Twisthorn Bellow Read online

  * * * * *

  But the first manufactured monster to earn Agency status was a grotesque mutant that was a result of Cherlomsky’s attempt to create homunculi in large jars. His funding allowed him to send buyers into all the bookshops of the world, seeking magic manuals, grimoires and unfathomable scrolls from the fœtid dawn of human civilisation, and the Agency’s occult library quickly became the largest in existence.

  One of those cursed textbooks was a hideous tome bound in the skin of a witch who had transformed herself into a snake—although in one of his more sceptical moods Cherlomsky did wonder if it might simply be ordinary snakeskin. Anyway, that damnable volume gave precise and foul instructions for homunculi growing.

  Homunculi are synthetic men, mostly small but sometimes as large as a suitcase, who are clean, feel little or no pain, do whatever they are told and are immune to vampire attacks.

  One of those would be a fine addition to the team!

  But there was something wrong with the recipe. The professor only succeeded in creating parts of a body, rather than a complete man. His first attempt produced a knee, then he grew a chin, a midriff, an ear, all disgustingly isolated from each other.

  He did consider stitching them together somewhat in the manner of Dr Frankenstein, that fictional meddler, but his sewing machine was broken. An anonymous joker, probably one of the soldiers working for him, had bizarrely stuffed an umbrella into it.

  After umpteen failures, he finally managed to grow a complete hand that was at least ten times as large as it ought to be. At first he concluded this was no improvement on what had gone before, but when he tried to pick up the jar that housed it, ready to drop it down the incinerator chute, the hand suddenly clicked its fingers.

  The jar shattered and the hand jumped free . . .

  Telekinesis! An ability to influence objects with the power of thought. No other explanation. Incredible!

  The hand scuttled like a spider but was much too bulky to fit under the table, so it cowered in a corner.

  “Can you hear me?” Cherlomsky cried.

  “Richie!” it squeaked.

  “That’s not my name. I’m not Richie. I am Cherlomsky, but you may call me Shylock,” said the professor.

  “Cool!” answered the hand.

  “Are you able to manipulate matter just by thinking about it or does the clicking of your fingers play an essential role in the process? Would you like to help British interests?”

  “Richie!” repeated the hand.

  “I’ve told you once before . . . What a moment! You don’t have a mouth, so how can you speak? I get it! You squeeze air in your closed fist and it ejects from between your fingers in the same way that air passes out of a talking human throat . . . But how can you hear what I’m saying? There are no ears on your surface area!”

  “Cool!” squealed the hand.

  “Maybe you can’t hear me. No matter! Welcome to my world. Do you have a name or shall I give you one?”

  “Richie!” grunted the hand.

  “No, that won’t do at all. Let me think . . . ”

  * * * * *

  And so Hapi Daze became an integral part of the Agency and one of the most valuable and potent of the professor’s allies against evil—at least until Twisthorn Bellow came along. If the professor ever needed to spring a lock, or wanted an enemy’s gun to misfire, or required the canteen kettle to boil more rapidly than normal, he turned to Hapi for help. The clicking of that hand’s monolithic fingers became a background noise hardly less familiar on campus than the whistled theme tunes, chiefly taken from bad televised comedies, of the soldiers.

  But there are two sides to everything and in return for Hapi’s unique help, the professor was forced to put up with a few annoying traits that the hand just couldn’t seem to grow out of. Meaningful conversations in particular remained a problem. Although generally tolerant, Cherlomsky often was pushed beyond his limits.

  “Cool? Richie? Cool?”

  “I’m not Richie, you five-fingered freak!”

  “Richie . . . Cool . . . ”

  “You opposing-thumbed twerp! Take this and that! Your knuckles will be raw by the time I’m done!”

  Fortunately Hapi was unable to bear grudges, and maybe we can all learn from his example, the example of a hand, that extension to an arm that is capable of such tenderness and artistry, that flowering of the stump that can stroke, tickle, wave, play a piano, count, slap thighs, scratch and pick, and that knows exactly how to hang on tightly but let go lightly and other kinds of hippie twaddle.

  Or maybe we can’t. Let’s hope not.

  * * * * *

  Certainly there was nothing much to be learned from the second monster to join the team. Miss Abortia Stake was an embryo aborted from a womb that had somehow refused to die.

  The embryo, that is, not the womb . . .

  She wasn’t one of the professor’s original experiments. She arrived in a parcel unexpectedly one morning.

  The Agency often received letters and parcels and many turned out to be booby traps. More than one soldier was killed opening the mail in the early days. Others were maimed.

  From an initial staff of a dozen soldiers, the Agency was soon whittled down to a workforce of only five.

  Cherlomsky installed extra security measures. A mechanical sniffing device was applied to incoming materials but if there were French stamps on the envelope or wrapping paper, then X-ray scanners were also used to check the contents before opening.

  The Agency was obviously intensely disliked in certain quarters, also in general halves and fractions of most other specificities, but the parcel containing Miss Abortia Stake was more suspicious than most, for the mechanical sniffer visibly winced as it performed its olfactory task, and that had never happened before.

  Something extremely grim was inside the box, make no mistake, or rather do: Miss Stake, the perfect name for an unwanted embryo, but the professor didn’t have an inkling what the contents were until X-rays were applied. Then he frowned.

  He opened the parcel, looked within.

  “Six weeks gestation age, I would estimate,” he declared.

  “Spot on,” said the embryo.

  “You can speak!” stammered the professor.

  “Can now,” came the reply.

  The professor burst into tears. “How is it possible?”

  “I was aborted in a clinic the usual way,” the embryo explained, “but I remained alive, a situation the surgeons had never encountered before. On the operating table I squirmed and thrashed. An emergency meeting was held to decide what to do. The clinic didn’t want to take responsibility for me, so I was given to my mother to take home. She was horrified, of course, but had no other option.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question!”

  The soldiers standing near the parcel also burst into tears and reached into pockets for handkerchiefs . . .

  “She looked after me for only a week before making up her mind to get rid of me,” continued the embryo, “but she didn’t want the guilt of murdering me, so she sealed me in a box and posted it to you, assuming that because your Agency deals with supernatural phenomena it was the best destination for a living abortion.”

  “Yes, yes!” sniffed the professor. “But you are aware. You’re sentient. You can speak. That’s the mystery!”

  “A very recent development,” said the embryo. “It only occurred when you switched on the X-rays . . . ”

  The professor wiped his damp cheeks. “Then the radiation must have altered your biochemical formula. How badly contrived! But it’s a superb anomaly to have before me.”

  “Is it? Yes I guess it must be . . . ”

  “So why are we weeping?” he spluttered.

  “Obviously that’s my special power,” said the embryo, “because every hero has to have a quality not in general possession. So that’s what I do. I induce fits of weeping in adults . . . ”

  “Welcome to the team!” blubbed the professor.
>
  “Don’t mind if I do,” she said.

  * * * * *

  Over the following week Cherlomsky made an electronic waldo for Miss Abortia Stake, a kind of exoskeleton that amplified her voice and powers of tear-inducement and enabled her to walk, run and jump on many types of terrain, including frozen lakes, just-cooled lava flows, scree slopes, soft dunes, karst, shingle and mud.

  In time the professor and his staff became accustomed to her presence and aura and their grief diminished, but for an enemy newly introduced to Abortia, her ability to cause monumental heart pangs that unavoidably express themselves in massive water expulsion through the eyes would be a truly dehumidifying weapon.

  Abortia and Hapi Daze became good friends in a short space of time, which made it unnecessary for the professor to supply artificial cohesion to the budding team. On the contrary, there was too much cohesion of the natural kind between these two monsters and Abortia was the only entity Hapi ever called by its real name.

  They drank sparkling wine together and Hapi popped the corks and filled their glasses from an impressive distance with a click of his fingers while Abortia jumped into her own glass and swam in lazy circles, a cœlacanth in bubbly, a giant germ in sparkles.

  Cherlomsky didn’t approve of this arrangement but he felt it wasn’t his place to object too strongly. We are all young once, he reminded himself, but he wasn’t convinced that was true . . .

  Occasionally he stumbled upon the grotesque couple while they were in the middle of a steamy and curious embrace. To protect everyone from acute embarrassment, Hapi clicked his fingers to make things happen. A discarded bathrobe might rise from the floor and form a screen in mid-air, or an indoor fog would congeal.

  Once Hapi clicked for the professor’s nose to explode.

  Nobody knows why he did that.

  It was almost certainly an accident. The professor punished him in a fairly moderate manner and arranged for a silver nose to be grafted onto his skull in place of the blown one.

  Now Cherlomsky looked like the famous historical astronomer Tycho Brahe, who had lost his own nose in a Danish duel and also wore a false metal one. Maybe that’s what Hapi had in mind when he did what he did. Benefit of the doubt and all that . . .

  * * * * *

  The conversion of the London Metropolitan University to the Applied Eschatology Agency hadn’t been as thorough as the professor liked to believe. Here and there existed the former fittings, the blackboards and charts and hollow desks filled with textbooks and chewing gum. In the Physics department the oscilloscopes and vacuum pumps still hummed and awaited educational tasks.

  The Chemistry department was even more untouched. Bunsen burners and jars of acid, thermometers and centrifuge mixers, litmus papers and boxes containing sodium, magnesium, phosphorus, caesium, thallium, technetium, uranium and other useful elements, all stood in the places where they had been abandoned. There were pots of thermite with the serving spoons still protruding.

  It was like the cabin of an academic Marie Celeste. And one huge vat stirred with sinister sluggishness . . .

  The room that contained it was bathed in shadow.

  But outside, in space, the sun still shone with its brood of planets and comets going round it like the balls of a bolas with invisible strings. Not quite like that. Yes, the sun. Sol. Helios. Aten. Many other names too. A typical class G star, mediocre in galactic terms but of supreme importance to human beings. Worshipped as a god in ancient times. There it was, up there, beyond the atmosphere!

  * * * * *

  Professor Cherlomsky finally felt ready for a third attempt at creating a golem. His golem-making machine was running smoothly and he had obtained a sack of a special kind of clay, mostly called diatomaceous earth but occasionally known as kieselgur, from a company based in Sweden, which promised to be stronger and less friable than the type he had used in his first two golems.

  With one soldier as a bodyguard, but with Hapi and Abortia also at his side in case of trouble bigger than a gun could handle, the professor set the controls of the blender to maximum. The clay churned within and the shaping blades rapidly carved it into a humanoid form, three metres tall, slate grey in colour. But then the machine shuddered and something went wrong with the large head.

  Instead of producing a solid cube, the machine created a spiral, a horn that rose like an insane helter-skelter in a tall crescent, adding another half metre to the creature’s height.

  “Cancel this one and start again?” Abortia asked.

  The professor checked his instruments and shook his head. “No point. Everything has worked perfectly apart from this one detail. I don’t think the shape of his head matters.”

  “But he looks like a narwhale!” objected Abortia.

  The professor stroked his chin. “Not really, young lady. More like a cross between a unicorn and a barber’s pole. See how the twist has been executed in three different dimensions including along its own axis? It’s a splendid horn. Let him keep it.”

  “In that case, is it time for the oven?”

  The professor nodded. “Go right ahead, my dear.”

  Soon the golem was being baked hard. The soldier began sweating, perhaps not from the heat, but Hapi clicked his fingers and a newspaper rose off a nearby table to fan him.

  Then Cherlomsky had an idea. “I think I’ll name this golem before he comes out. Don’t want history repeating itself. With an odd head like that, I can only call him Twisthorn.”

  “Won’t he need a surname?” Abortia protested.

  “Whatever for, dear girl?”

  “He’s not a pet, is he? Not a kitten or hamster.”

  “Yes, I see. Hadn’t thought of that . . . If I give him my own surname people will think I’m perverted, that’s he’s my real son and that I managed to impregnate a lump of modelling clay . . . Better to let him pick his own when he’s ready, don’t you agree?”

  “If you insist,” pouted Miss Abortia Stake.

  The golem was finished. The professor turned off the oven and pulled a lever to open the door. Then he donned an asbestos glove and scratched the word ‘Emet’ on its forehead.

  The dead eyes came alive, glowing pink.

  But golems are idiotic beings and now it was time for the professor to try the idea he’d had in Prague so many years before. Because a correctly produced golem will obey any instruction its master gives it, the professor ordered in a clear deep voice:

  “Hey stupid, I command you to be intelligent!”

  The golem blinked, raised its arms, dropped them, looked around in an almost comical bewilderment.

  “I . . . can . . . think . . . ” it groaned painfully.

  “Cool!” squeaked Hapi.

  “Welcome to our world, Twisthorn,” said the professor.

  “Your world? I don’t understand . . . ”

  “Your world as well now,” elaborated Abortia.

  “Richie!” added Hapi Daze.

  Suddenly the golem threw back its head and emitted a bellow so loud that the Pyrex oven door shattered. Then it was running for freedom. The soldier raised his machine gun but the golem pushed him aside like a rag doll made not of rags but of wet lettuce leaves—in other words a rotting salad puppet. A skull hit a desk.

  “It has gone mad. Stop it, Hapi!” cried the professor.

  “Cool,” replied the hand, preparing itself for a click that would reduce the clay monster to red rubble.

  “Wait!” barked Abortia. “He’s not insane, he’s just frightened. It must be the sudden existentialist shock of appearing in the world fully aware of himself. We must help him!”

  “Don’t listen to her, Hapi. Kill the brute!”

  But Hapi’s loyalty was to the embryo he loved, not to a professor with a false nose. He did nothing and Twisthorn got away. Cherlomsky hissed and set off after his creation.

  Hapi and Abortia followed as fast as they could.

  The soldier didn’t stir. He was a broken twisted wreck now, the latest ca
sualty of the Agency and its unorthodox mandate to rid the world of all anti-British supernatural stuff.

  But his tragedy didn’t stop the sun shining . . .

  * * * * *

  The chase took most of the afternoon. Where Twisthorn went, the trio of Eschatological Crusaders followed.

  They ran up and down corridors and up and down staircases and back along different corridors. They climbed through windows and leapt into courtyards and wove through a succession of lecture theatres. Because of sharp corners and other projections on the route, garments were snagged and pulled off bodies one by one.

  Within a few hours Cherlomsky, Hapi and Abortia were almost nude. During this process, they all had the impression that someone was playing a saxophone in the background, but when they stopped to listen there was silence. Such a juvenile illusion!

  Twisthorn kept bellowing, so he was easy to follow.

  At last he ran into the Chemistry department. There was no other way out and he knew that the professor was close behind, so he started scaling a rack of jars containing chemicals.

  Higher and higher he climbed but the rack hadn’t been designed for his weight. It crumpled and leaned over. Then he lost his grip and fell, but he didn’t land on the floor. No, he splashed into the big vat of sinister liquid mentioned in passing earlier . . .

  This fluid cooled his anxiety. He floated serenely . . .

  The professor raced in, with Abortia and Hapi close behind. For a long while they couldn’t guess where Twisthorn was hiding. Then Cherlomsky looked over the side of the vat.

  “He’s in here!” he barked.

  “Yes I am, and I’m alright now,” said Twisthorn.

  “Help him out!” urged Abortia.

  The professor stepped back in alarm. “The liquid in this vat. Don’t you know what it is? It’s nitroglycerine!”

  “And his clay is saturated with it,” added Abortia.

  “What’s the problem with that?” wondered Twisthorn. He kicked his legs and was amused to observe the professor’s horrified reaction. But the joke quickly wore off. He blinked.