by Mike Ashley
“That’s the brown stuff?” asked Ben, still giggling. They assured him that it was, and he went up to the bar and brought them back another three pints of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.
He could not remember much of the conversation that followed. He remembered finishing his pint, and his new friends inviting him on a walking tour of the village, pointing out the various sights to him: “That’s where we rent our videos, and that big building next door is the Nameless Temple of Unspeakable Gods and on Saturday mornings there’s a jumble sale in the crypt . . .”
He explained to them his theory of the walking tour book, and told them, emotionally, that Innsmouth was both scenic and charming. He told them that they were the best friends he had ever had, and that Innsmouth was delightful.
The moon was nearly full, and in the pale moonlight both of his new friends did look remarkably like huge frogs. Or possibly camels.
The three of them walked to the end of the rusted pier, and Seth and/or Wilf pointed out to Ben the ruins of Sunken R’lyeh in the bay, visible in the moonlight, beneath the sea, and Ben was overcome by what he kept explaining was a sudden and unforeseen attack of seasickness, and was violently and unendingly sick over the metal railings, into the black sea below . . .
After that it all got a bit odd.
Ben Lassiter awoke on the cold hillside with his head pounding and a bad taste in his mouth. His head was resting on his backpack. There was rocky moorland on each side of him, and no sign of a road, and no sign of any village, scenic, charming, delightful or even picturesque.
He stumbled and limped almost a mile to the nearest road, and walked along it until he reached a petrol station.
They told him that there was no village anywhere locally named Innsmouth. No village with a pub called The Book of Dead Names. He told them about two men, named Wilf and Seth, and a friend of theirs, called Strange Ian, who was fast asleep somewhere, if he wasn’t dead, under the sea. They told him that they didn’t think much of American hippies who wandered about the countryside taking drugs, and that he’d probably feel better after a nice cup of tea and a tuna and cucumber sandwich, but that if he was dead set on wandering the country taking drugs there was a magic mushroom patch behind the McGillicuddys’ barn, and that young Ernie who worked the afternoon shift would be all too happy to sell him a nice little bag of home-grown cannabis, if he could come back after lunch.
Ben pulled out his Walking Tour of the British Coastline and tried to find Innsmouth in it, to prove to them that he had not dreamed it, but he was unable to locate the page it had been on, if ever it had been there at all. Roughly half-way through the book, however, most of one page had been ripped out.
And then Ben telephoned a taxi, which took him to Bootle railway station, where he caught a train, which took him to Manchester, where he got on an aeroplane, which took him to Chicago, where he changed planes, and flew to Dallas, where he got another plane going north, and then he rented a car and went home.
He found the knowledge that he was over 600 miles away from the ocean very comforting. Later in life he even moved to Nebraska to increase the distance from the sea: there were things he had seen, or thought he had seen, beneath the old pier that night, that he would never be able to get out of his head. There were things that lurked beneath grey raincoats that man was not meant to know. Squamous. He did not need to look it up. He knew. They were squamous.
A couple of weeks after his return home Ben posted his annotated copy of A Walking Tour of the British Coastline to the author, care of her publisher, with an extensive letter containing a number of helpful suggestions for future editions. He also asked the author if she would send him a copy of the page that had been ripped from his guidebook, to set his mind at rest. But he was secretly relieved, as the days turned into months, and the months turned into years and then into decades, that she never replied.
A Cocoon of Oldies
LOOKING-GLASS LAND
Lewis Carroll
I couldn’t complete this anthology without including at least a sample of work from the two men who really created humorous fantasy. There had been satirical fantasies long before the Victorian era. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), for instance, is a very clever political and social satire. François Rabelais’s bawdy Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534) were also exuberant satires, in these instances of French society. In fact, we can go back at least as far as the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata who made a living from lampooning Greek and Roman beliefs in the 2nd century, and often got chased from town to town for doing so. But enough of history. Despite all these roots, something has to start flowering somewhere, and I believe that it was the two Alice novels by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–98), Oxford don and mathematician, better known as Lewis Carroll, where comic fantasy really began. He produced other stories and poems besides the Alice books, but they don’t come within a Jabberwock’s burble for the sheer ingenuity and invention of either Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) or Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Although most people remember the first, I think the second is the more ingenious, and it is from that book that I have selected the following extract.
Of course the first thing to do was to make a grand survey of the country she was going to travel through. “It’s something very like learning geography,” thought Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able to see a little further. “Principal rivers – there are none. Principal mountains – I’m on the only one, but I don’t think it’s got any name. Principal towns – why, what are those creatures, making honey down there? They can’t be bees – nobody ever saw bees a mile off, you know—” and for some time she stood silent, watching one of them that was bustling about among the flowers, poking its proboscis into them, “just as if it was a regular bee,” thought Alice.
However, this was anything but a regular bee: in fact, it was an elephant – as Alice soon found out, though the idea quite took her breath away at first. “And what enormous flowers they must be!” was her next idea. “Something like cottages with the roofs taken off, and stalks put to them – and what quantities of honey they must make! I think I’ll go down and— no, I won’t go just yet,” she went on, checking herself just as she was beginning to run down the hill, and trying to find some excuse for turning shy so suddenly. “It’ll never do to go down among them without a good long branch to brush them away – and what fun it’ll be when they ask me how I liked my walk. I shall say, ‘Oh, I liked it well enough—’ (here came the favourite little toss of the head), ‘only it was so dusty and hot, and the elephants did tease so!’ ”
“I think I’ll go down the other way,” she said after a pause, “and perhaps I may visit the elephants later on. Besides, I do so want to get into the Third Square!”
So, with this excuse, she ran down the hill, and jumped over the first of the six little brooks.
“Tickets, please!” said the Guard, putting his head in at the window. In a moment everybody was holding out a ticket: they were about the same size as the people, and quite seemed to fill the carriage.
“Now then! Show your ticket, child!” the Guard went on, looking angrily at Alice. And a great many voices all said together (“like the chorus of a song,” thought Alice), “Don’t keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!”
“I’m afraid I haven’t got one,” Alice said in a frightened tone: “there wasn’t a ticket-office where I came from.” And again the chorus of voices went on. “There wasn’t room for one where she came from. The land there is worth a thousand pounds an inch!”
“Don’t make excuses,” said the Guard: “you should have bought one from the engine-driver.” And once more the chorus of voices went on with, “The man that drives the engine. Why, the smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff!”
Alice thought to herself, “Then there’s no use in speaking.” The voices didn’t join in, this time, as she hadn’t spoken, but, to her great surprise, they all thou
ght in chorus (I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means – for I must confess that I don’t), “Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!”
“I shall dream about a thousand pounds tonight, I know I shall!” thought Alice.
All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass. At last he said, “You’re travelling the wrong way,” and shut up the window, and went away.
“So young a child,” said the gentleman sitting opposite to her (he was dressed in white paper), “ought to know which way she’s going, even if she doesn’t know her own name!”
A Goat that was sitting next to the gentleman in white, shut his eyes and said in a loud voice, “She ought to know her way to the ticket-office, even if she doesn’t know her alphabet!”
There was a Beetle sitting next the Goat (it was a very queer carriage-full of passengers altogether), and, as the rule seemed to be that they should all speak in turn, he went on with, “She’ll have to go back from here as luggage!”
Alice couldn’t see who was sitting beyond the Beetle, but a hoarse voice spoke next. “Change engines—” it said, and there it choked and was obliged to leave off.
“It sounds like a horse,” Alice thought to herself. And an extremely small voice, close to her ear, said, “You might make a joke on that – something about ‘horse’ and ‘hoarse’, you know.”
Then a very gentle voice in the distance said, “She must be labelled ‘Lass, with care’, you know—”
And after that other voices went on (“What a number of people there are in the carriage!” thought Alice), saying, “She must go by post, as she’s got a head on her—” “She must be sent as a message by the telegraph—” “She must draw the train herself the rest of the way—”, and so on.
But the gentleman dressed in white paper leaned forwards and whispered in her ear, “Never mind what they all say, my dear, but take a return-ticket every time the train stops.”
“Indeed I shan’t!” Alice said rather impatiently. “I don’t belong to this railway journey at all – I was in a wood just now – and I wish I could get back there!”
“You might make a joke on that,” said the little voice close to her ear: “something about ‘you would if you could’, you know.”
“Don’t tease so,” said Alice, looking about in vain to see where the voice came from. “If you’re so anxious to have a joke made, why don’t you make one yourself?”
The little voice sighed deeply. It was very unhappy, evidently, and Alice would have said something pitying to comfort it, “if it would only sigh like other people!” she thought. But this was such a wonderfully small sigh, that she wouldn’t have heard it at all, if it hadn’t come quite close to her ear. The consequence of this was that it tickled her ear very much, and quite took off her thoughts from the unhappiness of the poor little creature.
“I know you are a friend,” the little voice went on: “a dear friend, and an old friend. And you won’t hurt me, though I am an insect.”
“What kind of insect?” Alice inquired, a little anxiously. What she really wanted to know was, whether it could sting or not, but she thought this wouldn’t be quite a civil question to ask.
“What, then you don’t—” the little voice began, when it was drowned by a shrill scream from the engine, and everybody jumped up in alarm, Alice among the rest.
The Horse, who had put his head out of the window, quietly drew it in and said, “It’s only a brook we have to jump over.” Everybody seemed satisfied with this, though Alice felt a little nervous at the idea of trains jumping at all. “However, it’ll take us into the Fourth Square, that’s some comfort!” she said to herself. In another moment she felt the carriage rise straight up into the air, and in her fright she caught at the thing nearest to her hand, which happened to be the Goat’s beard.
But the beard seemed to melt away as she touched it, and she found herself sitting quietly under a tree – while the Gnat (for that was the insect she had been talking to) was balancing itself on a twig just over her head, and fanning her with its wings.
It certainly was a very large Gnat: “about the size of a chicken,” Alice thought. Still, she couldn’t feel nervous with it, after they had been talking together so long.
“—then you don’t like all insects?” the Gnat went on, as quietly as if nothing had happened.
“I like them when they can talk,” Alice said. “None of them ever talk, where I come from.”
“What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?” the Gnat inquired.
“I don’t rejoice in insects at all,” Alice explained, “because I’m rather afraid of them – at least the large kinds. But I can tell you the names of some of them.”
“Of course they answer to their names?” the Gnat remarked carelessly.
“I never knew them do it.”
“What’s the use of their having names,” the Gnat said, “if they won’t answer to them?”
“No use to them,” said Alice; “but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?”
“I can’t say,” the Gnat replied. “Further on, in the wood down there, they’ve got no names – however, go on with your list of insects: you’re wasting time.”
“Well, there’s the Horse-fly,” Alice began, counting off the names on her fingers.
“All right,” said the Gnat. “Half way up that bush, you’ll see a Rocking-horse-fly, if you look. It’s made entirely of wood, and gets about by swinging itself from branch to branch.”
“What does it live on?” Alice asked, with great curiosity.
“Sap and sawdust,” said the Gnat. “Go on with the list.”
Alice looked at the Rocking-horse-fly with great interest, and made up her mind that it must have been just repainted, it looked so bright and sticky; and then she went on.
“And there’s the Dragon-fly.”
“Look on the branch above your head,” said the Gnat, “and there you’ll find a Snap-dragon-fly. Its body is made of plum-pudding, its wings of holly-leaves, and its head is a raisin burning in brandy.”
“And what does it live on?” Alice asked, as before.
“Frumenty and mince-pie,” the Gnat replied; “and it makes its nest in a Christmas-box.”
“And then there’s the Butterfly,” Alice went on, after she had taken a good look at the insect with its head on fire, and had thought to herself, “I wonder if that’s the reason insects are so fond of flying into candles – because they want to turn into Snap-dragon-flies!”
“Crawling at your feet,” said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), “you may observe a Bread-and-butter-fly. Its wings are thin slices of bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.”
“And what does it live on?”
“Weak tea with cream in it.”
A new difficulty came into Alice’s head. “Supposing it couldn’t find any?” she suggested.
“Then it would die, of course.”
“But that must happen very often,” Alice remarked thoughtfully.
“It always happens,” said the Gnat.
After this, Alice was silent for a minute or two pondering. The Gnat amused itself meanwhile by humming round and round her head: at last it settled again and remarked, “I suppose you don’t want to lose your name?”
“No, indeed,” Alice said, a little anxiously.
“And yet I don’t know,” the Gnat went on in a careless tone: “only think how convenient it would be if you could manage to go home without it! For instance, if the governess wanted to call you to your lessons, she would call out ‘Come here—’, and there she would have to leave off, because there wouldn’t be any name for her to call, and of course you wouldn’t have to go, you know.”
“That would never do, I’m sure,” said Alice: “the governess would never think of excus
ing me lessons for that. If she couldn’t remember my name, she’d call me ‘Miss’, as the servants do.”
“Well, if she said ‘Miss’, and didn’t say anything more,” the Gnat remarked, “of course you’d miss your lessons. That’s a joke. I wish you had made it.”
“Why do you wish I had made it?” Alice asked. “It’s a very bad one.”
But the Gnat only sighed deeply while two large tears come rolling down its cheeks.
“You shouldn’t make jokes,” Alice said, “if it makes you so unhappy.”
Then came another of those melancholy little sighs, and this time the poor Gnat really seemed to have sighed itself away, for, when Alice looked up, there was nothing whatever to be seen on the twig, and, as she was getting quite chilly with sitting still so long, she got up and walked on.
She very soon came to an open field, with a wood on the other side of it: it looked much darker than the last wood, and Alice felt a little timid about going into it. However, on second thoughts, she made up her mind to go on: “for I certainly won’t go back,” she thought to herself, and this was the only way to the Eighth Square.
“This must be the wood,” she said thoughtfully to herself, “where things have no names. I wonder what’ll become of my name when I go in? I shouldn’t like to lose it at all – because they’d have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be, trying to find the creature that had got my old name! That’s just like the advertisements, you know, when people lose dogs – ‘answers to the name of “Dash”: had on a brass collar’ – just fancy calling everything you met ‘Alice’, till one of them answered! Only they wouldn’t answer at all, if they were wise.”
She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood: it looked very cool and shady. “Well, at any rate it’s a great comfort,” she said as she stepped under the trees, “after being so hot, to get into the— into the— into what?” she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. “I mean to get under the—under the—under this, you know!” putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. “What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it’s got no name – why, to be sure it hasn’t!”