The Book of Ultimate Truths (The Cornelius Murphy Trilogy 1)

by Robert Rankin

  Tuppe looked at Cornelius.

  Cornelius looked at Tuppe.

  And both gazed up at the air above their respective heads.

  Brother Rizla laughed. ‘You don’t know what to think. If you would prefer it, I shall stand in the inglenook with my head up the chimney.’

  ‘No please. We have nothing to hide.’

  ‘As you will then.’ Brother Rizla fanned out his long fingers on his desk. ‘I have Rune’s papers. Some, but not all. And I do not have the ocarina.’

  ‘The ocarina?’ Cornelius asked.

  ‘The reinvented ocarina. When you have read the papers, you will understand why they can never be published. Also why you will need the ocarina.’

  ‘Tell me about Hugo Rune. You knew him for many years, did you not?’

  ‘Many years. I was his acolyte. His Boswell. His amanuensis. I travelled the world with him. Never was there such a man as Rune. Such a thinker. Such a genius. Such a hater of Bud Abbott.’

  ‘But he was a nutter, surely?’ Tuppe put in. ‘I flicked through his book. Hedgehogs falling out of the sky. Biros with minds of their own. Small screws breeding inside pop-up toasters.’

  Brother Rizla smiled again. ‘You don’t believe a word.’

  Tuppe shook his head.

  ‘Yet you believe other things. You believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, for instance.’

  ‘That’s because it does,’ Tuppe protested.

  ‘But who would have believed you if you’d said that five hundred years ago? Copernicus was given a pretty rough ride by the Inquisition. Would you have been prepared then to back him up?’

  ‘Well…’ went Tuppe.

  ‘Probably not is my guess. But now we accept the Copernican system as a scientific fact. But there are no ultimate facts. What is believed to be a fact is only a fact until another fact supersedes it. Science is only a fashion. Nothing more.’

  ‘But some of Rune’s facts are pretty fanciful,’ said Cornelius.

  ‘You have read them. Can you actually prove them wrong?’

  Cornelius scratched his chin. ‘Not as such.’

  ‘How many primary colours are there?’ the old monk asked.

  Cornelius thought about it. ‘As I recall, the psychological primaries number six. Red, yellow, blue, green, black and white. Any colour can be regarded as formed from a mixture of two or more of these.’

  ‘He knows all kinds of stuff like that,’ said Tuppe. ‘You should try him on tonsures.’

  ‘I am sure your friend is a mine of esoteric information. He is wrong about the primary colours though. There are in fact nine. Rune discovered the other three,’

  ‘Now that is nonsense,’ said Cornelius.

  ‘Indeed?’ Rizla rooted in the lap pocket of his habit and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. He presented it to Cornelius.

  The tall boy stared at it. The paper had been printed with a colour. It was a reddy yellowy bluey greeny blackish sort of white. Except that it was not. It was an entirely new colour.

  Cornelius found his eyes beginning to water. He pinched at them.

  ‘You can’t look at it for more than a moment.’ Rizla plucked the paper from the Murphy’s fingers. ‘The other two are much worse. One of them makes you break out in hives. The other will put you in a coma. Care to see?’ Rizla offered the slip to the doubting Tuppe.

  The small fellow turned his face away. ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Did you know that pigs can see the wind?’ asked Brother Rizla.

  ‘Actually I did,’ Tuppe replied.

  ‘And that on Christmas Day all sheep bow three times to the east in reverence to their ancestors who attended the birth of Christ?’

  ‘Pigs I know all about. Not sheep.’

  Cornelius began to feel that a lot of valuable time was perhaps being wasted. ‘Why can’t Rune’s papers be published?’ he asked.

  ‘Because they would never allow it.’

  ‘They?’ Tuppe made a patronising face. ‘This would no doubt be the they who suppressed Rune’s work throughout his lifetime. The dreaded greybeards of the scientific fraternity.’

  ‘No. This is another they entirely. And you look very foolish with the word SMUG printed across your forehead.’

  ‘Who are they?’ Cornelius demanded. ‘You know. Tell us.’

  The old monk sighed. ‘All right. They are beings of an order halfway between man and the angels. Another race. They have always been here. Hugo Rune discovered them. They ruined him for it.’

  ‘Is Hugo Rune really dead?’ The eyes of Cornelius Murphy focused above the old monk’s head. ‘He isn’t, is he?’

  Brother Rizla fell back in his chair. Extraordinary little lights fizzed and popped around him. ‘Rune died in Hastings. In a cheap boarding-house. I have the death certificate.’

  ‘He never died. I have spoken with him. Where is he?’

  ‘No. This interview is ended. I have told you enough. You may take the papers. Read them and you will understand. Seek out the rest. Find the ocarina.’

  Cornelius watched the pyrotechnic display die down. The ancient ex-acolyte reached into the drawer of his desk and took out a green leather volume. ‘These are his papers. I had them bound together in chronological order. Take them and go.’

  Cornelius accepted the volume and hugged it to his chest.

  ‘If I can solve this, perhaps you might be cured of your affliction.’

  ‘It cannot be solved. All is lost to me now. I am cursed for my folly. I stepped inside. I saw them. Rune never returned. I came back alone and this is what I became.’

  ‘I’ll solve it,’ said Cornelius.

  ‘He will,’ Tuppe agreed. ‘Trust him, he’ll solve it. Whatever it is. What is it, by the way, Cornelius?’

  The tall boy managed a wink and a reasonably sized grin. ‘I think I know. I think I’ve always known. You’ll have your cure, Brother Rizla. Keep watching the sky.’

  The old monk gazed back at him. ‘You have a huge lightbulb flashing above your head,’ he observed.

  17

  Many years ago I conducted an interesting scientific experiment in the company of my dear friend, Mr H.G. Wells. The nature of this was to prove once and for all the real shape and size of the planet Earth.

  Had I realized then that my experiment would come to change the face of twentieth-century art, I would surely never have begun it.

  Wells, as most will be aware, was a man of erudite learning and great scientific knowledge. He was also, and this is not perhaps so generally known, a master of disguise, who lived a complicated double life. Writing, as he did, not only under his own name, but also that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A fictitious personality, invented by Wells as a prank early in his student years.

  Wells passed from Oxford with a doctorate in English Literature. His thesis was The Life and Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ho ho!

  I first met Herbert Wells, or Herbie as he preferred to be called, at a Masonic Luncheon, held at the Savoy, to honour me on the occasion of my first successful three-way Channel swim in 1929. I shared the high table with both he and ‘Sir Arthur’ and how well I remember the great amount of toing and froing about the gentlemen’s toilets. And how they were never actually seen together.

  My suspicions became aroused during the prunes and custard when Herbie returned from the gents, where ‘Sir Arthur’ had gone in search of him, wearing the latter’s now legendary straw boater.

  I quizzed him on the matter later on in the privacy of my private suite and he broke down and confessed everything.

  What had begun as a high-spirited jape, he explained, had turned into a living hell. His two wives were beginning to suspect something and the burden of work was intolerable.

  I swore to keep his secret, but imposed one condition.

  One year later “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” plunged to his death over the Reichenbach Falls.

  His obituary in The Times was written by H.G. Wells.

  Looking at thei
r photographs today, with the obvious trick spectacles and false moustaches, it is hard to imagine how Wells succeeded with his deception for so long. But those were the days before television and few people ever met authors in the flesh.

  I once asked Herbie why he chose to run the terrible risk of exposure by attending my honorary do in both personae. He replied that his two wives had pressured him into it. Both ladies being understandably anxious to make the acquaintance of the feted three-way Channel swimmer, who was at that time being lionized throughout Europe.

  Our scientific experiment began one evening in 1931. Herbie had coerced me into adding the considerable weight of my celebrity to a charity darts match he had got up with some chums to raise money for a worthy cause. I later discovered this to be the erection of a statue of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square. The very plinth the late King had reserved for me!

  The match itself was an informal affair, a group of aspiring young writers and some arty types from the local polytechnic. We naturally split the teams up into writers versus artists.

  Our team, as far as I can remember, consisted of Wells, myself, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and the ever-youthful poet John ‘Boy’ Betjeman. Our worthy opponents being Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Rene Magritte and their guest celeb’, the greatest artistic genius of the day, Hieronymus Tucker, who was at this time preparing for his first London exhibition.

  The writers won the match with very little trouble. The opposing team choosing either to throw fish instead of darts, or simply to stand around with paper bags on their heads for art.

  Those were the days, my friends!

  It was during the post-match festivities that Herbie chanced to remark that ale always tasted better from a straight glass rather than a beer mug. Boy added that this was also the way with tea. Which was infinitely finer when sipped from a Sevres bone-china cup than a chipped enamel workman’s mug. And in no time at all, as we’d all had a few drinks, the talk turned towards the cosmology and metaphysics of shape.

  Herbie was soon propounding his theories about the universe in general and the shape of the planet in particular.

  ‘And what shape do you believe this to be?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh, spherical, of course,’ he laughed, spraying me with half-munched potato crisps.

  ‘And about what size?’

  He named a figure. I forget what it was. But it was the one which is still in use today.

  ‘A fashionable notion,’ I told him. ‘But wildly incorrect.’

  ‘You have some other theory then?’ He laughed again, but this time I had covered my drink in readiness. ‘You are perhaps going to tell us that the world is flat.’

  Dali, who was hovering nearby (I never did find out how he did that), suggested that the world was the shape of a giraffe.

  ‘Take a little water with it, Dali,’ said Wells.

  ‘The world is not flat,’ said I. ‘The world is indeed spherical. But it is somewhat larger than you or your greybeard cronies think it to be.’

  ‘Oh yes? Oh yes?’ Wells whacked down his empty glass.

  ‘Do you have about your person a world map?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’ Wells produced his Collins Sportsman’s Pocket Diary and flashed it around the table. In those days the Pocket Sportsman’s was considered de rigueur. This progenitor of the Filofax contained not only photographs of Stanley Matthews and Bobby Charlton, the lighting-up times, high tides at Tower Bridge, the line of the British Monarchy, national holidays throughout the Empire, the precise number of bushels in a peck and when to celebrate the feast of the circumcision of St Paul, but also a traditionally out-of-register two-page map of the world.

  I examined the map. ‘And is this the world as you perceive it?’

  ‘You know that it is.’

  ‘And this also?’ I displayed a small tin-plate globe of the world which had fallen into my pocket as I walked through Woolworth’s that very morning.

  ‘It’s your round, I think,’ spluttered Wells, giggling foolishly.

  I ignored his feeble jest. ‘Would you say that the map in your diary is approximately to the same scale as this toy globe?’

  ‘As near as dammit,’ said a huffy Herbie.

  ‘Then while I get the drinks in, you try and fold your map around my globe. I bet you a guinea piece that you cannot do it convincingly.’

  ‘Elementary, my dear Rune,’ said the creator of Sherlock Holmes, collapsing once more into drunken paroxysms.

  I took my time at the bar and watched Wells with great amusement. He and Dali had detatched the map from the diary and were labouring in vain to fold it around the globe. There was a good deal of paper crumpling and no shortage of advice. In no time most of our company had become noisily and argumentatively engaged in the project.

  Hemingway suggested that success could be achieved by simply chopping off the north and south poles where most of the surplus paper seemed to be, on the principle of ‘who would miss them?’ Dali had now become convinced that the world was quite probably the shape of a doughnut.

  I left them to it for a while. But when the voices became too overly raised and Hemingway head-butted George Orwell and called him a ‘know-nothing lout’, I felt that I should intervene.

  ‘How are we doing?’ I asked, returning to the table with a tray of drinks. ‘Who ordered the packet of bird seed by the way?’

  ‘Me,’ said Max Ernst.

  ‘You’ll have to make do with pork scratchings, I’m afraid. Now, how is the map fitting coming along?’

  ‘Wells has muffed it up,’ seemed to be the general opinion.

  ‘And who is responsible for all those little snippings in the ashtray?’ Rene Magritte tucked away his Swiss Army knife.

  ‘Would you like me to explain?’

  Heads nodded gloomily. Herbie said, ‘Go on then.’

  ‘It is an evil business,’ I said in a low and leaden tone. ‘And a conspiracy of epic proportion. Neither the globe, nor the map, offer a true representation of the world’s geography or its true size. The flat map will not fit the globe, because there is, quite simply, too much map. In order to make the map fit you must increase the size of the globe by at least one third again. I contend that the world is a good deal larger than we are being told. And that there are portions of it which are not printed upon the map. Portions that are hidden from us.’

  ‘Oh come off it,’ sighed Wells. ‘The world is charted. There are no spare bits.’

  ‘Charted yes. But the charts lie. Do we have any world travellers with us tonight?’

  Hemingway stuck up his hand. ‘I’ve been around a bit,’ he boasted. ‘And then some.’

  ‘And on your travels, have you found maps to be reliable, distance wise?’

  Hemingway shook his beard. ‘Anything but.’

  ‘And in our own fair land. Boy Betjeman, you favour a country bike ride. Speak to us of the English signpost.’

  ‘The signpost does tend towards modesty when it comes to the matter of miles,’ said Boy. ‘Although I understand this to be tradition, or an old charter, or something.’

  ‘Or something. And what say you all regarding this?’ I pulled a London A-Z Street Directory from my pocket and placed it on the table.

  ‘Er…ah…hm,’ went the assembled company.

  ‘I am sure that each of you has at some time attempted to navigate across the metropolis with the aid of this.’

  Heads went nod nod nod.

  ‘With any success?’

  ‘Not much,’ Wells conceded. ‘In fact I threw mine away a long time ago and always travel by…’

  ‘Taxi?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Indeed. In fact I’ll wager we all came here tonight by cab.’

  All heads nodded except for Dali’s. The word giraffe was again upon his lips.

  ‘Then ponder this. You take a cab from home. The cab takes a certain route. Covers a certain distance in a certain time, you are charged
a certain fare. Later the same night you engage another cab to take you home. This time you find yourself travelling by a route which is utterly strange to you. The journey takes half the time, yet the fare is almost double.’

  ‘Yeah, well, but…’ went Wells.

  ‘But me no yeah-well-buts and kindly put a sock in it until I’ve finished.’

  Wells hung his head.

  ‘What you have here is a conspiracy. It exists in every great city. It is a conspiracy of cab drivers to keep their customers always confused about their exact whereabouts. So that they can never get their bearings. They do this to conceal the huge areas of uncharted metropolis from the public. These areas are disguised by intricate one-way systems, pedestrian precincts, no-through roads and diversions. These are the areas which never appear on any map.

  ‘Let me reveal to you a closely guarded secret. Before a London black cab driver can officially don his sacred blue cap and receive his mystical number, he must first take something which is called THE KNOWLEDGE.

  ‘This is a rigorous test of his courage, stamina, endurance and dedication. He must debase himself by riding around London for months on end, mounted upon a moped with a wooden board fastened before his eyes, memorizing the name of every London street. Few survive. Those who do then sit before a Secret Council of Elders. If they are deemed worthy, they receive THE KNOWLEDGE and are formally initiated into the Black Order. London’s Legion Of Cab Knights. BOLLOCKS for short. THE KNOWLEDGE is a secret so terrible that they are sworn upon pain of terrible death never to reveal it. They are told what lurks within the concealed areas and why no man must ever enter them. And they learn the true meaning of the A-Z.

  ‘A-Z, gentlemen, means Allocated Zones. The zones allocated for mortal man to inhabit.’

  I gazed from face to shocked face. Gauging the effect of my words. It has always been the way with me, that when I speak, others crave to listen.

  All of a sudden George Orwell burst out laughing.

  He could never keep a straight face for long and was always the first to see the funny side of any situation.

  ‘Hugo,’ he howled, ‘you outrageous liar. You really had us going that time.’