For today’s sermon I take as my text some pairs of words from the Grauniad cryptic crossword, No. 25,733, set by Chifonie. There we will find, when we have solved the puzzle, NORMAL BUTCHERS (15 across and 18 across), OMINOUS STORAGE (16 down and 1 down), and DERANGED PENANCE (12 across and 7 down).

We may imagine, at the outset, a NORMAL BUTCHER. He is normal insofar as he wears standard butchers’ apparel, makes use of conventional butchers’ knives and cleavers and slicers and mincers, and sells only those cuts of meat one is likely to find in any butchers’ shop throughout this land. He even has a normal butchery name, something like Mister Brinks or Mister Greaves. If you were to pass his shop, on a normal street in a line of shops including a greengrocers’, a haberdashery, a newsagent and a bakery, you would not feel a shudder of Lovecraftian terror. If, instead of passing by, you popped in, to make purchase of sausages, say, the transaction would be conducted absolutely normally, and you would take the sausages home and cook them and chew them and swallow them and you would lean back in your chair and pat your sated tum and there would be no catastrophic consequences whatsoever. All is normal, you would think, in the world of that butcher.

But there is normal and there is outwardly normal, and they are very different things. Mister Grimes the butcher may look and act as normally as one expects a butcher to look and act, but what his customers perceive may be a mere carapace, concealing a monstrous and abnormal inner maelstrom of seething chaos. It may indeed be a studied normality, honed and perfected over many years, the better to hide the awful reality.

Let us ask, does Mister Jarvis ever allow anybody into the back room of his butchers’ shop? Why is it always locked, and locked doubly or trebly, with padlocks and chains? Does he have the radio in his shop tuned to Butchers’ Playtime airing Xavier Cugat number after Xavier Cugat number at a loud volume simply to muffle the eerie and spine-tingling noises otherwise to be heard from that locked back room? What on earth does he keep in there, and is it alive?

We may be unable to provide answers to those questions, but we can say that the back room is used for OMINOUS STORAGE. There is something stored in there, and it is ominous. And if we study Mister Smethwick’s countenance carefully, we might notice that, as he serves us our sausages, wrapping them in greaseproof butchers’ paper and tying the package with butchers’ string, his eyes dart occasionally towards that locked door, and for all his normality there is in those eyes an expression of mad intensity. Whether it be fear or murderousness is harder to ascertain. We are likely to dismiss it as a trait or a tic, that darting, insufficient in itself to convince us that the butcher is in any way abnormal. In any case, as we wait to be handed our sausages, we are clicking our fingers to the catchy beat of Xavier Cugat. It serves not only to drown out the gruesome noises from the back room, but to distract us from wondering too deeply about the butcher’s darting eyes.

There is, to be sure, ominous potential in any storage facility, be it a butcher’s back room or an extensive warehouse surrounded by an electrified fence in the desert. Unless we personally go a-rummaging through all the boxes and crates and cartons and vats and canisters and what have you, neatly arranged in rows upon shelving units or piled up higgledy-piggledy or in any number of other dispositions, we can never be certain what is contained therein. That sense of doubt is not always ominous, but it can be. Just as we would jump out of our skin if we spotted a slithering vegetable tendril tapering to a palpitating sucker emerging from a crate in a storage shed, so we would shudder if, undistracted by the butcher’s skilful sausage-wrapping and the Xavier Cugat music, we noted that the locked door of the back room was shaking on its hinges, as if something within were trying to break its way out and crash through into the normal world.

And this explains why, at nightfall, when the butcher’s shop is closed and the shutters are down, we will find Mister Perkins sprawled on the bare stone floor of his cellar, abasing himself in an act of DERANGED PENANCE. He is gibbering words seldom encountered outside the pages of an H. P. Lovecraft story. Words? Perhaps it would be better to say hideous strangulated cries. These cries, these gibberings, are addressed to a mud idol standing on a slab. There are nails driven into the idol, and two glistening gemstones embedded in its head, to serve as eyes. And though it is mere mud and metal and jewel, all inanimate, the butcher knows in the deepest core of his being that those eyes can see him. They glare and sparkle and bore into him, and he grovels ever more abjectly on the floor, doing his deranged penance to his god.

If we were to understand his hellish gibbering, we would learn that Mister Wilkins is pleading with the mud idol to forgive him for what he has done. And what has he done? What was it he did, those many years ago, that forced him to avert suspicion by seeming so normal, that forced him to lock and lock again and lock yet again the door to his back room? What thing has he kept trapped in there? Only the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred could tell us that.

And as the night soil man roves the streets of the town under fierce moonlight, he makes his way down the alley behind the butcher’s shop, and hears, from within, oozing and chthonic, the repeated sound “Glubb… Glubb… Glubb…”

Something that has always puzzled me about the famous story in which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is its lack of detail. Ever since it first appeared in The Michigan School Moderator in 1885, it has been a popular and well-known story, and I would guess that most people know its basic outline. There is a fox which is quick and brown, and it jumps over a dog which is lazy. Even the most harebrained dimwit can understand that, and it is made all the more vivid by being told in the present tense. That gives it a sense of immediacy, such that we could almost be present, witnessing the fox jumping over the dog.

Yet I cannot be alone in thinking that the tale leaves too many unanswered questions. Of course, as sophisticated readers we do not necessarily want everything handed to us on a plate. We expect to do some work, and part of the pleasure of a tale well told is that we may well have to exercise our imaginations to fill gaps, to flesh out details, to complete a picture which is only hinted at. But in the story of the fox and the dog there is so much missing from the narrative that we are ultimately dissatisfied.

Even the few details we are given beg further questions. How quick is the fox, exactly? Quickness is surely relative. Is the fox quicker or slower than, say, a tortoise or a steam train? Does it move with the swiftness of a javelin through the air, or of a cheetah? Without having any moving object to compare it with, we have no idea of its speed.

The only other thing we know about the fox is that it is brown. Well, that tells us little, given that there are innumerable shades of brown, from umber to dun and from dun to umber, and all sorts of others I cannot be bothered to list. If we were to grab hold of the fox and hold it up against a paint chart, a grid of squares of various shades of brown, where would we stop and cry “Aha! Look how closely the colour of this fox struggling in our grasp and attempting to bite our wrist matches the colour of that square, such that if we painted the room with it from floor to ceiling we would render the fox invisible!”? We do not know the answer to that question.

Things are even less satisfactory in the case of the dog. At least with the fox we are given two snippets of information, vague as both those snippets may be. But all we are told of the dog is that it is lazy. It is true that, being a personality trait, the imputation of laziness tells us more – much more – about the character of the dog than we ever learn about the character of the fox. Insightful as this may be, however, it is meagre pickings.

Thus we have several questions directly related to what little we do know. How many more are thrown up when we consider what we are not told! What manner of dog is it? Is it asleep or awake? Has it been recently fed? Is it sound of limb? Does it wear a collar to which is affixed a small round metal tag with its name engraved upon it? Is it a homeless stray? Where the hell is the damned dog anyway? On a lawn? Outside a kennel? Inside a kennel? As the questions multiply, we begin to lose patience with the dog. If it were real rather than fictional, we would be tempted to kick it, or at least to throw a stick for it to go and fetch, were it to overcome its idleness. As a dog in a story it leaves much to be desired. One thinks, briefly and fugitively, of the hound of the Baskervilles, or the lapdog belonging to the lady in the Chekhov story. No doubt you can add your own fictional dogs. By any measure, the lazy dog in the present story is a pretty sorry specimen.

We may posit a similar, and endless, list of questions about the fox, if we are so minded. Frankly the prospect is wearying. The sad fact is we know in advance that repeated readings of the story will help us answer none of them.

If we put aside both the fox and the dog, and consider in isolation the action of the story, we realise how feeble it is. We have as much idea of the motivation of the fox, in jumping over the dog, as Tippi Hedren had about that scene in The Birds where her character Melanie Daniels inexplicably enters a room full of savage frenzied birds. At least Tippi had the wit to ask Alfred Hitchcock why on earth Melanie would be so stupid. We do not know if the fox is being equally stupid, or wise, or perhaps merely playful. It might be larking about for no apparent reason. But as readers, we want to know.

I must confess that I became so exasperated with the writer that I determined to send one of my notorious Letters of Remonstrance. Recipients, among them Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, and the late Iris Murdoch, are known to quake in their boots and make abject promises to mend their ways. Then I recalled that the story of the fox and the dog was originally published in 1885 and thus, barring a freak of nature, the author was almost certainly dead and gone to that place from where none return except zombies. I pummelled a cushion in my frustration.

My next step will be to go to the Wolverine State and to trawl through the archives of The Michigan School Moderator, hoping to lay my hands on working notes, early drafts, and possibly alternative versions of the tale. Then I intend to publish a long overdue critical edition, annotated with scholarly notes, of at least eight hundred pages, including colour plates with mezzotints of a fox (quick and brown) and a dog (lazy). I think I shall ask eighty-two-year-old Tippi Hedren to write the foreword.

France in the immediate aftermath of the revolution was not the only place in which a commissioner, seeking to climb a bell tower, would be deterred by the presence of an axe-wielding madman. It is a dilemma which has faced many commissioners, of differing stripes, in many lands at many times. What all the known and recorded instances have in common is the difficulty of ascertaining whether the woodcutter in the belfry is truly a madman, or is feigning madness as a ruse. No commissioner, it appears, has ever been able to say definitively, upon entering a bell tower with an axe-wielding woodcutter in situ, “Ah, a genuine madman!” or, conversely, “Oh ho, a perfectly sensible woodcutter pretending to be mad!”

A recent scholarly analysis of the phenomenon sheds light on the methods commissioners and their minions have used to decide the question. It is not an incandescent light, nor even a bright one, for the past is suffused with a great darkness, as Pang Gong Loon demonstrated in his important paper on the subject, the title of which escapes me, understandably, as it was published long ago, in the past, and was thus suffused with a great darkness, which rather goes to prove Pang Gong Loon’s point, if proof were needed. Me, I’ll take him at his word.

Even when the darkness is pitch black, we may still cast glimmers of light if we deploy what Pang Gong Loon called the “pointy torch of inquiry” into it. The author of the recent scholarly analysis clearly has such a pointy torch, for in the study we find such accounts as this:

Hail to thee! I am a commissioner. My most recent commission was to go to the bell tower of St Bibblybibdib’s church in the vicinity of Blister Lane and to count the bells. When I had counted them, I was to report back to the County Bell Counting Register Panel. There my duties ended. A straightforward task, but one nevertheless calling for a large breakfast, which I proceeded to enjoy in the salubrious setting of Alphonso’s Dining Room hard by the banks of the Toss. I had sausages and kippers and kedgeree and thrush-brains and wolves’ livers and custard triangles and milk slops and jugged hare and toasted grease and Doctor Baxter’s Fine Pudding and a pig’s head and wren innards and smokers’ poptarts, all washed down with a pot of boiling hot tea.

I then summoned my minions and we headed for St Bibblybibdib’s. One minion carried my propelling pencil and the other my bell-count ledger. The lych-gate was off its sneck but that was no business of mine. I paused to weep at the grave of a floozie of past acquaintance, but then it was down to business. Or should I say up, for we must climb the bell tower to count the bells.

No sooner had we entered the church, however, than a cry came from above. To my ears it sounded like the inarticulate gibbering of a madman. I sent Minion Lars to the foot of the bell tower to peer upwards and to tell me what he saw. He reported that, as so often happens, the belfry was occupied by an axe-wielding madman who would surely chop us to bits if we dared venture further.

I took from my pocket my two-way radio contraption and gave the details to HQ. They said a mad-doctor would be sent immediately, and that I should do nothing until he got there. I ushered the minions into the St Bibblybibdib’s annexe, where there was a snack bar. We tucked in to toffee and boiled seal and Carlsbad plums while we waited.

The mad-doctor duly arrived on his motorbike at 0955 hours. Brain-probe in one hand and pack of flash-cards in the other, he sprinted up the spiral staircase like a man half his age, which I estimated to be in the region of forty. What went on up there I have no idea, though I assume he probed the axeman’s brain and tested him with the flash-cards, each of which bore a mysterious occult symbol.

At approximately 1005 hours the bloodied corpse of the mad-doctor toppled from the belfry. It was missing the head. I radioed through the details to HQ, who advised that the axeman in the belfry was almost certainly a genuine madman, and not one of those pretenders who feign madness as a ruse to prevent bell-counting by commissioners. As I am the bravest commissioner in the entire commission, I offered to climb up to the belfry and give the madman a sound thrashing with my seagull-beating stick before he had a chance to chop my head off with his axe. But I was forbidden to do so by HQ, who suggested I return to the snack bar to await the arrival of the priest and the verger and the sexton, all of whom were on an unofficial St Bibblybibdib’s charabanc outing.

Unfortunately by this time the snack bar was shut, so I blew off steam by giving Minion Lars and Minion Tim a sound thrashing with my seagull-beating stick. Then I sat on the floozie’s grave to write this report in my bell-count ledger with my propelling pencil.

This is but one of no fewer than three contemporaneous accounts of commissioners confronting axe-wielding madmen in bell towers cobbled together in this fascinating piece of scholarly analysis. Frankly, I am not convinced that the analysis following the accounts is up to snuff, but then I am no scholar. I am merely a fanatical devotee of the teachings of Pang Gong Loon. If you have any sense in your heads, you ought to be too.

These are the voyages of the Starship Corrugated Cardboard, its five year mission to seek out, somewhere in the illimitable vastness of space, the Planet of the Crumpled Jesuits. This is needle in a haystack stuff. Unless you have boldly gone across the universe yourself, aboard one of the other starships, you really can have no idea just what a palaver it is. So, some sympathy please.

When I was called in to Starship Command, four and a half years ago, all I knew was that I was going to be made captain of a mission. What I did not know was the nature of that mission. I was excited, for this was to be my first captaincy. I had plenty of experience as a bo’sun and a crow’s nester on both ships and starships. I had done the so-called “milk round”, delivering bottles of milk to far-flung space colonies such as New Jaywick and Far Distant New Isle of Muck. I had served my time plying between the dismal little planetoids of Galaxy 14, eradicating the bindweed and setting up diversity outreach initiatives. I had even been to the furthest and most distant planet of all, the one with the weird voodoo-rastafarian belief system and giant Cyclopean turtles and sweet-smelling marsh gas. But none of these voyages had prepared me for the mission to find, somewhere in the illimitable vastness of space, the Planet of the Crumpled Jesuits.

The story goes that several hundred years ago, on a mere whim, a gang of Jesuits grew tired of earthly ways and set out in a secondhand spaceship to find a deserted planet. There they would establish a Jesuitical paradise, if one can imagine such a thing. They, quite clearly, did. But what they cannot have foreseen was their gradual crumpling, which began shortly after they landed on their distant world, and proceeded apace, with ghastly consequences. Now every single Jesuit on the planet was a picture of almost unimaginable crumplement. Paradise it might have been, but a paradise tinged with crumples.

This much we knew from radio reports picked up by a space scooter. The news caused something of a hubbub when it reached Earth. Certain members of the Interplanetary Council were livid, others more sanguine. But the livid ones won the day, and it was they who insisted on sending a mission to find the planet. Because of the space scooter’s on-board radio scrambling system, it was an unfathomable mystery from where the stark and crumpled messages had been sent. I did ask Starship Command what I was meant to do after I found the planet, and was given an envelope marked “Further Instructions To Be Opened Only After The Planet Of The Crumpled Jesuits Has Been Located And That Location Confirmed”. I kept the envelope tucked into a pocket of my Starship Captain’s Smock. It’s a fine smock, modelled on the ones worn by nineteenth century peasants in rustic English backwaters.

“Rustic backwaters” is as good a description as any of the many and various worlds we have visited during the last four and a half years. We have seen incredible things, most of them involving potatoes, hay and space-straw, but to date we have not encountered a crumpled Jesuit. Uncrumpled ones, yes, on certain other planets, a list of which I maintain in my log book. Most planets, after all, or at least most of the ones that support life, have a Jesuit, as they have an alderman and a town crier and a haberdasher and a man whose job it is to club seals. My crew and I have gained deep and penetrating insights into the basic patterns of the known universe.

And we have taken tea with the voodoo-rastafarians of that most distant of all planets. It was our first port of call. Knowing that some members of my crew would suffer from terrible homesickness, I decided to ease their sufferings by the simple expedient of so arranging things that for the bulk of our voyage we would be heading Earthwards. In a roundabout way, of course, but generally with the starship’s nose cone pointing towards home. As a result of my captainy wisdom, morale has been high. Where the average starship voyage is a purgatory of lassitude, grumpiness, longing, and weeping, the Corrugated Cardboard is a jocund ship, with piccolo recitals and flower-arranging contests and jousting tournaments and games of quoits and monkey divertissements and all sorts of other recreations. On Sundays I prance and skip about with a fairy wand. The only tears are tears of happiness.

Yet for all that, there is mounting tension. With only six months before our scheduled landing at Starship Command HQ at Clacton-on-Sea, we are all too aware that we are in danger of failure. There has been so sign of anything even resembling the Planet of the Crumpled Jesuits. Our daily prayers are not helping, even though we say them in Latin, and wear vestments. The envelope in my pocket remains unopened. I know I cannot ask for more time. For one thing, the fuel will run out. Also, the emergency boosters packed up after we had to make a quick getaway from a planet in sector 9 which turned out to be inhabited entirely by starving, befanged and ferocious giant space-donkeys. The chief engineer, a dour Scot like all good starship chief engineers, has been faffing about with the boosters day in day out, but they still make a horrible creaking noise and sputter out. Or perhaps it is the chief engineer who makes the creaking noise? He may be more elderly than I had been led to believe. Or the space-time continuum might be playing tricks on us. I have heard rumours of such things.

But we must keep our peckers up. Today is the feast day of St Ignatius Loyola. We shall continue on our voyage aboard the starship Corrugated Cardboard with hope in our hearts. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the gravitational field of the Planet of the Crumpled Jesuits.