* unspeakable desolation pouring down from the stars *
CHAPTER NINE
I AWOKE FROM UNEASY dreams to find myself manacled to the bench of a gig, bumping and clattering through the misty morning along a dirt road, pulled by a couple of decidedly inelegant horses. I blinked a few times. The gig's driver had his back to me: it was broad and somehow forbidding. Every few minutes, he lashed at the horses in a lackadaisical and hopeless manner. Peering around, I saw that I was not alone: I had three companions, each of whom was similarly fettered. Two were still asleep, slumped on the bench with nodding heads. The one furthest from me, however, was awake, but seemingly dead to her surroundings. Her eyes were swivelling in their sockets, and she was humming a hymn-tune.
"Hello," I said thickly, but she made no response. I tried again, louder.
"Quiet back there!" yelled the coachman, without looking round. I ignored his command, and shouted over to him to ask where I was and what on earth was happening.
"Shut your gob!" he snapped, by way of reply.
"Now look here," I countered, with what Mr Poxhaven would have called the arrogance spawned by privilege, "I demand that you tell me what is going on!"
"And I demand that you shut your mouth!" shouted the coachman, and this time he turned his head slightly towards me, and so terrifying was his countenance that I decided to do just what he said. Fearful and furious, I clammed up.
We juddered onward through ever more impenetrable mists until the person next to me suddenly gagged and choked himself awake. I gave him twenty seconds or so to come to his senses, then, whispering into his ear, put to him the same question I had tried out on the frightful coachman. After a minute or so of coughing and spluttering, my neighbour gradually apprised me of my fate.
"You're new, aren't you?", he said quietly, "I don't remember seeing you before, anyway. Don't worry, it's not as bad as it seems. Today's Thursday, isn't it? Mm, cakes and soup. I like Thursdays. Saturdays are good, too, those are our rest-days. We're usually put in a barn, and given buns. It's not so bad." He lapsed into silence: you can imagine the tone of my prompting.
"You want to know where you are?" he whispered, " Difficult to say, it's so misty."
"What I want to know," I said, at last phrasing my question correctly, "Is why on earth I'm manacled to a bench on a gig, being carted to god knows where. Tell me that!"
The coachman let out a blood-curdling cry, but whether it was intended for me or for the horses I do not know.
"Oh, I see," replied my neighbour, "They haven't told you yet? Well: you've been press-ganged into the service of the Hooting Yard Bell-Ringing Society. From this day on, you've become an itinerant bell-ringer. You'll be dragged from belfry to belfry up and down the land to ring the blasphemous and illegal Hooting Yard clarion. No one in their right mind would do it. That's why they drugged you and put you in chains. The rest of us here are still just about sane, and therefore capable of escape. Give it another few months and we'll have been driven completely gaga, and we'll do the job willingly. I can already feel myself going over the edge. It's odd, you know, but I think I'd stay put here even if they removed the manacles. But they have to be sure. I've probably still got a tiny sliver of sense in my head, so they can't risk letting me loose just yet. Oh look, the fog is lifting."
It certainly was. Within seconds, the mist dissolved and the light of a glorious bronze sun came battering down on us. At the same moment, the coachman brought the gig to a halt. We had arrived at the gates of a country churchyard. The sleepers awoke, and were introduced to me by my neighbour: Mat and Nat, they were called, and he himself, by the by, was Bam. Ever cautious, I gave another anagram of my name.
The coachman unbolted us from the bench and led us through the iron gates into the churchyard, where he produced a flask of boiling hot soup for us to share. Ordering us to stay put and keep quiet, he strode off towards the bell-tower and proceeded to fiddle at its lock with an enormous bunch of skeleton keys. Now was the time to flee. I looked at my companions questioningly, but they were too busy guzzling soup to take any notice of my preposterous facial contortions. Should I make a run for it on my own? I was not decisive enough. I was still weighing up my options when the coachman beckoned us over, having opened the massive oak door with the sixth of his innumerable keys. He shooed us into the bell-tower, dragged the door shut behind him, and stood guard at it, his arms akimbo and his eyes bespeaking ferocious horrors.
I had never before entered a belfry, and stood there incomprehending before an array of dangling ropes. Mat and Nat and Bam were all busy rubbing their hands with chalk-dust and moving about the place with practised determination, flexing their arms, huffing and puffing, and taking up positions at the ropes. Bam, all avuncular, steered me next to him and muttered something about keeping a grip on the tail-end and releasing the sally at his signal.
"What?" I said, rather rudely.
The coachman lunged forward and dealt me a crack on the skull, then retreated back to the door without a murmur.
"Listen carefully," said Bam, "I'll try to make it easy for you. Grab hold of the sally with both hands, as high up as you can. When I kick you on the shin, pull it down, and release it at waist height - but don't let go of the tail-end! Keep hold of the rope until it's right up above your head, pull it down again, and catch the sally when it's right in front of your face. Got that?"
It was admirably helpful, but I was completely in the dark.
"What," I whispered, "is the sally?"
"Doh!" exploded Bam. "Look, boy! See this rope? It is made of three or four strands of Italian hemp. The sally is the woollen tufting woven into it at head height. The tail-end is also tufted. Why? So you do not chafe your hands."
The coachman roared at us to begin. Mat and Nat and Bam smirked at each other and pulled on their ropes, setting in motion a terrible cacophany which went on for, oh, two hours. Every now and then Bam launched a kick at my shin, and I did my best, I did my best. But I kept being distracted by the sight of the coachman, who spent the whole time fending off a stream of villagers who were trying to beat their way into the belfry to stop our racket. I was fascinated by his weapon. It was a sort of advanced catapult device, and he fired from it projectiles of jam and molasses, aiming, with incredible accuracy, for the eyes of his attackers, who cowered away, temporarily blinded and probably quite nauseous.
It was a scene I was to see repeated virtually every day for the next four months. My ears gradually became accustomed to the clangour; my shin needed less prompting kicks as time went on; but my brain was ever more dizened by the insane noises I was being forced to produce. Six weeks after my abduction, Bam, as he had prophesied, went off his head: he no longer needed to be manacled. Indeed, he was so enthusiastic that during our journeys on the gig he sat up next to the coachman, babbling incoherently about biscuits, frost and tungsten. Like me, Mat and Nat were still partly sane: our teeth were still set on edge by the Hooting Yard clarion, however skilful we had become as bell-ringers.
Every day, except Saturday, was the same. After driving ourselves, and some poor hamlet, crackers with our clarion, we would pile back on to the gig and trundle off until we found a pleasant picnic site. The provenance of our luncheons remains a mystery to me: without fail, the coachman - whose name I never learned - would produce a hamper packed to the brim with black puddings, water biscuits, mustard buns, syrup, meringues, vinegar patties, cucumber pie, Icelandic porridge, cheese-crusts, stodge, gin, fishpaste, bananas, aniseed chippings, marmalade and blood oranges. How heartily we feasted, as gales assailed us and rain poured down! We had the use of a goodly tarpaulin to protect us from the weather, and Mat gladly shared with us her rug, on which we would squat, huddled close together round the little camping-stove, our ears by now recovering from the morning's maniac ringing, our brains less fuddled, and our manacles removed, though the coachman sat nearby under a tree, scoffing his swordfish cake and cradling the fearsome catapult in his bony, bony hands. After we had washed our crockery in a stream or brook, we dozed. Then it was time for the brain scans. The coachman placed his copper cone upon our heads, one by one, and took his readings, noting them down carefully in his sinister black book. We were never privy to this information, more's the pity. After another nap, we clambered back on to the gig and were driven to one of the Hooting Yard Bell-Ringing Society's secret caverns, where we were subjected to campanology lectures until supper-time. Another hamper was produced, we were fed, did post-prandial calisthenics, were quizzed individually on the content of the day's lectures, allowed out of the cavern under armed guard to jump about for half an hour or so, and then tucked into our reindeer-hide sleeping-bags, to snooze until three in the morning when, barely conscious, we were once again clamped to our places on the gig, and set off along unmarked roads towards the dawn, and another village church, and another belfry.
Saturdays, our rest days, were quite different, but for some reason I simply cannot remember them.
A month of this iron regime was enough to dizzy my mental faculties: by the end of the fourth month, I was a champion nitwit. It is likely that I would have spent the rest of my life carrying out the Hooting Yard Bell-Ringing Society's nefarious business, had it not been for the curious succession of events which took place on St Pang's Day. When the day dawned, I was a happy oaf, reduced to the near-cretinism that had befallen Bam, and honestly looking forward to the insane horrors of our daily bell-ringing. By nightfall, I was back at home, reclining on a comfortable sofa in the drawing-room, fully sensible, smoking a cigar, and sucking on a bottle of Wistful Leper.
Earlier in this narrative, I have had harsh words to say about Scrimgeour: forget them. For it was he who rescued me from the coachman's clutches, and put an end to the living nightmare of my bell-ringing days. To find out how he did so, read the following chapter, the text of which is culled from Scrimgeour's Memoirs of a Factotum (Snowflake & Prig, 19--). The book as a whole is something of a mishmash, in which autobiographical reminiscences jostle for space with great chunks of cod-philosophy, metaphysical ramblings, and daft theories about earthquakes, volcanos and the colour spectrum. Added to which, Scrimgeour's prose style is excruciating, the typeface is loathsome, and I have rarely fought my way through a book so riddled with typographical errors. If anyone did proofread it, I hope they were taken down to a cellar and shot. I have therefore taken innumerable liberties with the following extract, not just tidying it up, but giving it a thorough and vigorous going over. Now read on.
* a novel by frank key *