Twisthorn Bellow

by Rhys Hughes

  But what had possessed this cultural icon, whose lifetime hobbies had included the killing of lemmings, to become a storyteller in the Afterlife? It wasn’t very characteristic!

  Some kind of hidden electric amplifier made the storyteller’s lungless voice audible but also distorted it into the rasp of a duck in a sailor’s suit. Cherlomsky grimaced again.

  This new fable was about treachery.

  Mr Disney cleared his grey throat and proceeded to explain how once there was a lion who had reached the end of his lifespan. He lay in front of his cave and because he was the King of the Beasts all the animals in his kingdom came to visit him, but instead of paying their respects, the boar stabbed him with its tusks and the bull gored him with its horns and the ass kicked him in the face. “This is a double death,” lamented the lion as he died, the moral of the entire tale being that only the lowest cowards take revenge on the helpless…

  The members of the audience clapped.

  Zimara chuckled at the wisdom of the fable and nodded his head, but the professor could restrain himself no longer. He stood and made a rude gesture at the raconteur-head.

  “Utter nonsense! A lion wouldn’t say such a thing when it died. Have you no sense of realism?”

  Mr Disney arched an eyebrow. “What do you suppose were the lion’s final words? Pray tell us.”

  Cherlomsky pondered until he had the answer. “Aaaargh! Aieeeeeee! Unghghghghgh!” he said.

  * * * * *

  The Eschatological Crusaders had reached Little Italy. They stood outside the main entrance to Upside Downey Jr’s secret headquarters. A notice on the reinforced wall declared THIS PLACE IS VERY WELL HIDDEN to deter enemies from looking for it.

  The sign was redundant now, for most of those enemies—rival bosses and overzealous law enforcement officers—had been put out of action by the inverted gangster in the previous few months, after he had decided to establish himself as the single crime-lord in the USA, a plot fermenting in his lowdown head for years.

  “Do we penetrate the front or back?” asked Hapi.

  “Frontal assault is less perverted, though rear entry may be useful as a prophylactic,” said Twisthorn.

  “I was referring to the building, boss!”

  “Then my suggestion is that we just stroll inside. After all, this hideout is so perfectly concealed he can’t possibly be expecting us. I don’t believe we should even ring the doorbell.”

  “A commando attack!” whistled Hapi.

  “Indeed. Are we ready?”

  Carnacki snorted. “How can I feasibly ‘stroll’ anywhere with this limp? My cover will be blown!”

  “Wait outside in that case. But you must promise not to escape, defect to the other side or work against us in future exploits—assuming we’re still alive after this particular adventure to have them! Do you give your solemn oath in this regard?”

  “I cunningly do,” agreed Carnacki.

  Twisthorn turned to his other companions. “Follow!” He entered the hideout and found himself in a long passage. But the long passage was embedded in a short paragraph. Very odd! The sound of spaghetti being slurped came from the end.

  “Which way, Mr Bellow?” asked Abortia.

  “Towards that noise. Along the corridor. Now through this door. Keep your voices low. Mine too. Damn, too late for that, I’m already inside the room facing my adversary…”

  “We’re with you too!” cried Hapi and Abortia.

  “I’ll second that,” thirded Breath.

  Upside Downey Jr was standing on a table, his face buried in a plate of Italian food. Not spaghetti but tagliatelle. Just one detail the golem got wrong. Tagliatelle is easier to eat when your mouth is at a lower point than your throat and belly. Much easier to eat with a normal anatomical layout too. Try it sometime.

  Twisthorn coughed politely, menacingly.

  Upside recoiled when he saw his visitors, wiped his lips with a napkin and spluttered tomato sauce everywhere. “How da hell did you get in? I unlocked all da doors, disabled da alarms, deactivated da traps and even dismissed da bodyguards!”

  He considered the matter for a few moments and then frowned. “Oh I see. That’s how. Well now you’re here, what do you want? Bear in mind I’m resourceful and ruthless.”

  Before Twisthorn could answer, Upside added, “That’s right, my wife left me and her name was Ruth, so I’m ruthless. Too bad. But I’m highly resourceful all da same.”

  “More resourceful maybe,” suggested Abortia.

  “Yeah, missy, spot on…”

  “We’re here to kill you,” explained Twisthorn, “because you’re against everything we stand for—which is whatever I feel like at any time—and also because you insulted me a long time ago by refusing to work for my Agency and also because you’re a monster, a bad monster, not a good one like me or even a neutral one.”

  “Insulted you, did I? You undoubtedly deserved it, you clay lump. If you don’t get outta here before my clichéd dinner goes cold I’ll be forced to flip da bird at you. Then you’ll be sorry! Here, wipe your hands in this, will ya? Then throw it back.”

  And he cast his napkin deftly in the golem’s direction like a parachute for supper leftovers. Bad simile, bad situation! The golem hooked it with his kpinga and reeled it closer but he wiped only one hand, his left, in the stained cloth, just in case the request was the trap that it obviously was. A trap and slimy plot device!

  Then Twisthorn bunched it up and hurled it back.

  Upside Downey Jr intercepted it.

  It was amazing to watch how the inverted gangster moved with a body antipodal to that of all other humans, his legs as flexible as arms but even stronger, his feet as gestureful as hands but more tenacious, his bare toes as prehensile as fingers but armed with nails sharp enough to open sealed envelopes or cut teabag strings. He snatched the napkin in mid-air with his left foot. He was showing off.

  “Do we also have to take our shoes off?” asked Abortia. “I’m sorry but none of us are wearing any.”

  “No, missy, I didn’t ask this clay idiot to wipe his hands for da sake of etiquette but because I want to defend myself against him. Now I’ve got his scent on da cloth and I can let da bird have a sniff of it and da bird’ll swoop at him with precision.”

  “Only with precision?” questioned Twisthorn.

  “With murderous intent also!”

  “I think I’m in trouble,” whispered the golem to his friends. “Praise the lower-case gods of contrivance that I only wiped one hand in his napkin! Be ready for anything now…”

  Hapi blinked. “For anything, boss?”

  “That’s what I said!”

  “You mean… hormones, quartz, dementia, cats, sextants, eczema, ice, curates, bees, glockenspiels, flying fish, hazelnuts, string, feldspar, soup, dice, cranes, rhubarb, sums, smog, galaxies, deprivation, resin, obscurity, prickly pears, tables, jars, wallpaper, playing cards, pillows, lizards, hope, spoons, jokes, bones, washdays, interviews, smugness, ripcords, craters, cocktails, worms, stamps, plugs, irony, business, hoes, bus tickets, sand, petals, margins, pedestals, fullness, throats, parasols, memory, semolina, exasperation, altruism, dingbats, polyrhythms, lipstick, ontology, horses, gherkins, uniforms, mouths…”

  “Not those, you thumbskull!

  Upside Downey Jr laughed. “Learn how I deal with those who oppose me. Get ready for da bird!”

  “He’s flipping it!” warned Abortia.

  Something came out of the inverted gangster’s generous sleeve and the dizzy rascal dangled his measly napkin in front of its beak as it emerged. Then it took flight and he gave it a helping flip with his hand. A beautiful creature with golden wings and silver tail. A phoenix. The golem smiled. He wasn’t scared in the slightest. Da bird was too elegant, too lovely, too miraculous to create unease.

  “Come here, tweety!” he coaxed.

  He even extended his arm to serve as a perch.

  The phoenix burst into flame…

  Upside Downey Jr wa
s still laughing. “That’s what da bird does, burn itself up, regenerate itself, burn itself again, and so on. Bad enough for a normal man or monster to have a flamin’ avian landing on his hand, but for a living stick of dynamite it’s an utter catastrophe. Prepare to detonate and bury my hideout under tons of rubble, making it even more secret and difficult to find! I’m killing one stone with two birds—a lump of clay and one bird, for pedants out there!”

  “Da bird’s making for your hand,” squeaked Hapi.

  “The scent of your palm is guiding it to you. When the flames touch it we’re all dead!” wailed Abortia.

  Twisthorn gasped. He had only a few seconds to save his own life and the lives of his comrades. Not enough time to ask Hapi to telekinetically click the phoenix to bits. So he raised his kpinga in his right hand, closed his eyes and brought it down viciously on his left wrist. One of the blades cut into the clay, emerged the other side. The hand fell to the floor. Then Twisthorn kicked it through the open door into the corridor. The phoenix flew smoothly after. The hand rolled and slid down the polished passage nearly as far as the front door.

  There came a deafening explosion!

  Da bird had caught its prey…

  Breath O’Dicks extruded maximum ectoplasm, forming a supernatural umbrella against the shockwave. Upside Downey Jr was also protected by this shield, but his pasta dinner was flung against a wall where the tomato and oregano sauce formed enough star patterns for a constellation, but not one found in any sane zodiac.

  “You’ve failed,” Twisthorn told him.

  Upside Downey Jr snorted.

  “On da contrary, da rule is that whoever loses a hand is da loser. It’s a rule I made up just now but it’s still valid. I plan to celebrate my victory with a second pasta dinner!”

  “We’ll see about that!” roared the golem.

  Almost without thinking, he snatched up Hapi Daze and grafted him to his stump with sheer pressure. The telekinetic hand’s horrified protest was inadequate to stop Twisthorn. The saturated edges of the golem’s exposed inner clay closed around the dangling ligaments of Hapi’s wrist. So hand and arm became a single unit.

  “You’ve killed Hapi!” shrieked Abortia.

  Twisthorn considered this accusation and nodded slowly, his serious face lined with pain and guilt.

  “Technically true, because his nervous system has been incorporated into my own so perfectly that he no longer has any individuality at all, but symbolically he still lives within me and I’ll be reminded of him and my love for him whenever I scratch my buttocks or pick my nose—for I don’t have to do those distasteful things with my own hand now. Did you hear what I said? Symbolically he still lives! Isn’t that just dandy? But if you aren’t placated, then please select any other maudlin hippie sentiment and I’ll authorise it immediately.”

  “You killed the hand I loved!” wept Abortia.

  Twisthorn licked dry lips.

  “Don’t get moody on account of what I did on impulse. Hapi wouldn’t have wanted you to blubber over his demise. Listen, I’ll strike a deal with you. Whenever you feel lonely I’ll let you use my left hand for an hour and I’ll even poke it through a thick drape so the rest of me won’t intrude on your kinky privacy, ok?”

  “Poor Hapi! My darling Hapi Daze!”

  Twisthorn was about to lose his temper with her stubbornness but the inverted gangster came unwittingly to her rescue by distracting the golem with another threat, for the villain reached under the table for a gun that had been secured to the underside with sticky tape. It was a very odd gun. It curved right around so that the barrel faced the operator. That’s a weird philosophy for any firearm.

  Upside Downey Jr decided to explain.

  “Behold my prototype of Dædalus’s In-da-Right gun! Yeah you heard right. In-da-Right gun. æsop was in no technological position to make a copy, but I was. If I pull da trigger, I’m da one who gets shot. Does that make no sense? Sure it does, because it fires no bullets. Nope, it expels at great force a certain certainty—namely da certainty that da operator is in da right, hence its name.”

  “You mean that if you fire it, you’ll think you’re in the right about what happens next?” asked Abortia.

  “Not think, missy, but actually be. Can’t you comprehend? No doubts, no alternative interpretations. Pure Absolutism with a capital ‘a’—not like that one! And if I’m in da right, then you’ll have to let me do what I like. Or else you’ll be in da wrong!

  “We have to disarm him!” cried Abortia.

  “Leave it to me!” responded Twisthorn. “If there’s one thing I despise, apart from the French and the rest of the universe, it’s someone who puts emphasis on a word that’s already part of an italicised sentence, turning it back to plain text! And this topsy-turvy moron here did just that. So I’m going to granulate his hide!”

  And he repeatedly clicked the fingers of his left hand, hoping to access Hapi’s telekinetic powers thereby, but clearly those powers had died with the absorption of Hapi’s individuality into the golemic whole and nothing happened. Twisthorn gulped.

  “Prepare to be wronged!” chortled Upside Downey Jr.

  “Heck!” whimpered the golem.

  But Abortia wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to use her own special power, the one that everyone seems to have forgotten about, including the author, until now—the ability to induce fits of weeping! She directed this force at the inverted gangster…

  Instantly he burst into sobs, but because of the position of his head and eyes his hot salty tears spilled not onto cheek or chin but directly onto the floor—creating a slipping hazard!

  Unhinged with grief he shuffled forward. One false step into his own pool of sadness and he went tumbling over, the gun clattering out of his grasp and sliding to the golem.

  Twisthorn snatched it up, strode over to the prone gangster. He aimed the weapon and grimaced.

  “If I pull this trigger, I’ll be in the right and you in the wrong, and then I can rip you to pieces you with a clear conscience, but that’s an easy way out. Far harder to slaughter you while I’m in the wrong! To do that shows far more dedication, true fanaticism. The professor created me to fight for what’s right even when it’s wrong, for what’s good even when it’s bad, so that’s what I intend to do!”

  He reversed the gun, so the barrel rested against Upside’s head, then he pulled the trigger. A broad smile crossed the inverted gangster’s face and he chuckled, “I’m in da right!”

  “Yes you are, you really are. Goodbye!”

  Methodically, unjustly, wrongly, Twisthorn tore him into tiny pieces and scattered them about. Then he broke Dædalus’s gun on his knee and stomped out of the room…

  Abortia and Breath followed. The corridor was blocked with debris but a gap had been blasted in the outside wall. They stepped into daylight. Carnacki wasn’t there, but he’d promised to remain, so he must have been vaporised in the explosion.

  It was already late afternoon. Just enough time for a new æsop-style fable about Twisthorn Bellow…

  * * * * *

  There was once a clever golem. Because he was trapped in a distant land without money, he urged one of his paranormal friends to extrude enough ectoplasm to form rotors and turn himself into an organic helicopter. And so they all flew precariously back home. The golem unlocked his Agency gates and went inside. In his absence lots of mail had accumulated in the mail-room. Some parcels had opened themselves and fought to the death with the contents of other parcels.

  Moral: if you neglect your problems and leave them to mount up you’ll find they cancel each other out…

  THE SHOELACES OF JUPITER

  “I’ve changed my name by deed poll,” announced Losthorn Bellow less than one month after returning from Chicago. “I bet you can’t guess what I’m called now! Have a go.”

  “Any prizes for the right answer?” asked Abortia.

  “None at all, Miss Stake, but there’s a forfeit if you decline to take a guess. A nast
y, lethal forfeit.”

  “Did you change it to Twisthorn Grumpy?”

  “My surname’s the same.”

  “So you altered your first name! I can’t imagine why. Twisthorn suits you perfectly. Well now, as I’m forced to guess, I’ll take a wild stab in the dark. How about Oswald?”

  “Close but extremely distant. It’s Losthorn!”

  “Losthorn Bellow? Ah!”

  “Yes,” said Losthorn, “rather evocative of my present plight, isn’t it? I keep thinking about our last adventure and how detrimental it was to my health. I lost my knee, my horn, my hand… Good job I’m already 90% of the way through my anticipated life-span, otherwise I’d get depressed and need to seek counselling.”

  “How is the graft, by the way?”

  Losthorn raised his left arm and tried to flex his fingers. They moved slowly and made awkward clicking motions. “I’m managing to exert more control every day. Still can’t make the telekinetic powers work, but they’ll come eventually, I hope. Hapi’s life wasn’t sacrificed in vain even though it was sacrificed in vain!”

  Abortia cleared her throat. “When it is fully functioning again, I don’t suppose you’ll be willing…”

  “To let you spend time with it for bizarre erotic escapades? Of course I will! Don’t worry, Miss Stake, your depraved sexual tastes will be catered for to the utmost extreme.”

  “Thanks, Mr Bellow. I loved him.”

  “Why the formality? Call me Losthorn. I’m your friend as well as your boss and I’m here to help you as well as obliterate you entirely if you fail to discharge your duties.”

  “Thanks again. You said on the phone there was a dismal crisis in the mail-room. We’re standing in the mail-room now, I think. So why did you summon me here, Losthorn?”

  Losthorn overturned his desk, smashing it to matchwood. “How dare you refer to me by my first name! I’m your boss, you amniotic imbecile! Just because I tell you to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Do what I want, not what I say!”

  “Sorry, Mr Bellow. I’ll remember that.”