At The Beach [formerly published in LifeDeath]

AT THE BEACH


'You've seen the manifest?'
'Yes, and a more surly bunch of thieves, con-men and child molesters the old London has never carried. I tell you we'll have trouble this trip.'
'Control thinks so too. I have sealed orders. We divert. Not Cygnus, it's…too soft. It's run by a cult now. Cults are unreliable. Its days as a prison planet are numbered.'
'So we ditch them then. Into space is cheaper, I always say.'
'Oh no, someone…hates…these prisoners.
The new orders say they get the Block'.

The man on the seashore was building a castle as the turning tide began to sweep back. He knew he had maybe two, three hours at most to form the walls, dig drainage ditches, prepare the barricades. He worked calmly, methodically, whistling to himself, for all the world as if he wasn't going to die.

The mica of the beach wasn't that firm a foundation even mixed with urine, and the acid pools, however diluted, were too damaging to the hands to moisten the available materials.

At his back the sea wall was an unclimbable sheet of fused glass, and at the top of it his captors were setting out their deck chairs. The Block was an inescapable prison, not only because of its size and design but because once outside, once on the beach, there was nowhere to go. He'd escaped, and now no one was going to pull him back up the wall. They were just going to watch – oh, and videotape him, to provide useful re-enforcement for the others still inside.

He wasn't going to look at the wall. If he did, he knew he'd be able to see just how far the bleaching and burning waves of the sea rose; he'd know if his hope were possible or whether a wave tall enough to flick a bracing, sizzling spray an inch or so over the wall's top, would sweep away any possible efforts.

But he did look of course, because otherwise he wouldn't know how high the castle walls needed to be.

***

Inside the prison a man, whose papers identified him as an inspector general, was cooling his heels in the chief warders' office, waiting for someone to get back to him. It hadn't escaped his notice that his tewachi was getting cold, and the sub-warder hadn't come back with any cake as promised, and the gap between the door's edge and wall had formed a single molecule when the warder had gone out. The Inspector had white hair that framed his head like a halo and a face like a dissipated eagle.

He sat on the desk and unfastened the top button of his red-lined judicial cape, letting a faint breeze from the air conditioning ruffle his layered silk shirt. His hands ran a quick arpeggio across the desk's inlaid ivory keyboard.

He got the wall to turn into a flat screen display. He got the Beach.

The man on the screen had a mop of black hair, and he was short, though somehow the prison issue pants' legs and tunic-sleeves still ended a good inch before his feet and hands. Yet despite his build he had to be immensely strong, and he worked swiftly as if his life depended on it.

The Doctor recognised the man on the beach at once. It didn't make it any easier. Along with the time-travel codes the Time Lords had ripped from his memory had gone a swathe of other recollections, that he'd been here before was one of them. He had no memory of it.

All he had was the box. The Time Lord message box that had materialised on his lab bench, identical to the one he had carried to Solos. When he'd seen the destination the Time Lords had set for him and the set of inspector’s credentials lying on top of it – his free-pass to the most dangerous prison planet of the latter fascist days of the Federation – he'd made sure that he hadn't brought anyone with him. He hadn't wanted to bring Jo here, to see the future glory ending in black uniformed horror. He hadn't wanted to risk having hostages to fortune. Now he'd found that the worst one in the world was already here.

What hostage could be closer to his hearts than himself? He found out soon enough when he broke the coding on the prisoner lists. On the death orders. They were due to dump another eight prisoners on the beach at full tide. They'd be pitched out of the black walls, squealing, to skid down into the acid. Not a show, not a failed escape, just a routine house-clearance. Unlike the little man he watched on the screen - for he'd somehow made it through, hadn't he - mustn't he? - to have survived, to have his appearance altered by the Time Lords into his own features, to end up their long-lease skivvy and messenger-boy. Unlike him the prisoners would have no chance no chance at all. Five unknown names and two he recognised. Jamie and Zoe. Maybe his former companions too had survived, if he had, but still he couldn't remember any of this, and he felt deep inside that somehow all bets were off.

There was a bitter stinging wind, and a smell that caught at the throat. Death was rolling in. The Doctor ignored it and got on building the inner bailey. He knew he had to break the inrush of the waves by a succession of barriers to weaken and subdue the tide. He was rather pleased with the crenulations nevertheless. Did it make it less real to him? Did it make him frivolous to think that this whole life was the gift of the Time Lord's, a moment in time cut and stretched out, that maybe he could die here, and still elsewhere the other strand of his life, cut and changed and sent to Earth would survive in some unknown and unknowable form? He hoped not, and wished he had some flags.

***

In the grey metal cell, where the air was musty and old and there were no air vents. The saturnine man wasn't pacing and his face was like death. Jamie had seen men like him in the wars with England, people who had seen death and death and death again until it ran in their blood like black fire. He'd been in some massacre, Jamie guessed, seen his kin or his girl gunned down. Round them, the thief was pacing, testing the door, every circuit, until Jamie wanted to scream at him, it's a wall ye bam pot, just a wall, its fixed like magic, y' Sassenach. In the far corner the calm man, the big one, was clenching his hands as if they were going to break, and maybe he'd break first. He had some control Jamie reckoned, but it was like a dog's leash and the dog was scared.

Zoe was talking to the leader, the grizzled man in green, and the fair haired woman was watching her like an enemy.

***

The Doctor heard boot heels click along the corridor and hastily got up fromthe desk and straightened the chair. He left the screen on though as if he didn't dare turn it off. The door opened. It wasn't the underling he'd dealt with before. The chief warder had a familiar beard, and wore his Federation uniform as if it was an insult –whether to the wearer or him, the Doctor wasn't sure. He put his head in his hands. 'Am I never in this life,' he moaned, 'to be sent somewhere where you are not the proverbial bad penny?'

'Now Doctor. Solos of course, and Peladon twice. If that hasn't happened yet don't worry about it, there are reality changes all around that area, and, oh, a dozen others, all entirely free of my presence. Besides this isn't a “the Doctor is sent somewhere to thwart me" matter. This is different.' The Master pointed to the tray. 'Fresh tewachi, and cake.' He took a sip from one of the cups and a tiny bite from a slice of cake.

The Doctor nodded and pointedly took the other cup and a fresh piece of cake. He wasn't worried about poison.

'What did the Time Lords let you remember?' the Master asked, his back to the Doctor now, contemplating the screen and the sandcastle builder.

The Doctor sighed, 'Not much. Sub-time technology's all there. Gossip and snippets of past encounters with famous people - all of a jumble - and bits of cosmic lore that sound as if they were clipped from travelogues. I must sound like a club bore half the time.'

'My dear Doctor, half the time you sound psychotic, but I wasn't referring so much to that, as this.' He pointed at the screen. 'This travesty, this hypocritical breaking of their own laws, this discarded thing.' Turning, he grinned evilly, as the Doctor's face fell. 'You didn't know that they rewrote you, took an incarnation of you who had avoided them his whole life and turned him into a servant? Blocked memories! They must have been shovelling the tapes into a flaming furnace. They made him.'

'Why is he here now?'

'He's on your mission.' The Master sat down behind the Chief Warder's desk, and leaned forward. 'He's failing, and when he fails…they don't save him. Instead they send you, into this narrowest window of opportunity. Into this crowning moment, the moment you should see.'

'Why?'

'Because now the puppet's strings break.' The Master leaned forward, 'Unless of course we can find a form of agreement.'

'You're saying I die here?'

'A part of you certainly. May I?' The Master reached for the Time-box that the Doctor had under his cloak.

Maybe the Doctor should have been surprised when it opened, but he wasn't. He'd learned too much already. The Master lifted his hands in affirmation, and the Doctor could see the glint of DNA pads on the tips of his black gloves. His old friend reached inside the box and pulled out six cards. Black lettering on white paste-board. GET OUT OF JAIL FREE!

'A touch, an undeniable touch,' the Master smiled. 'Someone in the crowd of Machiavelli's Tortoises, has a sense of humour.' The cards warped, changed. Official looking now. Black seals, red print, watermarked and hologram impregnated, anti-forgery locked with a molecular coating. Only one line blank on each a grey shimmer for a person's name. The Doctor knew that the blank lines were thought-receptive; he had only to think the names he wanted to appear.

'Stays of execution,' the Master said, 'all signed and dated and agreed by the Federation Council, left open to you, the replacement inspector, to carry out, to deliver to the…replacement…Chief Warder. Carte blanche. Lifted of course from a more liberal time-line, an attempt to halt a chain of time shaking events originating in a gim-crack time experiment ten years in this galaxy's future. From an age when the legend these prisoners would have made stands on the brink of shattering an empire. I imagine the Time Lords are releasing the relevant data in your mind now.'

Flashes. A tyranny. Freedom fighters. A failure, and yet a clarion call that would in the end be heeded. An image of worth reaching forward in time until thrones toppled. The desire to end opposition in its cradle somehow given a physical opportunity. A gamble he was here to stop.

He was to fill in the forms. He was to name five names. He was to order the death sentences quashed and have them re-shipped to another prison, one they should have been sent to, one they would escape from. He was to specify the exact course their ship should take, at double speed. He was to be a puppet like the one on the screen, building his bloody sand-castles.

He looked at the Master, 'Your alternative is?'

'Write Doctor John Smith, Zoe Herriot, Jamie McCrimmon on the forms. The staff here see me as the Chief Warder. They'll go down on the beach and haul him up. They'll get his humans from the death cell and they will live. No tricks. All you have to do is let three people die instead, three people who'll die anyway within the next three years. I'll make it easier if you want I'll tell you the ones who stand the least chance of changing things by their absence. Some of them were due to die long before the others. Terrorists and criminals always use up lives so quickly—‘

'I don't want you 'making it easier!' the Doctor shouted. 'I will not kill others to save myself. I will not kill others to save my friends.'

'I know you are the kind of fool who'd sacrifice himself. Now I see how quickly you'd kill a stranger. Remember it isn't "you" that will die, but another person, a person with all the claims to life of one of these dead-end revolutionaries who won't last five years against the Federation. But I see that won't move you. I can see you've discarded him, and his friends already. I can see it in your eyes, Doctor. You'd let a temporal-doppelganger die like so much shed skin-tissue. You talk a good 'renegade', Doctor, but cut your hearts open and you'd see 'Gallifrey' written there like a cancer. I'm not killing anyone here, if you'll exempt the Chief Warder, and his death was, I assure you, a miniscule problem in ethics. He was the worst kind of psychopath.'

'A judgement which you no doubt found yourself well qualified to make,' the Doctor spat. 'I'd be interested to know what you regard as the worst form of that condition.'

'Touché, Doctor. I would say an absence of self-knowledge, if I were pressed, and maybe an...obsession with fine clothing if I were being facetious.' The Master let his eyes rove over the Doctor's inspectorial finery. 'I see you dressed for the occasion. Oh I know, I know, it's a disguise. It always starts like that.' He waved a gloved hand dismissively. 'I only wanted to explain that I didn't cause this tangle, I am merely exploiting it. I’m simply ensuring you understand the import of your decision, that's all.'

The Doctor put down his cup, and said five names. Quick, clean, military. The Brigadier’s best parade ground bark.

'You, sanctimonious monster,' the Master snarled. 'And you dare to judge me.' He had a black, short rod in his hand now, the weapon that shrank his victims into molecularly compacted dolls gasping out their lungs inability to absorb oxygen through too fine a membrane. 'Now we'll watch you die.'

He glanced behind him, quickly, daring the Doctor to try and jump him.
The Beach was empty.

'I've done it!' the thief danced back, shouting. 'It's like an enzyme you see, a living molecular zip. It can't hold if enough of the teeth come apart, and they can be vibrationally disarrayed. There's a rhyme lock. It might be a failsafe pattern in case a guard gets pushed in a cell in a riot! I'm brilliant! Somebody tell me I'm brilliant!'

The dark man with the face of death was at his shoulder. 'You're brilliant,' he said, sarcastically, 'but you didn't unlock that alone. I watched you apply the pressure, and the fourth site shifted on its own just as you brought down your hand.'
'What are you saying?' The little thief looked hurt, 'are you saying it was unlocked from the other side?’

'Oh yes, that's right,' a soft voice said. A head topped with a mop of thick black hair pushed open the sliding wall and a man fell headlong into the room. 'Don’t mind me, I'm only here to rescue you

'Doctor!' Jamie and Zoe were at his side in an instant, only to recoil from the acrid smell around his clothes.

'Quickly, Jamie, Zoe. My boots, quickly!' He started a frantic jig and the two youngsters knelt hurriedly to unlace his boots as the heels continued to disintegrate. Tto the others: ‘You do know your locksmith here's been opening the wrong wall. This is the disposal chute for this cell, it would bring you out into an ocean of acid. I managed to build a ramp up to the chute level, had to disguise it so they’d leave me in peace to work. Only way to reach here was from the outside. All the security is concentric you see, running out from the ship landing pad at the centre.'

'I'm afraid we don't see.' The curly haired man in green's voice was thoughtful, resonant, and yet hard. Not the black hardness of the thinner man, but still a voice that refused to be relegated to a bit part in someone else’s story. 'You say you're here to rescue us. Why us specifically?'

'Oh, now, that I can't say. You'll do great things. Isn't that enough? Suppose that there was a power…oh, no, no. Oh Jamie, what would you say?'

'I'd say be grateful you've got someone to get you out of this cell, and cut your blather.'

'Well,' the dark man said, 'we are still in the cell, and as the…Doctor…remarks, on one side we have the ocean of acid, and on the other the rings of guards. It's, ah, kill or be killed, isn't it.'

Zoe scowled at him. 'Nothing of the sort, there's always a third way, isn't there Doctor?'

'Yes, yes, Zoe. Please excuse her, she was a Blair's Babe for a week when the Nestene took over the Cabinet fixtures in 2001.' The mop haired man raised a silver whistle to his lips. In response, a trembling, groaning sound filled the room.

'This is it!' the thief shouted, 'they're going to eject us into the acid.'
'No, no, no,' the Doctor chided. 'It's a shortcut to your liberation.'

* * *

'You, know your problem?' The Doctor said, 'you've never learned to trust anyone else, and all the best psychologists will tell you, the key to doing that is knowing when to trust yourself.'

The Master, tied hand and foot to the chair, glared at him. If looks could kill, the Doctor would have had curlier hair and bigger teeth by then. 'Mununt hww r yyuuu hhrr ff hhss nt Dd?' he managed, tryinmg to spit out the gag.

'Why would they send me here if he didn't die?'
The Doctor repeated, smiling, 'I can only assume he never reported back'.

* * *

'Right, Jamie, Zoe!' The Doctor rubbed his hands. 'Who'd have thought a band of ragamuffins like that would have a computer genius and the galaxy's greatest lateral thinking thief in their midst? I think we've done it. We've really done it. That whey-faced tribunal won't be ordering us about any more.'

'Oh aye, with Mr Grumpy and yon drunkard’s help.'
'Now, Jamie, I thought Kerr was very sweet.'
'Aye, it's Kerr now is it!'
'Why, I do believe you were jealous.'

'Hush.' The Doctor grabbed their hands and pulled them ring-a-rosy around the consol. 'Doesn't it sound different? Even the TARDIS knows we're free at last. To have some really new adventures.’

The Death of Humph

Humphrey Lyttleton, aged 86.

Now, that saddens me. ISIHAC has been for me in radio comedy what Doctor Who is on TV, and without Humph.....well. ...

In memorandum

"Samantha informs me that she has to leave early to meet her gentleman friend. He's an undertaker specialising in celebrity funerals and is very busy at the moment with clients ranging from models to famous faces of stage and screen who must be cosmetically prepared to look their best.

Consequently he can only meet her for a quick snack. She says he's always happy to get her sandwidged between a couple of beautiful bodies."

Simon BJ

The Falling City by Paul Bellora (Guest Writer)

Enter Al-Ductor, the falling city. Buildings warp and twist under constant acceleration as this doomed city plummets down a dark shaft. Service and upkeep have long ceased in this place that rockets toward destruction, and whatever functions these edifices once had are now abandoned in the face of certain ruin. No sane being would choose to live in this place; no sensible creature would willingly confine himself here—here where at any second it should all end in a single, cataclysmic shock. The largest, strongest building—the tallest, proudest tower—is frailer than your most frangible vase as it hurls to its death. In moments, it will all be smashed, obliterated by its own shear kinetic energy. This city is beyond fear; it is beyond help; it is beyond hope.

But life, it seems, is the epitome of persistence. Look there! Closely, under the crumbling shell of structures, there is movement. Down here, under the sagging mass of useless spires, there is a sort of crawling buzz of activity. There are beings that would not be dissuaded from living even here… You study their movements, their patterns. A system begins to humbly form before your eyes: an economy, a society. Finally, you grasp the true essence of the place: this—not the shell of crumbled, spurned towers—is the Falling City. Here life continues, unabated by the thought of inevitable destruction; in fact, it belongs to destruction—this is Life of the Fall. And so in the merest of moments before death, before being violently shattered upon the floor of the shaft, this hidden level hums with a buzz of content routine.

Of course, that of which a society grows under the gaze is fated to be a subject of intense study. These denizens would look to the fall as we would look upon the moon—seeking, always, to explain its purpose, its effect. A certain caste emerges—the Depthists—tasked solely with predicting the exact moment of impact. Ushering an enormous, highly budgeted project, this order seeks to gauge the precise depth of the fall—and thus, the remaining lifespan of the city. These efforts are neither made out of terror, nor anticipation; they are strictly business. There are those who could gain from such knowledge, who could better grasp various economies. Countless factors are considered, enormous lengths of data tabulated; entire libraries are filled with equations. Much is learned of the universe in this golden age. There is talk of an expedition, a project to send a man across the gulf of space and to the wall of the shaft, racing blindly past—not so that he might escape, of course, but so that some new knowledge could be gained, science furthered, benefits reaped. But science cannot benefit society without changing it… the Depthists can find no end to the shaft; with each advance in technology and improvement of instruments, estimates grow larger. Gradually it dawns: the shaft is bottomless. Destruction no longer looms; it is, in fact, impossible. The Falling City becomes the Infinite City.

How invincible something is when it is proud! Look as the structures form, the towers soar, metal and glass, out into the void. Endless development, total advancement! The Infinite City grows, reaches up into the shaft—waving with jutting spires to a world forever left behind. And it dives too—reaching down with its metal tendrils to embrace the anticipated. At the zenith of the city, there appear temples, ornately vitreous, reaching with eager antennas into the rushing abyss. These needles are the epitome of the city’s spirit: they dive eagerly into the fall, accepting it, believing it, demonstrating faith in its infinity. The fall is the subject of worship; its infinity is the source of the city’s power. Behold this incredible organism of Infinite City! It reaches out with its metal limbs; it would touch the sides of the shaft, touch the edge of the universe…

But infinity would be its own undoing, it seems. With infinite length, infinite time, there is also infinite room for error. The Depthists, long obsolete, failed to recognize the truth. The shaft is not bottomless. It has an end, which arrives shortly. Al-Ductor becomes the Fallen City.

Tales of Brittlemasque: The Duc Du Lac

The young archduke, unluckiest of men,
Inherited a vast morass of fen.
A croaking wilderness of steaming toads,
Far from the spires of court, or law, or roads.
Within this patch of dank distended earth
The archduke's family home, his place of birth,
Ill-omened, turreted, Maison Du Lac
Stood steeped in brine and bile and at its back
Rose the first wooded slopes of Brittlemasque
That land whose dead sleep not, but wake to task
Of dire revenge or love-lost message born,
To tear a throat out, or mend heart-strings torn.
He long had shunned his home, since that ill night
Fixed first misfortune to his name - as wright
Binds subtle steel to willow-wheel's hard frame -
It bent his heart, with ill-hap's bitter fame.
Though seeking no salvation in the Deeds,
that gave dominion over swamps and weeds,
He ordered horse, and on her lively back
Rode forth to view the Citadel Du Lac.
Its averies and aperies and treacheries,
Had fallen to decay amid grey trees,
Whose branches clawed as if they meant to tear
Its walls asunder and its innards bare!
Admitting from their place beneath the logs
The speckled toads, and waterbeasts, and frogs.
Then to his helm-damped ear, a whisper twined
"I am then second to the croaking kind?
That you think no inheritance in me
Is worthy of your thought or courtesy?"
He flinched as from the shadows of Du Lac
A lady pale, white-haired, attired in black
In figure, youth-itself, in eyes all-age
Bowed low before him, low as any page.
"I wonder", he assayed, though his voice shook,
That you should dare attend, who from me took
all peace of mind, all sleep for five long years".
She interrupted, "All must end in tears.
For in this place of woe, what joy may spawn
'mid weeping cypruses, or mists forlorn,"
"No more," he said, "than witchcraft wrought in life.
My cursed paramour, my ruined wife.
I seek you not, above the ground nor laid
within your sepulcre, begone foul shade."
Then the liche wept, with graveworms at her eyes,
and creeping closer made her obseiquies
"Oh curse me not with blood within your veins,
With sweat from pulling on your courser's reins
still trembling on your hands, like dewy cast"
And then her teeth were at his throat fixed fast.
And only his main strength could turn aside
The passionate greeting of his undead bride.
"Come back to my dark bed, beneath the brine
And let us in the waterweeds entwine.
The love I scorned when living to grant you
Will pale to nothing next to that we'll do."
Even as back his limbs she bent with power
A shadow fell athwart them like a tower
of seige that moves with ponderous pomp until
Its force unleased enforces all its will.
And a sweet voice, that sounded all anew,
Announced, "Why certainly this will not do,
For howsoever things may have turned slack
There can be, only, one Chatelaine Du Lac."
In armour girded of an antique day,
The corpse-fires burning in her eyes of gray,
Her sword of tempered metal, edge aglow,
Took off the witch's head with one sear blow.
Oh, to her armored arms, the Duc does cling
as to the straw the drowning man does grip,
And many is the word that at his lip
dies utterless as he, her absent face espies,
beneath the helm which shades no cool gray eyes,
for that quick glance that painted them
for him, was but the sudden thrust of memories
and in that horn-edged helmet lies
but orbless bone and moving carapace
of beetles eating inward into space
that once was beauty's home,
the seat of grace,
and still in portrature attired in black
may be observed in Gallery Du Lac.
The Lady Demestura, who died first
(some said of poison) er he wed the worst,
A maid of noble house who laid in rest
beneath the bitterhills with sword on breast,
and still stirred forth to strike the witch-queen dead,
or at the least to free her of her head,
for death is never sure in Brittlemasque,
the land where time and graves do not hold fast.


Simon BJ

The Library Of Heaven

'In my Father's house there are many bookselves. If it were not so. I would have told you.'

The Library of Heaven (which unlike that of Babel contains nothing unintelligible) contains not only every book every written, every book whose intention every existed, and every work ever referenced even in metafictive jest but also every book experienced.

Thus for a work, say Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, there exists along the long 'human-ward' axis of the Library's multi-dimensional shelves, copies that flare
with the brilliance of each reader's separate responses - one for every reading from a person's first perusal to their last familiar browsing. Copies which peter out in intractable verbiage in Chapter twelve where once a schoolchild faltered and copies with the additional epilogues and sequelia of the avid reader's imagination. Reading along the human-ward access in chronologic order, the browser finds the texts read by Dickens himself and by his proof-readers and friends and then that read by the first purchaser and onward unto the last mortal reading in dim futurity. In human-axis-space books begin with a needle point and swell to their fullest readership - budding into exotic blooms of manifold translations each with their own scarlet traceries, and then die back into a grey thread of college students, intellectuals, and lovers of obscurity until the end of their worldly experience.

Along the author-ward axis books are followed by their chronological offspring, both those of the writer, and those of the books influenced by the works, so that Lovecraft follows Bierce and Machen, and the thread of an argument or the occurrence of an image or the unfolding of a form can be picked out in real time. In the author-ward axis books open outwards forever influencing and begating influences anew and even the obscurest work sows somewhere the seeds of offspring if only in a crop of 'would-be-better' rejoinders and reactions.

Along the character-ward axis are found the varied and multiplex accounts of many authors, who have chosen to follow a specific fictional persona. This special case of the influential branches through the galleries of bright ephemeral pastiche and the stony gardens of works undertaken to renew copyrights, with their gravestone hewn images. Here may be found every story of Sherlock Holmes, or Batman, or the Doctor, of Theseus, of God. Every story, from the tales children make in crayon of the vast adventures blazoned across their wide imaginations, to the last writing-for- hire makework of the last hack working to a dwindling audience. Every tribute to the giants, every satire at their expense, every Hemlock Soames, and every Solar Pons, every Mycroft and every Moriarty.

All this in one wing of the vast arrays. For it is only the literature of humanity, and only that of its mortality.

In the Library there are also the books of worlds other than those of humanity and of other universes of humanity, books never imagined in our history, and above them the books written by the transmortals who have the eternities to pick and choose among the books of mortality as a child picks up its choice from the golden covered volumes in the sunlight of a glorious afternoon.


Simon BJ

Bertie Wooster in "24"

10:01

"I say, Jeeves, what bally hour of the day do you call this," I inquired, not a little piqued with the old feudal s. for this, untoward interruption into what Shakespeare has rightly mot justed, as t. n. s. r.

And when I tell you that the previous night had seen not only the annual Drone's dart's tourney (in which without boasting I may say I unleased times winged arrow like mother's little cupid) but also the betroval of Percy 'Mr Pasty' Cuttermold to Florinda Sangreal thereby removing one of the most dangerously betroval-minded fillies from the set of man-traps agap who infest the metrolp in the Summer months, you may be sure that what tired nature profoundly wished was sweet restorer and lots of it.

A glance at the old hands of the bedside clock informed me, that if it hadn't bust its springs it was only a thin cat's whisker past ten o'clock. I mean ten o'clock. I'd only rolled home at five, and that because with the best will in the world the flesh grows a trifle weaker with the giddy onrush of the 20th C.

"I'm an sorry to awaken you, sir." Jeeves, remarked placing silently a glass of his patent sweet restorer on the mahog dressing table, 'but you will recall you left strict instructions that you were not to be permitted to sleep in if any threatened bomb-outrages were to come to light.'

Well I must say I hummphed, and hawed. If hawed is the word I want. These wouldbe civilisation wrecking blighters be they of the Red, Yellow, or indeed the Black Shorted persuation, seemed to have thrown the infant niceties of polite behaviour out with the bathtub of not terrorising the innocent. Was there any gain to be made by issuing their demands before elevenses? Really?


From 'Bertie Wooster in "24" '
By P G Weirdhouse

Part 1 of an old project repolished....Doc Zarathustra

DOC ZARATHUSTRA ADVENTURES : THE MAN WHO DIED BLUE.

Portions of this text were first published in a different form in Doc Zarathustra Magazine #23 November 1933. Reprinted by permission Concordat Press. Text here, Doc Zarathustra Adventures© Hazardous Tract Press 2002. Doc Zarathustra, Four-Eyes Patterson, Pam Zarathustra, Abraham McGurk and Spats Diamond and Nicky Tesla Jr are registered trade marks.

CONCERNING DOC ZARATHUSTRA

He took his name from a prophet of an ancient and venerable religion, because he had no memory, and the name had been in the title of the first book he’d opened following his physical recovery. He’d had no trouble reading or absorbing knowledge: he gained degrees as other men collected sports cards, or women. Physics, chemistry, biology, medicine. He didn't mind being called Doc. Folks knew him as Doc Zarathustra, and he was getting on for being a legend for fighting evil in the early days of 1933 when this tale is set.



CHAPTER ONE: A BLUE MAN WITH A GUN.

From the Memoirs of Donald “Spats” Diamond

With the considerable income his patents and experiments brought him Doc maintained a number of free medical clinics in the poorer parts of New York where anyone down on their luck could get advice, treatment, or a sympathetic ear. He was working up to an ideal he called `socialised medicine' but he hadn't sold it to the President yet, even though it turned out he'd taken a bullet out of the man’s arm in the mud of the Great War, back before he’d lost his memory.

The clinics were supposed to be anonymous, but word had got out somehow that Doc was involved, possibly because a man with his physical strength and build couldn't pull an inspection without some punk intern reckoning that the papers had a need to know. Doc hated that, but sometimes it helped. If someone too worried about cost decided they trusted his free clinics - because Doc had been on the cover of the New York Times bending a steel bar - and got the jab he needed, Doc would be happy.
Sometimes it didn't help. Like when Pugs Layfette got a gat and the nurses in the clinic up against the wall and demanded Doc come and help him: not any surgeon or doctor, but Doc. It was lucky for the nurses that Doc was in the country. He'd flown back just the night before from Paris after the business of the Crown of Fantomas, with the accolades of L'Academie Francais ringing in his ears. A reporter at the airport had put down that he was still blushing from being kissed on the check by the French Premier's pretty niece, and that could have been so.
Certainly he was fussing and tinkering with his scientific works in the lab, in a way that he tended to do when distracted by something when the call reached him from the New York police commissioners office. In a second he and his crew were moving.
Spats Diamond, that's me – reformed confidence trickster (Doc was the only man ever to turn down the Big Con, and trick me into joining him for a life of adventure on the right side of the law, a trick I've never regretted falling for) – Abraham McGurk, the man-mountain of Nebraska, an ex-logger and the US's foremost authority on bird and animal life, and Nicholas Tesla Jr – the jive talking Negro nephew of the great inventor, taken under Doc's wing after his uncle's demise at the hands of The Cult of the Coiled Serpent. Four- Eyes Patterson - the King of Optics – was on contract at Panama Observatory fitting a new refractor of Doc's design, and thank heavens Pamela 'Iris' Vane, the mystery woman who claimed to be Doc's sister and to know as much about optics as Patterson, had trailed after him to his annoyance rather than after Doc. Thus it was the four of us that leap to action, diving into the whoop-chutes that carried us, on nigh frictionless surfaces coated with a material Doc was working on for the President's space-program down from the seventy fifth storey lab and into the great garage hidden under the building. I gunned the motor of the Rolls Royce engined auto, McGurk filling the two back seats like something explorers might bring back from the Amazon, and Nicholas sucking gum like a baby with a pacifier next to me. Doc Zarathustra rode the running board, his great corded muscles bending to accommodate every bump in the road as if he was surfing the car.

Pugs Layfette was getting nervous, and so were the women he'd got as hostages. He'd let loose with a few rounds to soften everyone up, and it was working. They were brave women, these nurses, they'd do anything a male doctor would do – risk infection, work through the bone shattering and flesh-cutting of operations, put their care and skill into saving lives – but they hadn't come to work geared for war, keyed up to be shot at, or ready to face a madman with a smoking machine gun.

Pugs hugged the gun to him like it was his only friend they told me later, and he was twitching. Great big spasms of the muscles in his arms like St Vitus dance. Just what you want to see in a gat waving hoodlum, so it’s hardly surprising that they didn't jump him, and they did as they were told.

Doc strode up to the front of the clinic and took a loud-hailer of the new collapsible sort from his pocket, where he'd placed it from our car's trunk of gadgets.

`Pugs?' he said. The gunsel had asked for him by name and had given his own. A bad sign in some ways, I thought – and had said as much to Doc on the way – a thug with no reason to hide his identity might have decided he wasn't going to be taken alive. Doc hadn't agreed, he's got the darnest cock-eyed optimism for a man who faces down some of the things and people he's been up against, and he put his view now to the man himself.

`You don't want to hurt anyone, do you?' Doc asked, and he had that reasonable tone I've heard him use. McGurk bless his flat mountain-man's head can charm the birds down out of the trees (I've seen him, heck I've had to clear the bald eagle droppings of that pet of his off my spats more times than I like) but Doc's got McGurk's tone for men.

`No, no…I'

Pugs seemed to be buying it. Just to be on the safe side I started up a fire-escape opposite meaning to get a bead on Pugs with an old army rifle I'd slung in the back of the car. Maybe I could shoot that gat out of his hands as he came out. Hey maybe I could just shoot him in the head, Doc'd give me a dressing down, but I've never cottoned to this complicated justice business for anyone who'd threaten a lady.
It was a mistake. The sun must have caught the barrel of the rifle as I maneuvered it into position and I guess Pugs caught that glint from the corner of his eye.

`No tricks, you freaks,' he shouted and he whirled the machine gun round in a arc his finger tightening on the trigger, as he jerked the muzzle of the death-dealing autofirer back towards the cowering dames. I struggled to get a line on him, but before I could fire a great shape moved between me and Pugs, as Doc covered the hundred yards of open space in a few scant seconds. I don't keep Olympic records in my head like Four-Eyes does, but I think Doc was giving them five minute milers a good head start and beating them at the finish. His left arm caught the muzzle of the machine gun as it fired and knocked it upwards, the flash must have burn his skin through his shirt but he didn't flinch at the powder-burn or the noise. Instead he followed through with his right, and Pugs's jaw crumpled under a blow that I knew in other circumstance Doc would have managed to land just hard enough to daze and disorientate. Under the circumstance I think he can be forgiven for KO'ing the man, even with what we learned later.

A nurse was at Doc's side bandaging his arm, when I made it over there. Nicholas was eyeing up the pretty women (I don't think I've ever seen a US nurse who wasn't a knock out, although when I was in England after the Great War, I saw some matrons that'd make you think twice about getting sick). Young Tesla’s going to be an Italian-Negro terror for the ladies when he gets his growth, and McGurk was patiently bending some surgical steel into a pair of hand-cuffs. Probably to impress the ladies too, the big oaf, for I knew for a fact there were several sets of Doc's escape proof cuffs in the car.

Another nurse, a brunette, maybe a bit less pretty than the blonde pampering Doc (much to his embarrassment) was checking out Pugs. Close up now I could see the squashed prize-fighters nose that must have given the gun man his nickname. I could also see he wasn't breathing, just as the nurse announced that he was dead.

It was a conundrum especially when the police medical examiner confirmed that Doc's blow, worthy of a world champ though it had been couldn't possibly have killed a healthy man. But something had terrified an armed thug into risking his liberty to contact Doc, and something had carried him away to the banks of the Styx before he could say what it was.

`I'd like to conduct the autopsy,' Doc was saying to the medical officer, `I wonder if Miss Weathen would care to assist me.' He indicated the brunette nurse, to - I thought – the blonde's evident annoyance, and I wondered for a second how he knew her name, before I spotted her nurses number on her uniform, and the duty roster on the back of the clinic wall, and of course before I remembered who's clinic it was and who personally checked that his funds were buying the best care for the ill folk they helped.

`Why, yes, Doctor Zarathustra,' Miss Weathen said, firmly, `I'd be grateful to assist in any way I can'.

`Excellent,' Doc said, `I have a suspicion about the manner of Mr Layfette's demise, tell me do you notice anything about his physiognomy?'

I peered closer as Miss Weathen did, and like her, I uttered a gasp. The man's face had begun to turn a mottled sickly back and blue as if it had been badly bruised days before.


Simon BJ [With love and regard to Doc Savage, and his creator Lester Dent]

A cartoon strip done with my family....

Awful Jokes Made Up By Me #2 and #3

Q Why did Gandalf have to magic up special chickens for his barberque?
A He needed 3 wings for the Elven Kings.


A man goes into a Doctors with concrete lumps stuck to his ankles, hands, back and shoulders. The Doctor says 'don't be so hard on yourself'.


Simon BJ

Awful Jokes Made Up By Me #1

A pirate is looking for somewhere to bury his treasure, and he finds a cave on a lone island.

However the cave is guarded by an octopus with a cleaning fetish. Using the feather-dusters left by an early 19th C 'How Clean Is Your Cave Mr Selkirk' docu-novel writer, it mercilessly prods and pokes at the pirate almost forcing him to collapse with giggles.

Nevertheless he fights on, cutlass flashing, until all eight of the octopuses arms, with their attendant feather dusters, lie, severed.

But then just as he thinks he's won, two more feather dusters fly up from nowhere, and deftly make him laugh so much he drops his cutlass. Instantly the octopus - suprisingly fast on its eight stumps - gobbles him up.

How is this possible?

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Well you see octopuses may have 8 arms, but they have 10 tickles.

Simon BJ

The Strongest Flea In The World

The Strongest Flea In The World

Once upon a forest pig lived a forest pig flea. His name was Sampson and he was the strongest flea in the world. Everyday he would lead the other forest fleas who lived on the back of the forest pig off to forage for food amid the thickest piggiest bristles of the pig’s thick piggy bristly hair.
This made the forest pig itch, and one day the forest pig decided to do something about it.

He grunted and oinked and thought and thought and oinked and grunted until he’d grunted and thought and oinked of a plan. He would go and roll in the thickest gloopiest mud of the great grey mud pools and when his bristles were plastered with mud all the fleas that made him itch would be stuck in it like flies in amber, and die.
So he grunted and oinked and ran and ran and oinked and grunted until he came to the great grey mud pools. And he spooshed and he sloshed in the mud.

To Sampson and the forest pig fleas, the great disaster of The Mud, came like a great grey tidal wave, like an avalanche or mud slide, like a mountain falling.


But Sampson flexed his mighty arms and took a deep deep breath, and when the mud had engulfed them all, he breathed out and blew a great bubble of air for all the fleas of the flea village. And he braced the bubble with his mighty arms so that the weight of the Mud didn’t crush them, and they could breathe in the bubble. Then when the pig had grunted and oinked and come out of the mud pool, Sampson flexed his mighty arms again and broke the crust of the hardened mud, and let the fleas out. Then there was much miniscule rejoicing.

Humph, thought and oinked and grunted the Pig, Mud didn’t work, tomorrow I’ll try water. I’ll dive into the great flowing river and the fast quick white waters will wash the fleas off my back.
So the next day he woke up early, and grunted and oinked and ran to the great flowing river, and swam out to the deepest part. Then he took a great big oink, and great big breath and dived into the white foamed, quick flowing water.

To Sampson and the forest pig fleas, the great swift flow of the water struck their tiny village like water in a tornado or a hurracane. The droplets of water were as large as a flea and hit like bullets. Surely they were doomed to drown or be battered by the great white flecked drops.

Then Sampson flexed his mighty arms and dived off the back of the forest-pig into the raging torrent of the great river. Holding his breath he dived beneath the vast bulk of the forest pig, and with a superfleaish exertion, by the strength of his great arms and the kicking of his mighty legs, he drove the pig back up towards the surface of the water, and held it - at arms length - a fraction of an inch above the surface of the raging waters.

The forest-pig was so startled by this, unlooked for, feeling of lightness and dizzyness that he thought he’d contracted River-Fever, and when he’d floundered ashore in a dream of speed and flurry (as he was secretly pushed by Sampson all the way), he resolved to stay dry and out of mud or water, and put up with a little bit of itching, rather than risk his health!


Simon BJ, and children.

Shamadu

A joke of a town, a hucksterville of face-painters and log-jam sideshow booths, Shamadu sidles across country, insinuating itself at the edges of county fairs, its denizens frying honey-dew burgers, and offering 'Milk o' Paradise' shakes.
Its Mayor, Professor Rainbow, is tattooed in seven colours, and his wife Esplanardia - the Mayoress - bears the old stigmata of the life-time knife-thrower's assistant. But the town has an identity which lies behind the mask of peeling grease-paint, and which sloughs off the mockery of the few visitors, who pass along its 'Avenue of Booths Of All Nations'

Its trailer homes, are a true caravanserie, and its cargo is wealth beyond the Indus.
The jewels and sequins in the headresses are real and priceless, the faded yellows - cloth of gold, the snake-eye charms emeralds.

Their strongman, who came to earth so long ago from a world with a different gravity, can crush carbon into gems between his fingers. He does this with the abstraction of a collosal child.

Their Swami, is the One incarnation of the True Llama, a muddy birthmark pressed with a podgy fingertip in haste onto the forehead of another infant in his nursery.
He reads minds with ease, calms them, adjusts karma, drinks root beer.

In the tent of the 'Haunted House' live three ghosts in mourning for the lost soul they used to torment, a younger spirit, now gone beyond. In his memory they have vowed only to do good deeds, and make such scares as tingle the body with the numinous, and impart life to the living. Many a timid visitor have they scared to life.

The music man who tinkles on the ivories in 'Prof Prestigio's Pyramid Of Pianos', holds his finger to his lips when asked to sing, and brushes back his greying kiss curl.

Simon BJ

The City Of Shrouds and Mothballs

The City, awaits, as it has now for a thousand years, its final absolute occupancy. Its tallest spires are covered in wrappings of white and yellow damask: its tentative, and always temporary, inhabitants swathe their impertinant bodies in robes that do not so much hide them, as prevent the soiling of the citadels they expect at any moment to have to hand over to personages more exhalted, more dominant, and with a greater right to the looming turrets, the long plastic lined thoroughfares, and the mothball scented bedchambers.

No land in the city is ever sold, each plot or building is entered into by a complex system of leases. Some terminate at at set date (never far enough in the future to permit a feeling of ownership) but most end on receipt of some sign, password, or shibboleth, or after a proscribed series of omens. An attic room might be possessed only until on the seventh day of a month whose weather has been mild, snow falls on the metronomes of the singing cathedral spires. A cathedral itself has been known to change hands at the fall of a sparrow, the successor cult treading lightly upon the icons of the dispossessed for fear of those who might bear the Rose or The Spear required to disallow their holdings.

The lease system, dates back at least a thousand years, and each dwelling carries with it the codicils, amendments, interpretations, and deliniations of its future.
Here lawyers would carry much weight if they had not been purged as a class by their defenestration from the windows of their courthouses following a fall of scarlet frogs four hundred years before. In their place, soothsaysers, poetasters, charlatans, and house-pox-cleaners, serve to fill a similar niche.


Simon BJ

Secret Project et al

Back from an exhausting but good holiday in Paris, and determined to crack on with the secret project (now standing at 18,604 words), a memorial story to Craig Hinton due in May for the fanthology, and material for this website.

Simon

Books I could write for money if I had no guilt #1

"THE EALBORINTH IMPERATIVE"

"When a highly trained war-dragon scheduled to imprint on guild
flight-master Trant Grievebane is stolen by Ealbor Sepratists with a
High Jelabic Agenda: Trant knows he has only days to infiltrate the
pro-Jelabic Death-Cults before the coronation of Princess Belemrim
withers under the fire of a rogue beast, and his soul-mate perishes at
the breath of his destined war-mount."

'COMPARABLE TO TOM CLANCY AT HIS BEST'

'RED-BERET TOLKEIN!'


Simon BJ

SECRET PROJECT COUNT

17,540 words running text, 11,000 words of partially reconfigured previous draft material. A partial chapter by chapter breakdown, and a long description of the setting. Sheesh.

Simon BJ

JESUS VS CTHULHU IN A DINER!

‘Fishsticks’

‘What?’

‘If they’re not an abomination, I don’t know what is!’

‘You can talk’.

‘This is dream-telepathy actually, most sensitive people would go mad.
Obviously, I’m not sitting next to you, I weigh over fifty tonnes for a start, these plastic chairs would never take it.’

‘I’m not sensitive, not the way you’re using the word anyway.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Aesthetic, fragile, vulnerable.’

The lone figure in the darkened booth, beneath the flickering half-broken neon, raises his strong carpenter’s hands: their nails are black and broken.
The blood at the wrists, long dried, barely stains the cuffs of his lumberjack shirt.

The waitress, passing, thinks, ‘Jesus, no tip there’. The abomination, reading her mind through the mile upon mile of space and the fathom upon fathom of inky
water, and the massed weight of masonry upon masonry that is all that prevents its mere presence blasting the surface layers of her psychology to a clean and
gleaning madness, laughs.

'That was cruel, she didn’t know’.

‘Cruelty is in the job description, or at least heartless inhumanity is. They’re not my species after all, these crawling chattering latter-day apes. When I rise, the thoughts I nurture here beneath the wave will splinter their skulls entire.’

‘Ah, well when.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Well, it’s a matter of eschatology isn’t it. If I could be vulgar, I’d say who comes first. You wait for “the stars to be right” I await My “Second Coming”
in glory. They can’t both be true.

‘You do know you’re mad, and not Jesus? Really?’

‘I do not. Indeed I know I am, and really you’re a part of my proof aren’t you.’

‘What?’

‘Why would Great Cthulhu bother to argue with a bearded bum in a diner, eh.
If you’re real, I’m sane, and if I’m sane I’m Jesus, and if you’re not real, then you’re a delusion of Satan sent to try me and I’m still Jesus.’

‘I’m a delusion of whom!’

‘Satan’

A noise from outside, and far away, across the beach and the ocean, as of a million octopuses thrashing.

'You mean illusion, if Satan had delusions he'd need therapy, and there's no such person.'

'Ah, you do not believe in a personal evil?'

'Yes, I do. Me! I and the Great Old Ones, the blind forces spawned in the vortices of Azathoth, the aimless gnawing chaos that makes all things only to crush them randomly, and remorselessly. Your 'Satan' of the witch cults was but a Mask of Nyarlathotep: one of the thousand forms of the trickster mind, that darts as a messenger from the blind idiot God of the Void.'

'Your problem is that you believe in nothing higher than yourselves. Now if you could only put your faith in Me. Set aside your hatred, abandon these desires
that demand only destruction. Perhaps your stars would come right sooner for a right purpose. Come now, it is simple to pray to me. A child could do it.

'You are a dust mote preaching to a Leviathan, I roar the secret name of Azathoth and you are scattered to the winds.'

'The secret name of Azathoth, is Satan, he is fallen from the service of the Father, and I who sit at His right hand, may bind and pardon in His name. Do not
fear Azathoth but God.

'You sit in a Diner. You're not at the Right Hand of anyone.'

'The man over there in the green hat?'

'THE MAN OVER THERE IN THE GREEN HAT IS NOT GOD THE FATHER!'

'I know that.'

'HE SMELLS!'

'I do not hold that cleanliness is necessarily next to godliness although some have.'

'But you accept he is not the Father, so you are not with the Father'.

'Yes, I am. I ascended into Heaven and sit at the Right Hand of the Father, and will come again in Glory to judge the Living and the Dead, and of my Kingdom
there will be no end, and yet I am also with you always until the end of the Eon. This form, like the Holy Spirit is truly me, and yet it is not the form I
will wear in judgement.'

'When with strange eons, even Death may die?'

'There are some similarities between your mythos and Mine, except that Mine is true, that is.'

'And what is truth?'

'I've heard that one before, you couldn't say it in Latin could you, because then it makes a rather neat anagram with 'It is the man before you'. Very Gnostic
that one.’

‘So pending your rise in glory, you - what? - wander about in an old lumberjack shirt and blue jeans with your folksy beard?’

‘It’s a myth they have in the backcountry. The man who comes and helps and asks no reward, but a tip of the hat to the Lord. He works as a carpenter and
carries his own tools, and stands exactly six feet high. A true God may work through a myth, and in doing so redeem it. All that is believed of me that
is Good, I will make true.’

‘And a stumble-bum may get delusions of grandeur wider than the rivers of bitumen that flow under the grand bridges of Yuggoth. Don’t think you’ve got me
fooled. I heard the news last night, oh boy. The local circus has lost a big cat hasn’t it? Your going to wind me up with this ridiculous charade until
finally wild beasts come and lick your hands and you turn your face in mockery to the bloody moon. Its you isn’t it Nyarlathotep? True God, my
barnacle-encrusted bath-tub!’

‘No, I am not Nyarthlotep, I am who I say I am.’

[Is it Jesus or Nyarlathotep having a jape, will the waitress ever bring the waffles, how on earth am I going to end this?]

Simon BJ

15th Century hangovers?

On his heid-ake by William Dunbar (1461? – 1520?)
A modern verse translation by Simon Bucher-Jones
follows the original...

My heid did yak yester nicht
This day to mak that I na micht
So sair the magryme does me menzie
Persing my brow as ony ganzie
That scant I luik may on the licht

And now, schir, laitlie, efter mes
To dyt thocht I begowthe to dres
The sentence lay full evill till find
Unsliepit in my heid behinf
Dullit in dulnes and distress

Full oft at morrow I upryse
Quhen that my curage sleiping lys
For mith for menstraille and play
For din nor dancing nor deray
It will nocht walkin me no wise.

A modern verse translation by Simon Bucher-Jones

My head did ache last night
This day I can make nothing right
So sore the migraine does me hurt
Piercing my brow as any dart
I scarce may look upon the light.

And now, sir, lately after I
- to write thought I should start to try –
The sentence proved too hard to find
Encased in my unconscious mind
Dulled down in dullness and dismay.

Often at morning, I arise
When still my courage sleeping lies
For mirth, musicians or for play,
For noise, dancing, disarray
It will not waken, anyway.

Part 1 of some Detective Hi-Jinks

Murder By Mirrors?
An Absalom Daniels Mystery.
By Simon Bucher-Jones


‘The person you want is called Daniels,’ the old burser said, putting the tray of port down on the mahogany table. ‘Absalom Daniels. He was involved in that business in St Mary’s College in the summer of ‘36, when the matron was found dead in the locked pantry. A little bird tells me that if he hadn’t been visiting his niece, and spotted the method the murderer used half the college would have been hauled away on suspicion of complicity.’
The Master of the College grunted, and after a pause, rumbled ‘Reliable, is he?’
The Burser placed one long finger against the side of his nose, ‘As the tomb, Master. He was a student here I believe, in old Blenkinsop’s day, took the Wentworth Scholarship.’

‘1910?’ The Master said, his gold spectacles trembling alarmingly on his nose.
‘Yes, you recall that?’
‘Only that there was some scandal, hushed up of course.’
‘There was a question mark over the Wentworth prize. The papers were in a locked room, and yet the master setting the exam was sure they had been disturbed. Naturally, the papers were changed, and Daniels still sailed through so everyone assumed he couldn’t have had anything to do with the attempt to cheat. A few were inclined to put it down to the master’s ineptitude. But a few days later Daniels came to Blenkinsop and confessed to the whole thing: said he’d been in a funk about the prize and taken the papers intending to cheat, and didn’t feel he deserved the money. Well Blenkinsop wasn’t as green as all that, and got the truth out of him eventually. Daniels had found out how the paper was filched and confronted the student concerned only to discover that he had some pressing need for the money, a need so pressing that Daniels determined to forfit the prize to him. A girl in the matter I fancy.’
‘Hmph, and you think we need a sentimentalist in this matter do you, burser?’
‘I thought you might think so, Master, after all you were at the College yourself, then.’
An unpleasant silence of attempted complicity, fell between them, and the temperature dropped by at least ten degrees.
‘Thank you burser,’ said the Master, ‘that will be all, and his eyes flickered briefly over the awards and scholarships on his office wall, among which, by no means the least although it was among the earliest, was the 1910 Wentworth Prize for Philosophy.

A day later, on an offshoot of the Great Northern Road, Absalom Daniels, winced at the crash of his man-servant’s gear changing. ‘I say,’ he mouthed, ‘take it easy Hunter old man. We won’t gain any trophies for breaking the record for the London to Anchester run. Now I’m getting towards my forties, I’d like to slide into a well deserved old age, not careen to a sudden stop in some corner of an English field. The Bentley may take it but my old bones won’t.’
‘You’re as spry as a fox, Abs,’ Hunter grumbled – his harvard accent, a contrast to Absalom’s English tones - twisting the wheel savagely to avoid a straggly hedgerow, that, dislodged by the rising wind seemed about to throw itself bodily across the road. ‘Why we have to hare off to this god-forsaken township without so much as a by-your-leave, or have an apple, I’ll never know. I’d got ticket’s for that new thing on the Hippodrome, you know. I’ll expect that to be reflected in my pay.’
‘Well, it’s a chance to look around the old Alma Mater, Anchester College, motto Never Give a Sucker An Even Break, founded by Barnum and Bailey and for years the counties foremost supplier of hoodlums, ner-do-wells, and misfits to HM Prison Anchester. And, I thought we might look in on Mary.’
Absalom enjoyed immensely the sight of Hunter’s ear’s turning red. His servant’s ‘pash’ for his young niece was as yet unrequited, but Hunter hadn’t given up hope, and the girl would be turning twenty one shortly. They would require a certain amount of chaperoning around the ancient cathedral city. Ah, love’s young dream, how long ago it all seemed. The thought however lead to another, more to a nightmare perhaps than a dream.

‘More seriously,’ Absalom’s voice darkened, ‘twenty seven years ago I colluded in a crime, and I strongly suspect I’m about to be asked to help conceal another.’

***

In Anchester the police were politely, requesting people to move along. Hunter had taken to the English police from the first – it had helped that Absalom was on first name terms with half of Scotland Yard (“the more refined half, naturally” – he said.)
The shop was in ruins, but they still managed to be refined ruins. Tatters, as it were of a King.


[No this isn't the EXCITING PROJECT, just a small diversion].

Simon BJ

Progress as at 23:40 19th Feb 2007

INTERESTING PROJECT PROGRESS COUNTER: 15,025 words [of 100,000].

Simon and Garfunkle CSi5M

Simon and Garfunkle crap song in 5 min

I had a good friend who worked for a time
In Francis Ford Coppola's fresh cheese and wine.
Sam Peckinpah he would look in for news,
And offers of bath buns he couldn't refuse.
The lap san soushong of Alphedo Garcia
Flowed in the gutters and sang in his ear of good times
We're always nineteen in my mind
Always nineteen in my mind.

On Sunset he dreamed of an auto-de fa,
the burning of bridges from here to the bay.
And the stream in the stars where the galaxy turns
Span out in the heavens, til human concerns,
Were lost then, above and below,
Til they closed the shop and his job had to go,
We're always nineteen in my mind
Always nineteen in my mind.


Simon BJ

'Maltloaf' Song from the album in preparation.

'Empty Dances'

Verse 1

The band was playing in a parking lot, at the back of the
convenience store
We had run down through the jiving and the rock and roll songs but
our hearts were crying out for more
`Cause when the last dance comes and you're on the floor
And your hands are on your girl's back and you head for the door
Then you've got to have some place to go.

Chorus 1

Dancing is empty, when its got no heart, when you've no home to go
to for the kissing to start, when you're on the road with no hat to
hang. When you haven't got a backseat you can park at the Point,
where the lovers get to meet with a bang!

Verse 2

The band was playing in a parking lot, and the rain it started falling
down hard
We were soaking ‘neath the awning, huddled close from the night
and our hearts were crying out for more
`Cause when the heaven’s opened and you're drenched in a storm
And your sheltering your girl because you know that’s good form
Then you've got to have some place to get warm.

Chorus 2

Dancing is empty, when you've aching and apart, when you know the
girl you're holding is just breaking her heart, when we've got to
set your feet on the road, when your shoe leather is worn thin as
a lily-pads skin which is wiltin' neath the weight of a toad!

Simon BJ

A brief note of apology

Material will be fairly scant this year while an interesting project I can't talk about for the moment continues apace. However I will post at least one thing a month, as well as this ongoing:

INTERESTING PROJECT PROGRESS COUNTER: 13,870 words [of 100,000].

Simon BJ

The Pope Of Otters

The Pope Of Otters

The burning smoke of the bonfires drifts down river from Toad Hall.
All along the wild-wood the watch-towers they stand tall.
There are matyrs in the bullrushes, and weasels march in shifts.
While the Conclave of the Riverbank debates what evil is.

The Otter-pope is sleek and fat, with mackeral on his chin.
He takes the view that disagreement is the chiefest sin.
There are badgers in the chain-gangs, and Old Molely's gone to earth.
While the Conclave of the Riverbank debates what life is worth.

Oh rue that day that Mighty Toad was ousted from his seat,
He was a greedy, boasting, bounder, but he didn't claim the feat,
Of whispering with the Godhead, with the tufted ear of Pan
While the Conclave of the Riverbank denies the place of Man.

Now Otters are the chosen, and the Men beyond are damned.
And if you're stoat or rabbit well you keep your whiskers clammed,
Shut to any blasphemy, or critical expression
Lest the Conclave of the Riverbank your species' place will lessen.

The Old water-rat he mutters, and wonders if he's fated
For he saved the Pope's life long ago and now he wished he'd waited.
Just a set of fleeting minutes til the little chap got skinned
Would have sorted out the future, where the flags wave in the wind.

Oh raise the flag of Outcast Toad, and reclaim all the 'banks
Before the weasels finish work on mustard gas and tanks
There's nothing wrong per se of course with a Pope who is an Otter,
But when otters are rotters then the waters getting hotter.


'What if G.K.Chesterton had written Wind In The Willows'

Simon BJ

The Big Cat (formerly published in 'The Cat Who Walks Through Time')

I'm told that the excellent, and long awaited, charity fanthology The Cat Who Walked Through Time II will be published this year, so in case any of you missed the first volume: here's a reprint of my story:

THE BIG CAT.

The Neon sign over my door reads Guy Leopold PI, I guess the landlord is too mean to change it, although I’ve asked often enough. There must have been a glitch in the set-up software, but I guess I can live with it. My lease covers adequate and accurate business signage, but then it also covers air-conditioning and there’s no trace of that either.

In a hot day I wear that office like a cheap suit; I mass three hundred and fifty pounds in my underoos, and stand four foot eight on a good day. One day I’ll afford a better office. The weight I guess I’m stuck with in this life.

My first client of the day didn’t show until five. She was from one of the ‘modelling’ agencies on Lower X level. You could see the splicing in her genes from twenty metres; she was a were-cat. She was an Oce