Bellow.
THE SKIN OF MARSYAS
While cruising through London in one of the deluxe bulletproof Bentleys provided to the Agency, the professor tapped Twisthorn on the shoulder and asked him to slow down. The golem was a superb chauffeur and not merely because he had committed the entire metropolitan street-map to his senile-proof clay memory but also because his reactions were fast and he never crunched the gears.
“What’s the bother, boss?”
“Just take a look at the driver of that other car!”
“Which one?” asked Twisthorn.
“The nasty French model. It’s a Citroën, I think, something garlicky at any rate. Do you see what I see?”
“Afraid not, boss,” admitted Twisthorn.
“The driver’s some kind of loup-garou—which is a French werewolf in case you’re wondering—all covered in a snowy pelt and owning large blank eyes that reflect no light.”
“It’s a woman in a fur coat with sunglasses, boss.”
“You really think so, my lad?”
The professor picked his left nostril with his forefinger, not because it was obstructed with bogies but for the pure pleasure of etching the silver on the inside with a nail kept uncut especially for this purpose. Any hero engaged in fighting evil for the sake of his adopted homeland must snatch whatever simple delights he can.
“Yes, boss, I’m sure that’s what it is. Not a werewolf . . . ”
“Maybe. Let’s kill it anyway!”
“Are we going to give chase?” asked Abortia.
“Yes, young lady, that’s the general idea in such situations. There will be hazardous short-cuts down narrow alleyways, and market stalls will be knocked over in comical fashion.”
“Will traffic wardens be forced to dive out of the way?”
The professor nodded. “And two men carrying an enormous pane of glass across the road will find themselves holding only thin air suspended over a ground full of twinkling stars . . . ”
“We might be able to avoid all that,” said Twisthorn.
“How so, boy?” asked Cherlomsky.
“The traffic lights ahead have turned red. I can pull up next to her and deal with the situation instantly.”
“Do exactly that,” agreed the professor.
Twisthorn did so, stopping the Bentley and leaning over towards the other car. It was a Renault, not a Citroën. The occupant looked at him in ultimate dismay and her beautiful cheeks paled. She instinctively raised an arm to shield her oval face.
Although made to be thrown, the kpinga can also be used, awkwardly, as a cutting weapon. Her upraised arm tumbled off while a second curved blade entered her milky thorax. Sweet blood gushed. She gurgled and the golem yanked his greasy tool free.
Then she died. Tourists on a double-decker bus that was waiting in the third traffic lane took photographs.
With a muttered curse against such holiday-snapping, honour-sapping foreigners, the professor stepped smartly out of the Bentley to inspect the Agency’s latest success in closer detail.
“Not even real fur!” he spat in derision.
* * * * *
Exactly one week later the professor died.
It was sudden, almost painless . . .
He had been on the telephone, dialling a foreign number, as sometimes he did, hoping to persuade the Duke of Luxembourg to invade France, but there was a problem with the line and he ended up having a conversation with someone called Lohengrin Smirka instead. Neither understood what the other was trying to say.
Replacing the receiver with a scowl, he turned to greet the entrance of Dancin’ Daze, his mistress. He leaned forward, kissed her ankle. Then he straightened and said wistfully:
“You know something, Twisty? I’ve just realised that she reminds me of the ancient giant Sciron, a part of him at any rate. Does she remind you of any mythical creatures?”
“No, boss, but when she’s around I keep thinking something’s afoot. I don’t mean to insult her but . . . ”
The professor never got to hear the rest of the golem’s answer. With a look of surprise, he clutched his heart and keeled over. Twisthorn rushed to his side, cradled him gently.
“What’s wrong, boss? Are you dying?”
“Afraid so, dear boy. Some of the thorns that Pan fired at me lodged in my body. One of them has just moved into my heart. I didn’t say anything at the time because I didn’t want to upset you. Also I’m scared of surgery and didn’t want an operation . . . ”
“Can I do anything to save you, boss?”
“Yes, if you fetch me . . . ”
But it was too late. The professor was dead. The golem didn’t cry, but screwed up his eyes as an alternative. Then he had an idea. He hefted the professor’s limp body and ran.
He hastened towards the newly installed Cryogenics laboratory where the tanks of liquid helium were ready to receive their first occupant. With a grimace, Twisthorn lowered the body of his creator into the nearest tank and screwed the lid tight shut.
“One day—far in some unknown future—someone will develop a cure for thorns in a heart, and then you’ll be thawed out and live again, boss, I promise you!” he sobbed quietly.
Cherlomsky’s corpse floated in the freezing liquid.
And knocked against the window.
“Enter!” wept the golem.
But nobody did.
* * * * *
Thanks to the yeti known as MeMeMeMeMe U, who had spilled all his secrets in the torture chamber under the old Philosophy department, the Agency was now a leading authority on the art of storing cadavers until they could be reanimated . . .
Without the professor, the golem was forced to assume a role more in keeping with an authority figure. He discovered, much to his disgust, that his mucky soul was becoming softer, more sympathetic, and less virulent in his hatreds of those he regarded as only minor enemies. His loathing of the French, of course, never diminished a jot, but he felt reluctant to slice and dice random musicians.
He forced himself to do so, for the sake of the Agency, and in memory of his deceased mentor. Because of his guilt and shame at the thought he might be turning mentally pliable he even increased his kill rate of those electric guitarists who also sing.
Meanwhile, somewhere else, on another plane, not a charter flight but an astral dimension, where there was no horizon or sky, Cherlomsky was opening his cold dead eyes . . .
* * * * *
Golems don’t eat, but Twisthorn was so grief-stricken that he stuffed food into his mouth and forced himself to chew and swallow it. That’s the way clay statues mourn! The dedicated face of Cherlomsky floated constantly before him in his imagination as he gorged. The pies, cakes and fruit that were ground to crumbs by his teeth settled in his stomach, filling up that portable minor cavern, and they would later attract mice who entered his mouth while he slept and crawled down his throat and cavorted inside his belly, giving him indigestion.
He hated discovering traces of the professor all around the Agency, his papers on a desk, his hat on a peg, his coat on a hook, his pegs and hooks on shelves, his shelves on walls, his walls behind paper—wallpaper with a Union Jack pattern. Poignant!
This environment depressed Twisthorn so much that he asked Abortia to brighten the place up a bit. She bought plants in pots in response to his request and arranged them around the Agency. Orchids and mandrakes softened the geometrical angles of rooms, and a small fig tree took pride of place in the main office.
Twisthorn also threw himself into work, burying his sadness beneath a landslide of organisation and active tasks. He continued to elude assassins and critics. He went out and butchered morlocks, nymphs and ducks. He gave difficult missions to Abortia, Hapi, Dancin’ and the most promising of the new civilian recruits.
Occasionally they hit the streets all together as a gang. Once they had the good fortune to stumble on a tourist from the island of Guernsey, still British territory but too near France for
comfort. Sundering him quickly, they played games with his parts, football with his head, cricket with his heart, croquet with his eyes and thigh-bones, ping pong with his ding dong and squash with his spleen . . .
They also stamped his clothes into the dust!
These were glorious times, but Twisthorn remained unhappy. And his stomach pains grew worse.
In the space of a single week in high summer, he bagged a triffid, a gillygaloo, two griffons, four lamiae, eight lemurs, sixteen trombonists, twenty four sylphs, and a handful of much rarer monsters, including the simurgh, amphisbaena, jaculi, pareas and hidebehind, some of which had never been seen in London before.
But his misery didn’t abate one jot!
Nor did his bellyache go . . .
It was around this time that he first added certain types of ‘clothes’ to the list of Agency enemies. For a long time Twisthorn and his comrades had been instinctively contemptuous of fashion, a natural reaction for a clay statue, living abortion and disembodied hand, none of whom would ever be regarded as stylish.
Having said that, the contempt of Abortia for fashion did express itself in an unusual manner—in the acquisition of a vast and growing collection of garments. But if monsters can’t be eccentric, who can? This didn’t alter the fact they all hated clothes!
But hitherto their detestation had been unfocused and random. Now it should become official Agency policy, he decided. He opened the ledger containing the list of enemies originally drawn up by Cherlomsky with advice from Scarydung Chinwag and the Queen. With a quill pen made from the plucked feather of an elephant-devouring rukh, and ink distilled from the reservoir of a kraken, the golem inserted the words ‘swank attire’ between ‘squonk’ and ‘sylph’.
The desecration of the fake fur coat worn by the woman who looked like a loup-garou had been the turning point. Or maybe it was the rumour of a brand new creature lately seen in Florida, a hideous being called the ‘poshodile’ that seemed to be nothing more than a crocodile-skin handbag that enjoyed eating its owners.
Twisthorn planned to dispatch Hapi on the next available flight to the USA to check that one out . . .
* * * * *
Cherlomsky was still dead, he realised the truth of that even when he rose from his supine position and began walking. He was no longer in his tank of liquid helium. Or was he? As a scientist he had scoffed at the notion of souls, even though his work as a scholar of Applied Eschatology brought him time and again into contact with ghosts. But scientists were supposed to be sceptics, even when they weren’t, so he couldn’t be a soul now, even though he was. He blinked.
His surroundings were obscured by mist, or rather they were made of mist, solidified water vapour that was easily able to bear his weight, but it wasn’t white mist. It was grey, the colour of drizzle. He was on the other side of an overcast day. Was this the Afterlife? It looked like Wales, that schismatic, dreary, bleak land that has as much integrity as rusty stainless steel. The professor had always viewed the Welsh with suspicion, mainly because they weren’t able to decide if they were British or not. No better than foreigners, he huffed!
But he felt no anxiety as he proceeded.
He wasn’t damned, nor was this Hell, because he’d already been there once, on a day trip, and saw how it was located at the centre of the Earth, exactly where tradition puts it. Wherever he was, it wasn’t back there, so logically speaking he must therefore be in Heaven or somewhere close, probably in the lobby area.
A voice called him by name. He turned.
Far to his left, a splash of colour among the grey, the figure of a man beckoned to him cheerfully . . .
Cherlomsky frowned. Something familiar about the fellow, but he was too distant to be sure. He changed direction and his heart, even though it had stopped when he died, felt as if it was pounding harder than one of Glushko’s fuel pumps—which are the hardest working fuel pumps in the rocketry business. Honest.
The man called again and the professor broke into a stumbling run. It couldn’t be! But it was! The professor threw himself down and covered the man’s knees with kisses.
“I don’t believe it! Mark Anthony Zimara!”
* * * * *
Twisthorn was still musing over the problem of clothes. There remained things about them he didn’t understand. Why did his pyjamas, which he now planned to burn, always rotate in his sleep so that on waking all the buttons ran down his back?
Better to go nude than suffer such humiliation!
Nude but not innocent . . .
Twisthorn recalled when he had first been invented and had fled into the Chemistry department, Cherlomsky, Abortia and Hapi close behind. All had lost their own clothes during that chase. But what clothes in fact had they lost? For Hapi, the item was a knuckleduster; for Abortia it was one miniature nappy; for himself it was nothing at all. Only the professor had possessed more than a single garment to be cast off in the acoustic shade of that mysterious saxophone . . .
But perhaps not all clothes were evil. How might he differentiate with any degree of confidence between the good and bad kinds? That was the rub, or in the case of extra tight corduroy trousers, the chafe. What if he banned all non-human Agency staff from wearing garments of any kind? Was that too draconian a measure? Who was Draco anyway? Just another classical allusion or a dragon-master still at large? Life was proving hard without Cherlomsky as a guide.
Yes, the golem finally decided, he would announce his new rule. Only human staff should be permitted to wear clothes. But he wouldn’t enforce this order immediately. There would be a month’s period of grace for the monsters to make preparations.
Now back to other tasks . . .
The following morning Hapi left for Florida.
* * * * *
The postman arrived with a parcel that was very large but so light he was able to balance it on one finger. Twisthorn signed the receipt, offered his usual tip, accepted the box.
The golem’s usual tip was a fifty-pound note.
The Agency’s budget was big.
The postman mounted his bicycle and pedalled away with a backward cry of, “Bonne chance!” in his phoney accent. Why was the fellow always satirising the French like that?
The golem couldn’t really understand it, but he was grateful for the regular reminder that the French use weird words to communicate and must therefore be horrid people.
Since the professor had died, it had become appallingly easy to forget how bad the French were, to actually start thinking they had good writers and film-makers. Twisthorn lived in constant fear he would become a fan of Cocteau if he wasn’t careful!
Or if not Cocteau then Godard or Besson!
Constant self-discipline was essential to protect himself against these perverted urges. Twisthorn believed himself strong enough to laugh and spit at temptation, or do something worse in its face if necessary. Never would it be said that Cherlomsky’s golem had gone soft. Nobody would ever call him Mellow Bellow!
He pursed his lips, turned his attention to the parcel, ran the standard security checks on it. The sniffer croaked a warning. The contents had the odour of wine, it reported, but not French wine. Prussian! Twisthorn took it to the X-ray scanner and adjusted the controls. Some kind of cybernetic bird flying about inside the box.
Before he could drop it down the incinerator chute, the parcel opened itself from within. The bird wasn’t a bird. Its wings weren’t wings. It had the body of a corkscrew and massive hands, hands so large they doubled as aerofoils. Then it sniggered.
“My name is Enid Hans. I have hands that can grip and gesture and do other things. They can scoop canals from baked soil. What chance does a paltry golem stand against me?”
“Try it and see,” sneered Twisthorn.
With a croak, Enid Hans rose up high, flapped around the room, then swooped at the golem’s neck. The fingers of a gloved hand closed around a clay throat and squeezed. Twisthorn was astonished to feel his windpipe distorting under the pressure.
Although he didn’t need to breathe, he would suffocate in principle if he couldn’t remove his assailant. Asphyxiating like that might leave him alive but would stain his honour.
“Is this all you can do?” he defiantly gasped.
“No,” said Enid Hans, “for in emergencies I can also uncork bottles of wine. More sociable that way!”
Twisthorn wasn’t powerful enough to dislodge his assassin, but then it occurred to him that guile might be a substitute weapon. The guile needed to be rapid guile, turbo-guile, if he stood any chance of getting free before official unconsciousness set in!
Otherwise he would be forced to collapse and turn green in the face just to satisfy the rules of strangulation . . .
And he didn’t feel like doing that. Too degrading!
“Nearly there,” said Enid Hans.
“Wait!” Twisthorn hissed with difficultly. “Look at my single horn on the top of my head. What shape is it? A corkscrew! Yes. So we’re kindred spirits, brothers of the helix!”
Enid relaxed his grip slightly. “Really?”
“What other explanation is there? If I ever approach a wine bottle huge enough I’ll open it too. With my head! Doesn’t that prove we’re the same kind, at least on the rotary and extraction levels? I think so! I even second my own opinion on the issue!”
Enid Hans let go and flew in a circle.
“Friends! Let’s be friends! I’m so happy to have met you, my screwed-up brother! So pleased that . . . ”
But Twisthorn was running for his swordstick, for the kpinga leaning against the far wall, and he snatched it up and hurled it over his shoulder with a fluidity that belied his stiff composition. But Enid Hans was more than a match for the golem’s reactions. He darted out of the way just as a new civilian staff member entered to see what was making the crunching and gasping noise. One of the blades sliced through half his neck and his head fell over on a hinge of flesh like a pedal-bin lid. Enid Hans instantly flapped for the open door.