‘What’s this?’ said Log Jaris, holding aloft a lantern.
No answer came from Chegory Guy who was deep in dream. At that very moment his noncqnscious fantasising was modulating from horror ad nauseum to mere absurdity. He dreamt of an acanaceous cabbage with thaumaturgic tendencies multiplying onyx and zircon to the lapidarian delight of a quivering grannam.
‘What is cabbage but a form of aliment?’ said Chegory, imagining (in his dream) that he had never seen such except in woodblock prints of foreign origin, though in point of fact he knew cabbage well enough since it grew (albeit poorly) in the market gardens of Injiltaprajura.
‘Cabbage is god,’ said cabbage.
Already the cabbage was inimically exerting its granitic will to crush him, all goodwill gone, just badwill remaining, its cassava cyanide, its perfume dung. Crushed, he fell. Yattering ants mocked his valour useless, his courage absurd, his pride misjudged, his skin tarnished with undeniable Ebrell Island red.
‘Wake up, boy,’ said Log Jaris, outside his dream.
‘I am awake,’ said Chegory (or imagined he said) within the dimensions of dream.
Where his unicorn speared her, where she moulded his mangos soft in her hands, her fingers palpating, his banana vomiting, his ants talking the language of sea slugs and carrots as they crawled across her nipples, her hair trailing across his cheeks as Varazchavardan aped monkey in the blue-stained topsails of a coconut tree.
‘Must I kick you awake?’ said Log Jaris.
Answer came there none.
So he kicked.
Not too hard, but hard enough.
Young Chegory Guy snorted, gasped, jerked awake, remembered his knife and grabbed for it, only it was the wrong boot he grabbed for.
‘A blade?’ said Log Jaris, observing the empty boot sheath by lamplight. ‘No blade there, boy! Who are you?’ Slowly Chegory got to his feet. Looked Log Jaris full in the face. Then turned away.
‘Don’t turn your back on me, boy!’ said Log Jaris, grabbing him by the shoulder and spinning him round. ‘I’m not that ugly.’
‘You’re a hallucination,’ said Chegory calmly.
Quite a reasonable assumption, under the circumstances. For Log Jaris was a monster with the body of a man but the head and horns of a bull.
‘What?’ said Log Jaris in startlement. ‘I’m a what?’
‘A hallucination. I don’t believe in you.’
‘You don’t believe in me!’ said Log Jaris, slapping a heavy hand on Chegory’s shoulder. His heavy hand gripped hard then shook the boy. Not much — but enough. ‘You don’t believe in me? What about this? Do you believe in this?’ Log Jaris grasped Chegory’s collar bone between thumb and finger. He increased the pressure. ‘Hurts, doesn’t it? You’re awake, right? Not dreaming! But drunk, perhaps. Are you drunk, my boy?’
‘I’ve dosed on zen,’ said Chegory.
‘You’ve what?’
‘The temple. Temple of Elasmokarcharos. There was zen, zen, burning, huge amphorae, you know, drugs in smoke, in clouds, clouds of it. And… I don’t have to argue with you. You’re a flashback. You don’t exist.’
‘I wish I didn’t!’ said Log Jaris. ‘It would make life that much simpler. All right, come along, boy. Indulge an old hallucination for a bit and let your story keep him company till he’s got the truth out of you.’
Chegory looked hard at Log Jaris. He was in sharp focus. The yellow candlelight shining shining through the lantern’s windows wavered ever so slightly but the shadow-mass bulk of the bullman did not. Tentatively Chegory dared his fingertips forward. The bullman grunted with displeasure as Chegory fingered the black bullhair. Chegory flattened his hand against the coarse hairs. Felt the warmth of living meat beneath. Pushed. Encountered unyielding mass, bulk, weight, inertia.
The bullman was huge.
A huge unyielding mass smelling of bullsweat. Hot breath outsnorted across Chegory’s face as he withdrew his hand from the bullman’s hide. Gold gleamed bright in the quivering moistness of the bullman’s nostrils. The outthrust ears, which looked a little like black tubes of hair with their ends sliced off along a diagonal, twitched as the bullman attended to some distant sound. Chegory raised his gaze to the huge ivory horns uplifted high.
For a hallucination, the thing was impressively detailed and uncommonly stable.
‘Are you quite finished?’ said the bullman. ‘My patience is great, but not infinite.’
‘You look real,’ said Chegory slowly. ‘I mean, you’re not wavery at the edges or anything. You feel real. You smell real. You talk as if you were real. But, if you are real — how do you explain yourself?’
The bullman snorted.
‘You’re the one who’s got some explaining to do,’ said the monster. ‘This is my cellarage, after all. So I suggest you get on with it, lest I obtruncate your loathsome corpse without ceremony further.’
Chegory had no wish to be obtruncated, whatever obtruncation was, since it sounded as if it might be painful. He had already learnt that the pain of hallucinations can be at least equal to that of physical existence. So he had best placate the monster whether it was a free-willed entity in its own right or merely a projection of his own psyche.
‘I, well, I’m here because I got lost, basically,’ said Chegory. ‘Lost underground.’
‘How?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Doubtless,’ said the bullman. ‘A story which you will tell in my torture chamber. Gome!’
So saying, the bullman overturned a barrel and began rolling it out of the room in which Chegory had been caught sleeping. The young Ebrell Islander was bitterly disappointed to realise he had not evaded another ordeal of pain, but nevertheless followed without protest. Torture, torture! Thus he helplessly mindsaid, silently wailing with despair as he followed his massively muscled captor. Drump-thrump echoes rolled into the darkness ahead of them as the bullman kicked the barrel over flagstones and cobblestones then up a series of ramps.
Then the bullman stopped.
‘Here,’ he said, passing Chegory the lantern. ‘Hold this.’
Chegory held it. This was his chance! To smash the lantern, punch the bullman on the snout and then go haring off into the darkness. But he did not seize that chance. He had at last run up against one challenge too many. His resources of courage, initiative and daring were exhausted entirely.
Of course, he should have dared. He should have tried. He should have attacked — then fled. Since the alternative was to endure monstrous horror in the bullman’s torture chamber he had nothing to gain by cooperating with the hideous thing. Yet cooperate he did, holding the lantern while the bullman bullhandled the heavy barrel up through a bullhole, grunting bullfully as he did so. Then he hauled himself up through the same hole, reached down for the lantern and uplifted it.
Run!
Thus spoke Chegory’s last reserve of daring. But already the bullman was reaching down, and Chegory, helpless to resist, found himself extending his own hand to the monster. The bullman hauled Chegory into the darkshadowed room above then closed a heavy trapdoor on the bullhole and bolted it.
Chegory was trapped.
A prisoner in the bullman’s lair!
‘Through here,’ said the bullman, opening a door to reveal a small room lit by bright and cheerful light flooding in through skylights. Blue sky! Blue sky! A startlement of colour pure and bright. So beautiful that Chegory almost wept to see it.
‘What day is it?’ he said.
‘Today,’ answered the bullman. True, but unhelpful. Then: ‘Come,’ said the bullman, ‘in through here.’
So saying, he opened another door and rolled the barrel into a room much larger. By the light flooding in through a dozen latticework windows (more sky, a courtyard view, a wall, no hope of escape, not yet, not that way) Chegory saw all. A huge stove at the near end of the room, and a woman cooking at that stove. A dozen tresde tables with benches set before them. Two dozen assorted fishermen and such seated on those benches, all those fishermen busy talking, eating, and drinking from pewter tankards. Doubtiess there was liquor in those tankards, for this was surely a speakeasy, a house of degradation built to cater for the depraved tastes of helpless drug addicts, the addicts in question being the fishermen yattering-laughing over their breakfasts.
‘You’ll stay for breakfast,’ said the bullman.
‘Oh, of course,’ said Chegory, hoping that he himself would not be one of the courses at that breakfast.
Then he caught the smell of a well-spiced cassoulet and realised he was hungry, very hungry, famished, starved, ravenous, a cat among mice, a dog among cats, a dragon amidst lambs, a fire in a heap of paper, so short commoned it was miraculous he was more than dwarfish, his skeleton clad with ghost and fast demanding man, mass, heat, weight, blood, nerve, sinew, bone, kidney, liver, heart, lung. He was ready to grab, claw, eat, bite, suck, gnaw and swallow, hungry enough to shark it out with the sea’s mobsters for a bucket of offal, possessed of hunger such that he was ready to beg for his mother-in-law’s paps then feed from her twat as well, as the proverbial saying has it, or squeeze a stone for blood, or peel the stone itself then cook it and eat it.
‘Here,’ said the bullman.
So saying, the monster caused a miracle to manifest itself in the form of a bowl of hot, steaming cassoulet. Beans! Meat! Pieces of cassava! A bit of baked banana on the side!
‘Well, boy,’ said the monster. ‘Don’t just gape at it. Sit down. Get into it!’
Moments later young Chegory was sitting at table gulleting into the cassoulet.
‘Slowly, young Chegory,’ said one of the fishermen sitting at the same table. ‘Slowly, or you’ll do yourself an injury.’
‘Oho!’ said the bullman. ‘You know this lad, do you?’
‘No lad, Log Jaris. This is a man in the prime of youth. Isn’t it just, Chegory? You got into that sweet Olivia yet?’
‘Working on it,’ said Chegory.
‘Oh, I bet you are! More meat on that than a chicken, hey?’
‘Leaving aside this question of Olivia chickens,’ said the bullman Log Jaris, ‘what’s the rest of your name, Chegory?’
‘Chegory Guy,’ said Chegory Guy.
‘Oho! Not the son of Impala Guy, by chance?’ said the bullman. ‘Not the son of old man Impala, Japone’s beloved stillmaster?’
‘The same,’ said Chegory.
So saying, he managed a crooked smile.
A crooked smile? Let us be more exact. Chegory Guy experienced a certain degree of discomfiture but was loathe to make this known; hence he tried (but without complete success) to make pleasure rather than displeasure express itself on his face. Following convention, we say therefore that he smiled a crooked smile, though in point of literal fact he did not.
Some people who are in perfect health (and some who are not, such as some who have suffered strokes or varying degrees of severity, or who have been mutilated, or who are under the influence of certain unethical drugs) habitually express themselves by means of a smile which does not run the full length of the mouth, and which can therefore accurately and literally be termed ‘crooked’. Some people can do this with ease, just as some people can wiggle their ears.
Chegory Guy could not have wiggled his ears to save his life (except by the expedient of grasping the said ears with his hands and causing them to move by an application of manual pressure). He was completely bereft of innate ear-wriggling talent, just as he was born without poetic potential. Nevertheless, since he had a fair degree of control of the voluntary muscles which supervise the lips, he could no doubt have managed a crooked smile if his life had been at stake. However, he did not. Indeed, he rarely (if ever) did anything so unnatural as smiling crookedly. Even after the most diligent research, it has proved impossible to find a single witness [The Originator appears to have succumbed to a fit of what Kerkransolifski Bodo has so neatly termed ‘that painful accuracy which makes all Truth impossible’. To preserve the communicability of that which the Originator has elsewhere managed to capture in phrase, and to lessen the incidence of repetitive strain injury among our scribes, an exercise in pedantry which extends for no less than ten thousand words has here been deleted. By Order, Sptyx Rhataporo, Surveyor of the Office of Overview.]
[What, pray tell, is wrong with pedantry? I applaud the Originator’s outbreak of accuracy and must severely deprecate Rhataporo’s unwarranted excision of the same. Brude, Pedant Particular.]
After Chegory Guy had confessed to his true identity Log Jaris conducted a gentle interrogation which soon told him all he needed to know about his young visitor. Then the bullman took down an amphora and poured mugs of foaming brown fluid for himself, the fisherman and Chegory.
‘What’s this?’ said Chegory, looking into the mug with the deepest of suspicion.
‘Something for the pain,’ said Log Jaris.
‘The pain?’ said Chegory.
‘To exist is to suffer,’ said the bullman. ‘Learned philosophers proved this way back in the dawn of human history, whereupon the greatest genius of the day was assembled to provide a remedy. That remedy you have before you. Drink! For by drinking we prove ourselves true students of the higher philosophy.’
Chegory had never heard anyone espouse such a doctrine before, though it is certain the dogma was not the bullman’s original invention; indeed, it is rumoured that the Korugatu philosophers of far-distant Chi’ash-lan first evolved a similar theory over a thousand years ago, and have laboured mightily ever since in an attempt to refine it by practical research.
‘This is a drug, isn’t it?’ said Chegory.
‘You would worry about that?’ said Log Jaris, with open amusement. ‘You, a crazed adventurer who daily dares life and limb Downstairs for the sole purpose of indulging a craving for zen? Will what’s in this mug turn your insides out or split your skull to spill your brains upon your feet?’
‘No, but-’
But it was liquor, surely.
‘Make a choice,’ said Logjaris, with less amusement than before. ‘Are you my friend or my enemy? My guest or my prisoner? Come, boy, it’s not bub, it is but beer.’
Then Chegory gathered his courage, and did what he needed to do if he was to survive. He lifted the mug of beer to his lips. He drank. What was the alternative? To be trampled to death by the bullman, surely. To be battered and gored, pulped and destroyed. Nevertheless — was that not the better course? For is not addiction to drink a fate far worse than death? And was not young Chegory well-launched upon such a fate? For he had been boozing in the lair of Firfat Labrat just the day before, and now here he was drinking up large in a scurvy speakeasy in the worst of low company imaginable.
But Chegory lacked the courage to die. He wanted to live, to escape from this place of evil, this hell-hole with its amphorae filled with liquid death, these all-too-jolly fishermen who had already succumbed to the sly seductive wiles of unholy chemical combinations. He wanted to walk once more beneath the clean sky. To walk again in the sunlight. To be pure, and law abiding, and at peace with himself and the world.
So drink he did.
Remember he was but a poor ignorant Ebrell Islander whose philosophical tutoring had been neglected entirely. He had yet to learn that ends seldom justify means, thus he did not realise that his hopes of escaping to a life of purity and peace were doomed when, to secure his survival, he adopted means that were foul, unclean, unlawful, destructive, polluted and corrupt, and evil, immoral, unethical and incontinent, and vile, dirty and sickening to boot. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that by sharing the bullman’s beer he did indeed enhance his short-term chances of survival, and of escaping from the speakeasy with both his life and his hide intact.
‘You don’t look happy,’ said Log Jaris. ‘What’s wrong? Is there something the matter with the beer?’
‘Don’t you understand?’ said Chegory, with a touch of desperation. ‘I mean, what I said — Shabble, the soldiers, Varazchavardan, the whole thing — you think that’s some kind of joke?’
‘Oho, we have us a most unhappy little fellow here!’ said Log Jaris. ‘Why, from the way he talks, you’d think him up to his neck in sharks already. Yet the worst he’s dared already. What’s worse than zen? Naught that I know of. The rest is but trouble in trifles. Don’t worry about it! Soon enough it’ll all blow over.’
‘It can’t, it won’t, I’m done for, there’s nowhere to hide.’ Thus Chegory, in something of a wail.
‘Can’t!’ said Log Jaris. ‘You’re very free with your can’t and your won’t. How comes this can’t and won’t so freely from a strong man like you? Have you not legs you can run with? If bad comes to worse then surely your legs can carry you. Jal Japone will welcome you surely. After all, you’re the son of Impala Guy.’
Chegory was infuriated by the jesting tone which had entered the bullman’s voice. He wanted to pour out his protests in a flood of incoherent anger. Instead, he restrained and controlled himself. He said merely:
‘Not Zolabrik. Not ever. I’m not running away.’
‘Oho!’ said Log Jaris. ‘A hero indeed! Yet it wishes to live regardless. Very well! A change of face will do it. Do what I did, my bloodskinned friend. Hide your face forever by means of transmogrification.’
‘By means of what?’ said Chegory. ‘You mean you weren’t — you chose — you — you-’
Log Jaris laughed.
‘I wasn’t born like this,’ said he. ‘In truth I’m a man of Ashdan descent. My hometown was Pondros Yermento, which-’
‘I know, I know,’ said Chegory, cutting him off. ‘I’ve lived with Ashdans long enough, you know, they talk Ashmolea no end.’
‘Well, if you know you know,’ said Log Jaris, more than a little offended by Chegory’s interruption.
‘He’s only a boy,’ said a fisherman. ‘Don’t be hard on him.’
‘I’m not being hard on him!’ said Log Jaris. ‘I’m offering him escape. Anonymity forever! The secret of transmogrification.’
‘I’ll worry out my own problems,’ said Chegory.
Thus he failed to learn about the transmogrification machine Downstairs which, if he had dared to use it, might have turned him into dragonman or dog, centaur or merman, satyr or rundicorn, giant or dwarf. Or — better yet — he might have kept his born proportions while losing his skin of Ebrell Island red. He might have come out black like the Ashdans, or white like the leucodermic Varazchavardan. He might have emerged in an elegant shade of grey like the Janjuladoola of Ang, or in the pink- tending-to-pallor of the natives of Wen Endex. Or bark-brown like many of the peoples of Argan, or strangulation blue like the scholars of Odrum.
Alternatively, if the luck of the stars had been with him, the young Ebrell Islander might have won an appearance like mine own, which would have given him green skin, green hair and two thumbs on each hand.
[What is one to think? Does the Originator truly believe the scholars of Odrum to be blue in hue? We know ourselves to be in truth an eclectic selection of the best brains of the Twenty Seven Superior Races. So does the Originator err by accident or with malice? Furthermore, what is one to think of the Originator’s self-description? If he is mad, as Reader Zeb has suggested, then possibly he believes himself to dwell within flesh configured as described, though nothing matching the description is accounted for in the Library, unless we accept into the Body of Knowledge certain wild rumours concerning the impenetrable jungles of the interior of the island of Quilth. These matters scholarship must attend to closely until in the fullness of time thay are elucidated. Inserted by Order, Jon Jangelis, Scrutineer.]
Thus did Chegory lose his chance to enlist the help of the formidable Log Jaris and to learn of the transmogrification machine. But, since he was only a backward Ebrell Islander, he knew not that he had lost anything at all. Instead, he occupied himself by trying to think of some smart way to escape his quandary.
‘Well,’ said Log Jaris, ‘since you don’t want my help, I can guess where you’re going next.’
‘Where’s that?’ said Chegory.
‘To the pink palace. The next petitions session is at noon today.’
With that said, Log Jaris ushered young Chegory out into the street, and, with the slightest hint of a shove, dismissed him and closed the door on him.
Young Chegory Guy was so surprised to find himself out in the sunlight — he had still been at least half-expecting imprisonment, torture and sudden death — that at first he entirely failed to recognise this narrow lane. Then, as he orientated himself, he realised he was in one of the sideways of Marthandorthan, not far from the warehouse where his ill-favoured cousin Firfat Labrat presided over a vigorous business in illicit drugs.