Apocalypso (17 page)

‘He
discovers that a special ministry has been set up in London. A kind of ministry
of the paranormal and that the people working there are doing all kinds of
deals with people and “things” from the other realities. Everyone being on the
make, as I said. The old bloke is horrified, especially when he learns that
this ministry is virtually running the world. And who’s in charge of this
ministry, eh, eh?’ Wok Boy nudged Porrig painfully in his wounded ribs. You’ll
never guess if I don’t tell you. So I’ll tell you. The person running the
ministry, the Ministry of Serendipity, it’s called, is the person your mum
showed the letter to. He tried out the ritual for himself, realized the
potential, approached the government with it, for the good of the nation, of
course, and now sits there in the ultimate seat of power running damn near
everything.

‘It’s
your dad, Porrig. It’s your dad.’

Wok Boy
grinned down at Porrig. ‘Now what do you think about that?’

Exactly
what Porrig did think about that can only be imagined. But that it was nothing
altogether jolly would be a reasonable guess.

‘The
old bloke wants you to expose your own dad,’ said Wok Boy. ‘Expose him and the
ministry. Tell the world who’s really running everything. No publisher will
touch the story, no newspaper or TV news service, the ministry controls them
all. But a privately printed production, beautiful artwork, telling the whole
story, could get the message across to the young. They take comics more
seriously than newspapers anyway. Well, that’s about it.’ Wok Boy rose from the
bed. ‘That’s the brief outline, all the details are in the book, so you can
read them when you wake up. I’d read it all to you myself, but I’ve got other
things to do, if you know what I mean.’

Wok Boy
leaned over and gave Porrig’s tender testicles a mirthsome tweak, then he left,
leaving Porrig once more all alone.

No rock
stars, no sports personalities, no television presenters.

All
alone, bewailing his lot.

And
cursing the name of Augustus Naseby.

Inwardly,
of course.

12

Augustus Naseby, inwardly
cursed but outwardly thriving, lurked in the seat of power on the swirly-whirly-patterned
carpet that covered the floor of his little office in the Ministry of
Serendipity, beneath Mornington Crescent Underground station.

The
station itself has apparently been closed for years. In fact the station never
ever was open. Ask anyone you like. Say: ‘Have you ever been to Mornington Crescent
on the Tube?’ Some bugger is bound to say yes, but they will be lying.

So why
exactly has the station never been open? And why is the Ministry of Serendipity
situated there?

Good
questions. And ones that are relevant and so shall be answered.

Allow me
to explain.

Now, as
you may well know, the London Underground system is reckoned to be the very
best of its type in the whole wide world.

Sure,
you’ve got the Paris Métro, with its fab Art Nouveau fiddly bits, and Tokyo
with its Sars attacks and New York with its muggers and junkies, but the London
Underground has its own special magic.

It’s a
magic that most people don’t know anything of. They might travel on the
Underground for all of their lives and still know nothing about the real magic.
They may well know about the race of troglodytes who live down there,
descendants of trapped Victorian navvies. They may know about how the
government regularly tests out new strains of flu virus on the commuters there.
And they may even know about the ghost of Jack the Ripper, who pushes so-called
suicides to their deaths. But they don’t know about the magic.

And why
don’t they know? Because it’s a secret, that’s why. Guarded by the Ministry of
Serendipity.

Consider,
if you will, the map of the London Underground. It’s a very stylish map and has
won numerous design awards. But the map conceals far more than it reveals.
Certainly it shows you the order of the stations, but it does not show you
their actual locations.

Allow
me to explain.

The map
is all straight lines — apart from the Circle Line, and the Circle Line isn’t
even drawn as a circle. If you take a large-scale road map of London and mark
on it all the tube stations, then join these dots up, a curious pattern is
revealed. A series of strange, almost cabbalistic symbols.

The
reason for this is that the location for each  station was carefully chosen by
a group of Victorian ritual magicians skilled in the arts of geomancy and working
for the government of the day. The London Underground follows the course of the
major ley-line system, the stations being at node points where certain earth
energies are released into the capital city. The entire system has at its very
hub Mornington Crescent, and it is towards this station that the channelled
energies flow like water spiralling down a plughole.

You
see, once we had an empire that ruled two-thirds of the world. And bow? By
magic, that’s how.

But
then, later, what happened? Some daft twat behind a Whitehall desk decided that
magic offended the British sense of fair play. And so we lost the empire.

It is
not difficult to imagine how thrilled a later government was when Augustus
Naseby turned up on their doorstep with a plan to restore it.

But
what exactly was his plan, you may well ask, and how did he intend to put it into
action?

Well,
as it is Thursday and the Ministry of Serendipity always has its special
meetings on Thursday, why don’t we listen in and find out?

Augustus Naseby rose from
the chair he was lurking in and donned the robes and fez of an Egyptian. The impersonating
of Egyptians was an important part of Thursday meetings. But as its
significance is a closely guarded secret, it wouldn’t do to go blabbing it
about here.

All
donned and dandy, Augustus set out along a corridor which led him at
considerable length to the big boardroom where the meetings were held.

It was
a bloody big boardroom, about the size of, well, ooh, something really big,
Wembley Stadium perhaps. Or if that is a bit too big, something slightly
smaller. It was all panelled out in oak the way that boardrooms are and had a
table so long that it dwindled away into the distance.

Augustus
sat down at the head of the table. Without the aid of a telescope (something he
never carried), he had no way of knowing who, or what, might be sitting at the foot.

He
struck a small brass gong, which emitted a sound like a cat being put through a
mangle, and called the meeting to order.

‘Order,’
he called.

Many
faces turned towards him. Many faces of many shapes and sizes. Some very big
and some really really really little. Some in between and a few it was
difficult to categorize.

‘Now,’
said Augustus. ‘Before we begin this meeting and for the benefit of anyone or
thing that has not attended before, a word or two of what it’s all about.’

Heads
nodded thoughtfully. Big, small and otherwise.

We at
the Ministry of Serendipity take care of business. We plan next week’s news,
what will be in fashion next year, who will become famous and for how long and
for why.

‘Why do
we do this? Because someone has to. If politicians and world leaders, who are
just jumped-up politicians anyway, were allowed to do this, there is no telling
where it might all end. ‘When I took over the helm here back in the 1960s, my
brief was simple. “Sort out the mess that the world’s in, Augustus,” the Prime
Minister said to me, and that’s just what I have been doing. Sorting out the
mess the world’s in. Or should I say, the
worlds
are in?’

There
was much applause at this. Which meant that it had to mean something.

‘You
all have problems,’ said Augustus. ‘You know this and I know this. Beings from
one reality want something that beings in another reality have got and so on
and so forth, and I act as broker and arbitrator to see that everyone and
everything gets a fair share.’

There
was even more applause at this. Much clapping of hands and things that passed
for hands.

When,
all those years ago, I performed the ritual that enabled me to pass from one
reality to another, coming as I did in the spirit of peace, a stranger in
strange lands, I did so in the hope that we would be able to co-exist in
harmony. You, as chosen representatives of your separate realities, meet with
me here every Thursday so that we can iron out little difficulties, trade
freely and with trust.’

Even
greater clapping and flapping and several cries of ‘Here, here.’

An
enormous maggot in a red fez rose upon its belly parts.

‘Mr
Chairman,’ it said, in a voice that resembled the sound of two ferrets fighting
in an over-sized condom. ‘Mr Chairman, your fairness and generosity are well
known to us all. The folk of my reality, Insect World, would like to take this
opportunity to thank you for all the rotten apples you unfailingly supply us
with, in exchange for nothing more than their weight in useless gold.’

Augustus
Naseby cleared his throat. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘useless gold.’

Hands
and things went clap clap slop and soon the boardroom air all but glowed with
the eulogies of praise that poured from up and down the table. Praise for
Augustus, the man who so selflessly plundered the riches of his own world:
beer-bottle tops, used cocoa tins, horse manure and condemned veal, in
exchange for the rubbish of other realities: gold, silver, platinum, diamonds..

Do you
see a pattern beginning to emerge?

Augustus
Naseby held up his hands. ‘Please, please,’ he said, ‘enough praise.’

‘More
than enough,’ came a voice. ‘If there’s any praising being done, it should be
done for me.’

Augustus
Naseby cast a doubtful eye towards the owner of the voice: a young and
shabby-looking individual who had now risen to his feet. He was, by all
accounts, human — well, humanish. His eyes were small, his mouth was large, his
nose was in-between. He wore upon his unwashed head a dirty fez and a
crown-of-thorns-style wreath of Christmas tree fairy lights which flashed on
and off at irregular intervals. He sported an ill-fitting tweed suit, onto the
shoulders of which had been glued a pair of cardboard wings. These, like his
face, had been spray-painted gold.

‘Ah,’
said Augustus. ‘Espadrille, it’s you.’

‘Angel
Espadrille,’ said the angel Espadrille.

He wasn’t
much of an angel really. In fact he wasn’t really an angel at all. He hailed
from a separate reality peopled by types such as himself, who had accidentally
stumbled into this reality for a moment or two, been observed by some gullible
sap and taken for the real McMessenger of God. And then got it into their own
heads that they actually were. Sounds unlikely? Well, anything’s possible. And
if it’s possible then it must exist in a separate reality.

The
Ministry of Serendipity found the likes of Espadrille extremely useful. They
were always on the lookout for bogus religions they could manipulate, the ‘real
church’ being something that, in their opinion, held far too much power in the
real world. And holding
all
the power in the world was what the Ministry
was all about.

Augustus
had The Twenty-third Congregation of Espadrille pencilled in as next year’s big
thing.

‘Angel
Espadrille,’ said Augustus. ‘How honoured we are
that you should grace us once more with your presence.’

‘I’d
grace you with my presence a whole lot more if I got the chance. But my name
seems to get unaccountably left off the invite list every other week’

‘I
cannot imagine how that happens,’ said Augustus, the lie falling from his lips
with the ease of a turd falling from a passing pigeon.

‘Yeah,
well, I’ve filled out all the application forms and I want to know when I can
start visiting my followers on a regular basis.’

‘You
wish to manifest,’ said Augustus.

‘He
wishes to give the womenfolk a good knobbing.’ A small grey head bobbed up from
beneath the table. It was a small grey domed head with oval black eyes, a tiny
lipless mouth and no nose whatsoever to speak of.

It was,
as it were, your archetypal grey.

‘Keep
out of this you little weirdo,’ said the angel. Weirdo?’ said the grey. ‘You’re
calling
me
a weirdo!’

‘Yeah,
well we all know what you get up to.’

‘Oh
yes, and what’s that?’

The
angel made a two-fingered gesture that is universally understood.

‘And
what does
that
mean?’ asked the grey.

We all
know what you do with the people you abduct.’

We have
permission,’ said the grey. ‘In triplicate, with the Ministry’s seal on the
bottom. For our interbreeding process.’