Twisthorn Bellow

by Rhys Hughes

  Abortia sighed and capitulated. She tried to wriggle out of the garment while the golem frowned at her. Something was wrong. She couldn’t take her arms out of the sleeves . . .

  “I’m stuck!” she admitted ruefully.

  “Go to her assistance, Hapi,” ordered Twisthorn.

  “Cool! Richie! Heeeey!”

  The giant hand moved to her side. Suddenly one of Abortia’s powerful waldo arms lashed out and punched him in the middle of his palm. With a groan he collapsed unconscious.

  Dancin’ hopped into the fray, but Abortia grabbed her by a toe, hurled her against the nearest wall and ran in pursuit, her waldo hands slapping and punching the disembodied foot until its heel was a bloody pulp. Then Abortia cried to the golem:

  “Help me! The coat is controlling my waldo!”

  And she rushed at him . . .

  Twisthorn ran to meet her charge.

  Sentient clay statue and steel exoskeleton collided at high speed with a sound like an empty suit of armour making love to the steps of a ziggurat. Something along those lines.

  Talking about lines, both rebounded to find themselves covered with a web of new cracks that no amount of anti-ageing cream might cancel out. Those creams don’t work anyway.

  Abortia was more disturbed by this than Twisthorn was. So distracted was she by the sight of structural damage that could be interpreted as the sign of an early onset of middle age that she didn’t notice how the golem was able to gain his feet and hasten to her side. He jumped on top of her and began pulling at her coat.

  It was like skinning a yeti without permission . . .

  The coat struggled like a living magical pelt, in other words like what it was, and the waldo arms pinched Twisthorn’s cheeks and even tried to rub out the word on his forehead that gave him life. But finally the golem managed to free Abortia . . .

  He cast the coat with disdain onto the pile.

  “Pour the fuel on quickly and light the matches—I can’t do those tasks. Hurry before it recovers!”

  Abortia nodded and rose to her feet.

  She seized the barrel and poured the volatile fluid all over the sinister sartorial hill until it was saturated. She was about to strike a match when the entire mound erupted . . .

  It was like a jumble sale volcano!

  The clothes rose into the air like vultures and flew at Twisthorn, who backed off and reached for his kpinga, which was leaning against a wall. He hurled that weapon with all his might and eleven blades sliced eleven individual garments in mid-air.

  But dozens more were on their way!

  And now they were attacking Abortia too. Luckily Hapi and Dancin’ had recovered and joined the fight. Hapi clicked scarves to ribbons and Dancin’ dirtied blouses by treading on them. It might have been enough, but suddenly a pair of pyjama bottoms tangled themselves round Hapi’s fingers and Dancin’ got her foot stuck in an ankle sock, and both these warriors were put of action.

  But Twisthorn had a bright idea.

  Too bright. It might easily mean his own destruction. “Throw matches at that blazer!” he called out.

  Abortia heard him and complied. The first flaring match brushed the arm of the blazer. Its elbow burst into flames. Shrieking and whistling the garment veered blindly around the courtyard, striking other flying clothes and rapidly spreading the fire.

  Soon every single item of clothing was ablaze.

  Twisthorn closed his eyes . . .

  He wasn’t a particularly religious golem but he needed all the help he could get now. He prayed. To Cherlomsky. If a single pair of underpants or waistcoat touched him he would detonate. He stood more rigidly than the statue he was while burning clothes orbited him like gigantic mutated fireflies. Not really like that.

  One by one they turned to ash and stopped burning.

  The danger lessened bit by bit.

  The final garment to die was the fur coat sent to Abortia as a gift. The hairs shrivelled in spirals and a voice seemed to hiss out from the flying embers: “Myths are so unfair!”

  Twisthorn opened his eyes. Safe.

  “My closest call yet!”

  Abortia stood among the ashes, watching the wind scatter and mingle them across the courtyard.

  “I don’t understand what happened,” she said.

  “Nor do I,” admitted Hapi.

  Twisthorn felt empty, traumatised . . .

  “Your fur coat was very persuasive and incited all the other clothes to rebel against us. I shouldn’t have thrown it onto the pile where it had the chance to spread dissent!”

  * * * * *

  Then he collected his kpinga and turned to go.

  But he stopped and faced in a direction that was new to him, one he had never noticed before. He stood and stared as if he was looking out of the page of a book, out of a paragraph directly at the reader. He wanted to say something now, to point out that low-octane petrol is easier to ignite than the high-octane kind.

  Octane is a chemical added to petrol to stop it exploding prematurely when compressed in an internal combustion engine. People who use the words ‘high octane’ to describe something powerful and energetic clearly don’t know what they are talking about. Music reviewers are always the worst offenders in this regard.

  The golem won’t tolerate it much longer.

  Please take note out there . . .

  THE FEET OF SCIRON

  O’Dicks is what they call me. Breath O’Dicks. You don’t expect me to use my real name in this business, do you? I went into porn because I needed money fast. I looked for other kinds of work but couldn’t find. Yeah, you heard right. Porn. Gay porn, in fact. A comedown for the ‘ectoplasm guy’, don’t you think? Not all of us land on our feet. Hell, some of us never get off our knees in the first place.

  I was on the set of my latest film, Bukkake Cthulhu, when I got the call from Twisthorn Bellow. Without so much as a goodbye I walked out of the studio and caught the first plane to the headquarters of the Applied Eschatology Agency in London. A plane and then a cab, if you want to be picky. He was there to meet me at the gate.

  “Good to see you again,” he said. He even sounded sincere, the big grey brute, his spiral horn glistening.

  “Been a long time,” I answered.

  “What’s your new film about?” he asked innocently.

  I told him. Ain’t never seen that look on a golem’s face before. A mixture of disgust and fascination. He led me inside and took me down to a basement room for a lecture, then put his hand on my shoulder and said in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear:

  “I’ll get you a chair, a very soft chair.”

  * * * * *

  Compassionate sarcasm. I like that. In case you’re wondering, I was only employed by the Agency for a few months. Originally they wanted us to work as a permanent team, Twisthorn, Hapi, Abortia, a few others, but things in the real world aren’t like the comic books, people get killed, pressed flat in giant mangles, fatally stung by manticores, the usual stuff, and teams don’t stay together. Not worth it in the long run. Or even in the short run. To be honest my one talent isn’t that useful either. I can extrude ectoplasm from my naked body. From any part.

  What use is an agent who has to take off his goddam shirt or pants every time he wants to lasso a vampire or werewolf with a spooky gloop noose? Way too slow. I left before I was kicked out. Turned out that my talent was more appreciated by the gay porn industry. Ghost Riders was my first film. Many others followed. Erectoplasm won an award. Now I was back at the Agency but it was clearly going to be a one-off job.

  The expert in the tweed suit who wanted to talk to me was called Marvin Carnacki and didn’t seem comfortable in his surroundings.

  “We have reason to believe it’s like a maze.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked.

  “On the inside,” he spluttered impatiently, “the most complex maze ever designed. Far worse than what Theseus had to find his way through. Maybe a million times more convoluted.”
>
  Then he removed his little round spectacles and wiped them carefully on his sleeve. I was aware of Twisthorn grinning next to me but I didn’t look at him to check. Instead I protested:

  “You’ll have to start from the beginning.”

  Marvin Carnacki frowned. “Hasn’t anyone told you anything about this case yet? Time is short.”

  “Nope, and whose time are you referring to?”

  So he told me about Theseus, the ancient hero who killed the Minotaur, and the labyrinth he had to get through, and how before doing that, he slew Sciron. And a bunch of other people and monsters too. Sort of cut from the same mould as Twisthorn. Except he wasn’t grey. And didn’t have a horn. And spoke in Greek. And didn’t carry a sword-stick. Other differences too. Heck, he wasn’t even remotely the same.

  But that’s life, I guess. And death. And mythology.

  * * * * *

  By the way, Sciron was a giant who liked to kick men off the top of a cliff. First he got them to kneel down before him and kiss his feet. Then he let them have it with the toe of his sandal. It’s a scene familiar to me from a dozen films. I’ve been the kicker and the kicked. Porn is weird. What else do I need to fill you in on? The planet Nekrotzar. A golden barge. A river as long and twisted as a life-span.

  All in good time. Or bad time. Depending.

  * * * * *

  I’m dictating this from a sickbay bed, incidentally, which is where Twisthorn put me. He went nuts and threw me around a bit. Broke my ribs, shattered my legs and arms, but the fact of the matter is that he was only defending himself. We’ll get to that later. When the lecture was finished at last, Twisthorn took me for a coffee. I wondered where Abortia and Hapi were. On a job somewhere up north, he said.

  “Marvin confused you quite a bit, didn’t he?” he added.

  “He’s a nervous man,” I replied.

  “That’s because he’s a defector.”

  “Sure, but I still can’t work out from which country.”

  “Not a country. A rival Agency.”

  “We have official enemies?” I croaked.

  He shook his impressive head and I sniffed the air carefully but didn’t catch the odour of rancid olive oil, which is the way Twisthorn smells on a good day. So this had to be a bad day.

  Logic, pure and simple. But what makes a genuine golem anxious? If I had worked longer with the Agency I would have known that Twisthorn gets worried just like everybody else and hardly ever smells like rancid olive oil, or even like a burst jack-fruit, but for me at that particular moment the lack of salad dressing stench was a negative sign.

  I felt afraid then. Thanks to my line of work I find it easier to poop my pants than the average guy but I used willpower to hold back the flood. I further calmed myself by muffling my heart in soft pillows of ectoplasm, because I can also extrude the gunk internally, and I even flatter myself that Twisthorn didn’t notice this trick.

  “Ready to hear the worst,” I said with a grin.

  “Then I’ll explain briefly,” he answered. “Turns out that for many years we’ve had a secret competitor, a possibility we never suspected until now. The rival to our Agency is a private organisation managed by the descendants of the original Carnacki.”

  “You’ve lost me already. Who was he?”

  Twisthorn rapped his strong fingers on the table. “The few people who do know the name think he’s fictional, the creation of a writer named William Hope Hodgson. The stories Hodgson wrote are a century old but worth reading. Carnacki was a real man, a ghost finder.”

  “The same way that Sherlock Holmes really lived but was turned into a fictional character by Conan Doyle?”

  Twisthorn gave a casual wave, a surprisingly fluid gesture for a hand made of clay. “Yeah. There are many such examples. Jules Verne pretended that Phileas Fogg was fictional, H.G. Wells did the same thing with Dr Moreau, M.P. Shiel with Prince Zaleski, Maurice Richardson with Engelbrecht, the list is endless.”

  “Go on with the explanation,” I muttered.

  “When he was old Carnacki decided to create a society dedicated to ridding the natural world of paranormal threats. The same as what the Agency does but on a much smaller scale. The Carnacki Institute never had the resources or quality of agents that we did. They were envious of us for a long time. The only advantage they had was that they were aware of our existence. We knew nothing about them.”

  “They don’t seem much of an enemy, more like an alternative, albeit a poor one. We’re doing the same job.”

  Twisthorn shrugged. “You’d be surprised at how vicious men can become under the effects of jealousy when they’re working for identical goals. The problem is that we do have the same objectives.”

  “I guess I understand that,” I responded.

  “And Carnacki’s descendants aren’t as noble as he was. His family actually has a bad reputation. He was the exception that proves the rule. The others have always been greedy scheming rogues, manipulators, fraudsters, bullies and truculent megalomaniacs.”

  “Never met an amiable megalomaniac,” I snorted.

  “Don’t get too fresh,” warned Twisthorn, rubbing his fingers along the edge of his kpinga and frowning. “Since it was established, not once has the Carnacki Institute had a chance to mount a serious challenge against us. Not until now. Marvin Carnacki, present director of the Institute, discovered a method for diverting Nekrotzar onto collision course with Earth. There was an old book in a locked attic. He had the good fortune to find it. That book outlined the myth of Nekrotzar, gave instructions for a ritual that would alter its direction through space.”

  “And the ritual was performed?” I asked.

  Twisthorn nodded. “Looks that way.”

  I finished my coffee. I like regular caffeine hits as much as the next guy but this one suddenly tasted disgusting even though the back of my throat’s immune to most bad savours now.

  “What in the name of sweet fellatio is Nekrotzar?”

  * * * * *

  Myths and legends are generally based on truth, that’s common knowledge. Somewhere at the back of every folk tale is an event involving real people. Theseus killed the Minotaur and probably there was a real beast for a real man to slay, not just a plastic puppet animated by hydraulic pumps like the monsters in my films. Before he tackled the Minotaur he killed Sciron and once again that giant was surely an authentic creature. Descriptions are few and far between but Sciron was an ugly mother, that much is certain. And an even more hideous father. Lame joke.

  I’ll continue more seriously. Bald shiny head, flat round face with bushy eyebrows, thin lips, sagging jowls, lopsided ears, wide nose covered in tough black hairs, bulging belly, muscular frame, relatively short legs, eyes the colour of a lake polluted by phosphates and uranium, in one hand a twisted club made of half a tree with obsidian chips embedded for teeth, in the other hand a meatier tool. Or perhaps I’m getting confused with the script for a forthcoming film.

  That happens a lot. Life and fiction all mixed up.

  Sorry for going off on a tangent. Back to my question but I’ll rephrase it more delicately. “What the blazes is Nekrotzar?”

  * * * * *

  Nekrotzar was a planet in a distant galaxy, a galaxy not yet identified. The book found by Marvin Carnacki didn’t seem too interested in speculating on such details as original locations, so I’ll be just as blithe. It was an old planet circling a very old sun, a sun so ancient that it had burnt out. For a million years the planet kept going around anyway but the dead husk of the star was gradually eroded by streams of particles from nearby supernovae and its gravitational attraction became too weak to keep a family of planets in orbit.

  Like the other worlds in that system Nekrotzar drifted away on its own, a rogue globe, like the drop of come that doesn’t get swallowed first time but falls off a pouting lower lip. Sorry, thinking about work again! Anyway, people still lived on Nekrotzar. The race of beings who always had dwelled there were excessively cruel. The monarchs w
ho ruled the planet were among the most insane in the universe. And another mystery that needs to be solved: they were humanoid, similar in many ways to us.

  I’ve listened to Agency boffins discuss this enigma. I don’t profess to know the answer but I’m pretty sure nobody else does. One idea is that in the remote past, long before the Stone Age, humans were more advanced than now. They constructed spaceships and spurted off around the universe, colonising worlds and moving on. Then something happened here, a huge disaster, and the folk who stayed behind on Earth forgot what they knew about technology. So the cosmos is populated with humans and the variations that natural evolution has had time to create but we’re unaware of the fact.

  Plausible. But Nekrotzar is much older than our own planet. Indeed the sun of that foul world had gone out long before our precious Earth even condensed from stardust. At least that’s what Marvin Carnacki’s book claimed. And who wrote that book? I don’t have a clue. The Agency is still examining it. Unlike every other book owned by the Carnacki Institute, that particular volume survived the terrific explosion that followed the ritual.

  Whatever the biology of the matter, one thing remains clear: the rulers of Nekrotzar were complete loons. I’ll skip over the more lurid accounts of what Kings Humper, Sepsis and Nobbel got up to. Each was madder than his predecessor. The line ended with the maddest of all, King Sciron, who wanted a palace bigger than those his ancestors had ruled from. In fact he wanted the biggest palace in the history of creation.

  Nekrotzar was a very old world, as I’ve said before. The core had cooled long ago, there was no liquid mantle under the crust, nothing but solid rock. King Sciron gave orders to start mining minerals, shaping blocks and piling those blocks higher and higher into walls.

  Eventually he had the biggest palace of all time, the biggest possible palace. It didn’t make him happy.

  * * * * *

  The Sciron killed by Theseus was clearly the same guy or else a mythical figure based on the real Sciron, but the question remains how the people on Earth who made up the myth, presumably the Ancient Greeks, knew about Nekrotzar in the first place. I found this aspect of the case rather troubling. I thought about ordering a beer or a bourbon, maybe several, but I wasn’t even in the mood to get drunk. Twisthorn was ready to leave too. He smiled cryptically.