The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived (15 page)

‘It is
a conundrum,’ said Hugo Rune. ‘The gold exists, we know this for a fact. The
conundrum is the means by which it might be extracted. It is a conundrum. Rune
solves conundrums. I think, therefore I’m right.’

‘So how
do you do it?’ asked the daring young man.

‘That
is for me to know and you only to know that I know.’

‘Sounds
like bullshit to me,’ said the public schoolboy with rare daring.

‘Sounds
like bullshit to me,
Mr Rune,’
said Mr Rune. ‘But you are here and I am
here and the suitcase full of money notes sent to me by my good friend the
Prime Minister is here. So bullshit, buddy, it ain’t.’

‘Pardon
me, Mr Rune.’

‘You
are pardoned. The Prime Minister and I have formed a pact in this matter. I
will undertake to extract the gold and we will divvy it up between us. He will
pay off the National Debt and buy back the British Empire for Her Majesty the
Queen (God bless her). And
I
have plans of my own. I trust that none of
you gentlemen would be so unpatriotic as to deny our dear Queen the opportunity
to rule once more over an Empire on which the sun never sets.’

‘Perish
the thought,’ said the public schoolboy.

‘God
save the Queen,’ said the daring young man. ‘You will require the services of
an assistant, Mr Rune. Might I put myself forward as an applicant for the
position?’

‘You
may,’ said Rune. ‘And you are hired.’

‘Thank
you very much, sir, now regarding my salary—’

‘Don’t
push your luck, shorty. You may cover whatever expenses you feel require
covering. And we must get to work at once. The suitcase there contains a very
large amount of money. Your job will be to spend it.’

‘Right.’
The young man rubbed his hands together.

‘You
will spend it buying Skelington Bay.’

‘Pardon
me?’

‘This
town. Every shop, every house, every public utility. All. The parks, the prom
and the piers. You will do it first thing tomorrow.’

‘But—’

‘I am
Rune,’ said Rune. ‘And Rune will be butted no buts. Buy it all. I want the
population on their bikes by Wednesday next at the latest. It is Thursday now.
You have plenty of time.’

‘Strewth!’
said the daring young man.

‘God
save the Queen,’ said Hugo Rune.

The stars looked down on
Skelington Bay.

And—

‘Enough of that!’ cried
Hugo Rune.

Eh?
What?

‘This
chapter may not have been as long as I might have wished. But it is
my
chapter.
And Rune does not share
his
chapter with characters in other scenes.’

Er,
sorry…

‘Sorry,
what?’

Sorry,
Mr Rune.

15

The stars looked down on
Skelington Bay.

And the
ocean gurgled like a happy baby in the piles beneath the old west pier.

It was
nearly midnight now, the day was done with and the pubs and clubs and bayside
bars were closed. The town was not quite sleeping yet, a voice or two called
out in mirth, a song was sung, a whistle heard, a car horn in the distance
honked farewell.

Night
fishermen cast out their lines, a boy and girl walked hand in hand along the
beach. A dog barked, two cats argued over something, and the vicar, turning in
his sleep said, ‘Handbag’, and was promptly kicked from bed.

In a
deck-chair at the pier’s end lazed Cornelius, his long legs stretched before.
Beside him Tuppe, his short legs all a dangle. Under Tuppe’s deck-chair, a
fellow from beneath the sea snored soundly in his somewhat matted sheep suit.

Cornelius
put his hand to his head and touched certain tender places. These were places
the tenderness of which had not been brought about by the truncheons of the
Brentford Constabulary. These were new tender places. New and bruised from
treatment Cornelius had lately received on the beach.

It had
all been a dreadful misunderstanding really. And not the tall boy’s fault at
all. Well, it had been his fault, but it hadn’t. So to speak.

It was
the fellow in the sheep suit who had caused it to come about. Although he
hadn’t actually seen it come about. Which was why it had come about. So to
speak also.

And it
had come about in this fashion. The fellow in the sheep suit had told his tale
to Cornelius and Tuppe. It was a fair old tale and it didn’t lack for interest.
It involved him coming from an undersea kingdom called Magonia, where a wise
old race lived in peace and harmony with minnow and mermaid. It involved secret
negotiations with surface dwellers regarding a possible exchange of advanced
technology for promises that the surface dwellers would not exploit certain
ocean areas. It included also a fair degree of New Age folderol, the usual
sprinkling of Gaea and eco-mania, and much of what Cornelius had mentioned
while sheltering in the barn, about mankind giving up its nuclear nastiness and
joining a cosmic brotherhood, et cetera and et cetera.

Cornelius
had listened to it all. He had nodded politely and when it finally reached the
et cetera and et cetera stage, had made a humble request.

That
the fellow in the sheep suit might demonstrate proof of his aquatic origins
simply by walking out into the sea, holding his head beneath the water and
breathing there for five minutes or so.

‘And
then you’ll believe me?’ asked the fellow in the sheep suit.

‘I
could hardly deny what I had witnessed with my own two eyes,’ said Cornelius.

‘Come
on then and I’ll do it.’

And so
he had.

It was
a really bad idea.

There
hadn’t been many folk upon the beach. Just a group of youths. Young farmers
they happened to be. Down for the day and high upon the pleasures that come in
a ring-pull can. And they could hardly deny what they had witnessed with their
own, if bleary, eyes.

They
had witnessed a tall bloke and a short bloke drive a helpless sheep to a cruel
death by drowning in the sea. And they had taken out their rightful indignation
at this atrocious act by gathering up pebbles and stoning the two murderers
along the beach.

Breathing
happily in his natural habitat, the fellow in the sheep suit had missed most of
this and only after seven minutes had elapsed on his waterproof wristwatch, had
he risen as a maritime Lazarus from his watery grave.

His
reappearance, accompanied as it was by his cry of ‘What the bloody hell is
going on here?’, had caused a certain panic to break out in the ranks of the
stoners, who had then left off their stoning and fled howling to the nearest
bayside bar.

Cornelius
stretched in his deck-chair, yawned and clicked his jaw. Tuppe made little
grumbling sounds beneath his breath.

‘What is
it?’ Cornelius asked.

‘Oh
nothing much. I ache from head to toe and I’m not looking forward to spending
the night sleeping on the end of a pier, that’s all.’

‘Sorry,’
said Cornelius. ‘But I can hardly be blamed for the local seaside landladies
refusing to put up a sheep for the night.’

‘I
nearly had that short-sighted one going that he was a collie dog,’ said Tuppe.
‘Until the silly fool started going BAA, BAA.’

‘Sorry,’
said Cornelius. ‘But I had to put him straight. He kept going BOW WOW and
people were beginning to stare.’

‘Your
fault for the stoning we took also.’

‘I
accept some degree of blame for that, yes.’

‘And
for the fact that we can’t sleep in the car? You having left the keys in it
while we sought lodgings and somebody nicking it as soon as our backs were
turned.’

‘There
is much dishonesty in the world today,’ said Cornelius Murphy.

‘And
I’m hungry,’ said Tuppe. ‘Which is also your fault as you gave away the last of
our money to that bloke selling
The Big Issue.’

‘He
looked hungry,’ said Cornelius.

‘You’ve
been a bit of a disappointment to me today,’ said Tuppe.

‘I’ll
make it up to you tomorrow though.’

‘Oh
yes, and how so?’

‘I will
earn us lots of money.

‘Oh
yes, and how so, once more?’

‘Promotion,’
said Cornelius.

‘Promotion?
Promoting what, may I ask?’

‘A
little money-spinner of an act I intend to manage. It is called PROFESSOR TUPPE
AND HIS AMAZING DANCING SHEEP.’

‘Good
night,’ said Tuppe.

‘Good
night.’

16

Norman was not having a
good night at the bottom of the abandoned lift shaft. ‘We have to work out some
plan of escape,’ he told old Claude for the umpteenth time. ‘When does the
jailer bring the meals?’

‘Jailer?
Meals? Are you completely mad or is it me?’

‘I
don’t think it’s me. So what time does he bring them?’

‘There
aren’t any meals. You don’t eat here. No-one eats here or sleeps here. They
work
here. For that bastard up there. Doing his evil will, aiding and abetting
him in his Machiavellian schemes. But eat and sleep? You’re barking, sonny,
barking.’

‘But I
have to get out of here. I know terrible things. I have to tell someone about
them. People are going to die, millions of people.’

‘People
do that. All the time. By the million. Nothing new in that.’

‘There’s
something new about the way this lot’s going to die. All at once and everyone
there is, as far as I can make out.’

‘Bad,’
said the ancient one. ‘Bad that is. The bastard will be behind it, you see if
he’s not.’

‘I’m
bloody certain he is,’ said Norman. ‘Although I don’t know how or why. But I’ve
got to stop it happening. Which means I have to get out of here now.’

‘Wish I
could help you,’ said the ex-controller. ‘But I only experience fleeting
moments of lucidity, such as the one I’m having now. Mostly I am stark staring
kill-crazy. Not that you can kill dead people, of course. But you can make a
really dreadful mess out of them.’

‘Oh
great,’ said Norman. ‘Just perfect.’

‘There’s
a hole,’ said the old fella.

‘Where’s
a hole?’ asked Norman.

‘Up
aways. Higher than the door. You can see it if you squint with your eyes.

Norman
took to squinting. ‘I can’t see it,’ he said.

‘Well,
it’s up there. I’ve seen it. Can’t reach it though. Can’t climb up there.
Nothing to hold on to.’

‘There
has to be a way,’ said Norman. ‘There’s always a way. Where there’s a will
there’s a way.

‘And if
there was a way, what would you do once you were up there?’

‘I’m
going to speak to God,’ said Norman. ‘Tell him what’s going on.

‘Speak
to God?’ The oldster collapsed in a fit of laughter. ‘You can’t speak to God,
no-one can speak to God.’

‘Well,
I have to do something.’

‘Get
back to Earth, that’s what you must do.’

‘Don’t
know how to,’ said Norman.

‘I
do,’ said the oldster. ‘Reprogramme one of the big sky nozzles and
shoot yourself back, that’s how you’d do it.’

‘Tell
me how,’ said Norman.

‘Follow
the instructions you learned from your handbook, and—’

‘Go no
further,’ said Norman.

‘You
never learned the stuff in the handbook, did you, sonny?’

‘No,’
said Norman. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Never
mind. I can teach you all you need to know. Take a couple of years, in between
my bouts of insanity, but you’ll pick it up.’

‘Thanks
for the offer but I don’t have the time.’

‘All
bloody academic anyway,’ said the old fella. ‘Seeing as how you’d never be able
to get up to that hole anyway. Whether there’s a will or whether there’s a way.

‘There
has to be a way,’ said Norman. ‘There just has to.’

‘Not
unless you know how to fly, sonny. Not unless you know how to fly.’

‘Fly.’
Norman made the most dismal of all possible faces.

‘Something
I said?’ asked old Claude.

‘Something
I tried to do that got me into this mess in the first place. But hang about.’
Norman peered up the lift shaft and then gazed all around his miserable cell.
‘That’s it. Fly! That’s it! That’s it!’

‘It
is?’

‘It
is.’ Norman put his brain into gear, engaged his mouth and showered old Claude
with thoughts.

The
ex-controller listened to them, then made a face of his own. A face of horror.