The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy Page 34

  The next day at breakfast, after a suitably edited version of events had been given to her, Lucy said, “Where’s this LeBroque, then?”

  “We parted on the Admiralty steps, my love. I believe he wished to pursue certain – hem – activities.”

  Danvers recounted matters. The meeting with the little Admiral had been most interesting. LeBroque had produced his reports and accounts, and Arlette and Alois had provided corroboration for some of the events. Kokki had been interrogated by an equally odorous senior agent and confirmed the internment of the Wind Wizards. The plan formulated by Danvers and the others to rescue the Wind Wizards and to foil the invasion was discussed with much head-shaking until Kokki threatened to start using mindspeak with rectal flourishes there and then.

  Shortly afterwards the plan was agreed and Kokki was left alone in a room not used by anybody, not likely to be used in the foreseeable future (say for fifty years or so), to communicate the final details to his colleagues in France. It took four hours and two pounds of finest beef to send the message successfully.

  Christmas had come and gone and New Year’s Eve was upon them. Sir Danvers stared up at the sky from his vantage point and decided that, say what you liked, you would never get him up in one of those things. The carpets looked most flimsy. Troops were sitting on them, some holding ropes to which were attached sails, the Wind Wizards were chanting and exhorting and the whole aerial armada was just sailing serenely over the waves at five hundred feet or so, when it happened.

  As one, the Wizards simply stepped off the carpets and stood motionless in the air, chanting. The chant changed note, and they levitated higher and higher until they were over a thousand feet in the air, suspended, motionless.

  Suddenly the sky was full of cries in French and English, as carpets went up, carpets went down, carpets went sideways, in fact went anywhere except towards the English coast. Voices could be heard squealing in surprise and fright as bodies plummeted into the icy Channel. There were fruitless volleys of shots into the air to bring down the Wind Wizards, but they simply moved higher, hummed deeper and broke wind in a grand finale of anal eruption.

  There is a golden rule with flying carpets. DO NOT MOVE ABOUT. This had not registered with the troops and the Jacobites, who began shouting at each other and letting go of the sails and the rigging and the large aerial rudders that gave the craft direction. Some of the troops jumped carpet and splashed into the chilly Channel where they were picked up, shivering, by small boats and submersibles.

  The Wizards climbed even higher, and then the note of their humming changed to a menacing roar, the wind changed direction, and with a mighty whoosh it swept most of the carpets helplessly back towards the French coast. The sky lit up as bright as day.

  The carpets with stitching started to come apart and many a poor soul disappeared shrieking as they were stranded in midair with their legs straddling separating carpets. It was a case of jump or split, and some jumped and some did the splits as they hit the water. Very hard.

  Sir Danvers observed all this as a guest aboard the submersible HMS Enterprise under Captain James Church. On seeing the fliers disperse, Enterprise and the other six submersibles in the squadron rose to the surface and, ignoring the pleas for mercy from the remaining carpeteers, opened their conning towers. The Wind Wizards waited patiently as the craft positioned themselves and one by one they lowered themselves into safety.

  The English onlookers marvelled at the power and precision of the Wind Wizards as on a cold winter’s night they hung suspended, bathed in light, waiting to enter the submersibles.

  Danvers’s final image of them before they finally descended was of a few black shapes floating in the winter dark.

  “Pity we could not use the Stealth Squadron, Captain.”

  “Well, Sir Danvers, they would have been blown away with all the turbulence. Only junior Wizards in those things and they couldn’t cope. Just a minute, sir, a message for the Jacobite lads up there. HAPPY NEW YEAR, CULLIES. HOME, JAMES, AND DON’T SPARE THE SHAGPILE!” This last was delivered in a loud bellow.

  Several days later, while reading the newspaper at breakfast, Lucy pointed out the paragraph that outlined some details of the battle to Danvers, who shook his head, and said that but for the action and talents of Kokki and his fellow countrymen, England would now be invaded.

  He looked at his wife and asked if she were still hungry. She nodded and, holding her hands out, said, “I fancies a bit o’ meat about this long.”

  He blushed. “You exaggerate, my dear!”

  “Not by much, mate,” said her ladyship.

  NOT OURS TO SEE

  David Langford

  As I said when introducing David Langford’s story in the previous volume, the range of his wit and wisdom is awesome. He is, by profession, a nuclear physicist, and his “wisdom” surfaces in a number of serious tomes such as War in 2080 (1979) and The Third Millennium (1985). But he’s best known for his “wit”, often in the science-fiction fan magazines. He has received umpteen Hugo Awards for his fan writings, some of which have been collected as The Dragonhiker’s Guide to Battlefield at Dune’s Edge: Odyssey Two (1988), Let’s Hear it for the Deaf Man (1992) and The Silence of the Langford (1996). Langford enjoys spoofs. His first book, An Account of a Meeting with Denizens of Another World, 1871 (1979) was taken seriously by UFO devotees. He has also parodied nuclear research in The Leaky Establishment (1984), and the disaster novel in Earthdoom! (1987), written with John Grant (whom you’ll find elsewhere in this anthology). Come to think of it, I said all that last time. But at least the following story is different.

  The usual group of old acquaintances was gathered in the lounge bar of the King’s Head pub, huddled over pints of traditionally insipid beer and speculating upon the infinite.

  “If . . .” said crusty old Major Godalming to me, “if only it were possible! To pierce the veil of futurity, to glimpse the ineffable radiance of days to come, and to make an absolute killing in the National Lottery!”

  Carruthers snorted. “Speaking mathematically, I can inform you that if it were possible to predict next week’s winning numbers, half the country would very soon be doing it and the payout per one-pound ticket would slump to approximately 13.7 pence.” Like all the best statistics, this had the compelling air of having been freshly made up on the spot.

  Among our circle that evening was the well-known psychic investigator Dagon Smythe, who preserved his silence but now shuddered theatrically. I recognized the symptoms and took rapid action, crying: “Beastly weather this week, chaps! Would you call it seasonal for the time of year?”

  But it was too late. Before the razor-sharp wits around the table could pounce upon this always fruitful topic, Smythe interrupted in his peculiarly penetrating tones. “Speaking of prediction . . . I once dabbled a little in the divinatory arts.”

  “And you have a tale to tell,” said old Hyphen-Jones with a trace of resignation.

  “Of a terrible and frightening experience,” Smythe continued unstoppably. “But I anticipate. Let us begin from first principles. Methods of prediction are quite numerous. Palmistry, for example, has its adherents . . .” I am of the opinion that our friend had learned his anecdotal persistence from the Ancient Mariner. He seized my hand and announced that the Line of Life indicated a small but imminent financial upset, such as might be caused by buying a round of drinks. As I pointed out with some bitterness, the loud and eager assent of the others made this a regrettably self-fulfilling prophecy.

  When I returned from the bar with my slopping burden, Smythe had completed a brief demonstration of cartomancy using only a handful of beer mats, and was well launched into his narration. “The problem with all the well-known modes of divination is, if I might put it paradoxically, that they are too well known.”

  “Incredible,” grunted old Hyphen-Jones.

  “I have formulated what might usefully be known as Smythe’s Law: that too many prophets spoil the broth. That is, pred
ictions by cartomancy or crystallomancy suffer aetheric interference from all the thousands of other enthusiasts with their Tarot decks and crystal balls. Those faint shadows cast back through time by future events might be likened to frail and shy creatures of the night, suddenly confronted by the psychic equivalent of a horde of press photographers with flashguns. The sheer pressure of attention dispels any possible message. I will not mention Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle . . .”

  “Thank God,” I muttered. I have always admired Smythe’s genius for selecting awesomely bad analogies.

  “Sounds like you’ve just shot down the whole idea of successful divination,” said the acute Carruthers.

  “Not at all. To vary the metaphor a little, the trick is to listen on a less crowded waveband. For example: haruspication, the art of prediction through the study of fresh animal entrails, is rarely practised – and please, Major, please don’t make your usual joke about the contents of the hamburgers they serve here.”

  Major Godalming projected sulkiness into his mug of beer.

  “So when I set about the series of predictive experiments that had such ultimately unsettling results, I sifted the more obscure divinatory modes. Have you ever heard of spodomancy, the finding of portents in ashes? Or ophiomancy, all done by study of serpents? (You just can’t get the serpents these days.) Or rhabdomancy, the use of divining rods? That’s supposed to be good for locating water and oil, but one doesn’t see where to point the rod to take aim at the future. Sideromancy involves watching the movement of straws placed on red-hot irons, but it turned into spodomancy too quickly for me – or capnomancy, which is divination by smoke, if I hadn’t been too busy coughing. Ceromancy uses melting wax, which gets all over everything. Myomancy depends on the actions of mice; all my mice seemed to do was eat and pee a lot (but let’s not talk about uromancy). Cromyomancy is prediction by cutting up and studying onions . . . I tried that diligently, but it all ended in tears.

  “Once I even came to this very public house and attempted both oenomancy – using libations of wine – and gyromancy, being divination performed by walking in a circle until dizziness supervenes. And I want you to know that the conclusions which you lot all loudly drew were both distracting and unfair.”

  Meanwhile Carruthers appeared to be demonstrating divination by utter apathy and torpor, or – as it is technically known – dormancy. I suggested gently, “Perhaps we could skip the failures and hear about the experiment that worked?”

  “Er, yes. Actually it is a trifle embarrassing. In addition to the need, according to Smythe’s Law, to use a rare and obscure divinatory focus, you have to find something that specifically works for you. Someone who can achieve nothing at all through stichomancy (using random literary extracts . . . I thought you’d never ask) might find his hotline to the future lay in lampadomancy (which is divination through the use of a torch flame). In the end, ah, I came across my own personal “mancy” when I was, um, feeding the cat.”

  “Divination through observation of cats!” marvelled Hyphen-Jones. “That would be, let me think . . . ailuromancy.”

  “Not quite,” Smythe mumbled. “I appear to have been the first prophetic investigator to stumble upon ailurotrophemancy, or divination through the study of cat food.”

  We sat aghast.

  “Not just any cat food, mind you. It was a rather expensive brand called Vitamog, to which my little tom-cat Pyewacket was unreasonably addicted. The effect was remarkable! As I spooned out those glistening, glutinous lumps of what purported to be gourmet-cooked liver . . . by the way, divination by inspecting the livers of animals is known as hepatoscopy . . . where was I? Oh yes: I saw . . . visionary things in the Vitamog. You may well snigger, gentlemen, but I saw it: glinting fragments of the future. There was one flash of a newspaper headline – ROYAL SEX SCANDAL: MONARCHY DOOMED? – and sure enough, it appeared on the front page of The Times on the very next day.”

  “As indeed it does in most weeks,” said Carruthers the diehard sceptic.

  “There were other confirmations, though rarely anything truly useful. A vision, accurate to the penny, of the total amount of my next grocery bill. A glimpse of a blazing car that, within the week, I saw again in a James Bond movie on TV. And for natural reasons of sympathetic magic, I often saw the future doings of cats in my back garden. Disappointing, really, once the first amazement had worn off. We psychic investigators are above mere sordid matters of finance, but –” here a note of sadness entered Smythe’s voice “– one good stock-market tip or set of winning lottery numbers would have been useful objective confirmation.”

  “Hear, hear,” said the Major, with feeling.

  “One point of minor interest was that, although I experimented with other brands of feline food, only Vitamog ever glistened with numinous visions. Even Powermog, from the same manufacturers, was of no divinatory use at all. One wonders what the closely guarded secret formula for Vitamog might be . . . But at the time this seemed a trivial issue compared to my growing sense that there were good reasons for my seeing only these tantalizing glimpses beyond the present day. Something else, something greater and darker, overshadowed everything I scried in the oracle of the Vitamog. Day after day, as tin after tin of the miraculous cat food passed through Pyewacket and into history, I saw that my view of the future was being obscured by a monstrous, formless fore-telling that – if I may lapse for one moment into the technical jargon of the occult – was heavily doom-laden and exuded a pungent reek of wrongness.”

  “My cat keeps herself perfectly clean,” said Hyphen-Jones.

  “Psychic wrongness, my friend. Day by day the sense of doom grew: a terrible blank, as though something were coming irrevocably to an end. By reference to the few glimpses to which I was able to assign future dates, I gleaned that absolutely no forthcoming events after a certain date – the sixteenth of June this year – could be seen. It was as though the world were fated to be swallowed up by one of those nameless but inconceivably deadly astral entities from the Outer Spheres. A fearful burden of knowledge, as you might imagine. And then I was seized with a more personal fear.”

  “This would be the old one about not being able to see beyond the end of your own life?” suggested Carruthers, who like the rest of us had heard scores of Smythe’s psychic anecdotes and developed a certain uncanny skill at divination through literary familiarity. (Would that be called romancy?) “Yet here we are in the month of November and there you sit, which does rather lessen the suspense.”

  “It is a distinct problem of this narrative form,” Smythe agreed with a sigh. “But there was a tragedy, nonetheless. If only I had been able properly to interpret the meaning of that awful blankness!”

  Hyphen-Jones said, “Obviously it was the cat who snuffed it. Poor old Pyewacket.”

  “Hush,” said Smythe. “I took careful occult precautions as 16 June approached and time – all of time, everywhere – seemed to be running out. The utter emptiness of the revealed future was deeply unnerving. On the evening of 15 June I constructed a pentacle and multiple layers of psychic wards to defend against whatever threatened. I was resolved to stay within these supernatural defences for the whole of the fatal day, plus a few extra hours for luck. As midnight approached, I opened the last tin of Vitamog remaining in the house, and stared into a final scrying-bowl of the catalytic cat food – to see only one blurred and tantalizing glimpse of a daily newspaper, before all of futurity was swallowed in that frightful blank. Then I entered the pentacle to await destiny. You can imagine the psychic turmoil that racked me through the twenty-four hours that followed . . .”

  “We can,” I said. “Effortlessly.”

  “Well, it was a strain. Pyewacket mewed a great deal and refused to remain within the wards; at one stage he departed through the back-door cat flap and returned with a present in the form of one of the neighbours’ goldfish . . . which I decided not to use for ichthyomancy. Otherwise, events were few.”

  “And when the fateful d
ay was over?”

  “Ah, now comes the interesting part of the story. At dawn on 17 June, I cautiously emerged from my pentacle and found the world unchanged . . . except that, as usual, the previous day’s newspaper had been delivered and lay on the doormat. With a thrill of recognition, I saw that the layout of the front page corresponded to the last fading vision that I had obtained through ailurotrophemancy!” Smythe fumbled in his wallet. “I have the relevant clipping here. It was the smallest story on the front page, but not without a certain piquant intellectual interest. See!”

  CAT-ASTROPHIC. Following a scare about poisonous contaminants in some tins, MoggiMunch Ltd have today completely withdrawn their Vitamog brand of tinned cat food from the market. The sister brands Powermog and MoggiGorge are unaffected.

  A somewhat protracted silence followed.

  “Now,” said Smythe with a rhetorical wave of his hand, “which of you mentioned ‘the old one about not being able to see beyond the end of your own life’? The psychic implications are so very fascinating, the more you consider them . . .”

  We looked at him. It was hard to know what to say, but eventually I found appropriate words to honour his raconteur skills. “Smythe,” I said, “it’s your turn to buy the drinks.”

  There was general applause.

  THE CALIBER OF THE SWORD

  Larry Lawrence

  Larry Lawrence, who died in 2010, spent much of his comparatively short life in a small town in Indiana. He had been writing since the seventh grade, but had only began seriously submitting stories for publication since 1998. He wrote in a variety of genres, but preferred fantasy and horror. He was a voracious reader and also collected fantasy and horror objects and figurines which he used to display around his writing area. Which reminds me of a quip by Robert Bloch who used to say that he had the heart of a little boy – he kept it in a jar on his desk!