Like absolutely everybody else throughout the land – with the sole exception of Nige – I have become enamoured of Scandinavian crime fiction. That is why, the other day, I picked up a cheap paperback copy of Headhunters by Jo Nesbo and have read about half of it at one sitting. It rattles along. I found myself diverted by this passage:

The second [thing that caught my attention] was a quotation from what are known informally as “Pontoppidan’s Explanations” in which he declares that a person is capable of killing another person’s soul, infecting it, dragging it down into sin in such a way that redemption is precluded.

As soon as I felt able to tear myself away from Headhunters, about ninety pages later – I did say it rattles along – I made a cup of tea and devoted myself to discovering what I could about Pontoppidan and his Explanations. The first thing I learned was that no human being has ever resembled a poodle or a pompom as closely as Erik Pontoppidan (1698-1764).

In the Wikipedia, he is listed in the following categories: Danish theologians, Danish bishops, Danish ornithologists, Danish naturalists, Norwegian bishops, 18th-century Lutheran bishops, People from Aarhus. That gives us a reasonably comprehensive picture. As for the Explanations, these appear to be one of his most important theological works, a 1737 official state church explanation of the Lutheran catechism. One might think that makes for rather dry reading, but the part alluded to by Jo Nesbo suggests otherwise. I may have to see if there is an English translation available and pore over it for further references to murder and infection and sin and eternal damnation.

As with so many clergymen of the era, Pontoppidan was also an enthusiastic naturalist and antiquarian. He compiled, in 1763-64, The Danish Atlas, a detailed and ambitious description of Denmark based on information gathered from clergy around the country. His Natural History of Norway (1752–1753), was a description not only of the flora and fauna of the country, but also of the peasant population, their ways of living and thinking, based upon close observation. It is thanks to Pontoppidan that much folkloric material has been preserved.

Among his other works were a standard Danish hymn book, a guide for vicars to help eradicate superstition and reduce devotion to Catholic relics among the peasantry, a four volume history of the Danish church, and a collection of epitaphs transcribed from tombstones.

Of particular interest, at least to me, is that Pontoppidan is one of the earliest sources for our knowledge of that ferocious sea monster, the kraken. In the Natural History of Norway he gives an extensive description of the beast and makes a number of claims, including that the kraken is so enormous it is sometimes mistaken for an island, and that the greatest danger to sailors comes not from the creature itself but from the mighty whirlpool it leaves in its wake. Not that the kraken does not have great destructive power, as Pontoppidan writes “It is said that if [the creature’s arms] were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom”. The image of the kraken dragging a ship down to the bottom of the sea is startlingly similar to the image, in the Explanations, of the soul-murderer dragging the infected victim down into sin. One wonders what tormented phantasms were going on inside Pontoppidan’s head, surrounded by that pompom of snow-white hair and the crisp white ruff.

[This piece is nowhere near one thousand words in length, but I think it best to end there, when I have nothing more to say, than to expand it needlessly by chuntering on. I could copy out bits of Pontoppidanery from the Wikipedia and from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and from the 1914 New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia Of Religious Knowledge (Third Edition). I could point out that, weirdly, Erik Pontoppidan has his own Facecloth page, which is “liked” by a total of six people. (I am toying with the idea of becoming the seventh.) But, short of immersing myself in certain of the texts, I think I have learned enough, and told you enough, about Pontoppidan for the time being. It is interesting to me that, just a few hours ago, I had never heard of him, and a stray reference led me to find out that little which I have found out. Now, when next I am at an elegant and sophisticated cocktail party, leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece in my Tyrolean jacket similar to that worn by Christopher Plummer in The Sound Of Music, and the conversation turns, as it so often does, to the subject of the kraken, I shall be able to pipe up with a learned reference to Erik Pontoppidan. Having grabbed the attention of the gathering, I can then dazzle my listeners with abstruse points of Scandinavian theology and amusing anecdotes of eighteenth century peasant life in Norway. I might even throw in a couple of Danish tombstone epitaphs for added entertainment, by which time every single person at the cocktail party will be hanging on my every word. There is every possibility that, at this point, the cry will go up, from one voice or from many, to “please, please tell us what Erik Pontoppidan looked like, Mr Key!” “Well, those of you foregathered and rapt,” I will reply, “If you have ever seen a poodle, or a white pompom, and imagine either of those in human form, then you can summon in your mind’s eye a portrait of our man.” At which point I might sashay away from the mantelpiece and pay a visit to the bathroom, wherein I shall liberally entalc my hair and head and collar, and then reappear among the party guests, a striking tableau vivant of Erik Pontoppidan. It will then remain for me to select a victim, murder their soul, infect it, and drag them down into sin, in such a way that redemption is precluded – if, of course, it is that kind of cocktail party.]

Over the past seven days I have been posting pieces written in the twentieth century, so I feel I have had a week off from the Daily Essays project. Time, I think, to get back on board, and indeed to remind myself of the perpilocutionary impulse that pinged in my head at the start of the year. Then, the idea was very much to pluck a topic almost at random from the world’s storehouse of topics, and to bash out around a thousand words. As it has worked out, I have been pootling off in all sorts of other directions, and all that conceivably holds the year’s postages together is that (a) they are all roughly one thousand words in length, and (b) their titles all begin with the word “On”.

On Sunday the sixth of May, in the early afternoon, I find myself thinking of the following: Nikita Khrushchev, Kew. Rhone., mountaineering, and an ideal world where a jazz standard called Chutney On My Spats really does exist. I imagine it as an up-tempo Cab Calloway number, later adapted and slowed down and made beautiful and strange by Thelonius Monk or Miles Davis, and then, with added words – but what words? – being sung in arrangements by Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan. I don’t know much about jazz, so that last sentence is a pretty good example of perpilocution.

I am keen to stress, though I am not sure why, that those really are the topics bustling about in my brain this afternoon. It would have been easy enough for me to compile a quite different list, to pretend I was thinking about w and x and y and z, and you would never know. But what would be the point? Today, for reasons which are fairly clear to me, but which I will not go into here, the four topics I have listed are uppermost in my mind. What I suppose I ought to do is to pick one and then write about it, for a thousand words or so. But before doing that, I am reminded of a passage, somewhere in an essay by Nicholson Baker, where he tabulates the subjects he has been thinking about on a particular day. It is a long, long time since I read the essay, but if memory serves Mr Baker’s point is that his list of thoughts will be arrestingly different from the list of thoughts that, on the same day, go through the head of the person closest to him, in all ways, his wife – and that their closeness, their attachment to each other, is unaffected by the wildly different jumbles of things occupying their respective brains. That, at least, is what I remember.

This afternoon, as I say, I have arrived at having a head full of Nikita Khrushchev and Kew. Rhone. and mountaineering and Chutney On My Spats by processes I can clearly trace. It is, almost certainly – no, no, certainly, without doubt – the first time in my life that those four specific topics have jostled together inside my cranium. It may be the last time, too, though probably not, now that I have chosen to write them down, together in a list, and given that writing, that list, a life beyond the ephemeral, by posting it on Het Internet. Assuming that cataclysm does not deprive us of the power of electricity, and that international woman of mystery Primrose Dent does not press the big shiny red button that turns off Het Internet, then my list will be preserved, in the aether, forever and ever. One day in the far future, when we are all dead and gone and our children too are all dead and gone and their children too, and their children’s children, when untold generations have passed and humankind has evolved to that state familiar from any number of black and white science fiction films, where our descendants have huge heads and little or no hair, and they all dress in the same space age uniform, or in white robes, unless of course by that time they are merely brains in jars of bubbling fluid, with wiring attached, in that distant future it should still be possible for a person, or an enjarred brain, to access all the billions and billions of pages of Het Internet, and, while browsing in an aimless and desultory fashion, as I am sure they will, stumble upon Hooting Yard, quite by accident, and flick from page to page, from essay to essay, and alight, at last, without particular intention, upon this very piece, and read about Nikita Khrushchev and Kew. Rhone. and mountaineering and Chutney On My Spats, and thus those four separate, unrelated subjects, which just happen to be occupying my mind this afternoon, will occupy the huge pulsating advanced mind of the person or brain of the distant future, which is, I suppose, a kind of immortality.

It is an immortality not granted to whatever collection of gubbins bubbled to the surface of my conscious mind yesterday afternoon, or in the afternoon of the day before, because I did not record it. I did not make such a list. I did not tabulate, as Nicholson Baker did, one day late in the twentieth century, or early in this, I forget which. He made his list to demonstrate the distance, the distinctness, of his thoughts, from the thoughts of his closest companion. I made my list to contemplate my closeness to an unimaginable consciousness of an unimaginably distant future. My future reader – let’s call him, or her, or, by then quite possibly, it, Zagzob, or some such science fiction name – may have absolutely no idea who Nikita Khrushchev was, nor what Kew. Rhone. was, nor indeed have any concept of “mountaineering” as we do. After all, what with geological time, all the mountains might have been flattened, or Zagzob might be living in some kind of clean and gleaming artificial subterranean utopia, or, if there are still mountains, nobody will bother to climb them any more, having other leisure pursuits and adventuresome opportunities, ones we cannot even begin to guess at with our primitive mental blinkers. Zagzob will surely be utterly befuddled by Chutney On My Spats which, though I might dream, does not exist, and never has.

Although, of course, between now, the afternoon of the sixth of May 2012, and the afternoon in the far distant future when Zagzob reads these words, some jazz person of the future might indeed write the piece, and record it, and over the years it may be rerecorded untold times, in all sorts of arrangements and adaptations and versions, until it is considered a standard. It may even be that, as Zagzob scratches his or her or its gigantic pulsating hairless cranium in perplexity, wondering what a Nikita Khrushchev was, or who Kew. Rhone. was, or precisely how one might go about mountaineering, he or her or it, being a jazz buff, might be humming Chutney On My Spats, or indeed playing a version of it on their future Windows Vista Cranial Insertion Pod Hub device.

I find myself wondering if that is an accurate prediction of the far distant future, and hoping that it is so. Perhaps a science fiction writer can iron out the finer details.

Parts One, Two, Three, and Four. This is the fifth and final part.

Back at the Fop Palace, the band were in disarray. Deprived of their leader, they were improvising desperately. Buttercase and the spinettist Chockbung were trying to hold things together by running through some of the older numbers, but the four new players were having trouble with the smoochier passages, and the increasingly drink-sodden crowd began to make ominous hooting noises. Lip Suk Jab’s abduction had been carried out so swiftly and efficiently that the band were still not aware of it. They assumed at first it was some new crowd-pleasing trick which he had not told them about, which would have been in character. Buttercase had never forgotten the time the bandleader had had himself wrapped in sailcloth and carried on to the stage by a team of frogmen, authentically encrusted with whelks and stinking of ooze. The band had been as repelled as the audience – until, of course, one of the frogmen tore a small hole in the cloth, inserted the cornet into it, and the wily Korean let fly with a majestic solo rendition of “Chutney On My Spats” which brought the house down.

If he was up to such a trick tonight, thought Buttercase, he was leaving it a bit late. Several of the burlier elements of the crowd were polishing their scimitars and distributing cudgels. If there was not to be a riot, drastic action was called for. At half past midnight, the cartographer brought a turgid rumba to an end with a high-pitched squeak on the bassoon. He whispered to Skip to relinquish the tuba and passed him the accordion, telling him to do his best. Then, leaving Chockbung and De Strobville to muster some sort of performance out of the hicks, he fled the stage on some pretext and dashed like a maniac through the Palace seeking the cornettist. The eagle eyes which had mapped Sumatra three decades before did not fail him now; within minutes, he had come upon Lip Suk Jab’s cornet, abandoned between the side-exit and the riverbank. From there, it was a small matter to ponder some connection with the tell-tale skate-marks reaching across the ice. Buttercase ran back to the palace cloakroom and, taking advantage of the attendant’s absence, stole a pair of snow-shoes. Delaying only to peer into the dancehall and see that Skip was at least holding the accordion the right way up, he set off across the ice, hoping to heaven that he was not on a false trail. As he clambered up on the opposite bank, he was flattened by the force of an enormous explosion behind him. Alas, Skip had hit a bum note on the intro to “They Call Her Pope Pius IV”. The world of Sumatran jazz would never recover from the loss.

Buttercase eventually made it as far as the airstrip, but of course he was too late to catch up with Lip Suk Jab and his Javan abductors. Luckily, an aeroplane was taxiing ready for take-off, and Buttercase was able to attract the pilot’s attention and get himself aboard in the nick of time. The pilot was an outlandishly moustachioed Dutch hotelier named Van Der Wergo who had been prospecting sites for a leisure complex. On the long flight back to Het Loo in Gelderland he bored Buttercase insensible with a minutely detailed description of his scheme, liberally illustrated with financial prospectuses, architectural diagrams, flow charts, trilingual press releases, and horrid maps. As he brandished these in the exhausted accordionist’s face, Van Der Wergo repeatedly let go of the controls, and it is something of a miracle that he eventually brought the plane safely in to land.

As a reward for listening to all this gibberish, Buttercase was invited to stay at the hotelier’s garish mansion on the outskirts of Het Loo. Although he intended to stay only for a few days, Buttercase ended up spending the rest of his life there. With Lip Suk Jab incarcerated in a Javan prison and the rest of the band dead, he felt understandably reluctant to continue his musical career, with all that would be involved – forming a new band, buying a new accordion, and so on. For a week or two he mooched about Van Der Wergo’s estate, nauseated by the banana-coloured interiors, aghast at the collection of tubular titanium furniture, outraged at the hideous gewgaws which filled every room, each one monstrously ugly in itself, the effect multiplied by sheer quantity. Every day, it seemed, the garrulous hotelier would arrive home with yet more “objets”, as he called them, and tug at his moustachios as he agonised over where to place them to “heighten their effect”. To make matters worse, he insisted on consulting Buttercase over these decisions, dragging him from room to room to contemplate whether a cut-glass pink squid on a green satin cushion sewn with diamante lozenges would look better in the window of the billiards room or set on a nest of tables in the corner of the scullery. Van Der Wergo was generous and affable, and Buttercase was impossibly polite, but the strain of these daily consultations was eventually too much, and the houseguest came down with a nervous malady. Van Der Wergo employed a team of paramedics to give him round-the-clock care. As he slowly recuperated, one of these tireless medicos put it to the hotelier that what the patient needed was some activity – nothing too strenuous, but something that would make him feel useful. Aware that in his younger days Buttercase had had something to do with maps – or one map, at any rate – the mogul offered his guest the position of Chief Cartographer to Van Der Wergo Hotel & Leisure Complex International (Het Loo) Pty. Ltd.

As we all know, Buttercase took up the post. Between 1960 and 1966, he established his reputation as one of the greatest cartographers of the century. From his unutterably tasteless room in Van Der Wergo’s mansion, he sent teams of map-makers out across the globe to draw up sketches for his employer’s increasingly grandiose schemes. Constantly in touch with his juniors via telegraph, he would urge them on to ever more adventurous cartographic innovations. Regularly, the postman would deliver rolls of blueprints and sketches to the mansion, and Van Der Wergo himself would scamper up the staircase to his friend’s room, occasionally knocking over one of the lamentable ornaments in his haste. The two of them would pore over the materials, chuckling with glee and knocking back tankards of hooch. But then the hotelier would withdraw, and leave Buttercase alone to work. Out would come the gigantic sheets of Waterbath paper and the pencils of every conceivable colour, their points as sharp as dirks. And days, weeks, or months later, the map would be finished, and sent by pneumatic tube down to Van Der Wergo’s den, where the hotelier would weep with joy as he unrolled the paper and opened it to his gaze.

On the fourth of August 1966, Ken Buttercase tripped over a peewit while strolling in the mansion gardens. He fell headlong, cracked his skull, and died instantly. That morning, he had put the finishing touches to a new map of Sumatra. Unaccountably, he had quite forgotten to show the location of Blimbing.

Parts One, Two, and Three. And now, Part Four …

Buttercase’s map of Sumatra was his first and, arguably, finest cartographic achievement. Having abandoned his shipmates, his first step was to enter the general store in Blimbing, and, using the small sum of cash he had stolen from the purser’s hatbox, he bought a knapsack, some cakes, a compass, a shirt, a fetching little hat, a jar containing a substance no longer obtainable on earth, although it was quite common at the time, a guide-book, some clips, a lead-lined smock, and a windjammer, among other things. Then he set out on foot to cover the whole island. It took him five years. He began by keeping to the coastal routes, tramping from Blimbing all the way up to Oleleh, then along the eastern coast, through Edi, Balei, and Rupat until, once past Telok Betong, he returned to his starting-point. He took the opportunity to call in to the general store and have his clips de-rusted and his hat stitched. Then he headed off into the interior, zigzagging his way nor’east, nor’west, nor’east, nor’west, until he reached Segli. All this time he had been taking copious notes, and he was now ready to begin work on his map. He returned to Blimbing on a motorbike and holed up in a shack. Sustained by Rumanian beans and hooch, he worked for a further two years, using an enormous sheet of Waterbath paper and a collection of coloured pencils. A stupendously detailed description of the map appears in Crone’s Anthology Of Sumatran Maps Concocted By Felons (Hooting Yard Press, 1937), to which the reader is referred.

But that’s quite enough about maps for the time being. Of more interest is the fact that at around this time Buttercase fell in with a gang of ne’er-do-wells who haunted the more disgusting sinks of vice and iniquity in Blimbing and, when it was learned that he was an accomplished accordionist, he was invited to join their jazz band. The band was led by the scrofulous but benign cornettist Lip Suk Jab, a Korean who had been hounded out of his country following the infamous Unserrated Postage Stamp Scandal of 1922. Suk Jab’s musical gifts were slight, but what he lacked in technique he made up for with what can only be described as stage presence. Slightly less than five-feet tall and impossibly rotund, he held audiences in thrall. Several critics have attempted to explain precisely what it was about the man that was so spellbinding. Was it his occasional impersonations of Constantin Brancusi or Cicely Courtneidge? Was it the metal harness he strapped to his head which emitted incandescent light? Was it the pocketfuls of custard triangles with which he showered the audience at the end of each show? Who can say? What we do know is that, when his regular accordionist was drowned in a freak dandelion-hammering accident, he cajoled Buttercase into joining his band.

The next thirty years passed in a whirl. Cartography was all but forgotten as Suk Jab’s band – known variously as The Crumpled Ships, The Amnesiac Lane Octet, Lip Suk Jab And His Big Aluminium Kettle, Shimmying In Ponds, The Norwegian Hooters, or Go Wild With Lip Suk Jab And The Mullet Babies – toured endlessly through Sumatra, Java, Borneo, New Guinea, Timor, and the Yukon. There were shows virtually every night of the week, in hotels, dancehalls, casinos, scout-huts, community centres, bingo parlours, caves, factories, deserted mineshafts, and temples. Lacquered gits clutching recording contracts followed the band everywhere. Broadcasters from the burgeoning Dutch East Indies Radio Corporation were forever dragging the band into studios. Buttercase took up the bassoon and the ondes martenot in addition to his favoured accordion, although he was never able to play either of them with much conviction.

This idyll ended on 14th January 1959, when disaster struck. The band, billed as The Authentic Sound Of Geriatric Slobbering, were booked to play at the Fop Palace, a nightclub in Selwyn, hard by the banks of the Macmillan, which had become the in place to be for the local population of trappers, Mounties, card-sharps, detectives, rustlers, and circus performers. The journey from Borneo had been exhausting, and half the band had contracted dengue fever. Lip Suk Jab himself was under investigation by the Javan Secret Police following his involvement in a stamp collecting scam, and had become convinced – rightly – that agents pursued him at every step. Indeed, on the night in question, eleven Javan plainclothesmen were loitering in the snug bar at the Fop Palace, ready to make an arrest. As if this were not trouble enough, Buttercase’s accordion had been sabotaged by thugs employed by a rival Sumatran jazz combo; as soon as he played an F sharp, explosives secreted within the instrument would detonate, blasting the accordion, its player, and anyone and anything else within a five-hundred yard radius to smithereens.

By quarter to midnight, when the band were due to begin their set, the Palace was packed. The Javans, skilfully disguised as a group of Lithuanian business executives, had fanned out from the snug and taken up strategic positions around the stage and at the exits. Never one to tolerate sickness, Lip Suk Jab had summarily dismissed the dengue-stricken members of the group and was busy rehearsing four locals in a back room. None of the callow Yukon youths had ever played a musical instrument before, but so awe-inspiring was Suk Jab’s tuition that, by the time the lights went down, Biff, Skip, Chump, and Dib felt confident enough to attempt the banjo, tuba, sackbut, and kettledrums respectively. The locals gave them a rousing cheer, which was only slightly muted when they were followed on stage by Buttercase and the other two long-serving band members, whose names we may learn later. The seven of them started to bash out a scorching opener designed to set the scene for the arrival of their leader. You will be pleased to learn that Buttercase played the bassoon on this number. The deadly accordion rested behind him on a rather intriguing stool, carved entirely from the tusk of a narwhal and engraved with scenes of piracy and racketeering. He had received this piece of scrimshandy from a Bolton mustard merchant after a concert in Wetter in 1946.

Towards the end of the number, Lip Suk Jab made his way towards the stage. As he paused to screw the last bolt into his incandescent metal head-harness, four of the Javans pounced. Before he knew what had hit him, the cornettist was gagged, handcuffed, and frogmarched out by a side exit into the wintry Selwyn night. The rest of the Javan detectives joined them, and they hurried down to the banks of the Macmillan, which was of course entirely frozen over. Hastily lacing up their ice-skates, and muttering incomprehensible messages into their walkie-talkies, the agents careered across the river at breakneck speed, narrowly avoiding bashing Lip Suk Jab’s head into an ice-trapped tugboat in midstream. Once they had made it to the other side, they put the cornettist back on his feet and, having removed their skates, ordered him to march with them four miles to the airfield where their bi-plane was waiting. As they set off, midnight struck.

To be continued …

Part One, Part Two, and now …

“Well, lad,” said the navigator to Buttercase as the two sat in the stifling squalor of the Indescribable’s chart room, “As you can see, I’m plotting our course on these portolans. It’s exacting work. I am a very ancient, craggy man, the sort you sometimes hear referred to as a sea dog, or old salt. I have been at sea since I was much younger than you are now, first as a deckhand, then as a bilge-boy. Only in my fifties did I aspire to the position of navigator. It took twenty years of arduous study for me to reach my present state of knowledge, where I can be entrusted, single-handed, to take this mighty steamship across the world, issuing instructions to the louts on the bridge to steer this way or that, to correct the course by so many degrees, to hold fast to port or starboard, etc etc.” He spat into his mahogany spittoon. “My training began when I became a second deputy assistant to the navigator’s mate on a fine old wooden ship the name of which escapes me. Aye, your memory plays some rum old tricks, lad, when you get to my age. Day and night I watched the chief navigator, bewildered at the subtlety of his art. I perched in a little hammock just above his left shoulder, making careful notes of all he did in my notebook. I rarely slept. Eventually – oh, it was a long time – I felt I had gained some semblance of understanding.

“Then disaster struck. At midnight on the fourth of June 18–, a storm blew up, and that delicate ship was smashed asunder on some rocks. Only three of us survived. We managed to clamber into a dinghy, as the tempest howled around our ears. For fourteen weeks we drifted in the pitiless ocean, subsisting on rotten biscuits, pemmican, and the occasional seahorse we were able to spear with our bayonets. I passed the thirst-crazed days having frantic arguments with Mufton and Hairball, my companions, who became steadily more and more enraged with me, because I kept whingeing about my notebook. I had lost it in the very teeth of the storm, you see, and thus all my years of navigational study were as nought. You can understand why I whimpered so, can you not? Eventually they grew so sick of my moaning that they hurled me over the side. In the middle of the night, they grabbed me, Mufton taking my legs and Hairball my arms, and they swung me overboard, cackling like maniacs, and I splashed into the freezing sea, helpless and alone. Luckily I had secreted the remainder of the biscuit supply in my blazer pocket. There was no moon; I could see nothing. I trod water for hours, terrified that at any moment I would be attacked by all sorts of fiendish aquatic monsters. But none came. I munched the biscuits and moistened my parched lips with the last few dregs of my spittle. The silence was unendurable. I croaked old hymns, dredged up from memory. Sleep, I knew, would be fatal, even for a few seconds. Just as I was about to pass out, my luck came in. An enormous crab clawed its way up on to my scalp, where it perched, tweaking my hair agonisingly in its pincers. The pain kept me awake, and I began to hallucinate, but the visions were so mundane that I will not bore you with them. Suddenly, as dawn broke, I felt solid ground beneath my feet. Peering around, I saw that I had drifted on to an island. Crawling on to the strand, I shovelled a few handfuls of nearby crustacea into my mouth, swallowed them having hardly bothered to crunch them, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

“When I awoke it was pouring with rain. For as long as I remained on the island the rain never ceased. Bear that in mind, as I tell you the rest of my adventures.” The old sea dog took a plug of tobacco from behind his ear and lodged it between his teeth. “The island on which I had fetched up was small, but well-provided for in terms of foliage and nourishment. It was the shape of a dromedary. The air stank. After eleven weeks – during which I was absolutely drenched by the rain – I was rescued by a passing ship, the captain of which was the most devilish cur alive. His name was Lapwing, his flesh was orange, he wore a violet hat, and his pipe-smoke curled around his head so that he was forever in a fog. His crew were so terrified of him that they all assumed a permanent crouch, and suffered agonising back pain as a consequence. The ship’s doctor – a saintly man named Bagshaw, or Shawbag, I forget which – hardly had a moment’s rest. He was forever having to rub linaments and ointments on to the men’s backs to sooth the rictus, and had constructed a fascinating piece of equipment, an oak frame almost like a rack, on which four men could lie at a time, having their bodies stretched to counter the effects of their crouching, the doctor making incremental adjustments to a large red wheel with a special lever inserted in a hole in the rim. The dastardly captain knew nothing of this. The treatment was always administered at night, while he slept, and the machine was hidden from him during the day behind huge crates of cargo – tin, bitumen, custard – in the darkest recesses of the hold.

“When they hauled my soaking body aboard, Captain Lapwing immediately set me to work as the doctor’s assistant, replenishing the linament jars and holding Bagshaw’s massive fringe of hair out of his eyes as he went about his duties. I was also put in charge of the small colony of badgers which lived below decks. Procuring food for them was no easy matter, but I too was terrified of Lapwing, and I soon learned to entice a bowl of badger food from the least promising ingredients. It is a skill that has not deserted me. You may have noticed, lad, that I still keep a little team of badgers in my cabin. Dobbin is my favourite, rather frisky for his species, but a treasure nonetheless.”

“I hate to interrupt you,” said Buttercase, “But shouldn’t you be paying more attention to the charts?”

Those of you who recall the newspaper reports of the Glub expedition will be aware that Buttercase never reached the Antarctic. The navigator was so inept that he took the ship not to the Southern seas, but to the lemur-riddled western coast of Sumatra, in the Dutch East Indies.

To be continued …

Part One is here : now read on …

The Paraffin Shed was the smallest of a cluster of buildings, far from the railway itself but owned nevertheless by the company, which charged pitiful rents to the tenants. Among the other buildings were a tavern, an ink factory, a menagerie, a cork shop, an igloo, a massive, empty prison, and a warehouse full of bones. The Paraffin Shed was rented by a retired sea-captain, whose name is unfortunately not recorded. In later years, Buttercase remembered him as by turns gruff and amiable, languid and crusty, corrosive and vibrant, insensible and bereft. Although it may be thought that he spent long hours entertaining his small visitor with seafaring yarns, tales of exploration and derring-do upon the high seas, rattling narratives of piracy and bilgewater, there is no evidence that he ever did so. As far as we know, all that ever took place was that, upon Buttercase’s arrival, the boy unhitched the tub from his back, unscrewed the stopper, the sea-captain poured a paltry amount of paraffin into it, demanded his money and held out his vast and hairy hand for receipt of the coins, whereupon the lad paid him, replaced the stopper, hitched the refilled tub on to his back, bid the old salt farewell until the morrow, and began the long trudge back towards his parents’ hut.

Did he ever visit any of the other buildings? He may have done. What would have happened had he encountered, in the warehouse of bones, a slobbering giant wracked with the dropsy? Or blundered into the menagerie and come face to face with a starving bison? Or been lured into the ink factory and had his tub of paraffin stolen from him by the snag-toothed serf detailed to stand guard at the door, his mouth forever filled with sticky, raspberry-flavoured confections, the juice of which dribbled down his chin and fell in droplets upon his outlandish pantaloons? What turn might have been taken in the life of the cartographer-to-be had these things happened? There is rich material here, but we must turn our backs upon it, and follow the young Buttercase back to the rep-divided hut, to which, daily, he returns, as twilight descends upon the land, and howls are heard far off in the distance, or perhaps the occasional spurt of gunfire, or a hoot from the rickety train, trundling on its way, with or without passengers, with or without freight.

He was sixteen years old when he was flung into prison, and twenty when he was released on a special licence, having been recommended by the prison governor to accompany an Antarctic expedition as general factotum, accordionist, and toothbrush maker. Up to the very minute the steamship Indescribable chugged out of the harbour, Buttercase was handcuffed to a prison guard. The two had become fast friends during the seven-week journey from the prison to the small seaside town from which the expedition sailed. Clump, the guard, was a small, flickering man who drew maps in his spare time. Never having set foot outside his homeland, his exquisitely illuminated maps of Far Cathay, Beach, Zimpagu, Hoon, and Yssicol were the products of a fevered imagination all too rare in men of his profession. Buttercase, of course, was awestruck. He repeatedly badgered Clump to make him a gift of one of his maps, but the prison guard refused for reasons we can only guess at. Not that we will bother.

As they made their way on foot across the country for forty-nine days of that abominable winter, Clump nevertheless gave Buttercase a far more valuable gift – a pencil. It must not be forgotten that in those days, convicted felons – especially those released on licence – were routinely deprived of pencils, as they were of pencil-sharpeners, pencil-cases, pens, protractors, rulers, compasses, crayons, set-squares, and many other items of stationery and graphic equipment. The king himself had renewed the ban in the very year of Buttercase’s release. Clump was taking a terrible risk. Perhaps he was in his cups when he hastily shoved the pencil into Buttercase’s pocket. The great cartographer later recalled that the prison guard had tears in his eyes as he did so.

On the deck of the Indescribable, Clump removed the handcuffs from his young charge’s puny wrist. The two embraced. Doughty explorers, some already kitted out in their Antarctic furs, bustled Clump off the ship; they were impatient for Buttercase to begin his accordion lessons. Prisoner and guard never saw each other again. Clump came to a bad end. On his return to the prison, he had his pencils counted, and his furious blushes confirmed the governor’s suspicions. Dismissed from the service, he fell on evil days, and died two years later, drunk out of his brain on the floor of a post office in Tantarabim.

To be continued …

[NOTE : Clump is the first, but by no means the last Hooting Yard character to meet his end drunk out of his brain on the floor of a post office. The same fate befalls a music critic in The Phlogiston Variations, I think, and quite possibly one or two others. This was also the first appearance in my work of that realm of mystery known as Tantarabim.]

In a comment on yesterday’s piece of Hoonery, Banished To A Pompous Land pleaded for the resurrection of a story which has – unaccountably – never been reissued since its original appearance in the Massacre anthology published by Indelible Inc twenty years ago. Here, then, in several parts over the next few days, is Accidental Deaths Of Twelve Cartographers, No. 8 : Ken Buttercase. Please note that Nos. 1-7 and 9-12 were never written. With some misgivings, I have transcribed it exactly, resisting the temptation to mop up certain infelicities.

The parents of the great cartographer Ken Buttercase were employed by a small railway in a remote country. They lived in a wooden hut which served as a signal-box. A threadbare curtain of rep divided the hut into two halves. In one half, the Buttercases ate and slept and baked and washed; the other half contained the signalling controls and was also used to store an ever-changing collection of broken locomotive machinery. Once a day, at noon or thereabouts, a cart would trundle to the door of the hut; two railway workers would deliver some broken bits and pieces and take others away. Mr or Mrs Buttercase would sign one chit for the deliveries, another chit for the pieces removed, and help the two officials – one of whom was tubercular – to load and offload the invariably rusty pieces of metal.

Their duties left them little time to devote to their only child. Let us examine these duties in some detail. The railway itself was not busy – the one train passed the hut four times a day; heading north at 4 a.m. and 4 p.m., and heading south at 10 a.m. and 10.15 p.m. Before its passing, the signals had to be set; the cranks, winches, levers, pulleys, knobs, fulcra, and transistor motors all had to be adjusted with frightening precision. In order for this to be done, the broken locomotive-parts had to be shoved out of the way, into the other half of the hut. They could not be kept outside, exposed to the elements, as the company regulations forbade such a practice. Nor could they be stored permanently on the other side of the rep curtain, as not only was this – as we have seen – the family’s living quarters, it also served as the work-room devoted to carrying out the many other tasks they had to perform, which we shall examine in due course. Once all the broken stuff had been moved out of the way, the signalling equipment could be set. Readjustment, back to the original coordinates, took place once the train had passed, after which the day’s conglomeration of broken bits and pieces could be shifted back to the other half of the hut.

There was a great deal of paperwork. Buttercase’s parents carried this out at the tiny wooden escritoire next to the oven. Every day an inventory had to be taken of the heteroclite jumble of rubbish cluttered on the other side of the curtain. The railway provided pre-printed forms to be completed for each item, in the form of a questionnaire, detailing such things as time of delivery (to the minute), exact dimensions, percentage of surface area covered in rust, visual evidence of sabotage, signs of unlawful hammering, pounding, twisting, or breakage, and so on. The forms had to be handed over to the officers on their daily visit, whether or not they removed the piece in question. Multiple forms were therefore necessary if a piece remained in storage for more than twenty-four hours; but this was rare. Mrs Buttercase usually wrote the details out in rough, then her husband copied the information on to the form in his best handwriting, which was rarely neat enough for the officers, particularly the tubercular one, who lambasted Mr Buttercase accordingly.

There were other forms to be completed. It was necessary to count the number of passengers aboard the train each time it passed. It trundled along reasonably slowly, which helped – but the windows were filthy with grease, which made it imperative to peer with great concentration. The accuracy of the figures could always be checked by comparing the Buttercases’ calculation with that made at the next hut along the line, although this was rarely if ever done, and it could always be argued that passengers had leaped or fallen off, or jumped aboard, between the signal-box and the next hut, not that this was likely, as hardly any passengers ever used the railway anyway. The passenger-count forms were collected on a monthly basis by another, more important, railway official, who wore a tall hat like a funeral director’s and arrived at the hut astride a gigantic horse. When he called, the Buttercases had to feed both the man and his steed with buns and glucose syrup.

Other duties included buffing up ceremonial shields and brasswork, making flags and pennants, procuring rainwater, cooking sausages for the company hound, sharpening the pencil-sharpener, cleaning the rails, slaughtering insects which trespassed on the railway, keeping the paintwork up to scratch, dismantling the signals on public holidays, and carting huge amounts of sand and grit from one side of the track to the other.

Little Ken was bidden to undertake only one task. Every day a small amount of paraffin had to be collected from the Paraffin Shed, which was four hours’ walk away across the desolate, bandit-strewn moors. He would leave mid-morning, carrying a special tub on his back, supporting it with ropes crossed over his shoulders and under his arms. His parents gave him a flask of turnip soup for sustenance along the way. The bandits of that country were fierce and ruthless, but they were unforgiveably careless, and had little idea of how to conduct an ambuscade. Buttercase was always able to spot them long before they would have been able to waylay him, and he took the necessary precautions. Sometimes he would hide behind a stone until they went away. Or he would wait for them to set upon a less observant traveller – perhaps a pedlar or minstrel – and then dash swiftly past while they were otherwise engaged. His other alternative was to make long detours, which he often did, approaching the Paraffin Shed by a bewildering variety of different routes. Was it this early familiarity with the highways and by-ways of his homeland which stirred his first cartographic impulses?

To be continued …