by Bruce, Leo
He drove there alone and found the posters changed now bearing the stark words “Exp 7 Rev Oedipus Limbo by Tho Wilk” in letters of green on a yellow background. Hy Nox was again near the booking-office, stroking his thin red beard mournfully.
“Yes,” he said, “I remember you. Your name’s Car Dee and you’re a friend of Index Eleven, aren’t you? He’ll be out in a minute. He has only a small Exegesis in Execution One. Do you want to wait for him inside?”
“I’d like to buy a ticket.”
“Not one left, I’m afraid. We’re packed every night for this. It’s great, great. Tho Wilk at his most terrific. You’ll just be in time for the shattering interloc between Indexes One and Seven.”
Carolus saw as he entered the auditorium that only one bema was illuminated, the one on the left. It seemed crowded with skinny torsos and beards where a number of men wearing only loin clothes moved in rhythmic patterns as they talked.
“Ancient Britons?” asked Carolus.
“No. Ciphers. Nullities. Non-Existences.”
Two of them punctuated the talk of the others with periodic clashing of dustbin lids which they held as cymbals. Each wore a lavatory chain with the handle falling on his breast and the bema was festooned with toilet paper. The talk seemed to be of plumbing.
“The poetry of it!” sighed Hy Nox.
“Is it poetry they are speaking?”
“Emancipated, yes.”
A woman in over-alls interrupted the Non-Existences. She was lanky and her hair fell in sticky-looking strings, so that she looked like an Addams character.
“Venus Anadyomene,” explained Hy Nox.
“Is that why she’s nursing a lobster?”
“Of course. You’re beginning to get the idiom.”
Suddenly the other bema became illuminated showing three seated figures dressed and be-wigged as judges.
“Why three judges?” asked Carolus.
“They’re plumbers,” explained Hy Nox severely and the Mutual Consciousness went on.
Eamon Starkey when he emerged seemed contrastingly sane and commonplace.
“Let’s go over to the Wheatsheaf,” he said.
Not until they had their drinks was any mention made of the matter which had first brought them together.
“So there was method in his madness?” said Starkey.
“That exactly sums it up,” Carolus replied. “It was madness. But there was method of a rather hideous kind.”
“And my sister was the victim of both?”
“Yes. Of the Stabber and of the wife-murderer. The only thing that can possibly be any kind of a remote sort of consolation to you is that he knew his job and death was instantaneous. In those two years of planning he learnt the nearest and easiest way to the heart.”