Death Comes for the Librarian (again)!

In this final, bumper, double number of Volume I of Professor McQueen's Adventures, the tragic story of the seven old ladies locked in the laboratory reaches its grisly climax, and the Professor finally remembers to check the smurf trap in the gardens of Timor Mortis College at Noxford. Cherrytop the Sarcastic Horse again fails to put in an appearance, but he has supplied the following review of this chapter: "Oh, it's wonderful, hilarious stuff! My sides are still aching! And what a pile of wisdom! That Professor McQueen is every inch the genius he fancies himself to be!"  Thank you, Cherrytop.

Parental advisory: While there is no bad language in this chapter, the story of the seven old ladies will be, like Murdoch's Plutonium Coffee, too strong and dark for some stomachs.

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Transcript

The Adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer

Chapter 12: Death comes for the Librarian (again)!

Announcer: The adventures of Donald McQueen, bibliographer … Chapter 12: Death comes for the Librarian (again)!

DM: My name is Donald McQueen, and I am a bibliographer. At the beginning of writing this, the final chapter of the first volume of my adventures, I received delightful news. For the past fourteen years, my effusions have been sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of London and, alternately, by one of the two great rival firms of tomato ketchup manufacturers, Schickle’s Pickles of Nantwich and Gruber and Son of Soho. But this morning I learned that those two leviathans in the ocean of savoury condiments, once the sperm whale and giant squid, the fiercest enemies of the deep, had put aside their differences and merged into one super-leviathan, to be called simply Schicklegruber.

Man in quad: No, it’s Gruberschickle!

DM: What? Who said that? … I crossed to the window of my lodgings and looked down into the Great Quad of Timor Mortis College. There stood a small man in a brown coat, wearing a sandwich board bearing the legend “It’s not Schicklegruber, it’s Gruberschickle!”. What was going on? The company had sent me a complimentary bottle of their new ketchup, along with a substantial cheque for the encouragement of the publication of my adventures. I had tasted the contents of the bottle – shaped, wonderfully, like the Venus of Willendorf – with my breakfast of slumberland sausages (apparently made from old mattresses) and found it to surpass in deliciousness even the magnificent sauces of Schickle and Gruber. I peered closely at the label. It clearly said “Schicklegruber”. As I read the word, I heard again the voice from the quad.

Man in quad: No, it’s Gruberschickle!

DM: A letter had accompanied the cheque and bottle of ketchup, and I turned my attention now to its lavishly curlicued and gilded letterhead. Here too I read the word “Schicklegruber”.

Man in quad: No, it’s Gruberschickle!

DM: I could only conclude that the merger between Schickle’s Pickles and Gruber and Son had not been quite so congenial and absolute as I had been led to believe, and that a rival firm was yet in existence, the two origines having been amalgamated only to divide once more into two quite new entities, each constituted of two opposing halves of the original manufacturers. Something similar had happened, I believe, at Mainz in the 1450s with Crispus Rossfleich and his brother, Jimbo. It was, however, the firm of Schicklegruber

Man in quad: Gruberschickle!

DM: which was sponsoring my adventures, and it was my duty to ignore anyone who happened to shout out a different name when I mentioned the company. I popped the bottle of … the world’s best tomato ketchup into the side-pocket of my bibliographer’s smock, where it bumped against the Ear-trumpet of Death, and headed out of my lodgings towards the Fellow’s Library.

When I entered the Quad I found that the little fellow with the sandwich board was no longer to be seen, but a tall, thin figure in black robes was walking slowly away from me towards the portico of the Library. I have seen quite a few tall, thin, black-clad figures in this quadrangle, and have usually mistaken them for Death, though they twice turned out to be the Mincing Friar whose clutches I had so recently escaped, and once Martius Boyle, the loathesome Principal of the College in his robes and sable crown. This time, however, I had a strong fancy that the figure was, indeed, that of Death, and decided it would be better to try to avoid him, for a number of quite obvious reasons. So, instead of following Death towards the Fellows’ Library, I turned through the East Archway of the Great Quad and into the smaller Peverall Quad named not, as you might expect, after Sir William Peverall who built the Great Hall in 1556, but after his descendent Wallace Peverall, the Wigan-based alchemist and cheese expert. Indeed this space is graced by two charming statues, one of Wallace Peverall himself and the other of his faithful beagle, Gromit, also an alumnus of the college. When the original Gromit died in 1997, his body was presented to Timor Mortis and was stuffed, but is kept in the College archive, rather than being on public display, as it was deemed distasteful to exhibit the skin and bones of so popular a sidekick. Also, the stuffed Gromit would be, the Ruling Council felt, very much at risk of abduction by the students of the rival Brazeknob College, who might be tempted to position the body in humorous congress with the statue of their own canine alumnus, Scooby Doo. The College Archive also contains the cured pelt of Feathers McGraw, an evil Penguin whom Wallace and Gromit once put to the sword.

Peverall Quad was not, quite, deserted. As I passed through it, on my way to gardens, thinking to check on the smurf trap which I had sadly neglected for several years, my path was blocked by a small, elderly woman in a tweed onesie. She held a clipboard and brandished a ballpoint. My heart sank.

Woman: Professor McQueen!

DM: How do you know my name?

Woman: I have researched all the Fellows and servitors of the College, and determined which to approach, in the name of Jesus.

DM: My heart sank further. It was another religious nutter.

Woman: You will sponsor me, please, to the tune of twenty-five pounds.

DM: I remembered the words of Horace, or was it Virgil – the Church, all they want is your money! … What should I sponsor you to do?

Woman: I am taking part in a disapprovathon!

DM: A disapprovathon?

Woman: Yes. A disapprovathon. I intend to disapprove of one thousand different things in the space of twenty-four hours. 

DM: Good heavens. That’s one every minute-and-a half – my mental arithmetic was impressive … Am I right in thinking you will find it a very easy task?

Woman: Oh yes. I will have no trouble at all. I can disapprove so quickly that I will reach my target thousand by bedtime. If you sponsor me forty new pence for each thing I disapprove of, that will be twenty-five pounds. Shall I put you down for twenty-five pounds? … Professor Washbasin has agreed to twenty-five pounds!

DM: I am sure he has. Tell me, what are you raising money for?

Woman: The church!

DM: Which church?

Woman: There is only one church!

DM: I see. I would be more inclined to sponsor you, madam, were you to undertake an approvathon.

Woman: A what?

DM: An approvathon, in which you attempted to approve of a thousand things in twenty-four hours.

Woman: Oh, I wouldn’t approve of that!

DM: It would be real challenge. Could you do it?

Woman: I could not. If I were to undertake an approvathon, I would be screwed. And I wouldn’t approve of that!

DM: No, I imagine not.

Woman: Professor McQueen, I cannot approve of wasting any more of my precious time upon this conversation. You will sponsor me twenty-five pounds.

DM: I will not.

Woman: Why not?

DM: Because I don’t approve! … The woman stabbed her own arm with the ballpoint and then wrote something on her clipboard in blood. She glared at me with a look which I can only call disapproving, and scuttled off to seek out the next victim on her list. I paused beside the statue of Gromit and picked some of the lichen from his left forepaw. Why was the College so haunted by religious maniacs? I would have to raise the matter at Ruling Council, and see if some sort of armed response could not be organized. This trying conversation had occupied enough time, I felt sure, to allow me to return to my plan of visiting the Fellow’s Library, without fear of running into the rightful owner of the ear-trumpet. I could check the smurf-trap later. So, I turned about, and headed back into the Great Quad and thence through the portico and up the stairs to the Library.

It was pleasant to be back in that haven of quiet scholarly endeavour, beneath the learned gaze of the portraits of Lord Seaton, Sir William Peverall, Delia Smith and Great Uncle Bulgaria. I crossed to the little sentry box where the library assistant was usually hidden and rapped upon the shutter. But there was no response. After a moment I raised the shutter myself to find the box empty, of library assistants. Three eager mice stood upon the counter, however, so I wrote out an order slip for the Codex assinorum, rolled it up myself and popped it into the pannier on the back of the nearest rodent. He or she – it is very difficult to sex a mouse without upending it – saluted smartly, and scurried off to deliver my order-slip. As I walked down the length of the Library towards my usual seat beneath the bust of Clarkson Kent, I noticed the old Librarian, Young Hogg, standing in one of the carrels, reaching up to replace a book upon a high shelf. I considered calling out to him. But decided that he was beneath notice.

I settled myself infra the statue of Superman and spread out my notes on the Codex before me. At that moment, a beam of sunlight fell through the window and cast a harlequin pattern of light and shadow upon my prolegomena, and I felt a sudden sense of being close to the solution to the mystery. The page which lay uppermost was my scribblings on Pinkelman’s stencil theory, which I had heretofore regarded as no more probable than any of the others (with the exception of Kleinwald’s caterpillar hypothesis, which was patently ludicrous). The light seemed to be shining upon the words ‘Pinkelman’, ‘stencil’ and, for some reason, ‘Gentleman’s relish’ (I presume a shopping list had formed part of that learned palimpsest). Could the stencil theory hold the answer? Of course Pinkleman could not be wholly right – he was an American, after all – but he might be partly right, and I might grow a new theory out of his, the McQueen stencil theory. I stroked my chin …   

I decided to occupy the time before my book-order was delivered by attempting again to use the miraculous trumpet to aid me in my pursuit of the truth of the Codex. 

I inserted it into my earhole, and concentrated hard upon the place Mainz, Germany, the date 12 June 1460, and the man Crispus Rossfleisch (often held to be the inventor of the barbecue, as well as the originator of European printing technology) ... Once again, I failed, and found myself receiving radio waves from Noxford’s past. I must have been, at some semi-conscious level, thinking still of the tragic incident which besmirched my brother Starwheel’s first weeks in office as head of the University’s Department of Chemistry …

Announcer: And now we go over again to Plumb Valley Police Headquarters, where Detective Superintendent Walter Cruttenden – known as the Singing Detective Superintendent – is about to make a final statement in the case of the seven old ladies who were locked in a laboratory at the Department of Chemistry at Easter.

Buckle: Thank you ladies and gentlemen of the press. I am not Cruttenden, and I am not going to sing. I am afraid Walter Cruttenden is indisposed and has asked me to deliver the final statement in this case. My name is Chief Inspector Nick Buckle, and I am making this report now, late in the evening, when all little children, simpletons and pensioners should be tucked up in their beds, because it contains material of an adult nature, which those of a nervous disposition would do well to avoid, with some strong language, explicit content and themes of, and variations upon, unspeakable depravity. Our forensic scientists have examined the specimens removed from the laboratory, and our armchair scientists have sat and watched the seven-days’ worth of video-tapes taken by the closed-circuit cameras there. Beside each armchair was another armchair containing a deaf man or woman, who lip-read the words of the old ladies in the video, when their lips were visible at the same time as they were speaking or, latterly, screaming. From this evidence we have pieced together what occurred in that locked room, where the old ladies remained for full seven days without relief.

When they realized that the doors were locked they naturally banded together and tried to raise the alarm, first by shouting “Hello!”, then by beating a tattoo upon the locked door with their sticks and zimmer-frames. Of the seven ladies, four had sticks, two had zimmer-frames, and one had no visible means of support, but picked up a stool to use in battering on the door. After an hour of this behaviour they were exhausted and began to grow either melancholy or hysterical, as they came to understand that no one was going to rescue them that day. Viscountess Pelham, the daughter of the late Earl of Chichester, was among the ladies and was, it seems, a natural leader, or so she believed herself. She began to walk around the laboratory, slapping the other ladies as they grew hysterical, until the room was quiet again. Then she organized the six other ladies into pairs and sent them scavenging for food and drink. This did not take long, as the laboratory is not large. Fluids turned out to be abundant, as there were several sinks in the room and water could easily be drawn from the taps. Lady Pelham also had a hipflask containing whisky, but she told the assembly that she would not share it and if anyone tried to take it from her she would cut them with the large clasp-knife she had in her handbag. Of food they could find nothing in the room, not unnaturally as it was a chemistry laboratory, and an inorganic chemistry laboratory at that, and the contents of the various bottles and vials in the room were more likely to be poisonous than delicious. One of the ladies had a piece of cake wrapped in tissue paper, and another had half a packet of biscuits, and these were shared out on Lady Pelham’s orders. The problem of “amenities” soon became pressing. One of the old ladies, Mrs Mason, who was half-witted, short-sighted and had broken her spectacles, had already crapped in one of the litter-bins, and Lady Pelham dictated that this would henceforth be the receptacle for all solid, or semi-solid, bodily waste. Liquid waste, she suggested, could be deposited directly into one of the sinks, but the other ladies all refused to climb onto the tables to achieve this, and so a second litter-bin was pressed into service as a chamber-pot, which could be emptied into a sink after each use. Lady Pelham insisted that the ladies wash their hands assiduously after each visit to the bin … of which there were a great many – visits, I mean, rather than bins.

Night fell, and the ladies tried to make themselves comfortable to sleep, but with little success. There were no soft furnishings in the room, not even curtains, and they ended up seated or curled like dogs upon the floor. There was a good deal of moaning, both literal moaning and complaining, which Lady Pelham ultimately put a stop to with a few threatening words. In the morning they breakfasted on water and the last of the biscuits and cake. Margaret Simm, who was perhaps the most infirm of the ladies, declined to join in with their breakfast because, it was soon discovered, she had expired during the night, in a pool of her own bodily waste. Two of the other ladies used their sticks to push her stinking body into a corner, where it remained for the next six days. Lady Pelham then insisted that the remaining ladies played games to while away the hours until rescue came, as she hoped, later that morning. She produced a pack of cards and proposed a rubber of six-handed contract bridge, which proposition was rejected because only one of the other ladies, the convicted fraudster Jennifer Spender, knew the game. And so they played first Newmarket (all old ladies know how to play Newmarket), then Canasta, then Stab the Goose, then Gin Rummy, then Up to the Belfry Up Up Up Up, then Beggar my Neighbour, then Bull’s Pizzle (Basingstoke rules, naturally), then Racing Demon and finally Slap Down Hitler. A sense of doom and desperation was coming over the party by the time the last hand was played, when the King of Spades (the “Hitler-Card”) was triumphant over the alliance of the Queen of Hearts and King of Diamonds. Such an outcome is, I am told, almost impossible and is seen as a token of the most severe ill-fortune.

To prevent the inevitable outbreak of hysteria, Lady Pelham forced the others to play new games, more physical than heretofore. They endured nearly thirty minutes of Grandmother’s Footsteps, followed by twenty of British Bulldog, three rounds of Capture the Flag and two of Dragon’s Balls. An attempt at Red Rover failed for lack of numbers. Then, quite suddenly, Elizabeth Humfrey gave a blood-curdling scream and sank to the ground. She had read a note, pinned to a notice-board by the door, reminding staff that the Chemistry Department would be closed on Easter Monday and would not re-open until the following Saturday. One might have expected further hysteria to have ensued. But no. The ladies grew quiescent. They sat down in a circle and engaged in a conversation which our expert lip-readers were powerless to report. After a few minutes the wiry fraudster Spender left the circle and went to a large drawer which she had found earlier and drew out a number of glass containers, flasks and retorts, which she took back to the gathering. The largest of these she smashed in the centre of the circle, and selected a curve of glittering glass which she raised above her head. Lady Pelham did the same with her clasp-knife. Then she offered each of the ladies in turn the pack of cards from which they drew a single card. There was a moment of discussion, and then Eleanor Draper, who was the youngest of the party at only seventy-one, leapt up and began to run. She was quickly pursued by Pelham and Spender, and the three ran round and round the room, Draper screaming and Lady Pelham shouting ‘You agreed! You agreed!’ Suddenly the quarry fell, and the other two were on her in a murderous rage. But, I am happy to report, they did not take her life for the post mortem showed that she died of natural causes at that very moment. Pelham and Spender whooped in triumph, and began to cut away her clothing, one with her knife, the other with her blade of broken glass. “Which bit?” cried Spender. “The haunch!” replied Pelham. “I will not eat a woman’s arse!” said Spender. “Very well then, the leg, the leg!” They set to work to strip the flesh from the unfortunate Mrs Draper’s thighs, placing the strips of meat into a Waitrose carrier bag which Spender had produced from one of her pockets.

When the good meat had all been removed from the upper legs of Eleanor Draper, the two cannibals – for so we must now call them – lit two of the many Bunsen-burners in the laboratory, using a gold cigarette-lighter belonging to Pelham. Spender had found a collection of metal tongs in one of the drawers and bought two of these to the flames. They then cut some of the meat into small gobbets, two or three centimetres square and, holding them in the tongs, began to toast or barbecue them in the Bunsen flames. During this rather unusual performance, the other three old ladies had been cowering and whimpering at the far end of the room. But when they smelt the cooking flesh they fell silent and grew watchful. Spender and Pelham began to dine, eating roast lady with evident relish, and washing their meal down with beakers of whisky and water, and water, respectively. After about ten minutes, Candida Mason began to crawl slowly towards the spot where the feast was being taken. When she arrived, the cannibals would not share their meat with her, but gestured towards the remains of Mrs Draper, suggesting that she might like to conduct her own butchery. This Mrs Mason did, using another glass blade which she retrieved from the remnants of the smashed vessel and showing none of the compunction which had prevented Spender from carving the posterior of another human being. Soon she too was toasting and devouring Mrs Draper. It was, perhaps inevitably, only a matter of time before Elizabeth Humphrey joined the table, so that four old ladies dined upon a fifth and, indeed, had consumed all the muscular tissues of her arms, legs and back by the time the sun set. Only Miss Barrett, who was, it seems, a vegetarian and an animal-lover, abstained. She asked, from the other end of the laboratory, why they had drawn lots for the role of sacrifice and not eaten Margaret Simm, who had died during the previous night. Spender replied, talking, I regret to say, with her mouth full, that there was hardly any meat on the old bird and, furthermore, no one wished to devour an old woman who was covered with excrement. 

When the meal was done, they extinguished all but one of the Bunsens and settled down to sleep on the floor, seemingly quite comfortable now on the hard surface, like a pack of dogs sleeping round a campfire. Indeed, the pack analogy is a good one, for it seems that some kind of natural, but primitive, order had imposed itself upon the four cannibals. Pelham was top dog, Spender the pretender, and Humphrey and Mason the loyal pack-members. Only Barrett remained on the outside of the group and, the next morning, the looks that were exchanged between her and the other four dogs, were hardly those of trust, or amity, or genteel femininity. Barrett had not eaten for some thirty-six hours, and was feeling the effects, while the four cannibals were satiated and looked, in the video footage we all endured, somehow younger, sleeker, less wrinkled, more agile, with eyes that seemed to shine in the light of the Bunsen-flame. All through Tuesday they picked at the body of Mrs Draper, while Veronica Barrett kept her distance, creeping round the periphery of the room and growing ever weaker. It seemed inevitable that the four flesh-eaters would add Miss Barrett to their diet before too many hours had passed. But that was not to be. That night, while the other surviving ladies slept, the crooked Jennifer Spender eased the clasp-knife from Lady Pelham’s grasp and used it to cut the aristocrat’s throat.  In the morning she declared herself Queen of the laboratory, and Mrs Mason and Miss Humphrey swore allegiance to her. Spender used a fire-extinguisher to crack open Eleanor Draper’s skull and drew out her brain, which she and her two companions quickly ate, to formalize, as it were, their companionship and respective roles of sovereign and subjects.

I should perhaps introduce a note of formal warning here. It is never wise to eat raw brains, and I would warn all my listeners against the practice. There are prions in brain tissue which can quite unbalance the strongest constitution. And the three cannibals of the Chemistry Department were old ladies, albeit rendered briefly lithe and lupine by their protein-rich diet and the somewhat unusual circumstances which had brought out something bestial in their natures. On the Wednesday morning the three ladies who had eaten the brain fell ill. First they grew feverish and tremulous, and then they grew as mad as mad cows – indeed this is an apt analogy, since mad cow disease is similarly caused by the consumption of food containing prions. They started to hallucinate. To judge by her utterances, the simple-minded Candida Mason began to believe that her body was shrinking, that she was rapidly dwindling away. She cried out to heaven to protect her from the other two cannibals who, to her perception, were growing enormous beside her. Elizabeth Humphrey apparently heard voices, commanding her with invocations from various popular board games. She believed she should go to jail, go directly to jail, without passing go and without receiving two hundred pounds, that she had won second prize in a beauty contest, and that she had been convicted of murdering Dr Black in the Billiard Room with the lead-piping. Jennifer Spender became suddenly convinced that she was the lead-singer of the Rolling Stones, and began to prance and pout, and to sing something vaguely resembling Jumping Jack Flash. This phase of their illness was mercifully brief, and in less than an hour all three of the flesh-eaters had slipped into unconsciousness.

Thus, by the evening of the third day, three of the old ladies lay dead and three were comatose. Only Miss Barrett was still conscious and slowly circling the laboratory on all fours, avoiding the motionless bodies of the other six. The next morning found her in an attitude of prayer, which she retained for several hours. Finally she rose from her knees and, crying out the name “Mr Jacobi” several times, hobbled to the remains of Eleanor draper and used Lady Pelham’s clasp-knife to extract her liver and kidneys, which she cooked and ate deliberately over the next four days. 

You may thus imagine the scene discovered by the Head Janitor, one Samuel Earnshaw, when he returned from holiday and patrolled the building on the Saturday. The three corpses were removed to the mortuary, and the three comatose ladies to that most melancholy of hospitals, the Sadcliffe Infirmary. It was remarkable that they had survived in their unconscious state for so long, but tests have shown an unusual physical strength in their old bodies, though their brains have been reduced to mush and none is expected to recover. The only survivor of the tragedy, Veronica Barrett, has, I am afraid, been confined to Dribblemore mental hospital … I mean psychological wellness-centre or loony-bin. The psychological and physical ordeal, to say nothing of the consumption of human flesh by a vegetarian, has driven her quite out of her wits. The only thoughts she now has, and the only words she utters, are “Mr Jacobi”. This, it turns out, is the name of her beloved parrot. It is perhaps the saddest and, to my mind, the most moving aspect of this whole affair that Mr Jacobi too is no longer with us. You might say he has ceased to be, and joined the choir invisible. Without food, alone in his cage in Miss Barrett’s flat, I am sorry to have to report that Mr Jacobi starved to death, or perhaps died of loneliness in the absence of his keeper. (Voice breaks, sniffs).

Finally, we may ask – why was none of these old ladies missed during the week in which they were imprisoned in that laboratory? Mrs Simm, Mrs Humphrey, Mrs Mason, Miss Barrett and Miss Spender were all either widows or spinsters, without close family or friends, who lived alone and their absence simply went unnoticed. Mrs Draper was married, but her marriage was an unhappy one and it seems her husband positively reveled in his wife’s absence and preferred not to question it. Lady Pelham had no close relations, but lived in a household of servants. However, she had treated them so unkindly and with such disdain that they viewed her absence as an unexpected holiday and did not care where she was, as long as she was not at home making their lives miserable.

The Plumb Valley police will not be pressing charges against anyone involved in this sad case. While the Head Janitor Earnshaw was certainly negligent to lock up the laboratory with seven old ladies inside, his act was not malicious and he committed no crime. It seems he failed to enter the room himself, to check it before locking the door that day, for the simple reason that he believed the laboratory to be haunted and has a profound fear of ghosts. When we questioned him on the matter, he expressed regret for his actions, and remarked that, where but one spectre had formerly been observed, there would now be four, the ghosts of the three old ladies who died there having joined that of the headless laboratory-technician that had terrified him heretofore. Indeed, Mr Earnshaw believed that the three new ghosts would have a particular grievance against him, and so to avoid their malevolence he has decided to resign his position with the University forthwith and so keep his distance from that unquiet chamber.

That is the end of my statement. If any of you ladies and gentlemen of the press have questions, I will do my best to answer them … Anyone? … I see you are rendered mute by the gravity and melancholy of this case, which is perhaps as it should be. I see there is a string quintet at the back of the room … Perhaps you would play me out?  Thank you.

DM: I had forgotten quite how tragic, and indeed horrific, this tragedy had been. I had not encountered such a bloody and unnerving story since I had read a book called Horrific, bloody and unnerving tragedy (the sequel to Tragic, bloody and unlikely holiday), by the well-known writer of grisly tales, Mr Stephen Thing. The trumpet was still in my ear, and my mind was now wandering, so I found myself listening to a strange encounter from some unknown era, perhaps in the past or the future, but apparently close to my present location in Noxford. Its advent was marked by the ringing of a mercantile bell …

Lady assistant (RV voice): Hello, dearie, what can I do you for?

Customer: Good heavens, what a very … attractive voice you have.

Ass: Thank you, dearie.

Cust: Would you mind telling me where you are from, with such an accent?

Ass: See if you can guess, my deario.

Cust: Hmmm. Could you be from Monty Python?

Ass: Monty Python’s not a place.

Cust: No, quite right … Royston Vaisey?

Ass: Well, that’s a place, but a fictional one.  I come from a real place.

Cust: Really? Do you know the American situation comedy Frasier? 

Ass: Oh yes, I love Frasier. Very witty!

Cust: Well, do you by any chance come from the same place that Daphne in Frasier comes from? They call it Manchester, but it’s clearly not the Manchester we know and love, but another Manchester, somewhere in a strangulated backwater of America by the sound of it? Is that where you come from?

Ass (Daphne accent):  Nooow. If I came from Manchester, America, I would talk like this and drive you all dippy bum-bum with me monotonous tones and inaccurate idioms. (Back to VR) Besides, as I said, I come from a real place, not a fictional one …

Cust: Well … I have had three guesses.  

Ass: Do you give up, dear?

Cust: Yes, I give up. Where are you from?

Ass: Well, I am a little surprised you couldn’t recognize my accent. It’s a very common one, and I haven’t travelled far from my origins. I come from Hell. I am a demon.

Cust: Really? So Hell is real place? I thought it was fictional.

Ass: No, I am only joking, dearie. I come from Narnia. We all talk like this in Narnia.

Cust: Ahhh, yes, of course. That would also explain why you are beaver …

Ass: Nice beaver!

Cust: Nice … cultural reference.

Ass: Well, not bad for a beaver … Now, I wonder, what sort of accent yours is?

Cust: Perhaps you can guess where I am from.

Ass: It is a very generic, southern, posh sort of accent, so I suppose you are from around here, in Noxford.

Cust: Yes, I have lived in Noxford for many years. But I was not born here. Can you guess where I come from originally, from my voice?

Ass: No, I am not getting anything I am afraid, except a distant echo of Eton College.

Cust: I was born, and grew up, in Wonderland. Which is, of course, not far from either Noxford or Eton College …

Ass: Ah, that makes perfect sense, and also explains why you are a dodo.

Cust: If you were to ask me what I am, I would have to say, I dodo! 

Ass: Nice … pun

Cust: Well, not bad … for a dodo … Actually I stole it from The Goodies, 1977.

Ass: Yes, I know, dear, I know …

DM: This was hopeless.

I drew the trumpet from my ear and returned it to the side-pocket of my smock. Glancing at the great clock I saw that more than an hour had passed since I had put in my book-order, and the College’s copy of the Codex Assinorum had still not arrived. Where was Young Hogg? I struggled from my chair, and walked back towards the entrance to the library. As I passed the carrel where I had seen Hogg replacing a book earlier that morning, I was a little surprised to note that he was still there, replacing another book on a high shelf. I approached him and cleared my throat. He did not respond. Was he stone deaf? I looked more closely to see that he was not replacing another book, but the very same book he had held when I saw him an hour previously. I poked him with my forefinger. The fellow was stiff as a board. It will come as no surprise to anyone who remembers the title of this chapter of my adventures, that the librarian was not stone deaf, but stone dead, frozen by the Reaper’s touch in the act of replacing the Library’s copy of Stiltonius Wiganensis, De re camembertia (1596) upon shelf KK1. It was clearly to keep an appointment with Young Hogg that I had seen Death approaching the Library steps earlier that morning … I felt a little annoyed that I had waited all this time for him to fetch me the Library’s copy of the Codex, while he had been incapable of doing it, and clearly could not do it now. Indeed, I would not be able again to examine the book again until Young Hogg was replaced as Librarian, something which I knew could not happen until his death had been reported to the College authorities, and even then it would take several hours. So, I scribbled a quick note – Librarian dead, please replace – to Martius Boyle and determined to drop it into the goblet of fire, which was the correct receptacle for all the Principal’s post, on my way to the College gardens. Since I could not continue my research in the Library, I had determined to return to my earlier plan to examine the Timor Mortis smurf-trap.

I stepped out into the Great quad and, having dropped my note in Boyle’s goblet, walked quickly through Perevall Quad and into the beautiful, extensive and perfectly maintained gardens of the College. The smurf-trap had been set up some twenty years previously, when Noxford’s smurf problem was at its height, and I had been assigned responsibility for checking it, initially on a daily basis, for captives. In those days we averaged perhaps one prisoner a week, and when one of the little blue bastards was caught it was my job to inform the Smurf-Finder Royale, who removed it from the trap with tongs and took it off in a thick hessian sack to receive University justice. Usually, I understood, this meant execution, although a few smurfs were banished to their homeland in the hope that they would tell their fellows of the unfriendly reception they would receive in the city of Noxford. This approach seemed to work, for after a year or so the supply of smurfs had dried up and I would nearly always find the trap empty, so that, I began to check it less and less frequently until, I confess, I had given up altogether. I had been reminded of the matter recently – the reader may recall the circumstances – and since then the checking of the trap had been hovering at the periphery of my consciousness as a vaguely troubling duty I had left undone for too long.

There are a number of smurf-traps on the market, the most popular being essentially gigantic mouse-traps, with a powerful spring-loaded bar that breaks the neck or back of the unlucky smurf who wanders into it and usually kills him instantly. I use the male pronoun advisedly, for I have never seen a lady smurf, and have heard that they are so uncommon that perhaps only one in a hundred of the species is female, and those are so highly-valued as breeding-stock that they are very seldom allowed out of the smurf homeland in Wallonia. They are said to be immensely beautiful, and fertile, producing litters of ten or twelve smurflets twice a year, which is, of course, how the race proliferates. At Timor Mortis we decided against installing one of the proprietary traps, and a small committee drawn from the Engineering Faculty designed its own mechanism, which was seen as more humane than the giant-mousetrap-variety. It consists of a large cage, about two metres square, one end of which is hinged at the top edge to form a trap-door. This is raised and lowered by servos controlled by a computer system which detects the presence of any living creature that enters a field of laser-beams. The engineers claimed that the computer could distinguish a smurf from any other creature – a squirrel or a sheep, say, which might wander into the trap – so that it would be activated only by one of the unspeakable creatures for which it was intended. However, although the digital mind of the cage knew when a smurf had entered it, experiment had shown that it could not close the trap more quickly than the nimble smurf could move to escape beneath the descending door, and so booby-trapped bait was placed at the end of the cage, on a small metal plinth. When the smurf touched the bait, he received a powerful electric shock which stunned him for long enough to allow the door to close and his exit to become impossible. When the smurf came back to consciousness, he found himself imprisoned, and perhaps had an inkling of his fate. It only occurred to me some months after the trap had been installed that, with all this sophisticated technology, surely a simple warning of some sort could have been incorporated, so that I could be informed when the trap was sprung, thus saving me from having to check the bloody thing every day. But no, I was told, the development budget for the trap had been exhausted and no further refinements were possible!

The trap had been installed at the back of the college gardens, in an area known as the Wilderness, in the heart of a tangle of shrubbery, behind a line of ancient trees which were divided from the lawns by a wide bed thickly planted with thorny bushes. It was an ideal spot as smurfs, apparently, love nothing better than to caper through a shrubbery. The college staff were forbidden to approach the trap after an incident in 1999 when one of the gardeners was discovered committing an unnatural act with a captive smurf. He was dismissed, and I was given sole responsibility for the trap. The question of what bait to place on the plinth within the trap had caused at first some argument. The then Principal, an idiot ironically named Peter Principal, had suggested the Ikea catalogue, in the mistaken belief that smurfs originate from Sweden. Various foodstuffs were suggested. Sarsparilla pods, which are apparently known to the blue bastards as ‘smurfberries’, were tried, as was Belgian chocolate, French mustard, German sausages, Danish bacon and a full English breakfast, but the best bait was ultimately found to be pornography, which, it turns out, smurfs simply cannot resist. Two copies of a glossy magazine in Walloon, with rather more pictures than text, were acquired, lacquered to protect them from the weather, and wired up to the plinth to deliver their bewildering charge.

As I approached the trap I felt not a little apprehension, and guilt. I really should have checked it more assiduously over the past two years and hoped to find it empty and the cage door still wide. It took some little effort to reach the trap, for the bushes in the bed, the ancient trees, and the shrubbery beyond had all grown, jungle-like, without the attentions of the gardeners, since I had last visited the spot. When I finally achieved the trap I found it heavily overgrown with ivy. But it was clear that something had been caught within, for the door was closed and the cage was secure. My disappointment turned to puzzlement when I examined the scene and found two corpses, both in unexpected circumstances. The first was the skeleton of a smurf, clearly identifiable by his small and flattened skull, by the shreds of blue skin which still clung to his bones and by the tattered remains of his Phrygian cap. But what was extraordinary was that his remains were outside the trap, some two meters away from the closed door, and caught up in the lower branches of a tree, almost as if his body had been placed there deliberately, on display as a warning to other blue intruders. More bizarre still was what I found inside the trap. It was a human skeleton, upright and sitting upon a bicycle. 

I entered the secret code on the keypad beside the trap door, which slowly opened, trailing strands of ivy as it rose. Inside I disabled the shocking device and examined carefully the contents of the trap. There were no other remains – I had half expected to find further smurf bones strewn about – and the pornography was undisturbed, but the front wheel of the bicycle was touching the plinth. I got an inkling of what had befallen. The trap must have malfunctioned and was delivering a much more powerful jolt of electricity than its designers had intended, so that when the smurf entered and touched the tempting literature before him the shock had both killed him instantly and sent his body flying backwards, out through the still open door of the trap to be caught in the branches of the first tree it encountered in its flight. The door must then have closed, but opened again, either immediately through a fault or three months later as it was designed to do (if not reset by its keeper, the trap would open automatically after a hundred days had passed). Subsequent to this, a cyclist had ridden into the trap and collided with the plinth, sending a similarly mighty charge through both machine and rider, instantly killing the latter and freezing both in the attitude I now observed. I examined the skeleton. There was a good deal of long, fair hair adhering to the skull, and the remains of a skirt about its pelvis confirmed my impression that the cyclist had been female. The bicycle bore a basket on the rear, into which was stuffed a canvas bag, very damp and green with mould. This proved to hold half a dozen decayed books, some cloth which was rotted beyond recognition, and a plastic purse containing, among other things, the University Card of one Caroline Mount-Cardiac. I vaguely recalled the name. She had been a student at Timor Mortis, a second-year mixologist I think, who had suddenly disappeared a bit over a year ago. Everyone assumed she had either fled Noxford or been abducted by elephants, as was almost invariably the case with sudden student disappearances. But here she was. The mystery of her vanishment was solved. She must have been very drunk indeed to have ridden her bike through such rough terrain, into the Wilderness, through briar and break, and straight into the smurf trap without perceiving where she was and the danger she was in.

I stroked my chin. It seemed not impossible that, although Caroline had clearly been killed instantly by a faulty smurf-trap, I might yet attract some small blame for my great delay in checking the cage. There would be those, the Principal perhaps, and possibly the girl’s parents, who might wonder whether she had not been fizzled straightway by electricity but had only been stunned, like a smurf, and could have been saved had I found her in time. I knew this argument to be hollow. Yet some might make it, and might not be dissuaded from it. My first thought was simply to walk away. But someone was sure to discover the bones here one day, perhaps years hence, and would yet blame me, knowing of my responsibility for checking the trap. No one would care about the smurf. I could leave his remains hanging in the tree. But the girl’s body would have to be disposed of. Inside the cage, I laid my bibliographer’s smock upon the ground and, after checking that the current had truly been disconnected, disassembled the skeleton and placed the bones upon the smock. It was sad work. I recalled her a little better, as I handled her remains – a charming girl with freckles and an enormous left hand, the components of which now fell asunder in my hands, like some mechanical object from which all the screws had been removed. I would have wept had I not been too manly. When it was done I tied up the smock and carried the melancholy package back to my rooms. Then I returned for the bicycle and Caroline’s bag, and reset the trap, determining to check it in future, if possible, a little more regularly. That evening I pushed the bicycle down to the banks of the Plumb and let it roll in. I pictured it joining the many other rusting, half-buried machines upon the river bed. Later, when it was dark, I carried Caroline’s bones and belongings to the Botanic Garden where I strewed them behind the Rafflesia. They would soon be found, and the natural assumption would be that the responsibility lay, indeed, with elephants.

M: I had held the ear trumpet of Death in my hands for eleven days, and was beginning to be able to control its awful power, albeit I still often undershot, or overshot, the place and period upon which I wished to eavesdrop. But it has struck me that the trumpet might possess a still more awesome and improbable power. Death must have used it to locate and hear the words of his … clients, those who were to receive his mercies, but he must also have been able to attend upon them, or at least reach out a bony hand to grasp them, by the same supernatural means. Could the trumpet in fact allow its holder not only to hear the music of any time or place, in this world or any other, but also to travel thither? If this was the case, how could such travel be achieved? I had examined the instrument carefully and had noticed that there was upon the socle, on the opposite side from Death’s monogram, a curious symbol, shaped like an hour-glass with wings and a crown. I had felt it before I had seen it, for it was engraved upon the surface and both smoothed by handling and covered over with a plexus of fine scratches, so that it was hardly visible. When I held the trumpet to my ear, my thumb naturally rested against this part of its socle and I felt there the many scores in its surface. An idea occurred to me. Was not the polishing and scratching-over of this device significant of long and regular abrasion, and was not the most likely source of that abrasion the skeletal thumb of the former owner of the instrument, who must have held it just as I have done, and scratched or rubbed at it with his thumb? 

I fitted the trumpet carefully to my ear and tried to clear my mind of all thoughts.

At once I heard the now-familiar noises of the trumpet in action. And after a few moments I heard a voice.

Medium: Quite so Mr Coppercock. The experience can be disconcerting. But you need not be afraid. The spirits are kindly and no one has, to my certain knowledge, ever come to harm at such a gathering … 

H: The mention of safety, and the cracked old English voice were re-assuring. I pressed firmly with my thumb upon the engraved device and began to rub.

At once I felt my body drawn, as it were, forward through a series of curtained openings, quite invisible but clearly sensed by my face and free hand. My vision remained for a moment where it had been, in my room at Timor Mortis, and then darkness descended. After a few moments my body stopped moving and some light, a very little light, returned. It had not been an unpleasant sensation at all. There had been only an impression of gentle, inexorable forward motion. I peered through the gloom and saw a candle set up in the middle of a round table with six chairs about it. Then I heard again the voice of the old woman.

Medium: This way ladies and gentlemen, take your places at the table …

H: She emerged from the gloom, a crone of some eighty years, very small and stooped, but stepping nimbly towards the table. She was dressed in a ragged black robe, with a black head-dress crowned with feathers. At her heels were three ladies and two gentlemen. They sat down nervously at the table. To judge by their attire the year was approximately 1880.

My experiment had worked. I had been transported to the very place and time I had heard through the trumpet. A series of terrible thoughts struck me. Was I visible? Could I remove the trumpet from my ear without dire consequences? How could I return to my point and period of origin? And then it struck me that I might appear to be the former owner of the trumpet and might even have his powers. Could I reach out and take one of these very real and living people to their grave? I immediately dismissed the last two thoughts from my mind. Surely Death’s powers must be derived from other sources than his ear-trumpet – that was just a means of finding and visiting his lucky quarry. And it then occurred to me that he would only be visible to that quarry, so that I was, in all probability, entirely invisible. It would make no sense for the removal of the trumpet from my earhole to have any effect, now that I was present in this time and place, so I removed the instrument, and placed it in the front pocket of my bibliographer’s smock. The only concern that remained to me was how to return to my own hour and place, and I had an inkling now about that too. Thus dismissing all these concerns from my mind I concentrated upon the drama, now for the first time visible as well as audible, that was unfolding before me.

Medium: I must ask for complete silence, please. Do not spook the spirits … Now, let us join hands … yes, that is good. The circle must remain unbroken while I communicate with the dead … now I must concentrate … ohhhhhhhhhhhhh …. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh … ohhhhhhhhhh is there anybody there? … Knock once for yes, and twice for no.  Is there anybody there?  So, that’s a no is it? Is that correct?  I am sorry, ladies and gentlemen, the séance is over. I am afraid there is nobody there … No refunds. Please make your way out and collect your hats from the hall-stand …  thank you … good night …

M: The séance was over, and the ladies and gentlemen glumly rose from the table and filed out of the darkened room. The medium leapt up from her chair and, with a haughty sniff, apparently directed at the absent spirits who had failed to visit her, scuttled after them. I was alone in that candle-lit room. It was time to try my return strategy. I fitted the trumpet to my ear, gripped it as before and, concentrating on the last image I had seen of my college room, I rubbed with my thumb on the engraved device. 

At once I was drawn again through those invisible curtains, into darkness and thence into the light of my study. I was back. There was the copy of Simon Bigbone’s Descriptive bibliography of the second impressions of the novels of Dan Brown, the latest monograph from the Bibliographical Society, where I had left it, open on the side-table beside a plate bearing a slice of fruitcake. And there was my beloved Doggerel, sleeping soundly on the hearthrug with a piece of black string lying between his forepaws …

Announcer: That was The adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer! This final chapter of volume I was sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of London and by Schicklegruber

Man in quad: It’s Gruberschickle!

Announcer: Creators of the best tomato ketchup imaginable. It was written and performed by Paul W. Nash.

Next time in The Adventures of Donald McQueen, Bibliographer. 
 

DM: This is Donald McQueen, Bibliographer, speaking. The first volume of my adventures is now complete in twelve fascicles and may be bought in all good bookshops for the very reasonable price of eight guineas, neatly bound in boards, or twelve guineas in extra boards. Some of my readers have told me that they were, indeed, extra bored, while others were induced to engage the services of an extra bawd. All my readers have met a cast of thousands – who can forget … well, I forget his name, but you know who I mean, that unforgettable chap. Many of the cast sounded oddly alike ... There is talk of a motion picture based upon the book. Some Hollywood film director, Stephen something, I forget the name, has bought the rights, and intends to come to Noxford to film the action on location. The part of Donald McQueen has been offered to Mr George Clooney, who will have to put on an English accent of course, and Starwheel has already been accepted by Sir Ian McKellen, who will not. There is talk of asking Mr Denzil Washington to assay Cornelius Bunce, but I fear he would be quite wrong for the part, which should go to an English actor of hideous aspect, ideally one missing a leg. I wonder if Mr Ben Kingsley would be willing to undergo an amputation …

The reader will perceive that some of the great questions raised in this volume of my adventures are yet unresolved, and there are many of my exploits which remain untold. Who will be the next President of the Bibliographical Society of London? How did the young Donald McQueen save a circus belle from a cage of ravening lions? How did he rescue fourteen African children, three pigmies and a chimpanzee from the jaws of an enormous Nile crocodile using only a single bootlace? What is the great tragedy of Minerva Columba, the sweet dove, a story for which the world is not yet ready? Will Starwheel McQueen ever be famous outside the sphere of advanced chemistry, or Cornelius Bunce be exposed as the scoundrel he surely is? Are there any ideas for plots, songs or sketches which I have not yet used? How was the Codex Assinorum printed, by whom and when … and where? For the answers to these, and many other, questions, the reader is requested to subscribe to the second volume of The adventures of Donald McQueen, bibliographer!, which will be duly published in parts, one day …