I am honoured that Tod Davies has once again asked me to contribute, this time to Exterminating Angel Press’s ‘Weird Communities’ issue. Much as I would like to write about the village where I live I find that all the tales that spring to mind are too harrowing or bizarre for the gentle readers of EAP. It is also too soon after the unfortunate incident with the Belgian tourists at the Harvest Festival, so for the present the villagers are best left undisturbed, their lives unilluminated by my literary endeavours.
This story, however, both begins and ends in the village, so there is that weird-community theme, even if only in a minor key. I call this tale….
Ghosts In The Machine
The people who count in this world, the movers and shakers, know me, Hunt N. Peck, as the foremost Consulting General Specialist of our times. The people who count in this world are few in number, though, and often focussed upon matters of high import, so it often happens that my knowledge and skills are not called upon for periods of time, which leads ineluctably to a shortage of funds. So I was not overly surprised when I heard the heavy tread of my landlord’s steps upon the creaking stairs that lead up to my draughty garret room. My landlord, the Bosun as he is called, is a brutish oaf with a beard, and a drinker. He entered my sanctum sanctorum bearing a bottle, two glasses and a dour expression. He sat in the rickety chair on the other side of the rickety table, placed the glasses down, poured a measure into both and informed me that I was several months behind with the rent.
“I am mortified,” I said. “You do not trust me! As though I am a cheat or a fraud!” I would have said more, but he raised a hand and fixed me with a bloodshot eye.
“None of that taradiddle and foofaraw!” said he. “If you persist I shall depart forthwith, taking with me these two glasses and this bottle of ‘Braveheart’ allegedly-Scottish whisky, and then you will not only owe me the rent, you will not have a drink this night.”
He is an oaf and a drunk, but he is cunning, and he had checkmated me.
“Stay, kind Bosun, sir, I beg you!” I acknowledged defeat. “What would you have me do?”
He patted his paint-splattered dungarees for his pipe, eventually finding it tucked into the turn-up of his knitted watch-cap.
“It occurs to me,” he said, “that you may have need of renumerative employment.”
I nodded, and he slid a scrap of brown packing-paper across the table to me. On the paper, written in crayon, were the words ‘Professor Quulearque’, ‘agnostonymologist’ and a telephone number.
“It’s pronounced ‘Klurk’,” he said, before I could ask.
“That’s pretty weird,” I replied.
“No more weird than pronouncing ‘Featherstonehaugh’ as ‘Fanshaw’, ‘Cholmondeley’ as ‘Chumley’, ‘Carew’ as ‘Cary’ or ‘Mainwaring’ as ‘Mannering’,” said he. I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it again as he smirked at me. I thought for a moment or two.
“Agnostonymologist,” I said, “would seem to mean ‘a studier of unknown meanings’. From the Greek άγνωστος , meaning ‘unknown’.” I raised my glass and drained it in a challenging gesture. The cheap whisky burned my oesophagus and pyloric sphincter like napalm, and my eyes misted with tears.
“You pass the test, oh seeker after truth!” said the bearded oaf, stuffing his pipe with tobacco. “Indeed, you nearly have it. An agnostonymologist is a specialist in words whose meaning has been lost. Words possessing a palpable shell of sound, but which are empty of the meat of significance. Professor Quulearque has urgent need of an expert agnostonymologist and will pay well.” He downed his Scotch with no apparent ill-effects and refilled the glasses.
"You know I am a general specialist," I protested, "Professor Kluck requires a specialised specialist, and what do I know of these words of unknown meaning?"
"Nonetheless," said the Bosun, "a general specialist may surely generalise about a speciality, upon occasion. Furthermore, if a word has an unknown meaning then who does know anything about it? Indeed, you are better qualified than many, since most of what you say lacks meaning. And you need the readies, do you not? Phone the fellow in the morning."
I considered this, sipping the vile whisky. My landlord made a strong case.
"Tell me more," I said. "How did you meet this Professor Klank?"
"The poor fellow harbours the delusion that he is a yachtsman, or some kind of sailor," said my landlord, who imagines himself to be saltier than Popeye. "I am working on his boat down at the yard – a nasty plastic thing hardly better than an overgrown bathtub – and this came up in conversation. The Professor is employed on some obscure research at the University of Bumbleside, across the water. Now you know as much as I do."
What could I lose? Only the cost of a phone call. I assured the bearded oaf that I would do as he bid, and the conversation meandered off into other channels; the wickedness of politicians, the sinful price of second-hand motorcycle parts, the sad lack of skill, intelligence and manhood in the England cricket team, that sort of thing. I remember that the Scotch was finished surprisingly quickly, and that its toxic effects on my brain led me to uncork a bottle of 'Le Petomane' allegedly-French brandy, which I had been saving for an emergency.
In consequence, I was feeling a little shaky when I phoned Professor Quulearque the following morning. After a brief verbal combat with the Professor's secretary, a Miss Pikestaff, I was put through to the man himself.
"By all means! Come and see me!" he crowed, full of cheery bonhomie, and made an appointment for that afternoon. I was encouraged by his amiability. Academics talk a great deal of guff about the 'quest for truth' and suchlike, but what really floats their boat is grant money; he must have the scent of rich pickings in his nostrils to be so pleasant to a complete stranger. This may be an opportunity, I thought.
After some disagreements with my ancient motorcycle, which resisted starting and required two battery boosts and a squirt of diesel cold-start in its carbs before it would condescend to carry me, I hurtled across the ramshackle Bumble Bridge to my appointment with destiny.
Professor Quulearque was a man with a head like an egg. Two tufts of hair sprouted above his ears, giving him the look of a character from a Don Martin cartoon. We sat in his office and he perused my curriculum vitae, which I confess I had composed especially for him that morning on my landlord's computer. The old Bela Kun Gymnasium in Budapest, my alma mater, is now named the Admiral Horthy Institute, and the lessons in stripping assault-rifles blindfolded and in how to detect revisionism in one's friends and neighbours have been replaced by tennis and art appreciation, so I was unlikely to be rumbled for awarding myself the medal for mathematics in 1968. Neither would Professor Quulearque be likely to notice that my Harvard degree was from the Harvard Bible College in Flat Plain, Nebraska. I had also given myself a Master's in Persian literature from the Tehran Polytechnical College, but as I had learned Farsi at my dear old mother's breast and Arabic at the Wee Folks' Madrassa in Qom I felt confident that I could bluff my way through if challenged.
"Why, this is indeed fine!" chuckled the Professor. "You are almost perfect for the job! What is your experience of agnostonymological research?"
"I have little experience of agnostonymology, to be truthful," I said, "I have mainly been involved with agnostolexicography. That required an understanding of agnostonymology, of course, but I cannot call myself an expert." One mustn't seem to be too perfect, and I was being truthful; the sum total of my knowledge came from a half-hour of Googling on my landlord's computer whilst composing my fine curriculum vitae.
" Agnostolexicography, eh?" said the Professor, waggling his eyebrows. "That might indeed be useful. We must of course collate and organise the agnostonyms before commencing any analyses, and that will give you a breathing-space to bone up on the subject."
Bingo. I had the job. It took Professor Quulearque about another hour of waffling before he actually asked me if I wanted it, but that was useful as I learned something about the project. There was indeed a large sum of grant money on offer. The eccentric computer-billionaire Bill Doors – he of the DoorsTM software that resides in the computers of every chartered quantity-surveyor in the Western hemisphere – had recently acquired a codex, an ancient book of hand-written vellum pages. This tome was believed to be the work of John Dee, the astronomer, alchemist and sorcerer at the court of good Queen Bess. It was written in apparently-nonsensical gobbledegook for the most part, and the Open Doors Foundation had a big pile of money for anybody who could translate it. Professor Quulearque's department performed textual analysis of ancient writings with computers, and so was well-placed to scoop up the boodle. Adding an agnostonymologist to the team might clinch the deal. Would I take the job? I simpered a little, and accepted. You bet I did, this one was a doozy, money for old rope.
Professor Quulearque shook my hand and welcomed me onto the team. How big was the team? I queried. Just the two of us and the secretary for now. Could I start on Monday?
The few months that followed were a happy time for me. The work was interesting, and I even became a little enchanted by the romance of words of unknown meanings, where every one is a mystery hidden in a riddle and wrapped in an enigma (to paraphrase Churchill). I quickly made myself familiar with state-of-the-art cutting-edge agnostonymological research. This was not unduly hard, as it amounted to 'we don't know what these words mean, but we've invented a complex jargon to both express and conceal our ignorance'. Easy, you see? Interestingly, I found that agnostonymologists had coined a number of new words that would surely, in the fullness of time, become new agnostonyms. I found this pleasing, a form of etymological perpetual motion. The pay wasn't princely, but I paid off my back rent and fixed up my old warhorse of a motorcycle. I even bought insurance and road-tax to make it street-legal, and there's extravagance for you. I bought the bearded oaf a bottle of half-decent Scotch, to reward him for putting me on to the job.
Professor Quulearque wasn't a bad fellow to work for, really. He had some foul habits, mind you. As well as his belief that he was a skilled yachtsman, which was mainly expressed by wearing yellow oilskins to bicycle to work, he was also a devotee of Morris dancing and a dedicated fan of Monty Python. Once, for the sake of keeping him sweet, I attended a public house on a Sunday lunchtime and watched him and his pals prance about like fools, waving handkerchiefs about and jingling the little bells on their knees. Luckily the pub sold a murky-yellow cider that had an effect like benzodiazepam, otherwise I might have gone mad. Most of the time he was tolerable, though.
One day I returned from lunch to find Professor Quulearque dancing a jig in his office, thankfully without bells on his knees. The Open Doors Foundation had given him the deal! I thought that I would have to slap him, he was so giddy with joy.
Things picked up speed after that. The money gurgled into the project's coffers, and the University of Bumbleside took note of its new golden boy. A large cubical concrete building in the university grounds, formerly an engineering department, was converted to offices and the workshop area on the ground floor filled with computers in all of the shades of taupe, oatmeal and grey. A nerdy youth was added to the team to make the number-crunchers crunch the numbers. Professor Quulearque graciously gave up his tiny room in the university main building to a junior lecturer in runes and hieroglyphs and took up residence in his new domain. He allocated himself a large corner office on the top floor, with a big desk and a black-leather swivelling chair. Doctor Toothill, the nerdy youth, got a technician, a surly galoot called Fred. Professor Quulearque replaced Miss Pikestaff, his old battleaxe of a secretary, with a young blonde woman with large breasts. After a month of mis-spelled typing and lost files he replaced the busty young blonde with another old battleaxe, a Miss Halberd. Fred unrolled miles of coloured cables all over the place, Miss Halberd typed and filed, Doctor Toothill wrote code in arcane programming languages, Professor Quulearque made important-sounding phone calls to 'the Foundation', I lurked around, and that old concrete blockhouse started to hum with purpose as the smell of new paint faded.
I introduced myself to Doctor Toothill as soon as I could, of course.
"Call me Toots," he said. "You’re the agno-whatever. Pleased to meet you." He gestured to a chair and I sat down. He was a plump little chap with the unhealthy pallor of the midnight programmer, his pasty skin and spots evidence of a diet of pizzas and cola. I shook his proffered hand, which was like a rubber glove full of cold porridge. After a few pleasantries, I waved a hand at the electronics and asked him for a quick briefing. He proudly showed me around, while Fred the surly technician wrestled with skeins of cables in the background.
"… and this is the Ultratronics Matriculator X13. A lovely piece of kit!" Toots was saying.
We regarded a grey cabinet with twinkling LEDs, then I steered Doc Toots back to his desk.
"The hardware tells me little, amazing though it is," I told him. "Give me the low-down, the dope, the skinny, the inside story, Toots old chum."
Doctor Toothill was one of those people for whom the flow of time is continuous and indivisible, and who consequently cannot begin an explanation at a reasonable point. He must reprise his whole career before telling me what I needed to know. He had taken his degree in biology, he told me, but had become fascinated by genetics, getting his doctorate for work on the DNA of worms. I smiled encouragingly, and resisted the urge to tell him to get to the point. I should be grateful that he hadn't started with his birth, or even with his great-great-grandfather's. He continued by explaining that we get our DNA from our parents, and that we usually acquire our language from the same source: our mother-tongues. Mathematical techniques for analysing DNA can, in consequence, be easily adapted to analyse language. All life on Earth is descended from an ancestral cell, and similarly all languages have developed from an original language, a first language. By working backwards from known languages the structure, syntax and even some words of this first language can be deduced, and this information can be used to reconstruct words, or even whole languages, which have been lost or forgotten. This approach, based on genetic algorithms, had been very successful, allowing researchers to untangle the knotted braid of native American languages, a notoriously difficult branch of linguistics made more difficult by the fact that the last speakers of many of the native American languages had passed away long before the tape-recorder had been invented (presumably with the assistance of Colonel Cody or Liver-eatin' Johnson). Doc Toots continued by explaining that DNA often contains the evidence of past events. Indeed, Darwinistic evolution being the mechanism, one could say that DNA is entirely constructed of the evidence of past events. And so, in similar fashion, for languages. These 'cognate points' gave pegs, so to speak, upon which the reconstruction of a language could be hung.
"And the computers?" I prompted him.
"Why, they are the key!" he cried. "The fine Matriculator X13, for example, is an 'array processor' which allows matrices – multi-dimensional grids – to be set up. We enter cognates into a matrix in the same way that numbers are filled into a spreadsheet, then we muck around with them. If two words have identical lingual cognate matrices – LGMs – then they are identical in meaning. If words have similar, or related, LGMs then they are similar, or related, in meaning. This works even if the meanings of those words are not known!"
This gave me pause for thought; I'd only just got this nice easy job, and this geek is trying to replace me with a computer. I should have to keep an eye on him.
"Anyway, Hunt, how do you see yourself fitting into this project?" The geek was out to get me already.
"I am an agnostolexicographer," I replied, "and so I have been perusing the preliminary scans of the Dee Codex, identifying the unknown words – we call them 'agnostonyms' you know – and collating them into ordered lists."
"What, in alphabetical order?" he jested.
"There's more to it than that!" I said. There wasn't, but he didn't know that. I smiled to show that I took no offence.
"More how?" said Doc Toots. He was beginning to worry me.
"Well, there are agnostonyms in the Dee Codex – 'schorlixulum', for example – but there are also words whose meaning is merely obscure, like 'attacop'. The two need to be discriminated and separated, and this is not a job for a mere clerk. Tedious? Indeed, yes, but not work for a trained monkey." Put that in your pipe and smoke it, nerdy boy.
"Attacop?" he said, "what does that mean, then?"
"Spider," I replied, rising to go before he could question me further.
Several days later the actual Dee Codex itself was delivered to us by a security van with helmetted guards. Professor Quulearque allowed Doctor Toothill and myself to gaze upon it. It was a scuffed brown book about the size of an average Bible.
"Actually it's not a codex," said the Professor Quulearque. "A codex is, by strict definition, a scroll that has been cut into pages and bound into a book. Rich collectors call just about any old book a codex, though, as it sounds more swanky. Now take note that the Open Door Foundation want, demand, tight security. Mr Doors has no wish to share credit or to have anybody else translate it first. I've had to buy a safe," he indicated a squat cube in the corner of his office, "and it shall remain in there unless it is being examined. Under no circumstances is it to be left alone with only one person, either. They are so paranoid that they erased the preliminary scans of the pages from their own computers, so that the only copies are the back-up disks in the safe and the ones you've got, Hunt. If anything leaks it's our fault and Mr Doors will kill us all slowly but painfully with lawyers and torts. Understand?"
Doctor Toothill and I nodded, and Professor Quulearque, wearing white cotton gloves, wrapped the Dee Codex in a soft cloth, placed it in a wooden chest and locked it inside the safe.
As we left the Professor's office Doc Toots touched my arm.
"I have something to show you," he said, "come to the lab." He had taken to calling the ground floor 'the lab', but it was still unmistakably an old engineering workshop, just with fresh eau-de-nil paint on the walls and lots of computers where the machine-tools used to stand. At his desk he showed me some charts and numbers on the computer screen.
"It was your obscure word 'attacop' that got me thinking about this," he said. "There's more of them. Like 'moldweorp', 'porpentine' and 'jasper'."
"Yup, indeed there are, Toots. They're animals; 'moldweorp' means 'mole', 'porpentine' means 'hedgehog' and 'jasper' means 'wasp'. I'm guessing the last is an animal, because otherwise it's a green mineral."
"You are not wrong," said Doc Toots. "See here, the LGMs all show that similarity…" He indicated one of the graphs on the screen. "… so, in context, the meaning of 'jasper' is definitely an animal, and therefore a wasp. There's some other stuff there that I can't fathom, though. Some other similarities that I can't quite work out. Have you noticed that each of them only appears in its own section of the text? Like they were descriptions of animals in an encyclopaedia or something?"
"Yes, I have. The sections are at the back of the codex, each separate, and each containing the name of one animal repeated several times in amongst the gobbledegook. I don't think they are encyclopaedia bits, though. Hang on and I'll demonstrate." I searched through my pockets until I found a sheet of paper and gave it to Doc Toots.
"This is the transcript of the bit with 'moldweorp' in it," I said. "Read it out loud."
Doctor Toothill started to read the nonsense words in a flat voice, but the strange rhythm in the sounds came through and he couldn't help but inflect the words:
"Garble-barble bunki-boogle! Hunkle-bunkle snorkle-porkle! MOLDWEORP! MOLDWEORP! Fartle-tartle whingey-woogy! Humpa-chumpa norgle-noogle! MOLDWEORP! MOLDWEORP! Phnumty-gedumpty …"
He was almost shouting now, so I hushed him. He looked quite taken aback.
"Wow!" he said, "That's got a beat that shakes the street!"
"Would you not say that was more like a poem? Or a song? Or perhaps a prayer? Or even an incantation?" I smiled at him, raising an eyebrow.
"Good Lord, Hunt! You may have something there!"
"Not all things can be solved by computers, Toots, me old son. Sometimes the disordered human mind of the poet is needed." I took the sheet of paper from his hand and put it back in my pocket. "Security!" I said, tapping my nose, and wandered off to my tiny office for a cup of Earl Grey tea and a chocolate biscuit.
Several days passed until Doctor Toothill spoke to me again. He seemed to be absorbed with his computing engines, but then he came into my small office.
"You may be right about the animally bits," he said. "They could all be incantations. The LGMs seem to suggest they are similar and distinct from the rest of the writings in the codex. Thanks for the tip."
The last sentence had caused him pain, for, like all computer geeks, he believed himself to be infallible, and hated giving credit to anybody else. I knew he had been thinking about the tight security, which meant that I had become the de facto custodian of the transcribed codex pages, so he had to be nice to me. Ah, the academic life! I acknowledged this victory magnanimously.
"Think nothing of it, Toots me old darling. I merely pointed the way, it was you and your computers that broke the trail. We are a team."
The next day we had a progress meeting in Professor Quulearque's office, and Doctor Toothill told him the incantation theory. The Professor was quite taken with it, as it fitted with what was known of John Dee's career.
"The guys doing the forensic stuff say the codex is genuine," he said. "The age of the ink and the pages is right. They did genetics, too, and the vellum is mostly from a breed of cattle common in Bohemia, with a few pages from Angus cattle. This accords with Dee's peregrinations; he starts writing it in England on Scottish vellum, moves to Prague and continues on Bohemian vellum, it's left behind when he leaves Prague in about 1589, and then the codex turns up in the monastery in Brno after the Second World War. We know that Dee was obsessed with thaumaturgy before and during his Bohemia period, but that he lost his enthusiasm after Edward Kelley persuaded him that wife-swapping would please the Archangel Uriel – what a crook that Kelley was! – So Dee collects incantations in a strange language in the codex, but then leaves the codex behind, abandons it because he no longer believes in magic. It seems to fit. Incantations! We must be careful! Ho-ho-ho! Who knows what we might call up!"
Doc Toots and I laughed politely.
"That shouldn't be a problem unless we succeed," I said, going with the joke. "An incantation is not a password, but more of a contract. The words 'open sesame!' are like a PIN number, they work for anybody, but an incantation is more like 'I'll do this if you'll do that' so it cannot work without an understanding of the fine print."
"Devils, imps and demons are not such honest characters, surely?" laughed Doctor Toothill. "If they could get your signature, like a dodgy double-glazing salesman, they'd hold you to the deal, I reckon!"
"No, Hunt is right," said the Prof. "In almost all folk-tales and legends supernatural creatures are represented as punctilious about the rules when dealing with mortals, as though there was some kind of bunco squad in Fairyland."
"The Faerie Fraud Squad!" cried Doc Toots, "or perhaps a consumer-protection outfit … the Office of Fairy Trading!"
We all chuckled, shaking our heads.
"By the way, Hunt," Doc Toots said, "I ran some more tests on your obscure animal words. Very interesting! It pretty much confirmed the 'animal' cognates, but there was more there. There was a lot of matching in the cognition vectors and matrix eigenvalues…" I nodded wisely, to show that I understood, despite the big words. "… and the similarities seem to be 'first of', or 'king of', or 'archetypical', or 'spirit of', something like that. That make sense to you?"
"Um, might do," I said, frowning, "if they are incantations they could be addressed to some animal spirit 'Oh, Great Boss Mole! Please don't bugger our croquet lawn!' That sort of thing."
"This is getting interesting!" said Doc Toots. "We're really getting somewhere! I need more power, though. The set-up's straining a bit at this sort of analysis. It's all 'what if this?' and 'what if that?' but multiplied-up the deeper you go. It gobbles up memory and core-time like a mad gannet."
I tuned-out of the discussion that followed, which was all about the cost of electronical widgets and the consequent strain on economical budgets. I sipped my coffee and thought about the eerie desert north-east of Tehran, where the wind kicks up dust-devils that the locals call djinns. Do they have a code of conduct? I wondered.
The following week I found Professor Quulearque and Doctor Toothill in the 'lab' admiring a new piece of electronical wizardry. I knew straight away that it was an important and costly piece of kit as it was not painted in a shade of grey but in a vibrant shade of teal, the dark blue-green colour beloved by women of a certain age for cosy winter jackets. Only very new and advanced computers are coloured teal; you usually find such things only in a nuclear-physics laboratory, in a black-projects skunk-works or in a film studio's special-effects department.
"Heh-heh! Look at this!" chuckled Doc Toots. "A Mofocorp Quantatlas-8! This baby is smarter than I am, ho-ho!"
"Better than the Matriculator X13?" I asked.
"That old clunker! Pshaw! This is the biz, the full monty! The old X13 will be feeding it, which is all it is fit to do." Doc Toots was in geek heaven.
"How then is it better?" I asked him.
"They are not even in the same league. The old X13 sets up the matrices and grinds its way through them, but this is a quantum computer! The 'what-ifs' that I mentioned are crunched one at a time in the old X13, but in the Quantatlas-8 they are all crunched at the same time, exploiting the phenomenon of quantum state-superimposition! A huge increase in speed and power! When this baby is hooked up we will see results in hours, not weeks."
That evening, as I was leaving, Professor Quulearque and Doctor Toothill were in a fine state of enthusiasm. The Mofocorp Quantatlas-8 was now connected up to the 'old clunker' Matriculator X13 and had 'run benchmarks', whatever they are. They were preparing to do an analysis on the obscure-animal-word sections of the Dee Codex.
"This is just so exciting!" burbled Professor Quulearque. "Won't you stay and wait for the results? There may be something in a couple of hours."
"My dear Professor," I said, "I would love to, but alas I have an appointment which cannot be broken. Also, 'a watched pot never boils', as the old wives say, and too many watchers may slow down even a Mofocorp Quantatlas-8, ha-ha!"
I bid them goodnight, booted-up my old warhorse motorcycle and rode off across the Bumble Bridge to my unbreakable appointment with a steak-and-kidney pie, chips, peas and gravy at the Autochthonic Arms, followed by a game of pool with the Bosun and several pints of draught cider.
The next morning was bright and clear, and my hung-over head was fuzzy, but not too painful. After a shower and some breakfast I felt ready for the world and headed off to the University of Bumbleside. As I crossed the bridge I wondered if the Prof and the Doc had got some results, or if even the mighty Mofocorp Quantatlas-8 had proved inadequate to the task.
After parking my 'bike I walked to the concrete blockhouse. There were police cars and ambulances there. I felt a deep sense of foreboding, but cop cars will do that to me every time. I suppressed my natural instinct to scarper, and ran instead to the front door, arriving just in time to see Doctor Toothill being brought out on a gurney. His eyes were closed, and his skin, normally pale, was an ugly shade of light blue. I noticed a wound on his neck under his ear. As the paramedics spun the gurney round to fold its wheels and slide it into the ambulance I saw another wound on the other side of his neck under the other ear. It was oozing a greenish substance.
"And who might you be?" an aggressive voice challenged. It was a police detective.
"Hunt N. Peck," I said, "I work here."
The detective was going to speak again, but a commotion interrupted him. Two male nurses were carrying Professor Quulearque out of the front door. He was trussed-up in a canvas strait-jacket and his feet were bound together with a padded rope. The nurses were built like rugby internationals, but they were struggling; if they'd let go of the Professor he would have pogo'd over the ambulance like a giant flea, he was thrashing about so much. He was alternately screaming the same phrase over and over and howling with insane laughter. His hands were bandaged and his flushed face was pocked with small puncture marks. His tufts of hair were standing on end and his blue eyes were as round and bulging as fish-eyes. Two of his front teeth were broken off to bloody stumps.
"Ha-ha-ha-ha! It was SPINY NORMAN! Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee! It was SPINY NORMAN! Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!" he shrieked.
I stared at him in fascinated horror.
"I'm afraid, Mr Peck, that you must go with this constable until I can question you," said the detective, and the constable led me away to an empty classroom in the main building. I noticed surly Fred the technician and Miss Halberd sequestered in the adjoining rooms. My mind was a whirl. What had happened here?
The Old Bill kept me and the others in the classrooms all morning, watched by a constable, although I did persuade them to bring us some tea and biscuits. I was questioned by the detective in the early afternoon.
"Detective-Sergeant Ronald Gubbins, commencing interview with Mr Hunter Nasruddin Peck, on university premises at 13.05, Thursday, 12th June. He has declined to have a lawyer present,” the policeman muttered into the recorder. He looked tired.
"What the hell is going on?" I asked him. I needed to know, and the gavvers are always suspicious of anybody who is too cooperative.
"I was hoping that you could tell me," said DS Gubbins, "but since I have already had your place of residence searched – yes, we did have a warrant – and since both the landlord of the Autochthonic Arms and the landlord of your digs say you were on the lash all last night and went home nearly incapable, you are already pretty much eliminated from our enquiries."
He asked me plenty of questions, nevertheless. He looked like a typical copper in his creased grey suit and sensible I-can-run-in-these shoes, but he was meticulous and sharp. He pushed the interview form to me and I signed it, then he wearily told me I was free to go. I stayed sitting.
"What happened?" I said again. DS Gubbins rubbed his face and sighed.
"Since the book, whatever it is, is reckoned valuable, and since it was initially missing, I first proceeded on the basis that there was a criminal conspiracy, and that the thieves had fallen out, as thieves will do. However, it transpires that Professor Quulearque has in fact eaten the book, so my assumption is that he has had a mental collapse."
"What about Toots? Doctor Toothill?" I asked.
"I am afraid that Doctor Toothill was dead on arrival at the hospital."
"That's awful! Poor old Toots! Are you saying Professor Quulearque killed him? That's ridiculous!"
"It seems to be the only rational explanation. Professor Quulearque went crazy, stabbed Doctor Toothill twice in the neck, perhaps with a poisoned blade. Doctor Toothill fought back with some pointed object – which we have not yet located – giving Professor Quulearque extensive puncture-wounds to his face and hands. Then the Professor ate the book and destroyed all the computers, even dismantling them so that he could smash the disk-drives with a sledgehammer. He was found raving this morning by Miss Halberd, who phoned us straight away. She's a right old battleaxe, isn't she?"
We regarded each other across the desk.
"Come with me," said DS Gubbins, "I have something else to show you."
He led me to the university's sports fields and pointed.
"There, in the middle of the croquet lawn."
A huge mound of earth had been pushed up in the middle of the croquet lawn. The groundskeepers would be furious.
"It looks like an enormous mole-hill," I said.
"Indeed," said DC Gubbins, "and do you know anything about it?"
"I am as bewildered as you are," I said, not wishing to get any more involved than I already was.
"Um," said DC Gubbins, giving me a considering look, "in that case I have no further need to question you, and you may go. See you at the inquest."
"What will happen to Professor Quulearque?"
"The quacks say he will never stand trial, so I would guess that he will go to the St Badger's loony-bin, near your own village. At least until he stops shrieking, anyway," said the copper, and then walked away.
And that was how it was. The inquest found that Doctor Toothill had died from two blows to the neck from a poisoned sharp instrument, although even the medical examiner joked that it looked like a bite from a giant spider, ha-ha! just my little jest, Your Honour! Pathologists are often people with a macabre sense of humour, I've found. The newspapers took little notice, the story being pushed off the front pages by reports of sightings of an enormous wasp, with a blurred cell-phone photo. The University of Bumbleside terminated my contract with three-month's pay in lieu of notice. I made vague threats to sue them for exposing me to psychological trauma and they settled out-of-court for a moderate but useful sum. They no longer have a croquet lawn, though. The ruined greensward is now the Doctor Gascoigne Toothill Memorial Flower Garden, which is nice.
Professor Dinsdale Quulearque was committed to the St Badger's Institute for the Mentally Incontinent, and there he still remains. On a quiet night, as I sit in my garret room and drink whisky with the bearded oafish Bosun, I can hear the sounds of the madmen in the 'old asylum on the hill' carried faintly on the breeze, and I know that Professor Dinsdale Quulearque is now one of that chorus as he howls:
"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! It was SPINY NORMAN! Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!"
And so, you see, the story ends as it started, in the village.
One last thing, though. If you've guessed the long-forgotten true meanings of the words 'attacop', 'moldweorp', 'porpentine' and 'jasper' then it's probably for the best if you don't speak them out loud. Actually, it's probably far better if you don't even think them, especially if you value your life, your sanity and your lawn.