The Sprouts of Wrath

33

The grounds surrounding the house of Professor Slocombe had long been protected by an ancient spell which afforded the sage advance warning of all who entered there. Upon this night, as upon countless others past, he sat at his study desk, deep in thought. Before him was spread Ordnance Survey map TQ 17 NE, and upon this cartographical representation of the borough, the lines of the great Star Stadium were etched in green ink within the blued boundaries of the Brentford Triangle. The Professor worked tirelessly with compass and protractor as a long black automobile of advanced design and uncertain nationality drew to a silent halt beyond the walls of his domain. The liveried chauffeur stepped from the cab and opened the rear door, a handkerchief clasped across his face.

Professor Slocombe reached towards the tantalus and poured a single dry sherry. A slight tingling at the nape of his neck set his head on one side, but he shrugged it off and continued with his work. The unbearable stench which then soured his nostrils and the cold chill which swept up his backbone, set him bolt upright in his chair.

“Professor Slocombe,” came a harsh whisper, “am I not to be invited in?” The old man swung about with a gasp of surprise. “You appear startled,” said the figure who now stood in the french windows.

Professor Slocombe regained his composure with some difficulty. The fact that someone had actually slipped unfelt into his presence was sufficient to rattle him considerably. But the appearance of his uninvited guest was one to inspire horror.

He was of medium height, clad in a suit of dark stuff, but of his actual physiognomy, what could be seen was at all odds with all normality. The upper part of the head was covered by what appeared to be a plastic film, strung tightly to contain a mass of ugly folds and bulges. Across the eyes a complicated contraption served as an optical aid, with artificial eyelids which opened and closed at measured intervals. The mouth was hardly visible beneath a bulbous shapeless nose. “Calm yourself, Professor,” whispered the apparition. “I must apologize for my intrusion and also for my appearance. I am not pleasant to gaze upon, I know. Might I sit down, I have little strength?”

Professor Slocombe nodded, “Please do so, can l offer you anything?”

“No, no, do not trouble yourself, I have learned to … to live with my infirmity.” The intruder moved awkwardly, his legs seemed to bend in the wrong places, low at the ankles, high at the misshapen thighs. Whatever was contained within the folds of the dark suit was a human form far gone in disfiguring malady.

Professor Slocombe winced as the cripple lowered himself into a fireside chair; his every movement appeared to cause him excruciating pain. “You are in evident discomfort,” said the Professor. “Might I ask the nature of your illness? I have some skills in healing.”

“No, no,” the intruder raised a gloved hand, “you will not find it listed in any Encyclopedia Pharmacia, nor in any one of your extraordinary books.” He made an inclusive gesture towards the Professor’s vast collection of Thaumaturgical librams. “I am a scientist and a victim of my own experimentation.” Professor Slocombe raised an eyebrow; the invalid had much the look of one who had tampered with occult forces and become subject to the three-fold law of return, whereby an evil sending rebounds upon the magician thrice powerfully. “That, I can assure you, is not the case,” whispered the intruder, breaking in upon the thoughts of his unwilling host.

Professor Slocombe lowered a mental shield and watched in fascination as a shiver ran through the body of his guest.

“As you now understand, my infirmity has brought with it some compensations. They say that when one sense is lost the others become heightened. In my case I have lost almost all my senses. I now possess others that most men would fail to understand.”

“You are an unusual man, to say the very least.”

“I might well say the same about you.”

The Professor composed the fingers of his right hand into a curious grouping. “And now that we have exchanged these pleasantries, I suggest that you outline the purpose of your visit.”

“Quite so. But I surmise that during the brief moments of our acquaintanceship you have already surmised who I am, and suspect why I am here.”

“I believe that you are the organizer of the games, the designer of the stadium and the inventor of the improbable Gravitite.”

“Do I detect a note of chagrin in your pronunciation of the word ‘improbable’?”

“Who are you and what do you want?”

“My name is not important. For the sake of commerce, I am called Kaleton. Do not waste yourself trying to read into it, it was chosen at random. I am here upon what you might call a diplomatic mission to engender a peaceful co-existence between us.”

“‘As a thief in the night’,” said the Professor, quoting Scripture.

Ignoring this, Kaleton said simply, “I am dying.”

“You seek my help.”

“On the contrary, I seek only that you do not hinder me.”

“In dying?”

Kaleton’s mouth became a perfect “O” and an exhalation of rancid air escaped from it. Professor Slocombe, who had switched off his olfactory sense upon Kaleton’s entrance, sat back in his chair, fearing the spread of disease.

“The games,” said Kaleton, “the stadium and the games are to be my epitaph. I may not live to see them, but through them I will live for ever.”

“Posthumous fame for one who will not reveal his true name to the public, how can this be?”

“By their deeds shall you know them.”

“But at what expense?”

“Expense?”

“Deaths have already occurred, I believe you must answer for them.”

Sounds came from Kaleton’s mouth, sounds of coarse mocking laughter, “No one has died. Professor,” he crowed. “Are you too so easily fooled?”

“Not as easily as you might believe.”

“The creation of holographic images as a security system, guard dogs without teeth, without substance, conjured from the Ids of the trespassers. Effective, do you not think?”

“The chimera on the barge and the island griffin?”

“Advanced optical trickery, nothing more.”

“I think not, Kaleton.” Professor Slocombe reached beneath his desk and brought out Pooley’s present. “And this?”

“All right,” said Kaleton. “The creation of the stadium is too important to risk interruption from meddling ne’er-do-wells.”

“Quite simply, you are prepared to kill in order to protect your interests, your immortality.”

“Men die daily, men without vision, without worth. My genius will benefit generations to come.”

“Monomania. You are sick not only in body, but also in mind.”

“If you are not for me, then you are against me!”

“Then I am against you, in body and soul. I do not fully comprehend your true motives, but I suspect them to be anything other than beneficial to mankind. I request that you leave immediately.”

Kaleton climbed with difficulty to his feet and stood with his back to the Professor. “You are an annoyance,” said he, “I think perhaps I should be rid of you.”

“That might prove more difficult than you imagine.”

“You say that, knowing how simply I voided the spell of protection which surrounded your house.”

“You will not invade my privacy with such ease in the future, I can assure you.”

Kaleton’s head revolved slowly until it reached a point midway between his malformed shoulder-blades. “You have no future,” he said, in a voice which might have been one, or a chorus of many. “You are finished.”

“Leave now while you are still able.”

“I think not.” Kaleton’s mouth widened, became a gaping maw, devoid of teeth, gums or tongue. A torrent of icy wind swept from it, striking the Professor from his chair and blasting him against the wall. But the effect was momentary for the sage rose from behind his desk and stared defiantly at his attacker, words of an ancient formula upon his lips.

Above the study Jim Pooley reclined in rose-scented bath-water, a copy of the Lazlo Woodbine thriller Farewell my Window propped before him upon the bath-rack. “That Laz,” said Jim, “he slays me.”

In a house, not so very far away, John Omally lazed upon silken sheets, clad only in his boxer shorts. Before him, humming gently to herself, Jennifer Naylor shed her outer garments.

Kaleton raised a crooked hand to fend off the tongue of darting fire which leapt towards him. The flames froze into glassy splinters tinkling on to the Persian carpet to dissolve into nothingness. A look of perplexity crossed Professor Slocombe’s face as he summoned the powers that greater words commanded. Kaleton made a single gesture and the world which was the Professor’s study vanished, became a darkened sphere enclosing only himself and the magus. “There is no future,” whispered the crippled man, “not for you or any of your cohorts.”

Jennifer Naylor’s brassiere fell to the floor, exposing a pair of breasts most men could only dream of witnessing, first hand. Omally felt the mark of his manhood rising to meet the occasion as the rare beauty slipped her thumbs into her silken camiknickers and dropped them to her feet.

“Only you and I,” said Kaleton.

“Only you and I,” echoed Jennifer Naylor.

Professor Slocombe made a series of lightning passes with his old frail hands. Before him a wall of white chitin composed itself and behind the light returned, as a small opening, through which he stepped backwards with some alacrity. He was once more at his desk, but from within the dark sphere the wall of protection crumbled away and the image of Kaleton swam into view swelling ever larger. The black mouth spread encompassing all before it. “And so die,” came the chorus of a thousand voices which were also only one.

“And so die,” said Jennifer Naylor. Her left hand slid up behind her back, rose to the nape of her neck where it took hold of something which might have been a zip fastener. She drew it down the length of her naked spine.

Kaleton’s image bulged and grew, the mouth was a great black hole, all-consuming. A bottomless pit, into which all must surely fall. The Professor folded his arms across his chest and uttered the syllables of his final spell.

A great shock wave passed through the ether of humankind.

The outer shell, which had been the skin of the bogus Jennifer Naylor, dropped to the floor, a crumpled empty husk. Before Omally stood a group of elemental horrors supported one upon another in a writhing mass, which momentarily retained Jennifer’s shape before tumbling towards the boy in the boxer shorts.

“Hell’s teeth!” said John Omally, which was a close approximation.

The things swept towards him in a heaving, crying cacophony. Great bloated maggots with the heads of babies, beasts all spine and scorpion stings, bladders and entrails. Eyeless heads with one mouth set beneath another. A gross and fetid stench burned the air like fumes of acid. Omally flattened himself against the bedhead as the whirling, screaming nightmare engulfed him.

“Up and begone!” Professor Slocombe raised his arms and exerted the final issue of his strength, spoke the final syllable of the great spell. The black image wavered in intensity, crumpled in upon itself with a deafening explosion, re-gathered in a cluster of spinning fragments and finally flew upwards through the ceiling, an icy maelstrom of escaping energy.

“Aaaaaaaagh!” Jim Pooley howled in anguish as his bath-water froze into a solid block of ice.

In a room of unutterable blackness, Professor Slocombe collapsed unconscious to the floor.

In the bedroom of a house not so very far away, a thick green slime dripped down a silken sheet to mingle in a pool of human blood.

“Oh, help,” wailed a living iceberg in a marble bath. “Oh, bloody hell, help!”