by Paul Magrs
It struck me: we were going down there. Into Qab. Just as in the book. We would be among the many citizens, and part of all that life.
Mrs Mapp managed to wrench her attention away from studying this glittering, sun-baked mirage of a metropolis. She urged Mr Rupert to continue with his tale. This was vital stuff: his description of his and his friend’s reception within the grey walls of that ominous palace down there.
‘So what was it, then?’ she asked Mr Rupert. ‘What was this strangely disturbing thing about Professor Quandary? When at last you were faced by the woman who had ensnared you and brought you to her throne room?’
‘Blow me, but if he didn’t recognise Her! And she recognised him!’
‘What?’ gasped Mrs Mapp, at this plainly impossible fact.
‘You could have knocked me down with a feather,’ said Mr Rupert. ‘There we were, in all this splendour – beaten copper panelling and polished stone . . . a tall throne on an impressive dais, and all her guards around her. Those lizard men . . . they give me the creeps, they do. Ah, look . . . you can see them now, moving about in the thoroughfares down there. I believe they’ll be setting out on their hunting expeditions. We shall have to beware . . .
‘Well, to go back to my story . . . I’m looking about, all impressed, and there’s the queen of the whole world standing before us in her robes. Magnificent she is, if a bit pale. Beautiful. Lovely to look at. But frightening as well. I mean, I wouldn’t want to get too close. And I was right, as well, in my intuition, to keep my distance, as I found out a bit later on . . .
‘Suddenly she’s growling and spitting at us! Like she can’t bear the sight of us!
‘Next to me, the good professor’s gone likewise. His beard’s bristling with irritation. His face is red with fury as the two of them start hurling insults at each other.
‘Obviously, what I wanted to know . . . how on earth could the two of them be such old enemies? How on earth could they have met before?
‘We were on Qab. This was Her. The embodiment of female power in the land of Qab. You know Her, Mrs Mapp. How could the queen in your book know my professor so well? Know him at all?
‘All I knew was that neither of them bothered to fill me in. My presence was an irrelevance. They had eyes only for each other, those two.
‘ “You followed me,” she said to him. “Why? What do you want from me? How dare you come after me like this?”
‘ “Believe me,” he rejoindered. “I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to . . . erm, I wouldn’t choose to place myself in your ineffable effing power!”
‘ “You had no choice!” She ejaculated crossly. “My people captured you! Brought you here!”
‘“I allowed us to be captured,” said he, in more measured fashion. “I wanted to come here. I wanted to see you. We have many things to discuss.”
‘ “There’s nothing I want to discuss with you,” she snapped. “This is my new life here. My new world. I am happy here.”
‘ “I’m sure you are. Surrounded by servants. Everyone at your beck and call. Fed and pampered like the queen in her hive . . .”
‘ “How dare you? How can you criticise me for finding something new? It was you who ruined my previous life . . .”
‘ “You’re a very sick woman,” he told Her, and the queen responded as if he had leapt on to that dais and slapped her. She screamed for her guards and they came running with daggers held aloft. They grabbed hold of Professor Quandary. And that was the last I saw of him, I’m afraid.
‘As they pulled him away I shouted out, “Professor!” in this madly futile kind of way.
‘ “Keep back, Rupert,” he told me. “The Source. You’ve got to get back to London. Somehow. You need to bring . . . the Source . . . bring it here . . .”
‘The Source? What could he have meant by that?
‘I had no idea what he was on about. Some of his mystical mumbo-jumbo, no doubt. At first I thought he meant a sauce like, you know, tartare sauce or gravy or whatnot. But later, as I lay in a filthy cell deep beneath the palace, in the catacombs, I realised he meant Source . . .
‘And that can only mean you, Mrs Mapp, can’t it? The source of all this? The source of Qab itself?’
Mrs Mapp looked surprised.
‘You brought us here, to Qab . . . to this city we see before us . . . because Professor Quandary told you to?’
‘Quite so.’ He nodded sadly.
‘But we came here to save him! We are here on a rescue mission!’
In the past Mr Rupert had been a big-game hunter, trolling about the veldt for beasties. And now Mrs Mapp was his prey. She felt stung, I could tell just by looking at her face.
She went on, ‘You told me that the professor said that Qab had somehow got inside my head . . . It inveigled its way into my mind, and forced me to write it into existence. You said that the professor thought that this place – this grand, glorious, all-too-real world – actually pre-existed my writing about it. That’s what you said, back in my drawing room.’
‘And that is what we thought,’ said Rupert grimly. ‘But I don’t know any more. I simply don’t know. Professor Quandary called you the Source. You are the source of all of this. Everything around us.’ He stood on the brow of that hill, with all of the valley and the strange city behind him.
I was dumbstruck as Mr Von Thal went a bit philosophical at this point. ‘Who knows where other worlds come from? Who’s to say who creates them? Could this place exist without your imagination? Did your dreams cause it to be?’
We both looked at his face. It was twisted up with thought, almost feverish-looking. Mr Rupert was a man of action, quite unused to this kind of intellectual wrangling. I could see that it wasn’t doing him any good at all.
It was me who took the decision to direct everyone’s attention back to palpable things and the matter in hand.
I focused on the lizard men in the valley below. Beyond the borders of the extravagantly eclectic city they were moving in packs through the tall jungle grass. I studied them for some time. Horrible-looking things. Like men, really, only paler, and faintly green. Their faces were much more lizardy, with rictus grins filled with jagged teeth, and those funny, untrustworthy eyes – though I never saw those, of course, until we had carried ourselves down into the valley and came face to face with the brutes. Take me to your leader and all that business, which we felt we had to do, of course. Easiest way of getting yourself inside the place: just march up to the guards and announce your presence.
‘We have to watch out,’ Mr Rupert counselled. ‘We have to be very careful. They are savage and, I think, merciless. See those whips they carry?’
Indeed we did. They lashed out with them indiscriminately, using the nasty things to clear away the rushes and vines. The snapping and slashing could be heard from miles away.
‘They take those whips from some tree that grows here. They emit a kind of sting on contact, a kind of poison. And the lizard men use those whips to capture their slaves.’
Mrs Mapp nodded. ‘This really is my world, down to every last detail, isn’t it?’
In her book, the lizard men went abroad to enslave the local human beings. A shabby, underdeveloped lot. Reading her novel, I felt a bit cross at these bits, as if I was privy to how Mrs Mapp and those of her ilk saw the ordinary people, the working people. Shambling, inarticulate brutes in musty flea-ridden rags, who had to be whipped and told precisely what to do. Was that how the mistress saw me? I remember thinking, as I sat up in my bed. But then the story had moved on and I had buried the thought. It would never have done to ask her about it.
The human slaves were not the only kind in Qab. As a keening, screeching noise filled the air, I realised that we were about to see the other sort, too. My heart gave an excited bounce at this, for we were going to see the bird people.
Sure enough, as we started to make our way down a sharp declivity of volcanic rock, we saw a party below with their bird people wheeling and dipping through the m
agenta cloud cover. They had hugely long chains that clanked and jingled, tethering them to the ground and holding them steady.
‘They’re hunting the blood beasts?’ Mrs Mapp said, though she knew the answer already. We all did.
The going was hard on this ashy, uneven ground. We clutched hold of each other and advanced as carefully as we could down into the valley.
Every now and then we would see one of the bird men circling, far in the distance. Amazing creatures with huge spans, diving and screeching, full of the joy of the hunt. They looked rather like those hulking brutes, the vultures I had observed in London Zoo. Reeking of carrion and with their unkempt feathers matted and slick with old blood. The bird men’s bills were even crueller-looking than any bird I had seen and their claws were more horribly dextrous. We saw one take a blood beast midflight. Mr Rupert pointed it out to us. The bat creature must have been roosting in the highest part of the forest’s canopy. One of the birds had spotted it a mile off and homed in on silent wings. Its talons flashed and slashed and took hold of the dozing beast. No contest. The bat was sated and fat, clinging to those upper branches, with no idea what had hit it. The bird man soared, cawing with triumph, holding the bat close to his chest in an unlockable embrace. It was almost as big as he was.
‘The thing is full of blood, after a night’s hunting,’ Mr Rupert said. ‘They’ll take it straight to her. They’ll squeeze every drop of blood into one of her silver churns. She needs gallons of blood every day simply in order to survive. She’ll take it from anywhere. From whatever the blood beast has been feasting on.’
I recalled all of this from Mrs Mapp’s book. I looked at her and wondered why she couldn’t have invented somewhere a bit more pleasant. Or perhaps she had no choice and Professor Quandary had been right in the first place: this land had come looking for her and seeped foully into her imagination. She herself was looking somewhat queasy. A vampire queen? Lizards who enslaved those bird men to hunt giant blood-filled bats? What was she thinking of? Was it all that Welsh rarebit she used to demand that I bring her in the middle of the night? Was melted Cheddar behind all of this?
And then, as we reached the forest once more and the ground underfoot became less rocky and steep, we were spotted. A great cry went up from a passing squad of lizard men. Oh, my calves were aching from that descent into the valley. Mr Rupert had led us at quite a trot. He was no respecter of this shambling, middleaged body.
‘Aha!’ he cried now. ‘I see they recognise me. Hmmm. I was the one who gave them the slip a little while ago. They won’t be very pleased with me, I don’t suppose.’
‘Chin up, laddie,’ Mrs Mapp said, sounding very staunch and proper all of a sudden. She drew herself up to her full height as if she were about to meet someone from a far-off land, someone whose customs she felt were savage but who must, for the sake of good manners, be treated as an equal. ‘Good morning,’ she called out to the advancing lizard men, waving her wrecked straw hat about.
Quite an impressive sight they were, close to. It was now that I took note of those scaly, brawny chests. That tinge of green about their gills. The crest of scarlet flesh atop their bony skulls, which would ripple in accordance with their mood. Those teeth, those eyes. We were truly in the presence of utterly alien creatures, and the very thought thrilled me in ways I never would have expected it to.
‘We are new to your world,’ Mrs Mapp went on breezily, sounding as if she was making conversation at a garden party. ‘We come from very far orf indeed. I wonder if you people would mind very much takin’ us to your queen?’
The lizards hissed and mumbled amongst themselves for a while.
Mrs Mapp looked at Mr Rupert sharply. ‘They do speak English, don’t they?’
‘As in your book, yes, they do. Though I don’t know who but you ever taught them it.’
She nodded with satisfaction. ‘Curious, looking at the brutes. I feel as if I know what is runnin’ through their heads. Their single-mindedness of purpose. The tiny preoccupations they have. All they care for is the hunt and serving their queen. And their bird men, which they think of as their kites. And the blood banks too, of course, which they tend to. That’s all the life I gave them. That’s all they have to their characters, I’m afraid.’
The lizard men were finished with their conflab, evidently having come to some sort of resolution. They rounded on us roughly and we were corralled and led into the trees.
‘They’re doing it,’ Mr Rupert said. ‘Well done, Mrs Mapp. They’re taking us to the palace. You actually made them listen to you!’
She shrugged modestly, as if to say, what are lizard men for but to do your bidding?
I had the sense of moving into the midst of a society and a civilisation quite unlike any I was used to. Mr Rupert seemed less overawed, but then he had been here before, and besides, he was an adventurer and a man of the world, taking simply everything in his stride. Mrs Mapp was filled with keen interest, peering at the wattle-and-daub dwellings of the lizard people. Observing them about their everyday business with the eye of a proprietress. I felt a bit glum and tired by now. It was strangeness heaped upon strangeness. I had thought I could cope with it all, but now I felt I just wanted a touch of the familiar for a little while.
We progressed to a wide thoroughfare, lined with tall palms. A crowd had come out to see us. Lizard people and some of the human slaves, who were very definitely a lower class. How pale and hollow-eyed they looked. Like some of the walking cadavers I’d seen in Whitechapel and Limehouse. Had they been worked and flogged to a state near death? A sense of outrage filled me at the sight of these pathetic human creatures. I could see that Mrs Mapp was similarly disturbed.
‘They have been bled as well, then,’ she mused. ‘Paying tribute to their queen.’
I remembered how, in her manuscript, the great queen – Her herself – had demanded blood tribute from her human populace. A horrible feeling went through me. All of sudden I wanted to be out of this primitive city and away from this world. I wished we had never come here, and yet there seemed to be no chance of turning back.
We were at the great doors of the palace before we even knew it. The building was huge, and even stepping back to crane our necks, we couldn’t see its many turrets. They stretched into the boiling clouds above. The doors themselves were three storeys high, taking at least six of the lizardy lackeys to screech them open to admit us.
Within, it smelled of dark and tangy blood. The lighting was smoky and dim and I wasn’t at all happy about accompanying my companions inside.
‘Oh, do come on, Brenda,’ hissed Mrs Mapp. ‘There’s nothin’ to fear.’
I couldn’t take her word for that. Her face was gleaming. She was in a rapture, just like she was when she wrote. She had, in her own parlance, gorn orf.
There was no one to rely upon, I suddenly felt. Mr Rupert was conferring with our lizard guards. He was thick with them. Murmuring, explaining. I felt a stab of guilt for suspecting him. But the thought remained: he had brought us here for a purpose. He was under instructions. This was all part of somebody’s plan.
As if he knew I was thinking about him, he turned to me with a tight, awkward smile. ‘Buck up, Brenda old thing. You wanted to see the palace, didn’t you? You wanted to see the queen?’
‘I’m not so sure.’ As we shuffled down the smoothly polished rock of the dark chambers, I was taunted by the memory of seeing real royalty. Our royalty, all dressed up. I recalled happy days of being dripped on by the piddling rain outside Buckingham Palace. Standing patriotically with the steaming, soaking crowds for parades and whatnot. I wished I was back in London now, where everything was commonplace and dull.
More spectacle! More ritualistic rigmarole! More spectacular antechambers and vaulting ceilings! Ooh, and lovely stained glass all midnight blue, just like the chapel of St Chapelle in Paris. Instantly I was back there, in all that blue on the Isle de la Cité . . . though when was I ever in Paris? I couldn’t remember. Some point in
my murky past.
This wasn’t Paris. This was the throne room of Her, just as I had pictured it in Mrs Mapp’s book. And then I set to wondering how on earth that worked: that it was my version of the place that we saw. Surely Mrs Mapp and Mr Rupert had pictured creatures, places, things, buildings differently to how I had? Why was it my version that held sway?
I was thinking too much. It was the heady scent of the billowing purple incense and the roar of the furnace that was sending me into a drowsy state of contemplation. Those lilac and green flames licked merrily in a huge pit between us and the golden throne upon which the queen must sit.
And above the pit a cage was suspended. Too high up to burn the sole occupant to a crisp, but close enough to the lapping flames to bring him out in a nasty sweat.
‘Professor!’ Mr Rupert was shouting. ‘Professor, it’s me! Rupert! I’m back! I’ve been home and back again!’
He sounded much too cheery and pleased with himself, that one.
My eyes were smarting with the smoke and heat, but as I gazed upwards, along with Mrs Mapp, I saw who it was Mr Rupert was calling to. The lumpy, disconsolate figure of Professor Quandary.
Now, I had only ever caught glimpses of Quandary. He had never been for dinner at Tavistock Square, but a sherry once, when Mrs Mapp held an evening salon. I once saw him dashing into a lecture hall where he was due to make some brilliant speech about his latest findings at the equator. I milled with many other admirers of his amazing adventures, just for a glimpse of the great man. And I had seen the drawings and an occasional photograph of him in the papers in which appeared accounts of his escapades. He always cut a very impressive figure. Rotund, barrel-chested, resolutely fierce of mien. That heroic beard thrust out arrogantly. A safari hat cocked at a jaunty angle.
This figure in the swaying cage seemed like a broken man in comparison. One of the reptile men jabbed him awake by thrusting a spearhead none too gently through the bars.