‘An army of the dead,’ I said to Fangio. ‘Why?’
‘To do what armies do, of course. This is all about war, isn’t it? Everything is ultimately about war. The war between Good and Evil. This war becomes the war between the dead and the living. When the reanimated dead are of sufficient number, when they outnumber the living, then they will rise. The war will be swift, the outcome inevitable.’
‘That is horrible,’ I said to Fange. ‘That is absolutely horrible.’
‘It is no laughing matter,’ said the barlord.
‘And when the dead have won and there are no more living, what then?’
‘What indeed?’ said Fangio. ‘I have told you. We, the living, cannot understand the motives of the Homunculus. He is beyond our worldliness, beyond our comprehension.’
‘That is a cop-out,’ I said to Fange. ‘You must have some theory.’
‘I have many,’ said the barlord, ‘but they are only theories, nothing more. I do not understand the motives of the Homunculus. But I and other concerned parties have no wish to understand them. All we want is for him to be destroyed, before all of the Earth and every living thing on it are destroyed.’
And off went Fange to serve another customer. Leaving me all alone.
‘Well,’ I said. To nobody but myself. ‘All this makes a lot of sense. I wonder if, perhaps, I should pass on to Fangio and to his concerned parties the fact that I know the identity of the Homunculus.’
‘Probably not the best idea in the world.’
And I looked all around and about. And, ‘Who said that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, surely you remember me.’
And there he was, as large as life, although not perhaps of it. The short, stumpy man with the odd Pickwickian looks. And that hint of a hairless Shirley Temple. And all that buck-toothed Caligula business also.
‘Mr Woodbine,’ said Papa Keith Crossbar, seating himself upon the next bar stool. And extending a hand.
I did not accept that lumpy paw. In fact I drew back in some alarm and kept my hands out of reach.
‘You,’ was all I managed to say. In a rather breathless voice.
‘And no other,’ said Papa Keith Crossbar. ‘And long time no see. Why, when was the last time I saw you? Oh, I know - at that bonfire party in Graceland’s garden. What a laugh that was, eh?’
‘It was real,’ I said. And I began to shake as I said it. ‘All that was real, wasn’t it? The futuristic stuff. The teleportation. The auto-da-fé?’
‘Real,’ said Papa Crossbar, the Homunculus. ‘But not this reality. Your barman friend is correct. The world I inhabit is not the world you inhabit. Not altogether. Although there are tangents and cross-overs here and there. I allowed you to enter into my world. Into one of my worlds. A parallel world. An alternative reality where Mankind had achieved all the things that it would have achieved if it had not devoted so much of its time to fighting each other. The parallel world that exists in parallel space where the fighting did not occur and Mankind did go forward. I granted you a view of that. A little visit to it.’
‘A world where Elvis was being hailed as the New Messiah?’
‘Yes, wasn’t that hilarious? All that futuristic technology, and Mankind was still ultimately as stupid and gullible as it ever had been. What hope for humanity, eh?’
‘And I killed Elvis,’ I said. ‘Or if not actually killed him, I was responsible for his death.’
‘Where the worlds connect, mine and yours, you killed Elvis. And he died in both worlds, yours, mine. You did what I intended you to do. You killed the man who was employing you to kill me. Job done, eh? Exactly as I planned it. Done.’
And I looked on in horror. ‘You thoroughgoing swine.’
‘And you were sufficiently traumatised by what you had done that you literally sleepwalked though the next twenty years of your life,’ this thoroughgoing swine continued, ‘as my puppet, campaigning against those ludicrous conspiracy theories about a rising army of the dead.’
‘You thoroughgoing—’
‘You said that, yes.’
‘Wife,’ I said. In a hopeless little voice.
‘Yes, wasn’t that a laugh? The memories will all return. You won’t enjoy them. And you didn’t get any sex. Your life has really been a bit of a waste of time, hasn’t it? If you were to go outside now and throw yourself under the first car that came rushing by - an old Ford Sierra, that would be, imported from Croydon - then who would blame you? You would be doing the right thing. And you really should do the right thing, shouldn’t you? After doing so many wrong things for so long, the right thing would make a pleasant change. What do you think?’
And the Homunculus looked at me. Deeply at me. Intensely at me. Completely at me.
‘It would be the right thing to do,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t it?’
And I nodded bleakly. It would be the right thing to do. It really would. I had been a total failure in life. Everything I had ever done had come to nothing. Life had failed me and I had failed life. I would be better off out of it. Death would be better than this life.
Anything would be better than this life. Death especially.
And so I got up from my bar stool. And I walked across the bar, opened the shatter-glass door and walked out onto the sidewalk of 27th Street.
And stood there.
And a Ford Sierra came streaking towards me. It ran straight through the lights. An old woman was driving it and I saw her face clearly. And she saw mine also. And we looked into each other’s eyes.
And I flung myself into the path of her on-rushing motor car, which struck me with deadly force.
53
Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick.
My life all ticked away.
And had it been worth it? Something to remember? Something to be proud of? Would I have made my mother proud? Or my father? Had I achieved anything? Anything?
I looked deeply into that woman’s eyes and felt a sense of ultimate betrayal. The Homunculus had governed my life for the last twenty years. I had been his puppet. My life had ticked and tocked away and I had walked through it as a somnambulist. And I looked into her eyes.
And in slow motion, as it always is, that car ploughed into me, breaking first my ankles, then one hip bone as I struck the bonnet, then several ribs and a right arm bone or several. And then my nose as my head passed through that windscreen. And much glass dug in well and deep, into my forehead and cheeks.
And then, as the car swerved and slammed to a halt, momentum shot my body forward, into that lamp post, shattering further ribs and doing all manner of horrible damagings deep internally.
This was not one of those accidents where someone was going to walk away with a bit of minor chafing and a good-luck tale to tell. No, this was one of those statistic jobbies, another one chalked up dead.
And then I watched it all happening. The crowd that formed, the eager helpers who knew nothing of first aid and caused more damage through their helpfulness. The arrival of the emergency services. Those flashing beacon lights and banshee-wailing sirens. And the policemen, stringing up that ‘DO NOT CROSS’ tape. Asking questions, taking notes.
The woman in the car did not walk away with a bit of minor chafing and a good-luck tale to tell. She was decapitated. Her head rolled across 27th Street and came to rest in the doorway of Fangio’s Bar.
Fangio had watched the whole thing happen. He stood gnawing a bar cloth.
‘That is very sad,’ he told another eyewitness. ‘But on the bright side, the bar will no doubt revert to me.’ And then he went back into his bar, carefully stepping over the fallen head.
They had to use the jaws of life to free the rest of the driver’s body. Jaws of life? That was a bit of a joke. And no one really troubled much to rush over and gather up my Earthly remains. What with me being twisted up into such a dire-looking Gordian knot and everything.
And if it hadn’t been for a lady in a straw hat who drew the attention of one of New York’s Finest to the
fact that I was still breathing, they would probably have just tossed a tarpaulin over me and carted me off to the morgue.
The fact that I was still breathing caused much excitement amongst the paramedics, who had been standing around, sniffing the oxygen and smoking cigarettes, and they fell upon my helpless body with great enthusiasm. They were clearly delighted at having an opportunity to use all of the equipment. All the different Band-Aids and braces. All the splints and pads and drips and dual monitors, LIH vascular packages, en-mode image intensifiers and portable nebulisers. Not to mention the hydro-colloid dressings, wound-closure strips, tubular bandages, Hemcom haemostatic bandages and chest-seal tapes.
Which I, in my present state, was quite unable to do.
And once they had transformed me into a passable facsimile of King Tut’s mummy, they loaded me onto a gurney, pushed this into the back of an ambulance, hooked me up to all manner of tubes, wires, chest-drains and whatnots, and then got the driver to drive away fast with flashings and hootings and wailings. And I watched all this happening. All of it. Even though my eyes were bandaged over. I watched it from outside my body, kind of hovering above it, free of gravity, as if in a dream and unable to feel the pain that the mash-up me below was clearly suffering.
And then we hit the ER. And my gurney was rushed along corridors and bumped through double doors and then surrounded by shouting surgeons, all of them shouting at once.
And they shouted all those things that they shout in movies.
‘Give me one hundred ccs of sodium bi-pli-nick-nack, hook up the defibrillator, bring a line in on the pulse oximetrical poliscope.’
‘Hand me a phase-nine sphygmomanometer and chips.’
‘We’re losing him. We’re losing him.’
‘Charge up the defibrillator. Full power. Stand back. Stand back.’
And then wallop went that electrical shock right on through my body.
And wallop I was no longer out of my body. I was back. But then I was out again.
‘No response. Stand back, I am going to shock him again.’
I was now hovering well above my body. I was drifting, in free fall, but falling nowhere. And I could see what was going on outside the Emergency Room. I could see folk in the corridor. I could see Fangio. He had come along. Which was decent of him. Although he did keep going on to passing medics that he had something really important that he needed me to sign before I snuffed it.
And there was someone else I knew. Although now this someone was truly a face from the past. It was Mr Ishmael. And he was remonstrating with medics, demanding that they save my life. That was nice of him.
Then wallop again.
And again I was back in my body.
‘We’re getting something,’ I heard someone say, not too far from my ear. ‘I’ve got a heartbeat, or something.’
And I was back in my body and I stayed.
And they said it was a miracle. But also that I’d never walk again. Nor speak, nor do anything much, really, other than impersonate a vegetable. And I lay there, saying nothing, doing nothing, but hearing everything.
And feeling it, too.
All those operations they did with the minimum or no anaesthetic, because, after all, I was in a coma, so what was I likely to feel?
Well, everything, really!
The cuttings, the probings, the sewings-up. The knittings together of bones. But I lay there saying nothing, doing nothing, unable to move, or to speak, just being.
As tick tock tick tock, my life went ticking by. And then all feeling left me.
One day the members of The Sumerian Kynges came to pay me a visit and sing me a song. The only member from the days when I’d had some involvement was Andy. And I could see him, even though my eyes were closed, as I seemed to be developing some very strange abilities within my vegetative state. Andy looked well; he looked older, of course, but he still had his hair and he still wore that hair in the ever-stylish mullet.
I tried like damn to communicate with Andy, to force my thoughts into his head, to persuade him to take me home with him, but it didn’t work. And presently he, and the three Chinese girls who now composed the other members of The Sumerian Royalty as they were now apparently renamed (a gender-neutral thing. Apparently), cleared off and left me all alone.
They came back once or twice, but as the media showed no particular interest after the second time, there were few other visits and I was left truly alone.
Apart from Fangio visiting me. He came every week. He brought me fresh flowers to put in my vase. And a box of chocolates, which he proceeded to eat, assuring me that ‘the nurses would only eat them otherwise’. And he never mentioned that piece of paper that he wanted signing. Which did make me wonder whether, perhaps, he had simply forged my signature onto it. But he did come. And it’s odd when you are really ill, isn’t it? Who does come and visit you and who does not. Who your real friends turn out to be. And all that kind of caper.
And what was really really strange was that I found, as time passed, as time all ticked and tocked away, that I was able to do all sorts of things that years and years ago I had read about in comic books.
In Doctor Strange comics.
I could see with my eyes closed.
Leave my body in my astral form and travel around and about.
Smell people coming from quite a considerable distance.
And, though it was faltering and not altogether reliable, read people’s minds. Hear their thoughts.
I was becoming a regular Master of the Mystic Arts. Which was all very well and quite wonderful really. But lying on my back in a coma was really doing my brain in.
The big change came one Tuesday morning, early in May in the year 2007. Because yes, I had lain in that bed being poked and bed-bathed and massaged and messed with for ten more years of my wasted, useless ticked-and-tocked-away life.
But a big change came one Tuesday morning, beginning with the arrival of a very old man. He looked to be a veritable ancient and he wore an old-fashioned uniform that perhaps once fitted him, but was now several sizes too big. And he took off the cap that was also too big and placed it upon my bedside table. And he took my left hand between his crinkly paws and stroked at my foolish tattoo.
‘Hello there, young Tyler,’ he said, in a wheezy, creaky old voice. ‘I’ll bet you won’t remember me. But I knew you when you were very young.’
And I looked hard at this venerable elder, hard through my closed eyelids.
And I said, ‘Captain Lynch,’ to myself. For none but me could hear it.
‘I’m Captain Lynch,’ said Captain Lynch. ‘Well, Major Lynch now, but long retired. Your mother told me you were here. It’s taken me a few years to save up the money to fly over from England, but I have and now I’m with you.’
And I looked on at Major Lynch, Captain Lynch as was.
‘I had to speak to you before it is too late for me to do so. I have to give you something. It’s an important something that we spoke of many years ago. More important than ever now, what with the way things are. I’ve talked with others and I know that you know all about them. And you know who it is - the Homunculus that I spoke to you of, all those years ago. It wasn’t Elvis, was it? Elvis is gone, but the Evil goes on and grows daily. You must stop it, Tyler. You will need this.’
And he produced from the pocket of his superannuated uniform a crumpled, dog-eared piece of paper.
‘I have carried this with me for sixty years,’ he continued. ‘It is the map. The location of Begrem, the Lost City of Gold. I never got to Africa. The Church Army said that I was not missionary material. There had been some trouble, you see. Certain Indiscretions. Certain scandals. But I kept your mother’s name out of it. But I never went. And I never married or had children. Well, only you. Well, oh never mind, forget I said that. But I was supposed to train you from when you were young, so that you would know what to do when the time came. So that you would have sufficient power to kill him.’
‘What???
? I went. But only to myself.
‘The map,’ said Major Lynch. ‘It’s there on the map. The location of the lost city. You must lead an expedition, Tyler. Find the city. There are secrets to be found in that lost city, secrets that could help you to destroy the Homunculus, before he destroys us all.’
And then the major patted my head, stroked my brow and, rising, kissed me on the forehead. Which was somewhat unlovely, as he lacked for several teeth and was a bit drippy in the mouth regions.
But I didn’t mind. Because his heart was in the right place. Although this business about him training me when I was young - what was that all about? And I tried to read his thoughts, but could not, because they were old and confused and chaotic.
And then he upped and put on his cap. And he saluted me, as the old soldier of the Lord that he was, and he said, ‘You will rise again, Tyler, as our Good Lord rose again. And you will slay the Evil One, as our Good Lord should, but can’t, because it is not in His remit. Good luck, my boy.’ And he saluted again. And about-turned and marched as best he could from my room.
And I lay there, saying nothing at all.
But thinking an awful lot.
And then, about an hour after the good major had departed, two fellows entered my room and stood at the foot of my bed, a-chatting.
‘Ten years?’ said one.
‘All but,’ said the other.
‘And who is paying for this?’
‘His brother made a donation, but that ran out some time ago and he is not on any Medicare programme.’
‘So why is he still alive?’
‘I don’t quite understand the question, sir. He lives because his body is healthy enough and one day he might awaken from his coma.’
‘But that is not altogether likely, is it? After three months in a coma, the chances fall and fall away. After two years the chances are almost zero.’
Nobody had told me that!
‘New advances are being made in the fields of neurosurgery all the time, sir. This man may be revived and go on to live a useful life.’
‘We do have a very thick CIA file on this individual. He did not have a useful life before his accident.’