The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “McCubby,” I said patiently, “this is the most important part of the entire ritual.”

  “Ah, well. Here goes the last of me Hex-lax.”

  He handed the chocolate to the blackfellow and launched into a long and seductive argument. At last, with a red-eyed glare at me, and so suddenly that I and the Anulas all jumped, Yartatgurk barked viciously into a clamorous chant. The other natives looked slightly uneasy and began to drift back toward camp.

  “My word, you’re hearing something that not many white coves ever do,” said McCubby. “The age-old Anula death song.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “He’s not going to die.”

  “Not him. You.”

  I shook my head reprovingly and said. “I’ve no time for levity. I must get to work on the sermon I’ll preach at the conclusion of all this.”

  As you can appreciate, Dean Dismey, I had set myself quite a task. I had to be ready with two versions, depending on whether the rainmaking was or was not successful. But the sermons had certain similarities – for example, in both of them I referred to Prayer as “a Checkbook on the Bank of God”. And this, of course, posed the problem of explaining a checkbook in terms that an Outback aborigine could comprehend.

  While I worked in the seclusion of my tent. I yet kept an ear cocked to Yartatgurk’s conscientious keening. As night came down, he began to get hoarse, and several times seemed on the verge of flagging in his endeavor. Each time, I would lay aside my pencil and go down to wave encouragingly at him across the billabong. And each time, this indication of my continued interest did not fail to inspire him to a redoubled output of chanting.

  The rest of the Anulas remained quietly in their camp this night, without any moans of indigestion, combat fatigue, or other distress. I was grateful that no extraneous clamor disturbed my concentration on the sermons, and even remarked on it to McCubby:

  “The natives seem restful tonight.”

  “T’ain’t often the poor buggers come the bounce on a bellyful of good python meat.”

  I cried, “They’ve eaten the ceremonial snake?”

  “Don’t matter,” he said consolingly. “The whole skelington is still down there under your wicker wicket.”

  Oh, well, I thought. There was nothing I could do about it now. And, as McCubby implied, the skeleton ought to represent as potent a symbol as the entire careass.

  It was well after midnight, and I had just finished the notes for my next day’s services, when a deputation of tribal elders came calling.

  “They say you’d oblige ’em, Rev, either to hurry up and die as warranted, or else to placate Yartatgurk someway. They can’t git to sleep with him caterwauling.”

  “Tell them,” I said, with a magisterial wave of my hand, “it will all soon be over.”

  I knew not how truly I had spoken, until I was violently awakened some hours later by my tent folding up like an umbrella – thwack! – and disappearing into the darkness.

  Then, just as violently, the darkness was riven and utterly abolished by the most brilliant, writhing, forking, jagging, snarling cascade of lightning I ever hope to see. It was instantly succeeded by an even blacker darkness, the acrid stench of ozone, and a roiling cannonade of thunder that simply picked up the whole Never Never land and shook it like a blanket.

  When I could hear again, I discerned McCubby’s voice, whimpering in stark horror out of the darkness, “Gawd strike me blind.” It seemed more than likely. I was admonishing him to temper his impiety with prudence, when a second cosmie uproar, even more impressive than the first, raged through the echoing dome of heaven.

  I had not yet recovered from its numbing fury when a wind like a driving piston took me in the back, balled me up, and sent me tumbling end over end across the countryside. I caromed painfully off numerous eucalyptuses and acacias and unidentifiable other obstacles until I collided with another human body. We grabbed onto each other, but kept on traveling until the wind died for a moment.

  By great good fortune, it was McCubby I had encountered – though I must say he seemed unaware of any good fortune in this. “What in buggery have you gone and done?” he demanded, in a quaver.

  “What hath God wrought?” I corrected him. Oh, it would make an ineradicable impression on the Anulas, when I explained that this was not really the doing of their dollar-bird. “Now,” I couldn’t help exclaiming, “if it will only pour down rain!”

  The words were no sooner spoken than McCubby and I were flattened again. The rain had come down like God’s boot-heel. It continued mercilessly to stamp on my back, grinding me into the solid earth so that I could barely expand my chest to breathe. This, I thought in my agony, is really more than I meant to ask for.

  After an incalculable while, I was able to inch my mouth over beside McCubby’s ear and bellow loud enough for him to hear, “We’ve got to find my sermon notes before the rain ruins them!”

  “Your bloody notes are in Fiji by now!” he shouted back. “And so will we be if we don’t do a bleeding bunk in a bleeding hurry!”

  I tried to remonstrate that we couldn’t leave the Anulas now, when everything was proceeding so well, and when I had such a God-given opportunity to make a splendid conversion of the whole tribe.

  “Can’t you get it through your googly skull?” he bellowed. “This is the Cockeye Bob – come early and worse than I ever seen it! This whole land will be underwater, and us with it, if we don’t get blew a thousand mile and tore to rags in the bush!”

  “But my entire mission will have been in vain,” I protested, between the peals of thunder. “And the poor Anulas deprived of –”

  “Bugger the bloody black barstids!” he howled. “They waved mummuk hours ago. We got to get to the lorry – if it ain’t flew away. Make the high ground by the Speriment Station.”

  Clinging fast together, we were just able to blunder our way through what seemed a solid wall of water. The lightning and thunder were simultaneous now, blinding and deafening us at the same time. Torn-off branches, uprooted bushes and trees of increasingly larger size careened like dark meteors across the Never Never land. Once we ducked the weirdest missile of all – the eerily airborne skeleton of Yartatgurk’s python, still sporting its natty grass collar.

  I thought it odd that we encountered none of the black-fellows. But we did find the truck at last, jostling anxiously on its springs and squeaking in every rivet as if for help. Wind-blasted water streamed up its weather side and smoked off its top like the spindrift from a hurricane sea. I really think that only the dead weight of the remaining beads, which still filled three-quarters of the van, prevented the truck’s being overturned.

  McCubby and I fought our way to the lee door and opened it, to have it nearly blown off the hinges as the wind clawed at it. The inside of the cab was no quieter than outdoors, what with the thunder still head-splittingly audible and the rain practically denting the metal, but the stiller air inside was easier to breathe.

  When he stopped panting, McCubby wrung another minor cloudburst out of his whiskers and then started the engine. I laid a restraining hand on his arm. “We can’t abandon the Anulas to this,” I said. “Could we dump the beads and crowd in the women and pickaninnies?”

  “I toldjer, they all took a ball of chalk hours ago!”

  “Does that mean they’ve gone?”

  “Soon as you sacked out. They were well clear of the low ground by the time the Cockeye Bob came down.”

  “Hm,” I said, a little hurt. “Rather ungrateful of them, to desert their spiritual adviser without notice.”

  “Oh, they’re grateful, Rev,” McCubby hastened to assure me. “That’s why they waved mummuk – you made ’em wealthy. My word, they’re reg’lar plutes now. Nicked off to Darwin, to peddle that python skin to a shoe-manufactory.”

  I could only wheeze. “The Lord works in mysterious ways . . .”

  “Anyhow, that was the reason they guv me,” said McCubby, as the truck began to roll. “But now I suspicion they
smelled the blow coming and bunked out, like bandicoots before a bush fire.”

  “Without warning us?”

  “Well, that Yartatgurk had put the debbil-debbil on you with that death-song of his.” After a moment, McCubby added darkly, “I didn’t savvy the boong bugger had narked me, too.”

  With that, he headed the truck for the Experimental Station. Neither the windshield wipers nor the headlights were of any use. There was no road, and the faint track we’d followed coming out here was now obliterated. The air was still thick with flying debris. The truck jolted now and then to the resounding blow of a hurtling eucalyptus bole, or chunk of rock, or kangaroo, for all I know. Miraculously, none of them came through the windshield.

  Gradually we inched upward from the low country, along the gently rising slope of a plateau. When we achieved its level top, we knew we were safe from the rising waters. And when we nosed down its farther slope, the rackety violence of the weather abated somewhat, cut off from us by the intervening highland.

  As the noise subsided behind us, I broke the silence to ask McCubby what would become of the Anulas now. I ventured the hope that they would spend their new-found wealth on implements and appliances to raise their living standards. “Perhaps build a rustic church,” I mused, “and engage a circuit preacher . . .”

  McCubby snorted. “Wealth to them, Rev, is a couple of quid, which is all they’ll get for that skin. And they’ll blow it all in one cranky shivoo. Buy a few bottles of the cheapest plonk they can find, and stay shikkered for a week. Wake up sober in the Compound calaboose, most likely, with the jumping Joe Blakes for comp’ny.”

  This was most discouraging. It appeared that I had accomplished nothing whatsoever by my coming, and I said so.

  “Why, they’ll never forget you, Rev,” McCubby said through clenched teeth. “No more will every other bloke in the territory that you caught with his knickers down. Here you’ve brought on the Wet nearly two months early, and brought it with a vengeance. Prob’ly drownded every jumbuck in the Never Never, washed out the railroad perway, bankrupted every ringer, flooded out the peanut farmers and the cotton planters –”

  “Please,” I implored. “Don’t go on.”

  There was another long and gloomy silence. Then McCubby took pity on me. He lifted my spirits somewhat – and encapsulated my mission – with a sort of subjunctive consolation.

  “If you came out here,” he said, “mainly to break the Bingis of conjuring up heathen debbil-debbils to make rain, well, you can bet your best Bible they’ll never do that again.”

  And on that optimistic note, I shall hasten this history towards its happy conclusion.

  Several days later, McCubby and I arrived at Brunette Downs. He had the truckloads of beads transferred into a caravan of Land Rovers and headed Outback once more. I doubt not at all that he has since become a multimillionaire “plute” by cornering the market in dingo scalps. I was able to engage another driver, and the two of us returned the rented trucks to Sydney.

  By the time I got back to the city, I was absolutely penniless, and looking picturesquely, not to say revoltingly, squalid. I hied myself at once to the English-Speaking Union in search of PrimPro BisPac Shagnasty. It was my intention to apply for some temporary underling job in the Sydney church organization and to beg a small salary advance. But it became immediately apparent, when I found Bishop Shagnasty, that he was in no charitable mood.

  “I keep getting these dunning letters,” he said peevishly, “from the Port of Sydney Authority. A freight consignment of some sort is there in your name. I can’t sign for it, can’t even find out what it is, but they keep sending me fantastic bills for its storage.”

  I said I was just as much in the dark as he, but the Bishop interrupted:

  “I wouldn’t advise that you hang about here, Mobey. Deputy Protector Mashworm may come in at any minute, and he’s after your hide. He’s already flayed a goodly portion of mine.”

  “Mine, too,” I couldn’t forbear muttering.

  “He keeps getting letters of reproach from the Resident Commissioner of the Northern Territory, inquiring why in blazes you were ever let loose to corrupt the blackfellows. Seems a whole tribe descended en masse on Darwin, got vilely intoxicated and tore up half the city before they could be corralled. When they were sober enough to be questioned, they said a new young Bush Brother – unmistakably you – had provided the money for their binge.”

  I tried to bleat an explanation, but he overrode me.

  “That wasn’t all. One of the blacks claimed the Bush Brother had shot and wounded him. Others said that the missionary had provoked an intertribal war. Still others claimed he danced naked before them and then fed them poison, but that part wasn’t too clear.”

  I whinnied again, and was again overridden.

  “I don’t know exactly what you did up there, Mobey, and frankly I don’t care to be told. I would be everlastingly grateful, though, for one word from you.”

  “What’s that, your reverence?” I asked huskily.

  He stuck out his hand. “Good-bye.”

  Having not much else to do, I drifted down to the Woolloomooloo docks to inquire about this mysterious freight consignment. It turned out to have been sent by dear old SoPrim’s Overseas Mission Board and consisted of one Westinghouse two-seater electric golf cart, seven gross of Lightolier lampshades – that’s 1,008 lampshades – and a number of cartons of Old Crone Brand burley snuff.

  I was too benumbed and disheartened, by this time, even to evince surprise. I signed a receipt and was given a voucher. I carried the voucher to the sailors’ low quarter of the town, where I was approached by shifty-eyed men. One of them, the master of a rusty trawler engaged in smuggling Capitalist luxuries to the underadvantaged Communists of Red China, bought my entire consignment, sight unseen. I have no doubt that I was bilked on the transaction, but I was satisfied to be able to pay off the accumulated storage fees on the stuff and have enough left over to buy steerage passage on the first tramp ship leaving for the good old U.S.A.

  The only landfall in this country was New York, so that’s where I debarked, about a fortnight ago. Hence the postmark on this letter, because I am still here. I was penniless again by the time I landed. But through fortuitous coincidence I visited the local Natural History Museum (because admission was free) at just the time they were preparing a new aborigine tableau in the Australian wing. When I mentioned my recent stay among the Anulas, I was at once engaged as a technical consultant.

  The salary was modest, but I managed to put away a bit, in hopes of soon returning to Virginia and to dear old Southern Primitive, to find out what my next mission was to be. Just recently, however, I have discovered that a mission calls me right here.

  The artist painting the backdrop of the aborigine tableau – an Italian chap, I take him to be; he is called Daddio – has introduced me to what he calls his “in-group”: habitants of an homogeneous village within the very confines of New York City. He led me into a dim, smoky cellar room (a “pad”) full of these people – bearded, smelly, inarticulate – and I felt almost transported back to the abos.

  Daddio nudged me and whispered, “Go on, say it. Loud, and just the way I coached you, man.”

  So I declaimed to the room at large the peculiar introduction he had made me rehearse in advance: “I am Crispin Mobey, boy Bush Brother! I have just been circumcised and I learned my Pitjantjatjara from a defrocked priest named Krapp!”

  The people in the room, who had been desultorily chatting among themselves, were instantly silent. Then one said, in a hushed and reverent murmur: “This Mobey is so far in we’re out . . .”

  “Like all of a sudden,” breathed another, “Howl is the square root of Peale . . .”

  A lank-haired girl arose from a squat and scrawled on the wall with her green eyebrow pencil, “Leary, no. Larry Welk, si.”

  “Naked Lunch is, like, Easter brunch,” said someone else.

  “Like, man,” said several peo
ple at once, “our leader has been taken to us!”

  None of this conveyed any more to me than had the arcane utterances of McCubby and Yartatgurk. But I have been accepted here as I never was even among the Anulas. Nowadays they wait with bearded lips agape for my tritest pronouncement and listen, as avidly as no other congregation I have ever known, to my most recondite sermons. (The one about Prayer being a Check-book, etc., I have recited on several occasions in the tribe’s coffeehouses, to an accompaniment of tribal string music.)

  And so, Dean Dismey, I have been divinely guided – all unwittingly but unswervingly – to the second mission of my career. The more I learn of these villagers and their poor deluded idolatries, the more I feel certain that, sooner or later, I can be of Help.

  I have applied to the mission headquarters of the local synod of the Primitive Protestant Church for proper accreditation and have taken the liberty of listing you, reverend sir, and Bishop Shagnasty as references. Any good word that you may be kind enough to vouchsafe in my behalf will be more than appreciated by,

  Yours for Humility Rampant,

  Crispin Mobey

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  Gail-Nina Anderson is an art historian and freelance lecturer and journalist. She lectures on European Art and Gothic Literature at Newcastle University. She is also an expert on vampire lore and Fortean phenomena. She has undertaken a guided tour of Transylvania and was involved in an investigation into “Bigfoot” sightings in a park near Newcastle.

  Poul Anderson (1926–2001) was one of the great American writers of both science fiction and fantasy. He sold his first story back in 1947 and over the next half-century established a reputation for his technological fiction, strong in ideas as well as characters. His books include The High Crusade (1960), World Without Stars (1966) and Tau Zero (1970) whilst amongst his fantasies are The Broken Sword (1954), Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961), and The Merman’s Children (1979). Canadian-born Gordon R. Dickson (1923–2001) was likewise a heavy-weight of both fantasy and sf best known for his Dorsai series of works which began with The Genetic General (1960) and gradually began to encompass much of his sf. His fantasies include the delightful The Dragon and the George (1976) and The Dragon Knight (1990). Anderson and Dickson met at university in 1948 and though they remained life-long friends they seldom collaborated. Amongst those rare works is the series about the Hokas. These are teddy-bear-like friendly aliens who inhabit the planet Toka and are highly susceptible to English literature, which they treat as the truth and promptly start to act out. The stories were first collected as Earthman’s Burden (1957) with a later omnibus Hoka! (1983).