Necrophenia

  ‘The light,’ I said.

  ‘But he said that I would be amply rewarded. And I trusted him. So I just pushed off home. I did wonder what had happened to you, though, but it was cold and growing dark, so I caught a bus and that was that. And this arrived today.’ And Andy now waved something at me. And this something was a cheque.

  ‘A cheque,’ I said. ‘How much?’

  ‘Five hundred pounds,’ said Andy. ‘And it’s made out to me.’

  ‘Five hundred pounds.’ I sat back in my chair and let my spoon go slack. And, as I must have been ladling parsnip with it, I ended up with no little parsnip all down my front.

  ‘I think I might buy a speedboat and a sports car,’ said Andy. ‘And if I have any money left over, I’ll show it to you. Oh, and see what’s written on the back.’ And Andy handed me the cheque and I read what was written on the back: ‘If you ever want to be in a band, don’t hesitate to ask me,’ and it was signed ‘Mr Ishmael’.

  And I groaned softly and did shakings of my head. This was all so wrong. All of it, the timings of things, the way Mr Ishmael knew who my brother was.

  There was something missing here. Something big. An entire day of my life, for one thing, it appeared. Where had I been? What had happened to me? How had I got home? How had I just ‘come to’ at the luncheon table? And what was this all about?

  I recalled my brother’s talk of zombies.

  And the mausoleum that had been packed with other gear. Stolen from other bands? I was going to have a lot of questions to put to Mr Ishmael the next time I saw him.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said to Andy, and I handed him back the cheque. ‘I am in a state of considerable confusion.’

  ‘So where did you go and what did you get up to yesterday?’

  I just shrugged and shook my head.

  And Andy shook his, too. ‘Memory lapses,’ said he, and he tut-tut-tutted. ‘First sign of going stone-bonkers. And trust me, I know these things. Perhaps you should check yourself into Saint Bernard’s for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not mad. But something happened to me.’

  ‘I lost my memory once,’ said my mother. ‘Or at least I think I did - I can’t remember.’

  I opened my mouth to say something, although now I can’t remember what. But I didn’t get to say it because there was a sudden urgent knocking at our front door and my mother went off to answer it.

  And when she returned, she said, ‘Tyler, it’s for you.’

  And when I asked her who it was, she replied that it was, ‘Two enormous women who look like Les Dawson will in a few years time.’

  And I weighed up the pros and cons and left the house by a window.

  20

  Sometimes you have to wait a really really long time for an explanation for something that is confusing you. Something that you don’t understand. Like the Big Question, I suppose. You know the one - it goes, ‘What is it all about?’ And you have to wait a really really long time to get that one answered. In fact, you have to wait until all of your life is finished and you are dead to get that explanation. Obviously the fact that you are now reading this book means that you personally are not going to have to wait that long in order to get an answer to that particular question. Because I personally know the answer. And I will be divulging it to you when the time is right.

  Which will be a bit later in the narrative. But I will let you know. And it is worth waiting for.

  Regarding the questions that were troubling me as I sat at the lunching table listening to my brother, I worried that it might be a really really long time before these questions were answered. But, in fact, it wasn’t.

  They got answered very soon.

  Which was most convenient.

  I ran, you see, upped the sash window and leaped into the garden. It was the back garden. And its normal back-garden dullness was presently enlivened by the addition of a snowman of prodigious proportions, which, I reasoned, was probably the work of my brother.

  It was a snowman that resembled a zombie playing a guitar. And that is not a thing that is as easy as it might seem to fashion.

  I passed the snowman by at the move-along.

  I cleared the garden fence and headed off down the alley.

  The alley debouched (a good word, that) into Rose Gardens. Which weren’t really gardens, and didn’t have any roses. It was the road that ran at right angles to the one I lived in. The name of which I withhold for obvious reasons.

  And I would have run right across the road and down the alleyway opposite had I not run straight into the side of a long black limousine that was pulling to a halt in Rose Gardens.

  And as I fell back, rubbing at my bruised upper parts, which had taken most of the impact, a rear door opened and Mr Ishmael bade me enter in.

  ‘There’s trannies after me,’ I explained as I clambered inside. ‘And I have every reason to believe that they are of the undead brotherhood.’

  Mr Ishmael waved at his chauffeur and off we went in the limo.

  Mr Ishmael offered me the comfort of a scotch on the rocks. And I took consolation in this comfort.

  ‘Are you feeling yourself?’ asked Mr Ishmael.

  And although I confess that I was, and still am, a great fan of a Carry On movie, I answered Mr Ishmael that although sound in mind and limb, I was somewhat troubled of spirit and had many questions I thought he might care to answer.

  Mr Ishmael nodded and raised a glass of his own.

  ‘To the success of your mission. Your first case,’ he said, and he toasted me.

  I sampled further scotch and found some joy in this sampling.

  ‘You did very well,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘Employing the curious talents of your brother was an inspired idea.’

  And I nodded. In agreement. That it would have been if I had indeed thought of it. But I was prepared to take the credit, if it was being offered.

  ‘Inspired,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘I knew I wasn’t wrong about you. And I will be faithful to my promise. You recovered the stolen goods and I will now share with you the Big Secret.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And I hope that details of the Big Secret will include exactly what happened to me yesterday, because I appear to have at least twenty-four hours missing out of my life.’

  Mr Ishmael nodded. ‘Would you care for a cigar?’ he asked.

  And I said, ‘A cigar?’

  ‘To puff upon. You might need it, to stiffen your nerves. Folk generally have a cup of strong sweet tea to administer at moments like this, but I do not. But I do have cigars. You can take one, or leave it, as you please.’

  ‘I’ll take one,’ I said, for I had never before smoked a cigar. And what better place to begin the smoking of one than the inside of a stretch limousine?

  Mr Ishmael went through all the preparations then stuck the cigar into my mouth, asked me to suck hard and administered the flame of a match to it.

  And I didn’t cough. I puffed.

  ‘Nice,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘And now to business that I regret is far from nice. But where to start? Where indeed to start?’

  ‘At the beginning?’ I suggested, still not coughing at all.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Ishmael, going through further preparatory operations prior to lighting a cigar of his own. ‘This story is best told and explained beginning with the end. What would you say that the very end of everything would be, young Tyler?’

  ‘A big explosion, probably,’ I said. ‘The entire universe blowing up. Something like that.’

  Mr Ishmael shook his head. ‘Care to have another go?’ he asked.

  ‘Not an explosion?’ I said. ‘Nothing, then. I suppose the end of everything would be nothing.’

  ‘Very close,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘Death would be the beginning.’

  ‘I thought you said that it was the end.’

  ‘The end of life. All life. The creation of the Necrosphere.’

  And I asked what this was.

  ‘
The world of the dead. A spherical universe of the dead.’

  ‘I think I would like you to explain,’ I said.

  ‘The name of your band,’ said Mr Ishmael, ‘The Sumerian Kynges - you had heard the tales of Captain Lynch regarding the creation of the Homunculus, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but how did you know that?’

  ‘It is my business to know. And I know all about Captain Lynch.’

  ‘I think he’s carrying on with my mum,’ I said. ‘And if my dad finds out, he will probably beat Captain Lynch to an ungodly pulp.’

  ‘I consider this altogether probable. But Captain Lynch told you of the theory that the soul does not enter a person until the third month of gestation, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Well, something similar occurs at the point of death, but in reverse - the soul of the deceased remains within the body for a period of three months.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, and I coughed (just a little) upon my cigar. ‘You are not saying that you remain aware after death? That you know what’s happening to you while you rot away in the grave?’

  Mr Ishmael shook his head. ‘You are not aware,’ he said. ‘You sleep, as it were. Your soul sleeps, but it remains within the body; then after three months the soul awakens, in paradise, or otherwise.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘But why? Why the three-month wait? Is that like the Catholic belief of Purgatory?’

  ‘The misconception of Purgatory. The truth is that the body is vulnerable for three months after death as the foetus is vulnerable in the first three months after conception. If the soul left the body at the moment of death, it would leave a nice fresh, although dead, vehicle that a magician of sufficient power could instill something into, to reanimate that corpse.’

  ‘As a zombie?’

  ‘We use the term “reoccupied”. A living person is referred to as an original “resident”, because their soul is the original resident, while the dead who have been afflicted with “the Taint” are “reoccupied”.’

  These terms rang bells somewhere. As if I had heard them before.

  ‘A conspiracy exists,’ said Mr Ishmael, ‘to reoccupy the entire planet, to turn this into a planet peopled by the dead - a Necrosphere, do you see?’

  ‘I see, I suppose. But why? What would anyone have to gain from this?’

  ‘Not anyone. A powerful magician could create, at most, a single Homunculus in a single century. Whatever this is plans to annihilate the entire population of Earth, drive the resident souls from the bodies of the newly dead and reoccupy them with spirits, if you will, that will reanimate these dead bodies.’

  ‘It does sound very gruesome,’ I said. ‘But it also sounds rather pointless, or of a limited point, at least. Dead bodies aren’t going to last very long, are they? They will fall to pieces in no time. This Necrosphere of yours is going to smell pretty rank, I’m thinking.’

  ‘Puppets,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘They will survive long enough to serve the needs of their puppet-master.’

  ‘And who he? A man, is this, or the Devil?’

  ‘That I do not know. I have only a piece or two of the jigsaw. With your help I will find further pieces, put them all together, complete the picture. And then.’

  ‘And then?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

  ‘I think you’ll probably be crossing that bridge on your own,’ said I, ‘because I have had more than enough of this madness.’

  ‘Really?’ And Mr Ishmael sank some scotch. ‘So you won’t want to know what happened to you yesterday, then.’

  ‘I would like to know that, as it happens.’

  ‘Then so be it. After the furniture van had been loaded up at the cemetery, myself and my associates left the violated zone, for such had the cemetery become. Some time later you returned. You were then attacked by reoccupied beings. A task force from the Ministry of Serendipity, tipped off anonymously, by myself, arrived to sanitise the area.

  ‘The Government has known about this menace for as long as it has existed. They have a special department that deals with such matters - the Ministry of Serendipity. Their crack troops airlifted you out. You would then have been debriefed, reprogrammed and had your memory selectively erased, and then been returned to your family.’

  And then I coughed on my cigar. And I said, ‘What, what, what?’ ‘I must say,’ said Mr Ishmael, ‘that the Ministry does not think as I do. I am, how shall I put this, independent. The Ministry has a more corporate mentality. Rather than trying to understand and deal with the cause, they blast in and simply eradicate the effect. They are very efficient at that.’

  ‘Not that efficient,’ I said. ‘Two of the blighters survived. They arrived on my doorstep. They were going to get me. I fled through the window and bumped into your limo.’

  ‘Those were not reoccupied beings,’ said Mr Ishmael.

  ‘Oh?’ said I. ‘They weren’t?’

  ‘No,’ said he, and he drew further smoke. ‘That was just a pair of cross-dressing Jehovah’s Witnesses. I believe they refer to themselves as, “Jehovah’s Wet-Nurses”.’

  ‘Most amusing,’ said I. ‘But I am far from happy about any of this. Things don’t add up. There are too many contradictions. Wrong timings. It’s all over the place. And, hang about, reprogramming, did you say? These Ministry men have reprogrammed my brain somehow, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘In as many words, yes.’

  ‘Reprogrammed me to do what?’

  ‘Who can say?’ And Mr Ishmael shrugged. ‘They do have some very state-of-the-art techniques of mind control. They will probably have brainwashed you so that at a given signal, known only to themselves, you will perform certain actions without being aware that you are doing it.’

  ‘What?’ I said. And, ‘WHAT?’ I shouted.

  ‘Calm down, please,’ said Mr I.

  ‘Calm down? I’ve had my brain tampered with. What might I do? What?’

  ‘It might be just a surveillance thing. Although it’s more likely to be something more. Assassination, probably.’

  ‘They want to assassinate me?’

  ‘Not you. You will be triggered to assassinate someone else.’

  ‘WHAT?’ I shouted. Most loudly.

  ‘But don’t worry,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘If it’s me that they are intending you to assassinate, I will deal with it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I will kill you,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘Now, what else would you like to know?’

  21

  It’s funny how things turn out, isn’t it? How things progress, gain momentum, spiral out of control and things of that nature, generally.

  I mean, one minute I was strumming happily on a ukulele. Admittedly to an empty school hall. And then, the next minute, suddenly everything was wrong, wrong, wrong.

  There was a day missing out of my life, a day during which, it appeared, I had been put through some kind of mind-control programming that had the potential to turn me into a robotised assassin at the push of a pre-programmed button. A killer zombie, perhaps, but alive.

  And zombies. The reoccupied. Could any of that actually be true? I don’t know whether I would have believed it if it had just been down to my brother’s half-mad ramblings. But Mr Ishmael appeared to confirm it. And whatever Mr Ishmael was, he was clearly something. Somebody. He spoke with authority.

  And so I considered doing a runner.

  I weighed up the pros and cons. Hanging around here meant considerable danger, but would that danger diminish if I fled elsewhere? If this danger was a sort of Universal Danger, then ultimately there would be nowhere to run. But then if I did run and did hide very well, I might just be able to avoid the Universal Danger. If I hid very very well.

  It was a tricky one.

  Of course, if I stayed, I could go on being a private eye. And it was quite clear from the success that I had enjoyed thus far that I was really born to this particular profession. And
there was the matter of being in The Sumerian Kynges. Because Mr Ishmael had our equipment and he had promised to make us successful.

  It was every boy’s dream, wasn’t it? To be a private eye and a rock ’n’ roll star. All bases covered. How cool would that be? And I hadn’t forgotten about being cool. And just how important that was.

  ‘Speak to me,’ said Mr Ishmael, for I was still in the back of his limo, and although I couldn’t see him now as the vehicle was completely fogged up with cigar smoke, he could clearly see me. Because he then said, ‘You have a very silly look upon your face.’

  ‘I am cogitating,’ I told him. ‘Weighing up the pros and cons. Trying to make a considered judgement.’

  ‘Unnecessary,’ said the enigmatic Mr I. ‘I will make the big decisions for you, thereby saving you the mental energy. The added benefit being that I will arrive at the correct decisions.’

  I shook my head and made a wary face. ‘I can’t make any sense out of any of this,’ I said. ‘It’s all too much for my brainbox.’

  ‘Then leave it to me, young man. More scotch?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ And more scotch was poured into my glass.

  And then Mr Ishmael touched his glass to mine and said ‘cheers’. And we drank.

  ‘It is all very complicated,’ said Mr Ishmael, ‘and it may take years to unravel. All the loose ends must be carefully tied together. If we are to succeed, we must tread a careful path et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’

  ‘Et cetera?’ I queried.

  ‘You know the form,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘It would go on in that vein. But you probably don’t want to hear any more clichés.’

  ‘I’d appreciate some comforting ones,’ I replied, ‘such as “it will all come out in the wash” and “all will be well that ends well”.’

  ‘It will all come out in the wash,’ said Mr Ishmael.