The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy Page 42

  Thol placed his left hand on the pommel of the golden sword and said, “With this, I’ll have a chance against Krollok. But it occurs to me that if I lose, I should arrange for him to stop by and meet your friends. I’ll set up some good bait, just in case. Perhaps a letter directing my loyalists to come here for more of these god-metal swords, without mentioning your name.”

  Hanegral smiled. “I doubt you’ll lose in a fair fight. Krollok never had the discipline to be much of a swordsman. But if it happens, I’ll do my best to introduce him to my pet water-lizard for you. After all, to a very polite water-lizard, Krollok will just be one more uncouth snack.”

  A Touch of the Impossibles

  A CASE OF FOUR FINGERS

  John Grant

  John Grant (or Paul Barnett to give him his real name) has published over fifty books under one name or another, including about twenty novels and children’s books. His best-known non-fiction books are probably The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters (third edition, 1998) and (with John Clute) The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997). His fiction includes Albion (1991), The World (1992), the Leonie Strider space opera series and the twelve novels in the Legends of Lone Wolf series. Paul has received the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Society Scholarship Award, the Locus Award, the J. Lloyd Eaton Award and a British Science Fiction Association Special Award (all as John Grant). No wonder he had to move to America with all those awards. We can’t have such talented people living in Britain!

  They’d engraved the tombstone of Pretty Polly McTavish with the parrot’s tragic last words: “Hello Sailaaargh.”

  It was a touching gesture, and I don’t think there was anyone among the small huddle of mourners at the pet cemetery who didn’t have a tear in their eye as the Reverend Jeremy Harcourt-Fruitcake plummily read out the last rites. Pretty Polly had sacrificed her life so that Miss Grimthorpe, the so-called Pantry Detective, could solve her forty-seventh and best-selling case so far, the grisly Who Slew the Cockatoos?

  The grim service over, I headed off alone down Curling Lane to my home and workplace at the edge of the village.

  Birds sang.

  Bees buzzed.

  Trees rustled.

  Clouds did whatever it is that clouds do.

  It was Indian Summer, always a busy time in the village.

  Always a busy time for me.

  Today I was going to have to process Pretty Polly McTavish and, if memory served aright, half a dozen other carcasses. Human ones.

  But first I needed a cup of tea.

  Strong tea.

  Later I sat on my porch, savouring the Broken Orange Pekoe, looking at the sky, wondering if it was time for me to start searching, just out of interest, you understand, through the Sits Vac columns in the newspaper. Ten years – ten years I’d been doing this job, and that’s a long time out of anyone’s life. Especially since, if you looked at it another way, I’d been doing the job for something like a century. And despite the fact that even a long time doesn’t take much of a chunk out of eternity.

  But the century felt like an eternity in itself, is what I’m getting at.

  The village always looked good in Indian Summer, which lasts about half the year in these parts. Christmas takes up a good part of the rest. Hallowe’en lasts a week and a half.

  Maybe I’d better explain.

  Maybe I’d better not.

  Not yet.

  I drained the last of the tea and flicked the cup so that the damp leaves at the bottom flew to land among the oleanders. God alone knows how they flourish so well, all year round, since I hate gardening. It’s the digging. Makes me feel creepy.

  Superstitious.

  But that’s the way I am.

  The cup washed and put away in the cupboard, I sauntered from the house across to my workshed. It was tatty, corrugated-iron-roofed, wooden-walled, brown and greasy, just like it had been yesterday. Along one side of it were the heavy green plastic hoppers where the remains of the deceased were regularly dumped by the Authorities. One hopper per corpse. In Indian Summer it can get so busy that I need a dozen hoppers, but today, according to my accounts book – more accurate than my memory – there were only eight corpses to deal with. Still quite a number, but not as bad as it sometimes is.

  Hopper number one. Accounts book and pencil out of pocket. Tick off Pretty Polly McTavish in the RECEIVED column. The brute had dispatched her with a baseball bat, so she wasn’t a pretty sight. She’d require stitching before she was ready to be seen out and about again.

  Hopper number two. The first body of a set of five, I knew. This one and the other four had been exotic dancers, all stripped naked except for skimpy red underwear, all slashed and mutilated in inventive ways. Dave Knuckle had been in town for the Case of the Parboiled Detective, soon to be published as Smack My Butt, Babe. Which of the mangled bimbos had been actual victims and which were merely his discarded girlfriends was always a tough one. Best left to the Authorities.

  Hopper number seven. Tick went the pencil. The by-product of an ongoing case for Sir John. An Ashmolean subcurator smothered by having a rolled-up paperback copy of Piers Plowman rammed down his throat. The acne scars were as livid as vintage port.

  Hopper number eight.

  Empty.

  I coughed into it to listen to the little echoes confirm the evidence of my eyes. I stared at my accounts book in histrionic disbelief – these things should be done properly or not at all. In my own neat, crabbed writing the entry was there, just as I’d written it down the night before when the Clerk of the Authorities had dictated it to me over the telephone.

  “One corpse, male, with severed hand. Identity: Gerald G. Dukes, a.k.a. The Even Mightier Spongini. Profession: Stage magician. Age: 28.”

  There followed a few further personal attributes. The Clerk would have been bound to mention it had invisibility been one of them.

  No, the hopper was definitely empty.

  There’d never been an error before – not in the whole long ten-years-that-was-really-a-century-that-felt-like-eternity. Never could be.

  But I ran to the house and the telephone to call the Clerk anyway.

  Just in case.

  And now maybe I better had explain. About the village of Cadaver-in-the-Offing, and about the way things are around here, and perhaps a bit about myself as well – even though I don’t like the, you know, limelight.

  Nestled among the rolling hills of Barsetshire, one of the lesser-known Home Counties, Cadaver-in-the-Offing is a sleepy little place – two shops and a pub and a scattering of houses, not to mention the church and the vicarage – but behind this veneer of tranquillity lurk seething passions and unfettered violence. More passions, more violence than in the rest of the country put together.

  Because Cadaver-in-the-Offing is the place where detective stories happen.

  The village has a population of about two hundred, if you look at it one way, and about two hundred thousand, if you look at it another. There have to be enough people so that the lesser characters in detective stories – the victims, the witnesses, the murderers, the romantic leads, the local colour – are always different. But economies can be made, and usually are, by recycling those characters.

  Endlessly.

  Who can honestly recall the countless lusty young men who’ve accompanied Dr Gideon Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale, and who’ve waltzed off with the pretty, young but feistily independent ingenue at the end of the case? Who can recall those ingenues either, come to that? The victims in Perry Mason’s cases form a long train of utter anonymity, as do the various gorgeously pneumatic soubrettes who clutter up the proceedings. Who didn’t commit the murder or solve the case in The Nine Tailors or The Sign of Four or Inspector Queen’s Own Case or The Mysterious Affair at Styles or . . .

  I could go on.

  Once upon a time all these forgettable individuals actually had an independent existence, even if you couldn’t tell them apart from each other any more than
I’d been able to distinguish Dave Knuckle’s discards in my hoppers.

  It was wasteful.

  Decades ago the Authorities, during one of their periodic spurts of cost-cutting, realized this. Downsizing was the zeal of the day. Why expend effort hiring individuals for the bit parts, why have to put out the cash for the undertaker’s bills, when people could be found on the unemployment queues who’d be only too eager to accept zero wages in exchange for board, lodging . . . and immortality? Oh, sure, they’d have to accept being murdered every once in a while, but they wouldn’t be dead long before being revived, given a different name, maybe a fresh wig, a new home to live in, a new role and probably a new spouse or lover.

  Acting in conjunction with the Anti-Blood Sports League, the Authorities founded Cadaver-in-the-Offing.

  And hired me.

  Yes, I suppose you’re probably still wondering about me. Frankly, the less said about me the better. I had my own reasons for coming to work in Cadaver-in-the-Offing, but presumably the law-enforcement agencies of various obscure Middle European countries have forgotten all about me by now – which was one of the reasons why I was contemplating resigning my post, that day in the midst of the overlong Indian Summer.

  Or maybe they haven’t. That’s one of the reasons I won’t resign quite yet.

  The other? All will become clear, Tonstant Weader.

  So let’s just say no more than that it’s my job to take the . . . the secondary products of the detectives’ industry and . . . and mend them.

  That’s all you need to know.

  Other than that, let my past be an obscurity and my present something only dimly perceived; let me be a faceless and nameless cypher.

  “Hello, Victor,” said the Clerk wearily when finally he answered the telephone. He packed decades’ worth of disdain into those two words: just because Cadaver-in-the-Offing couldn’t continue to function without my services – or those of another like me – doesn’t mean that people are courteous to me. Oh, no: far from it. Most of them avoid me like the plague, and, whenever they’re forced to deal with me, look at me like they’ve just trodden in something the cat’s done.

  Tell you the truth, I prefer it that way.

  I explained my problem. For once I knew that I had his attention. I could hear the click of his keyboard in the background as he checked up on what I’d been telling him.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “I have the entry here on screen in front of me . . . Dukes . . . Even Mightier . . . inscrutable . . . magician. Hum. Ho. He is – was – part of a case for Inspector Romford.”

  “The one with the pipe, the puppies, the paunch and the passion for peppermints?”

  “The very same. Big in the library market. Would be even bigger if it weren’t for the difficulties he had kicking his crack habit. Hmm . . . he was supposed to have solved this case by now – it’s just a short story. It was one of his stage rivals did it – The Mighty Thrombosis – on account of the wife, Zelda. The Mighty Thrombosis’s wife, that is. Usually the wife in a Romford case.”

  Even though the Clerk couldn’t see me I held up a hand to stem the flow of words. “That’s all as might be,” I said, “but the fact of the matter is that I’m still a body short of my quota.”

  “Don’t suppose you’ve got even the, harrumph, severed hand?”

  “Not so much as a bleeding fingernail. I told you, I checked the hopper proper.”

  “Well, it’s not my responsibility – I don’t deal with the detailed stuff, as you know.”

  “I know.”

  In other words, the Clerk thought this was likely to be a knotty problem, and the quicker he got his rear covered the better.

  “Delegate, boy, delegate,” he said. “That’s my motto. Eh?”

  “I know.”

  He was going to dump me in it and leave me to sink or swim.

  “Tell you one thing, though,” he added, then paused. “This sounds like—” and I could almost hear the drums roll”—a Case For Inspector Romford!”

  The phone went dead.

  Quite how Inspector Romford’s inability to solve a Case For Inspector Romford could be a Case For Inspector Romford was a logical tangle that part of me was trying to unravel as I ambled up Curving Lane towards the centre, if the village could be said to have such a thing, of Cadaver-in-the-Offing. It was about lunchtime, and so Romford would certainly be in the Heart & Sickle, drinking brown ale and keeping an ear open for clues. It’s an old technique and can be effective. The sole disadvantage is that the brown ale tends to mean the clues, though gathered, get lost again.

  I found him at a table in the corner, nursing a pint. Beside it was a whisky chaser. I raised my eyebrows.

  “Needed a drop of the hard stuff,” he said, seeing the direction of my gaze. “Don’t mind telling you, whossname, that I’m bamboozled.”

  With the accent on the middle syllable, I thought, but I said nothing.

  “Right there in front of my eyes it was done,” he continued, “bold as brass and twice as natural. I thought I had it all sewn up within minutes, but it wasn’t to be. Mark my words, there’s more to this case than meets the hand.”

  I must have looked puzzled, because he added, leaning forwards confidentially towards me, “I would have said ‘eye’ but the hand’s quicker, see?”

  I said I saw.

  “Bleeding conjurors, prestidigitators, stage magicians, illusionists, call them what you will,” he mumbled through the froth on the top of his beer.

  Pulling the wooden chair scrapingly back over the slate floor of the Heart & Sickle’s snug, I asked him what he meant.

  And he explained.

  The previous night had seen a grand gala at St Boniface’s Church Hall, beside Dead Man’s Crossroads in the middle of Cadaver-in-the-Offing. The Barchester Bugle had been full of it for weeks. It was a rare honour for a conjuror so ïnternationally prominent as The Mighty Thrombosis to treat a place as small as Cadaver-in-the-Offing to one of his performances, but his mother came from hereabouts and he wanted to try out a few new tricks in front of an unimportant audience, so to here he’d come.

  ONE NIGHT ONLY

  An Informal Evening with

  THE MIGHTY THROMBOSIS

  – the advertisements and handbills had said. And under that there was further news:

  ably supported by

  Helsinki’s Most Dazzling Acrobatic Troupe

  The Family Brød

  “The Seven Deadly Finns”

  Mrs Romford had booked tickets at once for herself and the Inspector, telling him that he’d just have to juggle his duty hours to accommodate her wishes. He’d made a song and dance about the difficulties of disrupting his schedule, but in fact he’d been glad enough to go: ever since he’d first dropped a hidden pack of cards as a child he’d been fascinated by the whole charisma of stage magic – the greasepaint, the aethereally beautiful assistants, the mystery, the spectacle, and the whole participatory game whereby the audience knew it was being hoodwinked yet believed in magic all the same.

  So when his day’s labours were over he changed into his second-best tweed suit, checked his mobile phone was working in case of emergencies (“There’d better be no emergencies,” he’d growled at fresh-faced Sergeant Mutton), made sure he’d got plenty of tobacco and peppermints in his pocket for the walk home, and set off with his wife for the Church Hall.

  They were among the first to arrive. The Reverend Jeremy Harcourt-Fruitcake had laid out the hard wooden chairs in neat rows from the front of the hall to the back, but so far only a handful of people were there to sit in them. Ignoring each other’s protestations, the Romfords strode determinedly down the central aisle to settle themselves firmly as near to the middle of the front row as possible.

  This was their big night out, and they wanted to miss nothing.

  They weren’t to be disappointed, although the magic they would see would not be quite of the kind they expected.

  Romford chewed steadfastly on the
stem of his dead pipe for what seemed like hours as the Hall slowly filled up. He recognized most of the people there, of course: Mrs Dora Griggs of Griggs House, still in mourning for the death of young Clarence, murdered during a performance of Julius Caesar; Dr Smithies, the bluffly reliable GP who had played such a hand in that case; Donald Glover, who ran the garage – all the noteworthies of Cadaver-in-the-Offing, in short, each of them looking as eagerly anticipatory as he himself . . .

  At last it was time for the lights to dim.

  A hissy recording of a fanfare split the air.

  The silence throbbed.

  Mrs Romford opened a packet of peanuts.

  Someone sneezed.

  Breath was bated.

  And the curtain jerked open to reveal the Seven Deadly Finns standing in a triangle atop each other, poised on tiptoe – particularly difficult, Romford thought, for the three load-bearers on the bottom, but they showed no signs of strain – and with their arms outstretched, fingers pointing towards the wings. They were dressed in silver lamé suits, and the even teeth in their uniformly broad smiles glistened and gleamed every bit as much as the suits.

  The recording lurched into something by Strauss, and the topmost Finn tumbled forward in a somersault to land perfectly at the very front of the stage. The audience applauded as if this were the greatest thing they’d ever seen, and then the performance started in earnest.

  Bodies flew all over the stage in a blur of lamé and an endless confusion of stray limbs. Every now and then the Finns would stop in some multi-bodied contortion, and the watchers took this as their cue for yet another round of applause. Romford, hands still, thought around the stem of his pipe that team acrobats must have to bath a lot, what with constantly having to stuff their faces up each other’s . . .

  Mrs Romford interrupted his reverie. “Aren’t they grand?” she whispered.

  “Very grand,” he agreed.

  “You should steer clear of celery seeds when you’re pregnant,” she added significantly, then turned back to her peanuts.

  Baffled, Romford carried on watching the spectacle.