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Post By The Hooded Hood takes you to a cold, lonely moor in the wreathing fog Wed Jun 16, 2004 at 07:30:16 am EDT |
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Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Mystery - Part the Seventeenth: Blatherville Manor and the Dead Men of Dartmoor | |
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| Part the Seventeenth: Blatherville Manor and the Dead Men of Dartmoor The mist rolled in from Dartmoor that night, swathing the lonely villages in a white blanket that reflected back the thin slot of light from the taped headlamps of the Triumph Renown roadster. The bad visibility slowed the vehicle almost to walking pace. “I’m sorry, sirs,” Corporal Clement apologised to the two English officers he’d been detailed to chauffeur. “I can’t go any faster in this awful fog.” “Just do your best,” answered Brigadier “Bagger” Gallowglass in tense clipped tones. “And try to remember which side of the road we drive on here.” Right down the middle in weather like this, the soldier from Trinidad thought to himself, trying to stay on the black ribbon of tarmac. Out on Dartmoor it was dangerous to stray from the main roads. Solid ground could turn to grimpen marsh, and men and horses had often been lost to the sucking mud when the weather turned like this. Sir Mumphrey Wilton kept staring at his pocketwatch. He seemed to be in a terrible hurry to get to Blatherville Manor, out on the high land beneath Coombestone Tor. He used a pocket torch to trace their route on Ordinance Survey maps, since all signposts in the United Kingdom had been removed as a precaution against the expected Nazi invasion. He had navigated them down through Devon, through Moretonhampstead and Shapley Common, King’s Oven and Bellever and Tunabridge, each place smaller and lonelier than the last. The Brigadier threw down his field telephone in disgust. “Useless out here,” he frowned. “I managed to get the police at Tavistock and Buckfasteligh, told them to turn out the Home Guard to question traffic to and from the area, but…” “But if they meet the Expediter with his hypnotic hoodoo they’ll just salute and help him on his way, and make him a cup of tea to warm him up if he asks it,” growled Sir Mumphrey.” “Yes,” admitted Gallowglass. “When I sent Bookman down to Blatherville I thought we’d be getting him somewhere secure so he could solve that encrypted document of yours. We were preparin’ the place to move the whole Enigma project there, you know.” “You couldn’t know the Krauts would send this Yank traitor who could control minds,” Mumphrey allowed. “I just wish we had any file information on the blighter.” The Brigadier scowled. “A mercenary with those powers could easily…” He was interrupted as a man loomed out of the fog. Clement braked too late and the pedestrian bounced over the bonnet and smashed into the windscreen. “No!” howled the driver. “I never saw him, he…” Then the mangled lump of flesh turned round, reached through the broken window, and ripped out the soldier’s throat. “Uh oh,” scowled Mumphrey, rewinding the event. “Zombie, by the look of him.” He let time run forward again, but this time he had his Webley ready to blow the undead corpse backwards away from the driver. “What the deuce!” gasped the Brigadier. “Drive!” Wilton ordered Clement. “Don’t stop for anyone.” “Sir,” the corporal reported urgently as he swerved the Triumph round the staggering creature, “I think that was some kind of walking dead man!” “Don’t be ridiculous, corp…” Bagger Gallowglass began to retort, but then two more of the creatures jumped onto the car’s running boards. “An ambush!” growled Sir Mumphrey loosing his gun again, aiming at wrists to break the zombies’ grip on the vehicle. As they topped away Clement gunned the engine and they sped off down the track. “Make for the village ahead,” Gallowglass ordered, studying the OS map. “We’ll get to Hexworthy and then try and take care of this.” Clement skilfully navigated the unexpected twists and hairpin bends on the unlit road. Twice more he had to swerve to avoid figures in their path. “Don’t go off the track,” Mumphrey warned him. “We’d bog down and be completely stuck. Run ‘em down if you have to.” “Sir,” shuddered the driver. At last the dark silhouette of Hexworthy came into view. There were no lights, for England was under blackout to avoid giving targets to German bombers. The whole village was no more than two dozen houses, a post office, and a pub. “To the pub,” Gallowglass ordered. “The post office’ll have the phone,” Mumphrey pointed out. “The pub will have the men with shotguns,” the Brigadier countered. The men in the Dog and Gun did indeed have shotguns. They were all pointed at the intruders, the only three men in the village that were still alive. “An ambush!” Gallowglass hissed as the undead villagers raided their weapons and aimed with sightless eyes. “Yes indeed,” gloated a black man in a smart business suit. He stood behind the bar and he was holding some kind of decorated bone from which dangled gobbets of rotting meat and tufts of greasy hair. “If you hold still I’ll make sure it does not hurt when you join my little family.” “And who the devil are you sir?” demanded Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “You couldn’t pronounce my African name, imperialist,” Jebdallah M’Tumbe sneered. “You can think of me as the Voodoo Vicar.” “Church of England m’self,” Mumphrey scowled. “Less killin’ dozens of people to raise ‘em as zombies, more bazaars and Onward Christian Soldiers.” “You’ll see it differently when you’re my zombie slave,” M’Tumbe promised. Mumphrey stopped time and used the pause to thread his way through the shambling dead men and reach the Voodoo Vicar. He timed the end of the temporal stasis to coincide with his fist shattering the houngan’s jaw. “Also,” the eccentric Englishman added, “Fight the Good Fight.” The zombies became frenzied and turned on Gallowglass and Clement. Mumphrey could only think of one way to stop them. First he snapped M’Tumbe’s bone-wand, and then he snapped M’Tumbe’s neck. Even as the car drew up to Blatherville Manor Mumphrey knew they were too late. The clean up at Hexworthy had delayed them long enough for the Expediter to do his work. The soldiers on guard there were waiting in ambush, brainwashed as the guards at Whitehall had been. The eccentric Englishman used almost all the remaining chronal charge in his pocketwatch to subdue the charmed men gently and raced inside ahead of Gallowglass. Everyone inside Blatherville Manor was dead. They seemed to have killed themselves. A quick reply of the events with the final pocketwatch charge showed the Expediter sauntering in and speaking with people. Then the self-slaughter had begun. The mercenary had picked up the files he required, the Bertram diary copies, the translations from the Versalian, the solution Bookman had formulated, and strode back to his waiting Austin 10 Tourer. But where was Bookman? Mumphrey just had time to note that the German exile was not amongst those present before the images flickered away and the pocketwatch fell silent. “What a grisly business,” scowled the Brigadier as he strode past the mess and looked around the blood-stained manor. “So this Expediter bastard got what he came for while his voodoo accomplice slowed us down?” “Pretty much,” agreed Sir Mumphrey, “except for Bookman himself. Search the place, Bagger. Call for him.” They found Pieter Bookman cowering in a boot cupboard in the scullery, terrified out of his wits. He had grown used to hiding at the first signs of danger, and his instincts had saved his life. “I hid under the rags and old shoes and shut my eyes and put my fingers in my ears,” the code-breaker admitted as he swigged down a stiff tot from Mumphrey’s hip-flask. “So you didn’t hear the Expediter’s commands,” Mumph snorted. “Interestin’. But the blaggard’s got clean away with all the notes and solutions, and we’re left with nothin’.” “Except for the solutions,” Bookman blinked in surprise. “You know I have an eidetic memory, don’t you? I never forget anything I’ve read or written.” “And… you have the solution to what Blanchford Bertram wrote in his journals? You know what that Black Dome thingie was and where he found it?” “Oh yes,” agreed Pieter Bookman. “I know.” In our next exciting episode:We catch up on Miss Canterbury and her ex-fiancée and their meeting with the triumphant Expediter, and we hear of the unexpected journey they all undertake. 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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