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Post By Unpleasantness ensures with a nasty contents warning in this chapter from... the Hooded Hood Thu Jun 10, 2004 at 08:59:30 am EDT |
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Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Mystery - Part the Eleventh: Herr Wertham and the Limits of Pain | |
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| Part the Eleventh: Herr Wertham and the Limits of Pain “So Englander, you are not so clever now, hein?” gloated Herr Wertham. He waited for his henchman to throw another bucket of water over the prisoner he had strapped to a heavy wooden chair in the cellars of his temporary headquarters in Seville. “Could be a damned sight dimmer and still make you look stupid,” spat Sir Mumphrey Wilton. Herr Wertham touched the twisted pair of lampwires to his prisoner’s nipple again. “Keep being defiant, Englander. It will make your eventual surrender that much sweeter.” He leaned close enough to the blood-streaked British agent that Mumphrey could smell the stale pasta on his breath. “I am the Fatherland’s most renowned torturer, an expert in pain and torment. The Fuhrer himself comes to watch when I perform. I can keep you alive for days, screaming, and every moment you believe you cannot hurt any more I shall prove you wrong.” “You think you’re the best? You’ve clearly never been a fag at Rugby. Those prefects could get very vindictive.” Wertham snarled and held the electrodes to his captive’s genitals long enough to wring out a gasp. It was the best he’d got so far. “You know, Sir Mumphrey, it doesn’t have to be like this. Co-operate and I can send you back to Germany as a privileged prisoner. You would be confined at one of our country mansions, not unlike your own estates at home. You would sit out the war in luxury as our guest.” “Really?” Mumphrey asked, his eyes wide with emotion. “You mean it?” “Oh yes. We treat those who help us as well as we treat those who thwart us badly,” Wertham promised. “And would the Fuhrer visit? And wear a little apron and bring me a cup of cocoa at bedtime and tuck me in?” Wertham screeched in fury and rammed the wires onto Mumphrey’s tongue. Then he threw the broken lamp away in disgust and lit a cigarette. “You know you’ll have to pay for that broken lamp,” Sir Mumphrey told him, gasping for breath after the latest round of pain. “Now you won’t be getting your damage deposit back.” It was twelve hours since the eccentric Englishman had been spirited from the tarmac of the Casablanca airfield. A journey by plane and truck had brought Wilton to the cellar where he now suffered. The people upstairs were speaking Spanish, but Sir Mumphrey had no way of knowing that he was being held in Seville in a hotel run by Fascist sympathisers. Herr Wertham puffed his cigarette to a rosy brightness and breathed smoke over his captive. Then he very deliberately stubbed it on Mumphrey’s earlobe. “It occurs to me, Sir Mumphrey, that you really don’t require two eyes to see what I am doing to you,” he noted. “Perhaps you would like to reconsider your attitude? Perhaps you would like to tell me how you produce those extraordinary time effects that seem to occur when you fiddle with your pocketwatch. Perhaps you would care to tell me where you hid the said timepiece when I captured you in Casablanca? Or shall you replace your pocketwatch with a white cane?” “You’d better pray that I never find a way our of these handcuffs, Wertham,” Sir Mumphrey warned the torturer. But his mind was racing. Miss Canterbury knew about the Chronometer of Infinity, and since she had been under the telepathic control of the Expediter at the time, the arrogant mercenary knew as well. But the Expediter was not here, and he had evidently not shared that information with his partner Herr Wertham. That was probably just as well. The Expediter might just have been bright enough to work out the emergency contingency Mumphrey had used when he was captured to shift the pocketwatch itself an hour into the future. Presumably even now it lay on the tarmac at the Casablanca airstrip. “Are you going to talk, Sir Mumphrey?” Wertham demanded, lacing Mumphrey’s chest with searing circles from the tip of his cigarette. “Or is it lights out? Where did you send Bookman and the girl? How far have you got decrypting the Bertram Diaries? What is the secret of the Black Dome?” “The Black Dome?” Sir Mumphrey hadn’t heard of that before, so presumably the talents of the Reich’s own cryptographers were also at work on Blanchford Bertram’s text. “Perhaps if you explain where you’ve got so far I can fill in any gaps?” Wertham almost fell for it, then slapped the eccentric Englishman hard. “You will answer!” he shrieked. “We ask the questions! We are the masters! We are…” And then the cellar door vanished into the future. “Nobody move!” called Miss Canterbury. “You!” screeched Wertham, recognising the woman who has thwarted him again and again. He gestured to his flunkies. “Take her!” Miss Canterbury pushed a stud on the temporal pocketwatch she held and the three attendants around Wertham vanished as well. The torturer snarled and picked up his lash. Miss Canterbury pressed the pocketwatch again, but nothing happened. “No more charge,” groaned Mumphrey. “Must still be set for the hour jump, and that’s very draining. Run, Miss Canterbury!” Wertham’s whip slashed the Chronometer from her hands, and the Nazi strode forward. “Well now, this is a most interesting addition to the scenario,” he smiled unpleasantly. “I think Sir Mumphrey is about to become a good deal more talkative now you are my guest also.” Miss Canterbury forced herself not to back away. “I didn’t come alone, either,” she answered defiantly. “When I jumped from the plane in Casablanca and crept aboard the transport carrier you took Sir Mumphrey away in I brought an old friend.” And she held up a pineapple-shaped hand grenade. “That trick again?” smirked Herr Wertham. “Your companion fooled me once with a dummy grenade in Tangiers. Do not think I am so foolish as to fall for it twice.” Miss Canterbury raised her chin and stared back at the torturer. “And don’t think I have the technical proficiency to remove the inside of a hand grenade,” she answered. Despite his injuries, Sir Mumphrey snorted in amusement. “She’s got you there, Wertham.” The torturer watched with malevolent beady eyes behind his pebble glasses as Miss Canterbury skirted round him, retrieved the Chronometer, and put it in Mumphrey’s hands. Long use meant the eccentric Englishman could reset the device by touch alone, and although the charge was almost drained there was enough to send the handcuffs that bound him ten seconds through time so he could get free. Wertham chose that moment of distraction to dive out of the cellar, calling for the guards. “Are you well enough to walk?” doubted Miss Canterbury as she helped Mumphrey to his feet. “After such a splendid rescue it would be churlish to do otherwise,” Mumphrey assured her, painfully dragging his clothes on. “Now all we have to do is escape a hotel full of swarming Nazis, evade the checkpoints, get out of Seville without being shot by the Fascists, find a way out of Spain, then get back to Bookman, solve the puzzle and beat the baddies to the prize.” “I’m ready,” smiled Miss Canterbury. “Proceed.” In our next exciting episode:Something is killing civilians on the besieged allied fortress of Malta. So guess where Mumphrey and Miss C are going? Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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