Necrophenia

  And strapped to this, spread-eagled, was the girlie.

  And standing before her, big bad gem-encrusted book in his horrid hands, was Papa Keith Crossbar, the heinous Homunculus.

  And he had a wicked old grin on his chops.

  And the lightning flashed and the thunder crashed and those two men crouched by the doorway.

  My attention was also drawn to a number of television monitor screens that were affixed to the upright structures of the great glazed dome - CCTV. And there indeed was me upon one of these screens, standing sentinel upon the stairs outside the door.

  And I did shruggings of my astral shoulders. The Homunculus had probably watched me on screen as I came up in the lift. This was, after all, the CIA building. They did have security.

  And I returned silently to my body and sat down upon one of the stairs and had a bit of a think.

  And having had it, I marched up the stairs, kicked open the door, took one step forward, two steps back, invoked the power of the Tyler Technique and watched as Dave and Barry leaped forwards to the spot where I had been standing, struck each other mighty whacks with their electric truncheons and toppled both unconscious to the floor.

  And their heads did go crack upon that marble, which must have really hurt. Even if they were dead.

  And I stepped forward into that great domed wonderful-terrible room. And the Homunculus glared at me big pointy daggers and closed his book and placed it down upon the central altar.

  And then he approached me on short stumpy legs and he put out his hand for a shaking.

  And he grinned once more and said, ‘Welcome, Tyler, you are right on time.’

  And I grinned somewhat in return, but I did not shake his hand. Instead I did something I had never done ever before in my life.

  I spat in his face.

  ‘I have come to kill you, Mr Crossbar,’ I said, in a manner that let him know that I was not kidding around here. ‘Prepare yourself for death.’

  And I reached out for his throat.

  And do you know what? I never even saw them. But then you never do, do you? You never do see them, because they are all stealth and secret martial arts. Ninjas. Damned ninjas.

  All in black and looking cool. They came out of nowhere.

  And then—

  They had me by the throat.

  69

  ‘Tick tock, kill the clock, said the faerie queen in her flowery frock.’

  The Homunculus did a little bit of a jig on his stumpy legs and he wiped my spittle from his chin. ‘Do you know that old nursery rhyme, Tyler? “Tick took, kill the clock”? I can only remember the first two lines. It’s funny what you remember and what you don’t, isn’t it? What sticks with you and stays with you. Because it is those things that stick and stay when we are children that make us what we are when we become adults. Were you loved, as a child, Tyler? Did your mummy love you?’

  A ninja loosened his hold on my throat. And I made a gagging, ‘Yes.’

  ‘How charming. And has that made you a good person, Tyler? Have you lived a good life? Done good things? Made your mummy proud of you?’

  ‘I’ll thank you to leave my mother out of this,’ I said. ‘This is strictly between you and me. If you’d be so kind as to ask the ninjas to release me, I will carry on with my plan to kill you.’

  ‘Well, that’s one possibility. And please don’t think that I am simply dismissing it out of hand without giving it due consideration. But I think . . . no. I think we will go along with my plan, rather than yours. After all, that clock that has ticked and tocked your life away has just a little bit more ticking and tocking to do before it stops for ever. Before everything stops for ever.’

  I made a very grumpy face. As well I might, considering the circumstances. ‘Is there nothing I can say?’ I said. ‘Nothing I can do to dissuade you from this course of action? Everything that you are doing is so utterly, utterly wrong. Can you not understand how wrong it is? Listen, let’s go and have a beer. I know a nice little place - Fangio’s Bar. We could drink some beer and talk the toot. I’m sure I could explain things better over a few beers.’

  ‘No beers.’ The Homunculus turned his back and fluttered his fingers.

  ‘Perhaps a sweet sherry, then, you old—’

  ‘What did you say?’ The Homunculus turned back.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. Just testing, I thought. Because I had not spoken. I just wanted to know whether the Homunculus could hear my thoughts as I could hear his.

  And he could.

  ‘Yes,’ said he. ‘I can. And they do all seem to be rather confused, the past and the present all jumbled up. However do you ever get anything done with such chaotic patterns of thinking?’

  ‘I get by,’ I said. And I tried very hard to think those words convincingly.

  ‘You do not get by, Tyler. You have never got by. Your entire life has been orchestrated and manipulated, if not by me, then by Mr Ishmael. Tonight is probably the first time in your entire life that you have done any real thinking for yourself and made any decisions that weren’t already prearranged for you.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘I’ve done tons of independent thinking.’

  ‘And it’s never crossed your mind to wonder why things have always been there, right there, exactly when you needed them? You wish to descend into subterranean depths, and there just happens to be a supplier of subterranean appliances and appurtenances right across the street?’

  ‘That was just a happy coincidence.’

  ‘There have been no happy coincidences in your life, Tyler. Everything was put there, for you to “find”. And all so that ultimately you would “find” yourself right here. Right now.’

  ‘Lies,’ I said, ‘all lies.’ And I had a bit of a struggle. But that was a waste of time. And one of the ninjas kicked me. Quite hard.

  ‘Ouch,’ I said.

  ‘It wasn’t that hard,’ said the ninja.

  ‘For half of your life, Tyler,’ the Homunculus continued, ‘Mr Ishmael guided you, saw to it that you learned what he felt you needed to learn in order to defeat me.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said.

  ‘When you were doing your little out-of-body walkabout, Tyler—’

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘I taught you that, while you were in your coma. I protected you. You would have gone completely gaga if I hadn’t. And then you would never have been able to enter Begrem, fulfil their prophecies and bring me the mother-to-be of my magical son. But what I was trying to say was that when you were doing your little out-of-body-walkabout tonight, Tyler, you should have popped down to the freezers in the basement. The big padlocked one at the end has Mr Ishmael’s head in it.’

  And the lightning flashed and the thunder crashed and I was far from happy.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Say I believe you, that you have kept me alive until this night. Why? What do I matter to you?’

  ‘You really haven’t figured it out?’ Papa Keith Crossbar stared very hard at me. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you haven’t figured it out. Why you are involved in this. What your part in it is. You really have no idea who you are, do you?’

  ‘I am Tyler,’ I said. ‘And I will kill you. You will die tonight. I make a promise to you of that.’

  ‘Sadly no,’ said Papa Keith, rubbing his pudgy hands together and doing a little pace up and down. ‘You will die tonight, Tyler. You are the sacrifice, the magical child who must die if another is to be born. You are the virgin sacrifice.’

  ‘I’m not a virgin,’ I said.

  ‘I think you will find that you are. In order to not be a virgin, you do have to have had sex with someone other than yourself.’

  ‘I’ve had sex with loads of women. I was around in the swinging sixties. I was at The Stones in the Park gig, in the green room with Marianne Faithfull.’

  ‘Tyler, you have never had sex in all of your life with anything other than Miss Hand and her five lovely daughters.’ And he waggled his fingers once more.


  ‘How dare you!’ I cried. Most loudly.

  And the ninjas sniggered.

  ‘I’ve had loads of sex,’ I told them. ‘I had sex earlier this evening with Ms Williams, the tall woman from Sales Services.’

  And wouldn’t you know it, the other ninja kicked me.

  ‘Ouch!’ I went. ‘That was hard.’

  ‘Ms Williams is my girlfriend,’ said this other ninja.

  ‘Yeah, well, take it up with Trevellian. He was snogging her by the lift on the thirty-seventh floor only a few minutes ago.’

  ‘He was what?’

  ‘In front of a load of people. No shame at all.’

  ‘You’re making it up.’

  ‘Wake Dave up and ask him.’

  ‘Cease this nonsense!’ cried Papa Crossbar.

  ‘I’m not having this!’ cried the ninja.

  ‘Stay put!’ And Papa Crossbar did foldings of the brow. And the ninja did clutchings of the skull. Which loosened the grip upon me by a factor of one. But didn’t help my situation too much.

  ‘I’ve had loads of sex,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve had none,’ said Papa Crossbar. ‘Both Mr Ishmael and myself saw to that. We both needed a virgin. It’s a magical thing. Don’t go bothering yourself about it.’

  ‘But I was married.’

  ‘But you never actually did it with your wife.’

  ‘This is outrageous,’ I said. ‘Let go of me,’ I told the ninja who wasn’t clutching his skull. ‘This thoroughgoing swine has stopped me having sex for nearly all of my life and I’m nearly seventy years of age. At least let me punch him once, really hard, in the face.’

  The ninja looked towards Papa Crossbar. ‘What do you think, Boss?’ he asked. ‘One punch in the face seems fair.’

  Papa Crossbar did further foldings of his brow. Which had my other captor clutching at his skull. Which at least left me with my hands free.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Papa Crossbar.

  But I was. And I couldn’t stop.

  ‘You had to be pure,’ said Papa Crossbar. ‘Kept pure, to fight on one side or the other. The choice of which side was always ultimately yours. Personally I think you chose the wrong side. You should have thrown your lot in with me.’

  ‘You? ’ I said. ‘YOU? But you are an evil madman who wants to wipe out the entire World. Why in the name of all that’s holy, or otherwise, would I want to throw my lot in with you?’

  And Papa Crossbar stared very hard at me.

  ‘Because you are my brother, you oaf,’ said he.

  70

  ‘Your brother!’ I shouted. And loudly I did so. ‘You are no brother of mine.’

  And I sprang forward to do wringings of the neck.

  And he took a smart step backaways.

  ‘Now, now, now, Tyler,’ he said to me. ‘There is no need for violence.’

  ‘No need for violence?’ I spat as I shouted. ‘I have come here to kill you. And you want me here so you can kill me. I do believe that there is bound to be some violence involved. But please do correct me if I’m wrong.’

  ‘Well, in essence you’re right,’ said he. ‘But come, before we engage in any fisticuffs, allow me to explain matters to you. There is a long tradition, both literary and now in the medium of film, that the super-villain explains everything to the hero before he offs him, as it were.’

  ‘I am aware of this tradition,’ I replied. ‘And also that within its closely prescribed boundaries, the hero always thwarts the super-villain once the super-villain has had his say.’

  ‘A break with tradition is never a bad thing,’ said Papa Crossbar, producing as he did so what looked for all the world to be my trusty Smith & Wesson and pointing it at me.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘My pistol.’

  ‘Correct. So, would you like to hear all the details, or shall we break with tradition completely and I’ll just shoot you and have done?’

  ‘Let’s stick with the tradition for now,’ I proposed, ‘and we’ll see how things pan out after that.’

  ‘Right then, where would you like me to start?’

  ‘Perhaps with the rubbish bit about me being your brother.’

  ‘Ah, that.’ And Papa Crossbar did evil grinnings of the ear-to-ear persuasion, and the lightning did flash and the thunder did roll. And up in this great conservatory in the sky, there was more than just a little weirdness about the atmosphere.

  ‘Oh yes indeed,’ said the Evil One. ‘Your not so humble beginnings. You see, Tyler, the trouble is that over the years a number of people have told you a number of things, but they haven’t always told you the truth. They have just told you what they wanted you to hear, in the manner that you wanted to hear it.’

  ‘So to speak,’ I said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Nothing, please continue.’

  ‘Captain Lynch - your spiritual advisor, Mr Ishmael - our guardian and trainer, and myself, I confess - we’ve all been a wee bit guilty of not sharing all of the truth with you. But then, in all truth, why would we have? We only wanted you to know the bits that it suited us that you know. But then you are a detective. You really should have figured it out for yourself.’

  I had already tired of Papa Crossbar’s conversation and was thinking about what would be the best way to wrest the pistol from his hands.

  ‘There is no best way,’ said he, interrupting the flow of both his conversation and my thoughts. ‘I can hear you thinking, Tyler. Do you want to listen to what I have to say or not?’ And he cocked the trigger of my trusty Smith & Wesson.

  ‘I’ll listen,’ I said. And I listened.

  ‘The Ministry of Serendipity,’ he said, ‘below the other Mornington Crescent. The department of the most potent of secret affairs during the Second World War, where the real business of war was carried out between the white magicians of the West and the black brotherhood of Hitler’s Reich, both sides vying to create yours truly.’ And he bowed, but he didn’t lower the weapon. ‘Had my magical father Adolf Hitler, the nineteenth-century Homunculus, been able to achieve the Great Creation, he would have become all-powerful and Germany would have won the war. But the West won that particular battle, with the help of Mr Aleister Crowley. He was the most skilful wizard of his day, greater even than those of Hitler. And at the behest of the Ministry of Serendipity, and a large quantity of the green and folding stuff, he cast the Spell of the Great Creation, the one in that big gem-encrusted golden book that rests there on the altar.

  ‘But the problem for the Ministry was Crowley’s vanity. He created six children, as he styled himself the Beast Six-Six-Six.’

  ‘Two died, Tyler, only two. Not three, as you were told. Four survived: Elvis, Darren McMahon - who grew up in the Ministry and is its present controller, myself - the true Homunculus, and you, Tyler, boy number four, not really one thing or the other. The dull one of the family. And there’s always a dull one, isn’t there?’

  ‘I’m not dull,’ I complained. ‘I’m as interesting as you.’

  ‘As me? I’m nothing less than the frigging Antichrist. One of your brothers runs the most powerful occult organisation in the world and the other one was frigging Elvis Presley. And you’re not dull, compared to your brothers?’

  ‘Stop with the frigging,’ I said. ‘But I suppose if you put it like that. If it were true that I’m your brother, which it isn’t. And I’m not.’

  ‘You are, Tyler. Mr Ishmael knew it. Captain Lynch knows it. Frig, Tyler, Captain Lynch attended the ceremony that brought you and me into being. He is a disciple of Aleister Crowley’s.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe it. Captain Lynch is a good man.’

  ‘A good man? He’s been humping your mum for decades.’

  ‘Ha!’ I said. ‘What a giveaway. My mum, you said. That’s my real mum, not some sacrificial virgin of Crowley’s.’

  ‘Same woman,’ said Papa Crossbar. ‘Has it never occurred to you what a weirdo your - I mean our - mum is?’

/>   ‘Which isn’t to say—’ I began.

  But he stopped me. ‘It is to say,’ he said. ‘You are special, Tyler. And you have some of your brothers’ gifts. Elvis got all the charisma, I make no bones about that. I got all of the evil, as befits my status. You got your share of magic, though. You’re a magical individual, a little bit of a Doctor Strange, aintcha, though?’

  ‘I have one or two mystical tricks up my sleeve,’ I said, and I blew onto my fingernails and buffed them upon my lapel. Which is not something you see every day nowadays, is it?

  Although it’s not particularly mystical.

  ‘You perfected the Tyler Technique,’ said Papa Crossbar - or did all this make him brother Crossbar to me? I thought I’d just stick with Papa Crossbar.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ I said. ‘The Tyler Technique. I did perfect that. And it was all my very own idea.’

  ‘Well—’ went Papa Crossbar.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Never mind. Let’s say yes, it was all your own idea. Well done.’

  ‘So is that it?’ I asked. ‘Is that all, or do you have anything else you wish to share with me?’

  Papa Crossbar did scratchings of the head with the barrel of my gun. ‘I can’t think of anything else,’ he said. ‘Unless there is anything you’d like to know.’

  ‘Anything I’d like to know?’ And I shouted this, I know I did. ‘Anything I’d like to know? Well, I wouldn’t mind knowing why you want to wipe out all life on Earth. You might try explaining to me just what the point of that would be and what could possibly be in it for you.’ And then I took deep breaths to steady myself. Not that deep breaths ever really do. Mostly they just make you dizzy.

  ‘Well,’ said Papa Crossbar. And he twirled my pistol on his guntotin’ finger. ‘That is the point of all this, after all, isn’t it? So yes, allow me to explain.’ And he did so.

  ‘You see,’ said he, ‘Planet Earth is a frightful aberration. It has all this life all over it. And I do mean all over, down to the tiniest single-celled whatnot. It’s all so busy busy busy, everything whirling away and making so much noise. The sound of it all! Have you ever heard of the Music of the Spheres?’ I nodded that I had. ‘Complete silence, that music. It’s more in the nature of mime. The universe is a great big interlinked body, all completely at peace with itself, this thing moving sedately about that thing, in perfect harmony and perfect silence . . . because these things are dead. But here! On this planet! Noise noise noise. And fuss and bother. And the smell! You can smell Planet Earth as far away as Saturn, did you know that? So it all has to stop.’