The Brightonomicon (Brentford Book 8) (15 page)

‘Keep up, Rizla.’ Mr Rune turned and shone his torch in my face.

‘This gun is bl**d*ng heavy,’ I said.

‘Ah, a touch of the Old Sussex dialect. How fitting.’

‘That particular running gag, if such it is,’ I said, ‘will soon run its course when I run out of swear words.’

‘Well, as it happens we’re nearly there.’ Mr Rune’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Now listen to me, Rizla, and listen to me closely. What you are about to witness you will not entirely understand, but do as I say, when I say it, and all will be well. Do you understand this?’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘And I am cold.’

‘Things will soon warm up, methinks. Now follow close at hand. I’m going to switch off the torch.’

Mr Rune did this and the darkness closed about us.

‘And now I am scared,’ I confessed. ‘There could be badgers about and those things can give you a terrible biting.’

‘Badgers are the least of our concerns. Stay close behind me, in case of man traps.’

‘Man traps?’
My voice made the whisper known as hoarse.

‘We are on secret government property now, and I do not mean property owned secretly by the government –
I
mean property owned by the Secret Government.’

It was an uphill struggle. In the literal sense of the words. Mr Rune was on his hands and knees now and so was I, struggling uphill, the minigun slung across my shoulders and Mr Rune’s big bottom filling most of what little vision I had.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I whispered.

‘Nearly, and indeed yes. Come up alongside me, Rizla, and position your weapon according to my specific instructions.’

Mr Rune’s specific instructions were: ‘Lay it there, pointing in that direction.’ Which I gratefully did. And then I peered out into the darkness all around and a big breath of surprise caught in my throat.

We were crouched, it appeared, upon the rim of some natural indentation in the Downs. But it was a vast indentation, somewhat like to that of an extinct volcano. It was a great crater of a thing, with steep sides that led down and down.

To brightness.

The only way to describe what I saw is as an encampment. There were vehicles parked there that looked to be of the military persuasion, but these were not of your everyday military ilk. They were camouflaged, but in psychedelic colours, positively Day-Glo, and lit by strips of lights that were powered by a chugging generator. And within the brightness of these lights were many folk all busily engaged in activities that were strange and enigmatic to me. And there was equipment, too, scientific equipment – big portable computer jobbies with rotating tape wheels and rows of valves that glimmered and glistened and looked very much all the present state of the art.

Which is not to say the
Art,
for this was no
Art
installation brought in for the Festival.

Whilst chaps in white work-coats fussed at the computers, other chaps in black suits, white shirts, black ties and sunglasses fussed at
them
and did occasional pointings towards the sky above.

The sky this night, although moonless, was altogether clear of cloud and I was able to make out the constellation of Orion (which put me in mind of spaniels) and vaguely the Crab Nebula (which put me in mind of Bartholomew’s brother who had perished hereabouts in a platypus-skin crab suit).

‘What is this place?’ I whispered to my companion.

‘A window area,’ said Mr Rune, ‘which is to say, a very special place where the line between what we believe we understand to be real and what we believe to be unreal is very thin indeed.’

‘You must feel right at home here, then.’

‘Just observe, whilst doing your best to remain unobserved. Do you think you can do that for me?’

‘I will try,’ I said and I patted the General Electric M135 7.62mm minigun. It really was a most remarkable-looking weapon, with its six rotating barrels and everything. And the big belt of bullets and …

Well, you know how it is for boys. Or at least you will if you
are
a boy. There is something strangely compelling about guns, especially great big machine-guns. It is like fire, really – how small boys play with matches and big boys have barbecues and bonfires. There is something about the excitement and danger of it all. Firing guns is
wrong. Guns are all wrong. But there is still something terribly compelling about them.

‘Am I right in thinking,’ I whispered to Mr Rune, ‘that the men down there are baddies?’

Hugo Rune nodded his naked dome. ‘Baddies of the baddest persuasion.’

‘Do you want me to shoot them?’ I asked.

The Guru’s Guru turned his head towards me. ‘Whatever has brought
this
on?’ he asked.

‘Well …’ I patted the minigun.

‘Ah,’ said Hugo Rune, ‘too close a proximity to a weapon. I once wrote a most erudite monograph upon the subject of the car crash in relation to metallurgy, to whit how certain metals are capable of absorbing the psychic essence to which we refer, most lightly, as good luck or bad luck. Allow me to elucidate.

‘The alchemists believe that gold is the purest metal, that all other “base” metals aspire to be gold and can in fact be transformed into gold by the addition of a catalysing agent known as the Philosopher’s Stone. This stone is, in essence, the very quintessence of purity.

‘People love gold – worship gold, in fact; they are unconsciously drawn to its purity. Gold pleases them upon a psychic level, above that which they are able to comprehend. Gold, you might say,
is
good luck. Iron, however, and the steel it is converted into, are quite another matter. Here we have the basest of metals, a primitive atavistic brute of a metal. Weapons are not fashioned from gold; jewellery that beautifies is fashioned from gold. Which brings me back to the subject of my monograph. It is my contention that the motorcars that crash, as opposed to those that do not, do so because a portion of the iron of which they are constructed has been recycled from a piece of iron that in the past absorbed bad luck. It might have once been a sword, or a knife or some other weapon. The cycle continues. Evil inevitably befalls the user.

‘Now please remove your hand from that weapon lest its evil contaminate you further.’

‘I was only asking,’ I said and I grudgingly removed my hand from the General Electric M135 7.62mm minigun.

‘When I do ask you to start shooting,’ said Mr Rune, ‘and be
assured that I will, it will not be towards those particular baddies that I will request you to direct your firepower.’

‘Whatever you say,’ I said. ‘This is all rather exciting. In a sort of I-wonder-what-will-happen-next kind of way. If you know what I mean.’

Mr Rune sighed deeply. ‘Just remain alert,’ said he.

And I remained alert, although chilly, and I watched the fellows below us, the ones in the white and the ones in the black. And there were some in colourful camouflage, too. And they were all keeping busy. Then a van arrived from somewhere.

And it was a Royal Mail van.

‘Look at that,’ I whispered to Mr Rune. ‘A Royal Mail van. What do you think
that
is doing here?’

‘What do
you
think it’s doing here?’

‘Delivering letters? Although—’

‘Although?’ Mr Rune took out a silver hip flask, removed its cap and drank from it.

‘Although, as you know, I recently had a most alarming experience in a Royal Mail van. You do not think it could be that evil Doctor Proctor, do you?’

‘Observe,’ said Mr Rune.

‘Give me a sip from your hip flask.’

‘Observe,’ said Mr Rune once again. And he did not give me a sip. The rear doors of the Royal Mail van opened. And it
was
that evil Doctor Proctor.

‘That f*cker!’ I whispered.

Mr Rune had no comment to make.

And that f*cker climbed down from the Royal Mail van and Nurse Hearse climbed down from it also. And then they reached up and helped another f*cker down.

And this f*cker was—

‘A crab!’ I whispered, though harshly. ‘Some f*cker dressed up as a crab.’

‘Enough f*ckers now,’ said Mr Rune. ‘Such language does not become you. But what do you make of it?’

‘No sense at all,’ I replied. ‘But I can see his head sticking out of the top of the crab suit – Bartholomew the bog troll.’

‘It’s his brother,’ said Mr Rune. ‘His twin brother, to be precise.’

‘But I thought his brother had been murdered.
You
said his brother had been murdered.’

‘He was.’

‘Well, clearly he was not, because he is right there.’

‘You misunderstood me.’ Mr Rune had pulled a bar of chocolate out of his pocket now and was munching upon it. ‘That is the twin brother of Bartholomew’s twin brother. The identical twin. It is, in fact, a clone of Bartholomew’s twin brother.’

‘And what is a clone?’ I asked.

‘A genetically engineered duplicate wrought from the DNA of a subject.’

‘That is science fiction,’ I said. ‘We cannot do things like that yet.’

‘We
can’t. But
they
can.’

‘Would you care to enlighten me, please?’ I pleaded. ‘Clearly you know what is going on here.’

‘All the clues were back at the house of Bartholomew’s brother – you saw them with your own eyes – but now is not the time for explanations. Look on and learn and be prepared to employ the weaponry if and when the need arises.’

I made exasperated sounds, but I looked on, because let us face it, whatever
was
going on was not the sort of thing that you see every day. Whatever it was that was going on.

And then …

‘Ah,’ whispered Mr Rune, ‘if I am not mistaken, the show is about to begin.’

And then I heard those big electrical clunking sounds that are only made by searchlights when you switch them on. And sure as sure can be, around and about the encampment below, searchlights that I had not previously noticed because they were all in darkness blinked on and shone up into the sky.

They crisscrossed and arced in the sky and then appeared to focus upon something.

Something large.

‘What is
that?’
I enquired of Mr Rune.

‘A scout-craft,’ said himself.

I could hear a low, distant humming. And this grew louder to such
a degree that I had to cover my ears. And down from the sky dropped this scout-craft.

This scout-craft was—

A flying saucer, no less.

‘Mister Rune!’ I shouted above the din. ‘Mister Rune, it is a flying saucer!’

Mr Rune clamped a big, fat hand over my mouth. With his other hand, he raised a finger to his lips.

Down and down came the flying saucer. I saw some kind of glowing undercarriage fold out, and I do have to say that it was with a certain elegance, almost balletic, that it set down within the crater below.

The terrible humming died away.

A terrible stillness followed.

‘The sound of silence,’ whispered Mr Rune.

I recalled that I had once seen photographs, purported to be of flying saucers, taken by an American chappie by the name of George Adamski. I had considered them to be fakes at the time, but now I was of a different opinion. George’s photos were dead on the nail, conning tower, portholes and all.

An entrance port in the saucer eased open and a metal gangway slid down towards Earth. And then an occupant of the craft appeared in the doorway.

And that occupant looked like a crab.

But it was a simply spiffing crab, and I am not being flippant here.

It came down the gangway sideways, as is the manner of crabs. But it was decked out in a silver spacesuit.

Which is what made it look so simply spiffing.

For those who pay attention to such matters, it would have been noticed that in the early days of the NASA programme, the astronauts all wore silver spacesuits, unlike the white ones that they wear today. Why? Because silver was the colour that spacesuits should be, wasn’t it? Everyone in those days knew that a spacesuit had to be silver. Until of course it crossed the mind of some spacesuit designer at NASA that spacesuits did not really have to be silver just because everyone naturally assumed that all spacesuits had to be silver.
Spacesuits could be
white.
In fact, they would actually look more chic if they were white.
^*

Well, everybody is entitled to their opinion, I suppose, but for me, a simply spiffing spacesuit has to be silver. To Hell with modern trends.

‘That is one simply spiffing space crab,’ I whispered.

‘I have to agree,’ said Mr Rune, ‘so I trust that you won’t take it too badly when I call upon you to shoot it.’

‘Of course not,’ I replied. ‘After all, it is a
space crab.’

The space crab was now at the bottom of the gangway. It had sort of scuttled around, because scuttling is what crabs do – as opposed to shifty fellows. Who sidle. Although there seemed to me to be a degree of sidling in the space crab’s scuttling, for it scuttled in a sinister fashion. I would not have trusted it at all.