by Rhys Hughes
While he spoke, his spring-loaded fingers connected titanium rods to each other, soldered wires, bolted plates, positioned solenoids. The golem cursed himself for leaving such useful items lying about on the tables. He should have realised that one day a robot would arrive in the post and use these leftovers to build a bigger and more deadly robot that might succeed where earlier robots had failed…
“And you’re that inventor, are you?”
“Yep. This is my invention. Its name is Backside-in-Gear and it takes the form of a massive bum.”
“A huge hobo?” squinted Twisthorn.
“That’s American usage.”
“Well, I’m learning the slang, for a forthcoming trip over there to kill an uppity inverted gangster.”
“Bum as in ass,” clarified Does-My-Head-In.
“A donkey, you mean?”
“Look, I don’t have time to play wordgames with clay men. Take up the matter with Frabjal Troose.”
“No need. I know what buttocks are,” grimly asserted Twisthorn, “and these are half the size of the laboratory!”
“Oh my!” croaked Abortia.
Does-My-Head-In smirked and remarked casually, “By the way, if the uppity inverted gangster you referred to is Upside Downey Jr, then he’s a direct descendant of æsop.”
“That surprises me,” admitted Twisthorn.
“Don’t stand there chatting with him,” cried Abortia. “Do something to save all our precious lives!”
“What do you suggest, Miss Stake?”
“Stop Does-My-Head-In before he powers up the other robot. Snap off his stupid head!” urged Abortia.
“BELLLLOOOWWW!” bellowed Twisthorn Bellow…
He was in berserker mode!
Running full tilt at Does-My-Head-In, he aimed a terrific punch at its shiny smug chin, but before his clay fist could connect with the dimpled zinc curve, something disgusting happened. The entire robot head turned inside out and everything was squeamishly exposed, all the interior of the skull, the electronic brain with every circuit dripping blue sparks, brightly banded resistors, spindly capacitors, light emitting diodes, transistors like massively magnified viruses!
Twisthorn pulled his punch. “Ugh!” he retched.
“Truly vile!” cried Abortia.
“The perfect defence,” said Twisthorn, “and means we have no choice but to stand idle while he activates the second robot. When you consider what he did with his head, it seems amazing that Does-My-Head-In has a name connected with his head.”
“A remarkable coincidence,” agreed Abortia.
“This new robot isn’t able to manufacture his own energy,” explained Does-My-Head-In, “so I must plug myself into him like this and transfer my own battery power. I’m dying as a result but the sacrifice is worth it to know that Twisthorn Bellow has met his match! Now I feel dizzy and I’m slipping away. Hold me, mama!”
Twisthorn frowned. “Can’t understand a word.”
“That’s because his mouth is now on the inside of his reversed skull. I will press one of my waldo ears next to his chest and thanks to induction I should be able to eavesdrop.”
“Do that, Miss Stake!” ordered Twisthorn.
Abortia pursed her lips.
“He’s lamenting the fact that he forgot to install the anti-fear circuits into Backside-in-Gear. He left them on the bench over there. What a pity! Now he’s singing a sort of song. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do? How is it possible for one of the smallest meadow flowers to respond to such obsessive questioning?”
“Pure gibberish! Is he dead yet, Miss Stake?”
“Technically speaking, no, because he was never alive, but he doesn’t work any more. However the second robot has just booted up. We should be scared of a thing like that—with all the power of a rump—but it seems more terrified than we are!”
“Frightened of my kpinga,” chortled Twisthorn.
“Or your face,” said Abortia.
“More likely yours, Miss Stake, you unborn ugly!”
“Scarydung!” shrieked Abortia.
“What’s he doing here? I thought he was humping the Queen today. I haven’t had time to tidy up.”
“No, not Scarydung, one word, but scary dung! My haste conflated it into the semblance of a name.”
“Ah, I perceive what you refer to. The massive buttocks that comprise the totality of Backside-in-Gear are discharging robotic excreta, probably a result of its extreme fear.”
“Yes. The dung itself isn’t an issue—just nuts and bolts, typical robot waste material—but see what’s wriggling around inside the robot-pat. A horrid cybernetic tapeworm!”
“And it’s coming this way, Miss Stake!”
“Help! Help! I can’t thrust my own arm right down my throat to pull out parasites like you can!”
“Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it… Wrggghhh!”
Rearing like a serpent hellbent on revenge, the robotic tapeworm flung itself around Twisthorn’s neck and drew itself as tight as a noose. Slowly and painfully the golem worked his fingers under one of its coils, digging trenches in his own throat as he did so, and then with a wrench so mighty and wild it ought to have a monkey named after it, he pulled it off. What he did next was reminiscent of what he’d done to Breath O’Dicks after the perverted sex-magic ritual.
Maybe he was running out of ideas!
He used the tapeworm like a whip, cracking it with all the glee of an insane ringmaster, cutting off the heads of potted plants, missing Abortia by millimetres, accidentally slicing open the throat of a civilian employee who had come in to see what the trouble was, breaking jars of liquids on shelves, tearing gashes in posters fixed to walls with sticky tape, even one showing the Periodic Table.
“Crack that whip!” urged Abortia, recklessly. “When a problem comes along, you must whip it… Before cream sits out too long, you must whip it… Whip it into shape!”
The golem frothed and growled.
In his madness he even whipped his own kpinga, which he had planted upright in the dirt of a vacant plant-pot for safekeeping. One curved blade neatly decapitated the parasite.
The head and three inches of neck writhed.
The remainder of the body went limp and started smoking. Twisthorn leaned over to pick up the head.
“I’ll pop that in my pocket. Might be useful!”
“Pocket?” exclaimed Abortia. “But you don’t wear clothes—they have been banned on pain of death!”
“Quite right. I’ll have an independent pocket tailor-made that I’ll wear around my neck on a thong. No need for trousers or shirts in such a case! I entrust this task to you, Miss Stake. Why not put the kettle on and brew coffee while you’re doing it?”
“That’s Carnacki’s job now, Mr Bellow!”
Twisthorn examined the active head of the tapeworm. “Can’t imagine what use I’ll ever find for it…”
Backside-in-Gear suddenly toppled over.
“Died of fright,” said Abortia.
There came a knocking on the window in the mail-room. With a frown, Twisthorn went to see who was there. Abortia followed. On the other side of the glass flapped a being with hands for wings. Between two fingers it held a letter. The golem opened the window, took the envelope and tore it open. But he didn’t read the letter.
“Become a postman now, have you?”
“By no means,” said Enid Hans, “but I’m happy to do a service for the man who sent this letter, because he’s an enemy of yours. My friend is my enemy’s enemy, apparently.”
“Yeah, I know that maxim. It’s accurate.”
“What does the letter say?” cried Abortia impatiently.
“It’s from Frabjal Troose. Says he knows I’ll defeat both his robots, so he wants to save time by adding a pre-emptive postscript to the effect that we haven’t heard the last of him. Then he does a creepy laugh, a wuh-hu-hu, and signs his name with a kiss.”
“Wonder what that means?” wondered Abortia.
Tw
isthorn shrugged. “No idea. But it gives me an ideal opportunity to slaughter his vile messenger!”
And he ran back into the laboratory to snatch up his kpinga and hurl it blindly from the other room, missing Abortia by inches—to the confusion of metric and imperial measurements—and also missing Enid Hans, but striking full in the face another innocent civilian who had come to check out the source of all the noise…
Enid Hans flapped contemptuously away.
Twisthorn slumped on a stool. “I can’t wait to arrive in America. It has to be better than this place!”
* * * * *
They limped wearily back to the games room where Breath O’Dicks was playing backgammon with one of his ectoplasmic extrusions. But he was losing as badly as a bad loser.
Twisthorn glowered and growled…
“Where the hell were you, Breath, when we needed you? There was an automated chickadee for you to extrude your throbsters up, but in fact we had to handle it on our own. I’m starting to think you’re a traitor as well as an incompetent. You’d better perform better when we reach Chicago. One false move and I’ll gut you.”
“Wait a moment, boss!” protested Breath. “I have been making myself useful in your absence. One of my extrusions did research and discovered that as well as our own Agency and the Carnacki Institute there is a third foundation dedicated to tackling supernatural threats at large in the world and it’s based in America.”
Twisthorn frowned. “Really? What’s it called?”
“The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence. Their star agent is a good demon named Hellboy.”
“Bah! Sounds like a doughboy to me! I’ll break him!”
“You’re on the same side, boss.”
“BELLOW SMASH!” countered the golem.
“Okay, keep your horn on, I was just trying to be helpful. Listen, this backgammon isn’t working for me. Fancy a game of shogi instead? I’ll do my best but you’ll still win…”
“You are one of the good guys,” said Twisthorn.
* * * * *
Born in the year 620 BC or thereabouts, æsop was probably a native of Phrygia, a country in the middle of what is now Turkey, a rather barren realm that nonetheless did produce famous things, including King Midas, a ruler with a golden touch. My rulers are wooden but feature both metric and imperial units. Useful!
It has been rumoured that the Walnut Whip Helmet was also originally a product of Phrygia before it found its way to France. Unlikely. Rumours such as that are no better than the rumour claiming poached eggs weirdly enclosed by meat are edible. That one was scotched long ago! What does this have to do with æsop?
Probably nothing, but one never knows.
The thing is, æsop tended to hide his meanings—and hide them badly and slightly annoyingly—in brief tales called ‘fables’. Here is an example of a fable. Ready? The frogs wanted a king to rule them, so Zeus granted their request and gave them a log. They weren’t happy for long with a log for king and asked for a better king, one that moved. So Zeus sent them a stork that gobbled ‘em up.
Profound? You be the judge. I’ll be the executioner.
The jury is still out…
æsop was a very ugly man. And deformed. He was a slave too. Hardly the best start in life! He was bought by a man named Xanthus, who took him to live in his house on the island of Samos. Presumably that’s where he began telling his fables.
One day, æsop was strolling by the seashore—he’d been charged with collecting enough seaweed to make the evening’s fire smokier, to irritate the neighbours—when he saw a bottle bobbing on the waves. Back then, they didn’t have bottles like we do now. They had amphorae. Pottery jugs. This one was sealed. æsop fished it out with a piece of driftwood as foul and gnarled as his own face.
The bottle contained a manuscript!
æsop was one of those educated slaves who could read. He read what was written on the rolled up sheets of papyrus and soon realised that they had been floating about on the ocean for at least six hundred years! It was the handwriting of the superb inventor Dædalus that æsop was squinting at with his bulging foul eyes!
The inventor Dædalus, of course, created the first ornithopter and the first maze, among other marvels…
But the manuscript now trembling in the grotesque hands of æsop was the unpublished blueprint of an invention superior to the previous work of the famous proto-boffin. It described a new weapon, a weapon easily able to alter the future history of warfare if it could be built. Which it couldn’t because of technical difficulties.
There just wasn’t a delivery system in existence capable of doing what was necessary to make the damn thing work right. Not then. But there is now. How dreadful is progress!
æsop kept the secret of Dædalus’s forgotten weapon to himself. Only on his deathbed did he reveal it, to his only son, who was made to pledge that he too wouldn’t breathe a word about it. That son finally passed down the secret to his own son, who passed it to his son, and so on. Such things happen for the sake of plots.
With every new generation, the mutations grew worse and worse until some thirteen centuries after æsop’s death, a boy was born who was so hideously ugly there are no real words to describe him, only neologisms, which are made-up words, such as ‘dhurky’, ‘glubbious’ and ‘yughiful’. He really was that awful! Strangely, his son was slightly less ugly, and so on, and so on. How bizarre is that?
It was almost as if the human form was coming back into phase, but it was being inverted piece by piece. With each new generation, arms grew below legs, eyes appeared under mouths, navels above nipples, the whole order of human anatomy was slowly reversed. And then, with the passing of another thirteen centuries, a perfectly inverted man was the result. By this time the clan had emigrated.
Upside Downey Jr knew he was the direct descendant of æsop but he was also a fully-fledged American citizen with a drawl. At first glance he looked like a normal man walking on his hands, an acrobat maybe, until the viewer saw that his face was the right way up. Also the lower half of his body was rotated by 180 degrees, meaning his rump faced forwards, his groin backwards, don’t know what advantage that might be. He liked flipping da bird at his enemies.
He could use his feet exactly like hands.
He was also in a position to build a working model of the weapon that Dædalus invented so long ago.
Upside Downey Jr didn’t look very Greek.
Only his earlobes were perfect replicas of the earlobes of his legendary ancestor. He wore a ring in one. Like a pirate on the opposite side of the world to you. Wherever you are.
Now where’s the moral in any of that?
* * * * *
Twisthorn was busy counting the remaining blades on his sword-stick. He scratched his head and called Hapi and Abortia for assistance. No matter how many times he counted he always got the same total, but it seemed wrong. Abortia arrived first.
“What’s the trouble, Mr Bellow?”
“Should be nine blades, but I keep counting less!”
“Let’s see. One was dissolved by acid and two were shot off by Nazis. You say there were twelve originally? One plus two is three, I think, and twelve minus three is… Um!”
“A difficult calculation,” agreed Twisthorn.
Hapi entered. “Cool! Richie!”
“No, Richie’s not here. I’m glad he’s not here. I have no idea who he is, and if he did turn up without a security pass I would have to summon the guards to throw out his leaking cadaver after I’d mangled it to a pulp, but that’s not important right now.”
Hapi was uneasy. “What are you doing, boss?”
“Counting the blades on my kpinga. I’m sure one is missing. If so, I’ll have to conclude it was stolen by someone in the Agency. The thief will be hung, drawn and quartered—but if I can’t find a talented enough artist then just hung and quartered!”
“Who could have done it?” wondered Abortia.
“Not me! I didn’t accidentally click
my telekinetic fingers and make it vanish into thin air!” cried Hapi.
Twisthorn nodded thoughtfully. “I’m really glad to hear that. For one moment I was worried you were the culprit, because your fingerprints are embedded everywhere in the dust motes in the air around the place where I left it. I didn’t want to order your lingering death, so your assurance of your innocence is a big relief!”
“I believe him too,” declared Abortia.
Breath O’Dicks entered cautiously and said, “There’s a visitor at the gate who wants to come in…”
“Kill him and send him away,” ordered Twisthorn.
“But you invited him here—his name is Mr Gum. He hopes to deliver a lecture before we leave for America. He’s the first of the academics on your revised list of professors.”
“When do we leave for America?” asked Abortia.
“In about twenty minutes,” replied the golem, “so I’ll have to slay Mr Gum during his lecture rather than after. What a nuisance! I loathe these pompous intellectual types, coming here to force their opinions down our monstrous throats. The twerps!”
* * * * *
Dancin’ Daze was dancing all over the stage, soaking up the atmosphere and digging the crowd response. It was a small club, an intimate venue, but the audience was full of energy and enthusiasm. Dancin’ exchanged smiles with Ruby dubDub, who sat at a drum kit and pounded out such complicated snaky rhythms that even free-jazz devotees were unable to tap snazzy heels accurately.
But Dancin’ kept perfect time. Her crucial role was to press an effects pedal whenever Ruby required a spacey sound. Each drum had a pickup that fed a signal through this pedal. Effects pedals were probably the only instrument Dancin’ Daze was suited for, but she brought a new vibrancy to what had previously been denigrated as a depressing operation. There was an art to doing it after all!
A third figure stood on stage. Wilson the Clockwork Man plucked his banjo with a three-fingered rolling technique that imparted an irresistible velocity to his tunes. He crackled, hissed and sometimes picked up Radio Albania, for his head was a wireless receiver. After a news bulletin, that station coincidentally played a song the same group had recorded the previous week and the result was a weird collage.