Twisthorn Bellow Read online

  Twisthorn Bellow

  by

  Rhys Hughes

  The

  unusual escapades

  of a self-exploding golem

  with a twisted horn and attitude

  somewhere on the astral plane

  and also on foot

  right here.

  ATOMIC FEZ PUBLISHING

  METRO VANCOUVER,

  BRITISH COLUMBIA,

  DOMINION of CANADA

  TWISTHORN BELLOW

  The First Edition Trade Paperback

  and Digital Book published in 2009

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9811597-1-3

  Electronic Book (all file types) ISBN: 978-0-9811597-5-1

  The text of this novel copyright ©2009, Rhys Hughes

  Rhys Hughes asserts the moral right to be established as the owner of this work.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Canada

  Cover illustration and design by Steve Upham

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  This is a work of fiction. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any real places, architectural landmarks, or persons—living, dead, or dismantled—is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the authors, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers’ prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  The “Atomic Fez Publishing” logo and the molecular headgear colophon is designed by, and copyright ©2009, Martin Butterworth of The Creative Partnership Pty, London, UK (Creative Partnership).

  ATOMIC FEZ PUBLISHING

  3766 Moscrop Street

  Burnaby, British Columbia

  V5G 2C8

  Canada

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  Contents

  The Wings of Phœbus

  The Pots of Pan

  The Skin of Marsyas

  The Feet of Sciron

  The Earlobes of Æsop

  The Shoelaces of Jupiter

  The Clangers of Paris¹

  ¹ Not the modern city Paris, but Paris of Troy, a man. Having said that, this particular chapter is told from the viewpoint of the French capital. The Eiffel Tower wrote all of it and it remains that iron edifice’s most coherent work of fiction to date. Honest.

  Dedicated to:

  Jessica Popper

  and to

  the memory of

  Philip José Farmer

  (1918 – 2009)

  “Monsters should be more careful!”

  —Stuart Ross

  TWISTHORN BELLOW

  by

  Rhys Hughes

  WARNING: This book has been sealed against meta-fictional outbreaks with the intention that no reader will ever appear in the text that follows. Each chapter was carefully sprayed from margin to margin with an immensely strong fourth wall resin and allowed to dry. However, such precautionary measures can’t be guaranteed 100% effective and it’s possible that certain passages remain unsealed. At these points the reader may well be sucked into the novel like an orange through a hosepipe.

  THE WINGS OF PHŒBUS

  The first golem went wrong.

  Maybe the oven was too hot or there wasn’t enough water in the mix because the moment it came alive it started to crumble. First it stamped about the laboratory, raising clouds of crimson dust, then cracks spread up its ankles and its feet fell off.

  Professor Cherlomsky never had a chance to name it before it tumbled groaning to the floor. So he decided to put it out of its misery and leaned forward for that purpose, but his creation preferred to keep its unholy life as long as possible and resisted.

  It lashed out with its huge arms and knocked him down, then it tried to crawl closer to his unconscious body, perhaps with the intention of fatally crushing him, but its elbows disintegrated as it went. Now it was stuck in one spot and it became furious.

  With an atrocious roar it writhed its torso in frustration until all its clay muscles broke. When the professor finally stirred, he found a neat pile of dust next to him, a few grains of which he had managed to inhale during his enforced sleep. He sneezed.

  And so ended another failed experiment.

  * * * * *

  Shylock Cherlomsky didn’t need to worry much about such disasters. He was the most renowned specialist in his field and never short of respect or money, with his photo in all the glossy journals and his budget annually replenished by an overgenerous grant from his government. In addition, he always accepted private donations from rich individuals with a vested interest in seeing his work continue.

  A decade earlier the situation was very different, back when he taught Applied Eschatology at the London Metropolitan University on Holloway Road. His department was the smallest on campus and his research was considered a mordant joke. And the Dean, who was French, made his life a constant source of unhappiness.

  Ghosts, monsters, demons, vampires, ghouls . . . He hadn’t been able to make anyone take them seriously . . .

  Then a chance meeting with a fellow by the name of Mark Anthony Zimara changed his fortunes. Zimara simply walked off the street one day and declared to the professor that the planet under his feet wasn’t as solid as he’d always assumed it to be.

  In fact it was hollow and the inside could be reached via Finsbury Park underground station, provided one didn’t get distracted and catch a train instead of proceeding downwards.

  Cherlomsky allowed Zimara to lead him there . . .

  At the centre of the world the intrepid duo discovered the location of Hell and observed how it pulsed with highly compressed souls. But they weren’t the first to reach this spot.

  It turned out the French were already involved here and an adventure followed in which it emerged that the French authorities were plotting to make French the official language of the Afterlife. Full details of this vile project are available elsewhere. It’s sufficient to know that the professor’s Dean was a key player in the evil scheme.

  The professor foiled the dastardly plan and returned to the surface to successfully confront his Dean in person. It was Cherlomsky’s first taste of his future career as an Eschatological Crusader. From that moment he would never again be just a theoretician.

  The experience also woke him up to the realisation that conspiracies are everywhere. The French had plotted to impose their own language on damned souls, so what might the even sneakier Russians, Belgians and Canadians be up to? Who knew!

  The facts about the hollow Earth and the planned French takeover of Hell were somehow leaked to the newspapers and Cherlomsky became a national hero with all the benefits attendant upon such a position. Money and the love of easy girls were the most memorable of those. For a year he indulged his appetites for both . . .

  No such luck fell to Zimara, who disappeared as mysteriously as he’d arrived. But as the professor always suspected him of being the one who informed the press of their elaborate subterranean escapade, he vowed to seek hi
m out and give him a share of the spoils. No easy girl objected to this; neither did any banknote.

  Powerful figures in the British government now got in touch with the professor and proposed an arrangement that would help protect the island from future supernatural hazards.

  They suggested that the entire university campus be given to him for the establishment of a new Agency devoted to opposing any paranormal perils that might lurk above, below or within the astral plane, specifically anything beyond logic that constituted a threat to the smooth running of British interests at home or abroad.

  The professor enthusiastically agreed to this.

  His mandate was very simple—neutralise unspeakable paranormal hazards, whether French or not!

  During an ordinary Monday morning, a squad of special force soldiers descended on the campus and forcibly removed the other lecturers and the students while Cherlomsky looked on with a guilty smirk. And so the London Metropolitan University was reborn as the Applied Eschatology Agency, a strictly private site with an electric perimeter fence and heavily armed guards on the tungsten gates.

  A dozen soldiers were also given to the professor to order about as he pleased. They were loyal and industrious. Cherlomsky didn’t reject their services but in addition he needed a special kind of staff to do the special kind of job he was being paid for.

  Humans alone weren’t up to the task . . .

  He decided to fight fire with fire and employ monsters, good ones, to fight the bad. He didn’t need to trouble much about ethics. Good means whatever benefits the British economy and bad is the opposite of that. So it just remained to find and hire some appropriate entities. In the end he resorted to making a handful himself.

  Most imploded or turned inside out. Typical!

  * * * * *

  Nobody knows what happened to the Dean . . .

  République Nutt was his name and some say he still lives and dreams like a sentient maggot, or possibly magnet, of taking revenge against the man who sundered his dreams. A few rumour merchants whisper that he has recently come into possession of the rumoured Walnut Whip Helmet, with which he can control rumours.

  It’s better not to believe stuff like that . . .

  In the meantime, high in the sky, the sun blazed down as it had been doing for more than five billion years. It shone on the Agency buildings without prejudice and shone on the streets of Paris with a similar lack of bias. Perhaps it shone on a hundred other locations where Cherlomsky’s name was spat rather than spoken.

  * * * * *

  His second golem also went wrong.

  This one had the opposite problem to the first, being too runny when it left the oven, and part of its brain must have overflowed into some other part, because it suddenly went mad.

  The professor knew instantly that he had to service his golem-making machine before making a third attempt, but even while he was thinking this, the runny golem squelched in his general direction, leaving pools of slime in its wake, and seized him.

  Fortunately the grip of a being that can barely control the bonding of its own molecules isn’t too painful. All the same Cherlomsky thought his life might be over, primarily from drowning, as the forearm that muffled his mouth and nose started leaking a clear fluid into his throat, more than he could swallow without choking.

  But some meniscus in the matrix of the creature must have popped by itself because without warning the whole mass of liquid splashed to the floor with a dread plopping sound.

  The professor collapsed to his knees and panted.

  He hadn’t named this one either . . .

  Soldiers came running to his side, alerted by the sounds of a struggle, but there was nothing left for them to deal with apart from a filthy pool that was soon mopped up and poured down the sink to mingle with the effusions of the London sewers.

  Later that day, Cherlomsky tinkered with the golem-making machine, which resembled an automated potter’s wheel combined with mechanical shaping blades, but his restless imagination was already flirting with the notion of turning out monsters in other styles.

  He could return to golems after trying something easier first. Golems are tricky. In the meantime, smaller entities might be advisable—easier to destroy if they went berserk . . .

  As they undoubtedly would.

  * * * * *

  More failures followed. The professor tried to hatch a serpent’s egg under a cockerel in order to produce a cockatrice, a beast with a look that kills, but the result was just a weird reptilian chick and a very angry cockerel. As for the serpent, it wasn’t there to pass judgment, but it seems unlikely it would have approved whatever methodology was used. The cockatrice is an extinct species now and probably will never strut on the Earth again. Not such a bad thing, perhaps.

  Other unnatural beings he attempted to create from scratch or summon from the astral plane included:

  Chonchón, (a flying severed head with elongated ears for wings and an inability to forgive insults),

  Gorgon, (standard snake-haired woman with petrifying gaze),

  Pyrallis, (insectoid quadruped that eats fire and probably inspired the original myth of the salamander),

  Celestial Stag, (misnamed and malevolent unseen presence that lurks in Chinese coal and silver mines),

  Pelican, (not really a supernatural being: a clerical error),

  Manticore, (lion/scorpion fusion but featuring a bearded man’s head with the widest grin in existence),

  Barometz, (hybrid of vegetable and lamb).

  * * * * *

  Despite his string of disasters and semi-triumphs, some of which escaped the vats, crystal eggs, cages or pentagrams where they entered our world and ran amok and killed soldiers, the professor never lost faith in his own abilities or in the wisdom of using horrible monsters to help the Agency achieve its aims. Even from his worst failures he learned much that was interesting and valuable to science.

  A shift in his attitude took place as his occult knowledge increased through trial and error. He began regarding himself not as a scientist but as an artist, a sculptor of weirdness. Later he rejected the artist tag and referred to himself in private as a special kind of midwife, a deliverer of nightmares. But that’s not how his employees thought of him. To them he was a godfather of unmentionables.

  He knew the importance of perseverance. If he kept going and never gave up, a monster would eventually appear worthy of official Agency status, capable of competently helping the British government cling to whatever influence it still possessed overseas. Attempts were made on his life, as might be expected, but the greatest danger to his health remained his own blasphemous creations.

  * * * * *

  The golem was still the type of monster he yearned most strongly to have working for him. Cherlomsky learned all about golems on a trip to Prague many years before. In the Jewish quarter of that wonderful city he met the caretaker of a little-visited museum who invited him inside to view lumps of shapeless clay in glass tanks.

  These lumps had once belonged to the notorious golem of Rabbi Loew and no longer possessed any power, which proved that the legend must be true, because when that golem became uncontrollable and went on a spree of smashing and rending, the Rabbi had chased after it and rubbed out a single letter etched into its brow . . .

  The caretaker then had to explain to Cherlomsky how life is imparted to a dead clay statue by inscribing the magic Hebrew word ‘Emet’ on its forehead. When the golem’s master wants to disable his creation he only has to erase the first letter of that word to make ‘Met’ and the golem turns back into a dead mass of clay.

  ‘Emet’ means truth; and ‘Met’ means dead . . .

  Golems don’t normally go on the rampage, by the way. It does happen but it’s not an inevitable outcome . . .

  In fact they are very obedient and obey any instruction immediately. They are also immensely strong.

  But they can also be very stupid. Yet as the caretaker told him all this, the professor thought he rea
lised a way of getting round this problem of their lack of intelligence, a sort of logical loophole in the mental matrix of the monster’s mythical makeup.

  Alliteration was a popular literary device back then . . .

  Rather to Cherlomsky’s surprise, the caretaker gave him a lump of clay as a souvenir of his visit to the strange little museum. He carried it around Prague with him in his pocket. Later he placed it on the outside sill of the window of his cheap hotel room.

  It snowed all night and in the morning the lump had turned brittle and crumbled in his hands, but the professor picked out the largest fragment and kept it safe for years, right up until the moment it was swallowed by a wholly inappropriate pelican . . .

  The coldness of Prague in midwinter might have damaged the sample of Rabbi Loew’s golem, but the professor had barely noticed the freezing wind and the ice everywhere.

  He rarely cared about the weather at all and never looked at a sunset, deeming it to be a blot on the skyscape. For him the sun was to be taken for granted like any other burning ball and he never could have imagined that a sudden change in its behaviour would one day prove to be the first major challenge of his Agency.

  But that lay a long way in the future . . .

  Right now most of his brainpower was diverted to thinking about what the caretaker had told him. Even then he was aware of the fact that he was fated to make a working golem!