The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived

271 Pages·2011·1.02 MB·English

by  Rankin Robert

ROBERT RANKIN
THE MOST AMAZING MAN WHO
EVER LIVED
1
THIS ICARUS SORT OF STUFF
‘And then I shall leap from the east pier and be borne aloft by these wings.’
Norman the elder made an expansive gesture which Norman the younger found
most encouraging. ‘Up I shall go.’ The daddy’s right hand described the flight
path. ‘Across and around.’ His left hand joined in with much gusto. ‘And away.’
The hands flew off in the direction of France then came home to roost in the
elder Norman’s trouser pockets.
‘Gosh,’ said his son, ‘and with only the aid of these.’
The daddy stroked the wings upon the garage workbench. ‘The aid of these
alone.’
Young Norman sighed a sigh. ‘Gosh,’ he said once more, ‘imagine that.’
‘Something to tell your school chums, eh?’ The daddy nudged his son
confidentially in the rib area. ‘Not many of them got fathers who can fly, I’ll
bet.’
Young Norman shook his head. ‘Not many,’ he said, ‘but a few.’
‘A few?’
‘Well, Blenkinsop’s father claims to have mastered the Lamaist art of
levitation. Charlie Huxley’s brother has a pair of zero-gravity trousers and Boris
Timms says he has a priestly uncle who can inflate his stomach with helium and
propel himself through the sky by fa—’
His father cut him mercifully short. ‘Not many got feathered wings, by the
sound of it.’
Young Norman shook his head. ‘Not many,’ he agreed.
The elder Norman ran a loving knuckle across the feathered wings.
‘Fine big wings these,’ he said, gazing wistfully through the cobwebbed
garage window towards the lonely sea and the sky. ‘Fine big wings.’
On his way to school the next morning the boy Norman thought a lot about the
conversation he’d had with his father.
Could it be, he asked himself, that the daddy has truly cracked it regarding this
wing business, or is this just another of the sad flights of fancy to which the old
chap has become subject of late?
The annual Skelington Bay East Pier Man-Powered Flight Competition
always drew the holiday-makers. And the annual £1000 prize for the first
successful one-thousand-foot flight always drew the town’s eccentrics. But no-
one was actually expected really to win the money. It was all just a bit of
summertime jolly, wasn’t it? Men in cardboard planes and dicky-bird costumes
jumping into the sea to raise money for charity.
A bit of jolly. That was all it was.
Although it didn’t have to be.
Norman strode on, chewing gum and bouncing a tennis ball.
It didn’t have to be.
As it was Thursday it was Science for 3A.
Norman sat at the back of the class, that he might observe whilst remaining
unobserved.
Mr Bailey bashed the blackboard with his baton. ‘Boyle’s law,’ said he, in the
voice of one who really cared about such things. ‘What do we know of Boyle’s
law?’ The eyes behind his pebbled specs searched in vain for that little island of
enlightenment set in the sea of vacant faces. ‘Blenkinsop?’
Blenkinsop the Buddhist pulled his finger from his nose. Examining the yield
he said, ‘There is only one law and that is the law of dharma.’
‘The law of dharma.’ Mr Bailey beckoned with his baton. ‘Come hither, boy,
and have your trousers dusted.’
Sheltering behind Bilson’s gargantuan frame, Norman leaned upon an elbow
and stared out of the window. His thoughts were far from the horrors of corporal
punishment. They were sailing high above with Timms’ clerical uncle and a
veritable flock of airborne relations. There couldn’t be too much to this flying
lark if you really put your mind to it. A lad of his capabilities should surely be
able to figure it out.
On Friday there was Games. PE it was called.
3A’s pimply personnel stood shivering in the drafty hall that springtime never
reached. Those whom loving mothers had furnished with ‘notes’ sat grinning
from the safety of the stage. Those with parents who believed in healthy exercise
and team spirit shuffled in their vests and shorts and viewed the exalted ones
with a healthless mixture of envy, loathing and contempt.
Mr McLaren the games teacher sprinted knees-high into the echoing hall. Clad
in the regulation-issue soiled track suit and evil-smelling plimsolls, his arrival
brought dread to the non-athletic noteless.
‘Vaulting horse, Tompkins and Turner. At the double!’ The order was barked
out in that staccato ex-national-service voice that you don’t hear much of
nowadays. ‘Straight line, the rest of you. Number off. Wait for . . it. Now!’
‘One, two, three, four,’ went the quavery wavery voices, to end with the big,
deep ‘twenty-three’ of Teddy Bilson.
‘And go!’
Number One was stubby Harry Hughes. His dash towards the towering horse
was determined and courageous. His would be the only broken collar bone of the
day.
Norman was unlucky Thirteen in the quivering queue. ‘A man with feathered
wings might soar above that vaulting horse with next to no effort at all,’ he
confided to the trembling Twelve.
‘To paraphrase the late great Winston Churchill,’ the Dozen replied, ‘Give us
the wings and we will finish the job.’
‘Twelve!’ screamed the martial Mr McLaren.
‘God bless me,’ whimpered Number Twelve, making the sign of the cross.
‘With wings all things are possible,’ Norman informed Number Fourteen, a
big lad with a small moustache. ‘All things to do with flying, anyhow.’
Number Fourteen nodded. ‘Wings have their uses,’ he said, ‘this cannot be
denied. But I am approaching fifteen years of age and beginning to take a lively
interest in girls.’
Norman stroked his hairless upper-lip area. ‘Further conversation with you on
the subject of wings would probably be wasted then, I suppose.
Number Fourteen nodded again. ‘Isn’t there a bird in South America called
the Giant Condom?’ he asked.
‘Thirteen!’ bawled the games teacher.
‘God bless me!’ mumbled Norman. And this gave him a sudden idea.
At 5.30 a.m. on the following Sunday, young Norman, damp with dew and ring-
fingered by carrier bags, laboured to the top of Druid’s Tor and stood puffing
and panting to await the arrival of the new sun.
Below him Skelington Bay, holiday town of his birth, lurked in sea mist, its
twin piers paddling in the tide.
Above him the sky. The big, wide-open sky.
Just waiting.
It was the ‘God bless me’ of Games that had brought young Norman here. It
had recalled to him a painting he’d once seen during a force-marched school
outing to the town hall.
It was one of those huge Pre-Raphaelite jobbies that municipal councils used
to snap up for a song before the War, to cover the cracks in their walls. It was of
angels evident at the birth of the Christ child. And the thing about these angels
was that, although togged up in what appeared to be old curtains and bereft of
footwear, they had, as Norman remembered quite clearly, dirty great wings of
the feathered variety growing out of their backs.
‘Fine big wings,’ as his father would have said.
And the recollection of these fine big wings had set young Norman thinking.
Now, angels could fly. This was well known. But, according to the Bible, no
matter how good you were while alive, your chances of becoming an angel when
dead were somewhat less than zero. The old harps and wings were not doled out
to the blessed the way cartoonists would have us believe. You joined the angels.
You did not become one.
And of course you did have to be dead first.
And of course, if you were dead, then you couldn’t win the man-powered
flight competition and fly off with the £1000 prize.
But what say, if you could communicate with angels? Contact them, with a
view to genning up on the various hints and wrinkles concerning the art of
‘winging it’? Surely that would give you the supernatural edge on the
opposition.
Of course it would.
And so it was to this end that Norman had spent the greater part of Saturday in
the reference section of Skelington Public Library. He’d drawn a bit of a blank
with the Christian tracts though. These spoke a lot about prayer and guilt and
living a blameless life, but nothing about how you could get any one-on-one
chit-chat with any of the feather-clad choirs eternal. In &ct, the would-be aviator
was just on the point of chucking the whole thing in and making off to the
Wimpy Bar, when the new librarian, the one on the Job Opportunities Scheme,
skulked over with a large buff-coloured book and thrust it into his hands. ‘Check
this out, kid,’ he said. ‘I think it’s just what you’re looking for.’.
Norman eyed the book with interest.
Its title was The Necronomicon.
Now it is a fact well known amongst satanic circles, or wherever two or three
heavy-metal fans are gathered together, that every borough library secretly
possesses a copy of The Necronomicon. Not the original, of course, bound in the
skin of a sacrificial virgin and penned in the blood of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred. The Vatican has that. But most often they possess one of the
forbidden Latin translations of Olaus Wormius, revised into English and
published as a part-work for private subscription by Marshall Cavendish, or
some such.
Of course the librarians, who have taken whatever binding oath they take
during their secret initiation ceremonies, won’t let you see it. They’ll swear blind
that it doesn’t even exist.
But then they would, wouldn’t they?
The new librarian on the Job Opportunities Scheme was wearing a Deicide T-
[1]
shirt with the legend DEAD BY DAWN printed across the front. His name was
Chris and he had lots of hair. And he’d only been working there for a day. ‘Use
the photocopier and go for it,’ was his advice.
So Norman had done and was doing so even now.
To the early-rising passer-by, the dog-walker or poet seeking inspiration upon
the misty hilltop, the youth would have presented a most disconcerting spectacle.
Now stripped down to his Y-fronts and crouched within the confines of the
lopsided pentagram he’d just chalked out, his Thermos flask and sandwich box
before him and a selection of anything he could find that looked remotely
‘occult’ spread whither and so, he clutched his photocopies in one hand and
began to make wild gestures with the other.
And to intone.
The way you would.
‘Hail unto thee, thou Ancient Ones,’ he went, as best he could, with the
unbroken voice and the touch of catarrh. ‘Hail unto thee, Absu Mummu Tiamet,
Nar Maturu, Yog Sothoth, Nyarlathotep and the like. I conjure thee, thou
fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave’s holding. Rise from your
haunts of forever night and summon unto me.’
It had to be said that there was a distinct air of blasphemy about all this. And
an older and wiser fellow might perhaps have thought twice before seeking to
invoke the powers of darkness and taking the risk of eternal damnation, just to
win the first prize in a man-powered flight competition.
But then, when you’re fourteen, you do that sort of thing. We all do. Indeed
who amongst us can truly put their hand upon their heart and swear that they
never once offered up a sacrifice to Satan during their teenage years?
Not many!
‘Harken unto me,’ the youth continued, ‘Ninnghizhidda, lak Sakkak, Laibach,
Napalm Death and Celtic Frost. Ye ghids and bogiebeasts, come serve I that
standith in the five-pointed star. Deliver unto me what I request. Come bring me
wings!’
Norman had decided upon the direct approach. Keep things sharp, crisp, to the
point. Summon up the deep, dark denizens from out the pit-that-hath-no-bottom.
Have them cough up the goods. Then back with them to from whence they came.
And quick. It was all for the best.
‘I summons you and constrain you by the powers of Lord Cthulhu, who is not
dead but only getting his head down for a bit of shut eye. Obey my commands.
Manifest. Give me Wings, Wings, Wings! I want them and I want them now. All
I want is Wings!’
If there was a distinct (a very distinct) air of blasphemy about all this, then
there was also the feeling that some callous spirit, with an eye for the obvious,
might any moment appear before Norman, bearing a copy of Paul McCartney’s
latest album in its scaly paw.
‘Wings!’ impeached Norman. ‘I command you, bring me Wings!’
It was no laughing matter really (especially the Paul McCartney gag). It was a
very bad idea doing this. The birds that had been making free with the dawn
chorus had gone very quiet indeed. And there was a definite chill in the air.
But Norman had started and he meant to finish. Chris had underlined for him
a certain Latin incantation, which was known as The Great Calling. And the
young magician in the Y-fronts bawled it out at the top of his voice, with a bit of
the old ‘What do we want? Wings! When do we want ‘em? Now!’ thrown in for
good measure, wherever he felt it appropriate.
And then suddenly Norman stopped.
Something was stirring. Something large. Norman couldn’t see it, but
somehow he could sense its approach.
And then he heard it.
From far away upon that misty morn, there came a distant-flapping sound,
which sounded, for all the world, like nothing less than the sound of a distant
flapping.
Norman got a cold sweat on to go with his damp behind. He strained his eyes
into the rising mists. The sun, now half awake, glistened upon the hedgerows
and dazzled him.
He gave his ears a strain also. The flapping sound grew louder. Something
was on the approach. Something monstrous.
Great wings were beating on the morning air. Great wings like those of The
Giant Condom itself.
‘Yes!’ screamed Norman, most pleased to get such a swift return upon such a
small Satanic outlay. ‘I’m here. My Wings. My Wings. My Wings.’
It was overhead. It was right overhead. It had come straight to him. This was
it.
‘My Wings!’
There was a sharp, snapping sound; a moment’s silence; a scream from on
high. The cry of a great bird? Not as such.
Another scream and then down though the mist, at the speed of one hundred
and eighty feet per second, came a cascade of wire, wood, wax, pegs, feathers—
And Norman the elder.
‘Look out below,’ went this unhappiest of men. ‘Test-flight systems failure.
Aaaaaaaagh!’
‘Oh my God!’ Norman the younger struggled to make his escape. But his left
toe had somehow become intimately entangled in the crotch of his Y-fronts.
So he couldn’t.
In the few seconds that remained to him on this plane of existence, young
Norman had just enough time to ponder on the folly of the particular method
he’d chosen to go about solving the man-powered flight problem. But not quite
enough to apologize to God.
Shame really.
The sun, now fully risen, looked down upon the drying grass of Druid’s Tor and
viewed the broken wreckage that had once been Norman and his dad.
The old sun smiled, for, after all, it had seen this Icarus sort of stuff before and
would probably come up to see it again. Sometime.
A little later a party of librarians came up to hold an initiation ceremony and
found the sorry remains of the two erstwhile airmen. They too mused upon
man’s folly.
One, by the name of Chris, who wore the robes of Initiate Novice Zero Grade,
pushed aside his corkscrew hair and raised his eyes towards the heavens as if
searching for a sign.
‘Surely’, he said, ‘that would be a Roman Catholic priest I see floating up
there.’