Nowhere Near Milkwood (17 page)

“Well that really takes the biscuit,” said Dr Mondaugen. He was unsure which biscuit he was referring to. His fingers idled over the custard creams and finally settled on a ginger snap.

“But do you believe me?” The visitor leaned forward and gripped the arm of his chair. “After all, I don’t know who else to turn to. I mean, would you confess to such a dark secret? Would you?”

“Hmm.” Dr Mondaugen spat crumbs as hard as gravel and dipped his tongue into a cup of lukewarm tea. “I doubt it. Now if you had said wolf or bear, or even squirrel, I would be inclined to investigate your case. But an aardvark? I don’t think so.”

The visitor sighed and held his tragic head in his massive hands. Then he looked up and indicated the window. Dr Mondaugen peered through the glass, across a dark lawn broken up by a number of haphazard paths, and toward the tall trees of the horizon. Stark branches netted a swollen moon.

“The sun has gone down and the full moon has already risen. Within a short time, the change will come upon me. I will start to tremble and there will be a terrible pain in the centre of my head. My face will elongate into a sharp snout, my ears will stretch upward. My arms will become short legs and I will grow a tail. I will develop an insatiable craving for ants. This is not a laughing matter. You must help me!”

Dr Mondaugen shook his head sadly and wiped his lips with a napkin. “What makes you think that I can help you? Possibly you need to visit a different kind of doctor. A severe blow on the skull perhaps? Eh?”

The visitor pounded his fists on his knees. “You are the only person who is even willing to listen to me! You are Karl Mondaugen, the great cryptozoologist. The man who won a Nobel Prize for documenting a genuine case of lycanthropy and developing an appropriate cure and whistle. The man who spent two years in China tracking down the were-monkey in a banana canoe! The man who tricked a vampire into entering Heaven and then secured a day pass to check on its condition! If you can’t help me then who can?”

Dr Mondaugen nodded solemnly, reached into his pocket for his pipe and began filling it with tobacco. He gathered up a few biscuit crumbs from the plate before him and packed these into the bowl as well. “I have my own reputation to think of. A were-wolf is one thing. A were-aardvark is quite another. I know that the moon is full tonight. But even if you change right before my eyes, why should I do anything but ignore you? An aardvark is a silly animal...”

The visitor snarled. “That’s where you’re wrong! The aardvark, which constitutes the
orycteropodidae
family, is over sixty million years old. Its forelegs are so powerful that it can not only rip open whole termite nests but even fend off lions and leopards. What does this say to you?”

“Never hug an aardvark?” Dr Mondaugen raised a cynical eyebrow.

The visitor was exasperated. He rose up to depart. Ruefully, he offered the doctor his hand, more out of habit than any respect.

“I think I’ll pass on that,” the doctor observed, “if what you have just said is true. Tell me, when you say that you develop an insatiable craving for ants, do you mean small black insects or the sisters of uncles? Ho, ho! An important point, I assure you. I thought for one ghastly moment that the crux of your tale was going to be one of those awful puns. But don’t take it too personally, Mr Hughes.”

The visitor left with a sneer, slamming the door behind him and locking it with bolts and chains. Dr Mondaugen glanced around the room with a critical eye. It was hardly a fitting environment for a world famous cryptozoologist. There were few books, for one thing, and the walls seemed to be made of some padded material...

Rising from his chair, he crossed over to his desk by the window, took up his pen and started writing a new page of his
Dictionary of Shapeshifters
. His hand moved at a phenomenal speed. At this rate, he knew, it would probably see publication within a year. He smiled to himself. The cranks always came to him at this time. Indeed, his own change had been completed an hour before. He was that rarest of all shapeshifters: the were-professor.

Glancing up through the bars of the window, he perceived the visitor on his hands and knees on the lawn. Doubtless looking for ants. Around him pranced and slithered the other patients in a variety of guises; tiger, snake, eagle, hyena and shark. This is what happens when you let the lunatics run the asylum, Dr Mondaugen decided as he went back to work.

There are many real pubs in the universe which forget to chase out their patrons after closing time, locking them in for illicit drinking orgies, and almost as many nonexistent ones which follow that tradition. But few indeed are the taverns which can’t be left because of the drunkenness of the streets outside. Whenever I tried to escape from the TALL STORY, the cobbled surface of the adjacent alley rose up like a wave and crashed me back inside. The only way it might sober up was if Hywel stopped mopping the spilled beer out of the door. And the only way that would happen was if people kept a tighter grip on their glasses. Which relied on them not buying so many drinks in the first place. But there was little chance of that occurring while Hywel remained in business. And that would continue so long as I told tales about him.

However, I have now secured a replacement for my ordeal. It is you, dear reader, though you don’t fully realise it yet. It should be obvious that imaginary pubs, however hard the roads which lead to them, can only properly exist as ideas in heads. I have erected this one brick by brick in yours, over the space of twenty feeble fables, and you have decorated and stocked it yourself. That’s business, I’m afraid. By all means, take over; you have no choice. Beyond this epilogue, you’ll have to deal with the biggest lies of the world on your own. I won’t be there to help, nor even to lurk and gloat. I have more critical campaigns to return to. I’m ready to conquer Europe again. I’ve learned a lesson. One front good, two fronts bad; and winter won’t be hearing from me this time. The next boat out of Cardiff to Elba isn’t mine.

After I sneaked away from my final exile, I wandered aimlessly over centuries and cultures, hoping to forget my failures. I went mad. Locked in the same asylum as Karl Mondaugen, I even started to believe I was an ordinary person, without megalomania or a funny hat. A were-man. It was ghastly. The birds spoke to me through the bars of my cell. They counselled patience and revenge. They broke open the walls with their beaks and told me to flee to Wales, a land where I might blend in without attracting attention. The capital city of that country is rife with short fat grumblers who do odd things with arms under clothes. I felt at home. I started to get better. I only popped into Hywel’s pub for a quick drink to toast my forthcoming victories. Now I’m hoarse with tales. But having already taken you for a long one, this is where I ride off alone.

In the old days, of course, murderers were often locked away in dungeons while hurricanes and earthquakes went free. And let there be no doubt that they took full advantage of their freedom. They rushed and shook, shattered and toppled whenever it suited them. They had no conscience.

The first Natural Disaster we arrested was the volcano that erupted on the outskirts of our City when the President was making his inaugural speech. Without stopping to retrieve his hat and coat, he raced to the scene with many attendants and ministers. He did not hesitate to show his concern on camera. The ash had engulfed one of the richer suburbs, the President's majority.

There was a hung Parliament then, an economic crisis followed as share prices fell sharply. The President took to drink and gambling. Women were a mystery to him. His nose was too large. Before he had completely destroyed his liver, we decided to take action.

The trial was swift. Our Judges proclaimed the volcano guilty with due solemnity and sentenced it to life imprisonment. They stood on the volcanic glass and hammered off pieces as souvenirs. We solved the problem or removing the remainder to a place of security by constructing the prison around it. We used iron bricks. We threw away the key.

To be perfectly honest, the idea was not entirely my own. I knew a poet once who suggested it. She had long hair and a winsome smile. I loved her, but I could never give her any credit, not even of the financial sort, and thus it was I, Titian Grundy, Prefect of Police, who became the renowned and much-loved one.

There followed a period of prosperity then, hope, luxury even. There was a Golden Age of sorts. We expected a Platinum one to be just around the next corner.

The blue Tsunami rolled in from the east, towering so (I gesture here with upraised eyes) that we could not see the noontime sun. It bore an island with it, one of the outlying Aracknids wrenched free from the Continental Shelf, palm-trees and huts and village life all still intact upon the rich soil, although the latter considerably disrupted, and it crashed down on our wharves with the force of the Cosmic Serpent's own heartbeat. Our crystal piers became shards, glistening on the green waters of the harbour, a hazard to shipping for many years to come. Very pretty they looked too, those shards, more pretty even than the original structures, though that is missing the point.

We had greater difficulties with this one. After all, the guilty party had melted away into the greater ocean again. We had nothing to point the finger at any more. But we were not foiled so easily. We employed mathematicians to calculate the probable volume of water involved and we pumped this amount directly out of the sea. We were not above punishing innocent liquid if necessary, yet we felt sure that at least some of the molecules we had acquired had been responsible.

We took longer over this trial. We stored the water in a large outdoor tank and adjourned often, fishing or boating on the accused, thus forcing some Community Service out of it while we waited for the verdict. Naturally, the Defence Lawyer was outraged. He was also frustrated. We cut his wages, handpicked the Jury ourselves and let them make the correct decision. We tortured our captive with red-hot pokers.

During these revolutionary changes in the legal system, I never failed to miss my poet. I tried to behave like an ordinary man: I visited the President and played croquet on his lawns. I married a beekeeper and asked my poet to become my mistress. She turned me down, however, having had enough of such romantic entanglements. She adopted a cat and took in lodgers instead.

You know the way I feel about my work. I have had doubts, but they have been few. I do not believe that I must justify my actions. I have posed nude, grown a fiery beard and learnt to juggle. I envy the arty set, I suppose. I can no longer walk into a student pub without being jeered at. I love my poet more than ever. I have not yet forgotten her name.

I write this report as a story for good reasons. Last summer, a particularly vindictive tornado escaped from its reinforced bottle and wrecked my office. All my papers were shredded. My filing-cabinets were peeled back and my secretaries stamped through the floorboards. I was left without a single record of my achievements. That is why I must circulate this one more carefully. Perhaps it might even find its way into the pages of a fiction magazine.

These tornadoes, incidentally, were my first real mistake. We collected them in barrels at first, but these were easily burst. We tried jars before bottles. Our bottles were made out of stainless steel. We had to wait until the tornado began to die and shrink to the correct size before pouncing. This did not seem to deter others: they saw how much damage they could do before they were apprehended. They began to come in pairs.

The mistake I made was as follows: I issued instructions to bottle tornadoes before they had formed. We collected them before they had committed any crimes, and forged the documentation. The scheme seemed to work quite well. The number of arrests increased dramatically. I was awarded a bonus.

And then one day, I received a telegram from the pressure group Amnesty Interstellar. They had been making the rounds of the prisons. One of the developing tornadoes I had arrested had turned out not to be a tornado at all, but a dust-devil. I was disgraced. I had to resign and move into politics.

The President and I became firm friends. We both complained about the World, about life, about women mostly. I drank espresso and smoked fat cigars. The President wrote pamphlets and picked his nose, which were both tasks that could take all day. My captive tornadoes were released. An independent body was set up to monitor Police procedures. My statue in the plaza was defaced.

I am no longer handsome, but my poet is still beautiful. She now works as a Careers Officer. There is a man who wants to marry her. He takes her to restaurants in a solar-powered glider. I know: I have seen them. I will follow them one day in my hot-air balloon. I have kidnapped her cat.

The President keeps a typhoon in his cellar. A man I know at the prison smuggled it out to us. In the evenings, the President, the cat and myself, creep down the winding stairs and peep cautiously at it. We are careful not to open the door too wide, in case it escapes. We feed it model towns which it devours with great avidity.

The World is going soft. We will soon return to the old days, when (as I said before) murderers were often locked away in dungeons while hurricanes and earthquakes went free. Sentences are being reduced everywhere.

I hear that even the volcano on the outskirts of the City is due up for parole next year.