The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or a Watt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or an Ampere?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.

  ‘Never heard of a Volt. What does it do?’

  ‘It kills you. He’s going to wipe out Magonia. You have to do something.’

  ‘You are winding me up. I don’t blame you. Fair dos.’

  ‘I’m not winding you up. It was all a con to steal the saucer and escape. This Rune is mad. Call up the Emperor, have him do something.’

  ‘He’ll be in his bed. Get real, Mavis.’

  ‘Boris! You turd.’

  ‘Boris then.’

  ‘Tell the Emperor. Get him to whip up something. Whack Skelington Bay with it. We have the technology. We’re an advanced civilization.’

  ‘Tidal wave,’ said Bryant. ‘Is that what you’d like?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Get him to organize a tidal wave. Smash the town with it.’

  ‘Boris.’

  ‘Bryant?’

  ‘Piss off, Boris.’ The line went dead.

  ‘No, come back. Wait. Listen.’

  Not a dicky sea bird.

  Nor indeed a turbot’s turd.

  ‘I’m flying out of here,’ said Boris.

  ‘Not without these you’re not.’ The saucer’s ignition keys dingle-dangled between the pudgy fingers of Hugo Rune. In his other hand was the deadly derringer. It was pointing right at Boris’s head.

  ‘Oh damn!’ said the man from Magonia.

  ‘Oh damn,’ spluttered Cornelius, thrashing towards the shore. He wasn’t much of a swimmer.

  And something bobbed up, right in his path.

  ‘Grrrr!’ went this something, lunging forward.

  ‘Oh no!’ went the tall boy, falling back.

  But ‘Grrrrr!’ it continued to go. It meant business. It caught Cornelius by the hair and it dragged him under the water.

  Ding dong, ding dong, went the town hall clock.

  A quarter to twelve already.

  Doesn’t time just fly, eh?

  WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!

  Cornelius came up fighting. Bright lights whizzed and turned across the bay. Boat horns did the whooping.

  ‘What the—’

  Down once more into the depths.

  ‘What the—’

  Chunky’s chaps along the shoreline cocked their weapons, squinted into the twisting, whirling lights.

  ‘What the—’ Rune stood up upon the saucer’s edge, gazed out across the bay. ‘Oh no,’ said he. ‘Oh no, no, no.’

  For now they could clearly be seen. The boats. Hundreds of boats. Rowing-boats, fishing smacks, trawlers and pleasure boats. Round-the-bay trippers, dinghies and coracles. And currachs and canoes and catamarans; and sailing yachts and speedboats, wherries and ferries, tugboats and tow boats and launches.

  And Lilos.

  And a gondola.

  An irregular fleet, it was.

  A flotilla.

  A forest of masts.

  An argosy.

  An armada.

  And a thousand folk were waving, cheering, jeering. Hooting and hollering. Raising sticks. Some bearing guns.

  ‘Twas the folk of Skelington Bay no less.

  Hoorah!

  Returned to retake their town.

  Hip, hip, hooray!

  It must have required an awful lot of organization.

  Probably that’s why they took so long to get here.

  The armada’s searchlights zigzagged over the bay. The waves were growing choppy now. There was thunder in the air. A big storm was a-brewing.

  Cheer! Cheer! went the town folk, letting off flares and firing shots into the sky.

  Dither, dither, dither, went Chunky’s troops upon the beach.

  Sweep, sweep, went the searchlights.

  And ‘There!’ cried the voice of a young woman from the leading craft, a white motor launch. ‘Keep the light there. I saw him.’

  ‘Uuuugh!’ went Cornelius, breaking surface. A claw closed about his throat. And dragged him down and down.

  ‘I’ll get him.’ The young woman dived from the motor launch, seemed to hang, as if suspended in the air, for just a moment, then arced into the blackness of the churning waves.

  ‘More light. More light,’ others cried, bringing their boats about. ‘Where is she?’

  Lights criss-crossed and those seconds ticked on towards twelve.

  ‘Wah!’ A great dark mass rose from the waves. Tendrils trailing.

  ‘Shoot it!’ cried many.

  ‘No don’t!’ Another young woman’s shout rose from the motor launch.

  And the diver’s head swept up through the mass, straining and hauling at it. And lo that mass was the mane of Cornelius Murphy.

  ‘Help them out.’ Hands reached, faces strained.

  Up and onto the deck.

  The diver clawed hair away from the tall boy’s face. Pinched at his nose, put her lips to his.

  Gasp and gulp and not enough seconds for all this.

  ‘Whoa!’ went Cornelius, turning his face to the side and vomiting seawater.

  ‘Is he OK?’ asked Louise.

  The diver looked up and smiled. ‘He’ll live,’ said Thelma.

  And now shots rang out from the beach. The big butch lads of Chunky’s private army weren’t really into acts of heroism. Acts of brutality, yes. But not the ‘making-a-final-stand’, Rorke’s Drift kind of jobbie. Oh no.

  They were shooting as they ran. Away.

  ‘Fools!’ roared Rune from the saucer top. ‘Buffoons.’ He pulled a golden watch from his waistcoat pocket (a present from Haille Sellaise), studied its face by the lightning that now streaked across the sky. A wind was rising from seaward, twisting the pylon cables, skimming litter and debris. ‘Only minutes,’ cried Rune, ‘and all shall be mine.’ He dropped down into the saucer beside Boris. ‘Fly,’ said he.

  ‘Stand back,’ said Jack. ‘I’m going to light the fuse, except I—’

  ‘Use my lighter, sonny. And get a bloody move on.’

  ‘Watch the minutes tick away,’ said the large controller to Chunky. ‘Nothing can stop us now.’

  ‘Hey!’ whispered Norman, who now found himself lost in the graveyard. ‘Who’s that I see over there?’

  It was Rune — well, a Rune — seated in a steamer chair, in the vicarage garden. Looking as if he cared not a jot for the growing gale that decapitated hollyhocks and cast them hither and thus.

  Norman pulled the pin from one of his grenades, but kept his thumb hard down on the trigger-release thingy. ‘Oi, you!’ he shouted.

  The Rune said nothing. Glass of port in one hand, other in his lap, wind whipping every which way about him.

  ‘What a bummer,’ said Norman. ‘I’d have liked him to at least have been able to hear me before I blew him up. Still, fair enough.’

  Norman vaulted the low wall between the graveyard and the vicarage garden, plodded over to the Rune and glared at him, face to face. ‘Can’t see me, can you? Can you see this?’

  Norman raised the hand-grenade, waggled it before the Rune’s eyes. The Rune’s eyes stared through it, as if fixed upon some point at the rear of the grenade. Unpleasant habit that.

  ‘Anyone home?’ Norman leaned forward and donked the Rune on top of his great shaven head. Not hard, just enough to say ‘anyone home?’

  The Rune’s face remained without expression. His eyes still focused on some point known only to himself. He slid gently down the steamer chair and belly-flopped into a flower-bed.

  This particular Rune was dead as dead can be.

  Norman stared down at the corpse.

  And then he became gripped by a terrible fear.

  This was a dead Rune, and the only good Rune was a dead Rune, so to speak. Except not so, because a dead Rune, a ghost Rune, could grip a dead boy by the ear and shake him all about.

  Norman released the trigger-release thingy, tucked the hand-grenade into the top left waistcoat poc
ket of the terminated Rune.

  ‘Go out with a bang, not a whimper,’ said Norman, making off at the double.

  ‘Make off this minute!’ the living Rune demanded. ‘That is an order. Get to it!’

  ‘Shan’t,’ said Boris. ‘You can’t make me.’

  ‘I can shoot you.’

  ‘Won’t help anything. You don’t know how to fly the saucer.’

  Tick tock, went the town hall clock.

  ‘Five minutes and counting down,’ said the large controller.

  ‘Duck your head,’ said Jack Bradshaw. ‘There’s going to be a bang.’

  ‘Booom!’ went the Rune in the vicarage garden, spreading bones and guts and ichor

  — and moving swiftly on.

  ‘Gag and gasp,’ and ‘Thelma, Louise.’ The tall boy’s eyes were open.

  ‘I know why you dumped us,’ said Thelma. ‘But we thought you could use a little help. So we brought everybody.’

  Cornelius struggled up, giddy and sick. The town’s folk crowding the armada of boats cheered. ‘Good one,’ said the tall boy. ‘What’s the time.’

  ‘Four minutes to twelve,’ said Louise.

  ‘Then blast the piers. Boris has tied grenades to them. Shine the searchlights. Shoot at the grenades.’

  The armada wasn’t too far from the piers now. In fact, it was a bit too near to them really.

  ‘There,’ cried searchlight sweepers zeroing in.

  ‘And there,’ cried others.

  ‘Shoot!’ cried Cornelius.

  ‘Care for a go yourself?’ asked Thelma, hefting a decent-sized bazooka from the deck. ‘We took a few prisoners on the way and grabbed a bit of hardware.’

  ‘Will you marry me?’ asked Cornelius, taking the bazooka and going down on one knee.

  ‘Only if you can get the Reverend Cheesefoot to officiate.’

  ‘Fire!’

  The tall boy whopped the trigger, tumbled from the recoil. The bazooka shell swept over the bay and tore into the west pier.

  ‘Booom!’ went another explosion. This one at The Universal Reincarnation Company.

  From the sizeable hole that now yodelled in the wall, issued Jack Bradshaw and Old Claude.

  ‘Where are we?’ asked the ancient.

  ‘My new office,’ howled Jack. ‘You’ve blown it to pieces. My new office.’

  ‘I didn’t blow it to pieces. You blew it to pieces.’

  ‘It’s all your fault.’

  ‘It’s bloody not.’

  ‘It bloody is.’

  ‘You bloody will.’

  ‘I bloody won’t.’

  These bloodys were being exchanged in the flying saucer.

  ‘I don’t have time for this,’ said Hugo Rune, reaching down a great hand and fastening a ferocious grip upon those parts of Boris’ anatomy, which, had He given just a little more thought to when He worked on the original design for males, God would have placed on the inside.

  ‘Aaaaaagh!’ screamed Boris. ‘You dirty pervert. Unhand my anemones. Aaaagh!’

  ‘Fly the saucer,’ barked Rune into his ear.

  ‘All right, I’ll fly it. I’ll fly it. Aaaagh!’

  Booom! went the east pier.

  Booom! went the west pier.

  Turning, billowing, flames rising, fun-fair bits and bobs, the ghost train, the helter-skelter, countless Sony the Hedgehog video machines (good riddance), candyfloss stalls, a decorative shell shop. Deck planks. The gents’ toilet.

  Rolling, bursting.

  Armada men and women jumping from the decks into the storm-lashed sea. Wind hurled debris. Mushroom clouds shredded.

  Lightning flash.

  Thunder roar.

  Struggling shapes on the wildly bucking white motor launch.

  ‘Did we do it?’ asked Louise. ‘Is it done?’

  Cornelius gaped into the gale. ‘It’s not done, the piers are still standing.’

  Victorian built those piers. Take a lot more than that to have them down. Made to last. Sturdy. Solid.

  ‘To the beach!’ cried Cornelius. ‘We must try to knock the pylons down — disconnect the cables. Do something.’

  Two and a half minutes to twelve.

  ‘I just knew that wouldn’t work.’ Tuppe was now very puffed on the crest of Druid’s Tor. Very good view of the bay from up there. Even with the mighty storm and everything. ‘It has to be done from up here. It really does.’

  And there existed the means.

  An abandoned bulldozer.

  What chance that the keys might still be in the dashboard then?

  With two minutes left?

  ‘Thanks be. The keys are still in the dashboard,’ said Tuppe, scrambling up. ‘Only trouble is’, he keyed the ignition and the engine roared, ‘I won’t be able to see where I’m going and work the pedals at the same time. Still where there’s a will, and all that sort of stuff. Which radio mast to demolish? The one with its cables leading to the west pier, I think.’

  ‘This pylon here.’ Townsfolk from the armada, many in a most horrified state having viewed the destruction of Skelington (a man with a bogus Rolex on his wrist wept over the burnt-out remnants of a car upon the beach), were gathered on the prom beside the east pier.

  Cornelius had found a pair of sturdy bolt-cutters. ‘I’ll shin up this pylon,’ he shouted. ‘Cut the power-line. Then if we all work together we might be able to rock the pylon. Push it over.’

  ‘Sounds about as unlikely as anything else,’ said a lady in a straw hat (it was a different lady). ‘But why not. We’ve got . . .’ she had a little peep at her wristwatch, ‘at least a full minute left.’

  Cornelius kissed Thelma. Well, you do in times like this, when every second counts. It’s a tradition, or an old charter, or the ‘aaaaaw aren’t they lovely’ factor, or something.

  ‘Get a move on,’ Thelma told him and the tall boy was off up the pylon.

  ‘Take it up! Take it up!’ shouted Rune.

  ‘I am taking it up,’ winced Boris. ‘You have to do a system’s check. Stabilize the ionizers so as not to risk positronic overload. Don’t you know anything about the trans-perambulation of pseudo-cosmic anti-matter?

  Twist! went the hand of Hugo Rune.

  ‘All cleared for take off!’ went Boris, in a very high voice.

  ‘Gotcha!’ said Norman, creeping up on the saucer. He couldn’t see Boris, of course (too short), but he could see that big bald head.

  ‘There’s the bastard,’ whispered Old Claude, spying out the big bald head bent over the screen of the big Karmascope. ‘Now just you leave this to me.’

  ‘Where did you get that three-foot-long, high-energy electric cattle prod from?’ Jack Bradshaw enquired.

  ‘Same place as the sulphur, sonny. Same place as the sulphur.’

  Cornelius had made it to the top of the pylon and was edging his way towards the strange-looking ceramic-bell-sort-of-jobbie arrangement which carried the cable. The wind and the storm weren’t helping. Cornelius shielded his eyes. Gazed out to sea. And then he saw something, lit momentarily upon the horizon. Another snap of lightning, and there it was once more: a thin line of white running straight across where sea met sky. Now what could that be? An early dawn? The tall boy didn’t think so. He edged along and climbed across and straddled the big cable.

  Roar and rev, went the big bulldozer, turning in another circle. ‘There’d be a knack to this,’ croaked Tuppe. ‘But not one I possess.’

  ‘I’ll have you, you bastard.’ The voice of Norman, not Claude. The dead boy leapt up onto the saucer’s rim, unpinning his hand-grenade.

  ‘Going up!’ went Boris, pulling back on the joystick.

  ‘Whoa!’ went Norman seeking something to cling to with his spare hand.

  The mechanical gubbins in the town hail clock began to clank their ratcheted wheels and hoist weights up chains and do all those things that clocks do preparatory to striking.

  The Murphy bolt-cutter bit into the cable. But there was a lot of cable and it w
asn’t that big a bolt-cutter.

  Cornelius strained, the bolt-cutter chewed, beneath him the town’s folk grew restless.

  A lady in a straw hat pointed out to sea. ‘What is that?’ she asked, viewing the line of white that Cornelius had seen.

  A line of white which was now a good deal nearer.

  ‘It’s—’

  Thelma stared.

  Louise stared.

  Everybody stared.

  The lady in the straw hat said, ‘That’s a tidal wave, that is. Typical, isn’t it? Last thing you need at a time like this is a tidal wave.’

  Tidal wave! The cry went up.

  It reached Cornelius.

  ‘Oh no!’ cried he, chomping away with the bolt-cutter. ‘Thelma! Louise! Head for the Tor. Everyone, run for the Tor.’

  Everyone ran.

  ‘Cornelius, come on!’ shouted Thelma. ‘I’ll catch you up. Run, just run.’ Thelma and Louise joined in the running. ‘Race you to the top,’ said Louise.

  And on the top Tuppe’s bulldozer finally got its act together and trundled towards the pylon.

  But the seconds were ticking right away. Tick, tock, tick.

  Crackle, crackle, crackle, came a burst of electrical discharging.

  CRACKLE, CRACKLE, CRACKLE.

  38

  The large controller turned at the sound of this crackling.

  ‘You!’ said he.

  ‘Me,’ said Old Claude. ‘And it’s time for you to get your medicine.’

  ‘Grab him, Jack,’ said the large controller.

  ‘Me?’ said Jack. ‘Stuff that. You threw me down the lift shaft.’

  ‘Good boy,’ said Claude, waggling the crackling cattle prod.

  ‘Chunky,’ said the large controller, ‘Wallop that old fool, will you?’

  ‘Bally won’t,’ said Chunky, folding his arms. ‘Bally murdered me, you did.’

  ‘Where are your friends when you need them, eh?’ asked Old Claude.

  ‘Right here and angry,’ said the voice of another Rune. New to the afterlife, this one, wearing a suit. The Transglobe American Publishing version, newly poisoned and later exploded in the vicarage garden.