Posted by Miss Canterbury demands a few answers of Sir Mumphrey in this latest installment of our ripping war yarn, by... the Hooded Hood. on June 05, 2001 at 15:41:30:
Part the Fourth: Terry Lucas and the Si-Fan Catamites
“So why don’t you tell
me who you really are, and what’s truly going on, Sir Mumphrey?” Miss Canterbury
challenged the dashing young Englishman who had rescued her and accompanied her
across three continents to discover the meaning of a puzzle which had led to her
father’s murder. “The truth, I mean.” “He awakes, Grand Master,” the Inquisitor announced. In our next exciting instalment: The sinister Expediter and Herr
Wertham return, Sir Mumphrey and Miss Canterbury part company, and the secret of
Vesalia is revealed.
Mumphrey Wilton KBE GCB GCMG CGVO FRS
looked a little uncomfortable. “Er, what do you mean, Miss Canterbury? As I
said, we’re waitin’ to meet up with this chap I had recommended to me as a
decent pilot who could get us to the location those old charts indicate as the
Lost City of Vesalia. Then we can hopefully get the passage in of Blanchford
Bertram’s diary translated and decoded and all that, and find out what was so
important in there to Herr Wertham that he had your father murdered for
it.”
“I mean,” the young lady clarified, transfixing him with her piercing
grey eyes, “that there is more to this affair than you are telling me. Dr
Hakenfakir seemed to know you from a long time ago, and he treated you as an old
friend, not as someone he’d known as a child, but you can’t be thirty years old
yet. You seem to know a lot about Colonel Bertram, the American explorer, yet
he’s been dead since the 1880’s. And you seem to have some unusual talents for
getting things accomplished in dangerous situations which I can’t really
understand. So I ask again, what is going on?”
Mumphrey looked around the
quiet Persian coffee-house for inspiration. “Well, d’you see, it’s something of
a confidential matter…” he began.
Miss Canterbury took Mumphrey’s hand in
hers and stared him in the face. “Did you, personally, know Bertram Blanding?”
she demanded. “On your word?”
The mustached Englishman blushed deeply red.
“Hmph. Well… yes, actually. Used to pal around with him and Hakenfakir. I’m…
older than I look.”
“And your presence in Marrakesh was no coincidence, was
it?” the lady continued.
“I was there on His Majesty’s behalf to find out
what had Wertham so streamed up,” Mumph answered miserably. “It was just good
luck that you decided to hide Bertram’s diary in my bag.”
Miss Canterbury
frowned. “And here I thought I’d bullied and charmed you into escorting me on my
little quest, and all along you were spying on me for the British
government.”
“I had to decide whether to go with you or try and follow
Wertham,” Mumphrey admitted. “I thought I’d best tag along and see if I could
help.” He paused for a moment then added, “You never bullied me, Miss
Canterbury, although I admit to being charmed.”
Both of them suddenly became
aware that their hands were interlocked, and pulled them back hurriedly.
A
waiter in a fez brought them two more of this thick, sweet, aromatic coffees and
retrired discreetly.
“So what’s the secret of your young-looking skin?” Miss
Canterbury asked at last. “Pears’ Soap?”
“I have a job to do, Miss
Canterbury, and some of the equipment I have helps keep me young.”
“Your
pocketwatch,” the young woman guessed. From Mumphrey’s reaction she knew she was
right. “I thought so. Every time we’re in trouble, you fiddle with it, and then
strange things happen.”
“I tend not to discuss my pocketwatch,” Mumph
prevaricated.
Miss Canterbury took the hint – for now. “So what was Colonel
Bertram like?”
“A good chap,” the Englishman remembered. “A fine soldier in
his day, hero of the US Civil War, and one of the last of the great explorers. I
only knew him when he was old, but when he was in his prime he must’ve been
really something.”
“He found the legendary African realm of Vesalia, for
example,” Miss Canterbury noted, glancing at the oilskin packet in her handbag.
“And much later on in his career, he discovered something else on his last trip,
something he thought was so important that he wrote about it only in encoded
Vesalian. When my father purchased his journal in an antiquarian auction he
hoped to find more about the great explorer’s final discovery. He didn’t know it
would cost him his… his life.”
“Please don’t be upset, Miss Canterbury,”
Mumph comforted her. “We will find those blighters and bring ‘em to
justice.”
“It’s not that,” Miss Canterbridge answered, swaying. “I don’t
feel… don’t feel…”
“The coffee!” Mumphrey realised. “By jingo, it was…” Then
he too slumped to the table.
Mumphrey opened his
eyes to find himself in a torture chamber, being glared at by the burning eyes
of Molestro the Mirthless.
“And who the devil are you, sir?” he demanded of
the unrealistically yellow-skinned commander of the Sinister Oriental
Stereotypes.
“Silence!” Molestro screamed in Mumph’s face. “You will answer
all my questions.”
“How can I answer all your questions if I remain
silent?”
Molestro struck Mumphrey across the face.
“You hit like a girl,”
the eccentric Englishman told him.
“Is that so?” sneered the Grand Master. “I
think you will find that… that… Oh, just bring in the girl, my
minions!”
“Miss Canterbury,” Mumphrey called as his companion in adventure
was dragged in. “Are you alright?”
“Well, I’m running out of unripped blouses
but other than that these Si-Fan Catamites haven’t harmed me,” the lady
answered. “Yet.”
Mumphrey considered his escape. Since he was stripped to the
waist he did not have his temporal chonometer available.
“You’re probably
wondering what time it is,” Miss Canterbury said to him. “I have a pocketwatch
here, if you’d like me to consult it?” She raised her eyebrow
curiously.
“Indeed?” breathed Sir Mumphrey. “Perhaps you could just depress
the first stud on the rim anticlockwise from the spindle?””
“What is this?”
screamed Molestro the Mirthless. “You will tremble in terror before me! You will
cry in pain and shame at what we will do to you both, and you will beg to tell
me the location of my old enemy the CrazySugarBlast-OffLad! Then you will
die!”
“Hmph!” snorted Mumph, who had been threatened by experts. “Bugger
off.”
Molestro the Mirthless moved to slap him again – and froze.
“What?”
Miss Canterbury gasped, surprised by the effect her manipulation of the
pocketwatch had caused. “Everybody’s frozen.”
“Or we are outside time,”
Mumphrey answered, concentrating hard to remain outside the timestop effect
since he was not in physical contact with the chonometer of infinity. “Could you
possibly pass the old instrument to me, m’dear?”
“So this is how you’ve been
pulling those stunts,” Miss Canterbury noted, walking round the inquisitors and
reaching her manacled hands up to pass the watch to the man in the
chains.
“Actually, yes,” Mumph admitted. It was awkward manipulating the
pocketwatch one-handedly but he had practised. He shifted the shackles that
bound him a few seconds into the future and freed himself, then did the same for
Miss Canterbury’s handcuffs.
“So what’s going on?” Miss Canterbury asked.
“Are these… these Si-Fan Catamites also after the Blanchford Diaries?”
“I
don’t think so,” Mumphrey replied. “They seem to think we know somebody they
don’t like. Anyway, if you’d be so good as to stand behind me I think it’s time
I dropped this timestop and smote the ungodly.”
“Very well. Smite away, Sir
Mumphrey.”
Molestro found himself slapping thin air. Then he found a
piledriver right jab connecting with his Sinister Oriental Nose.
“Right, you
blighters,” Mumphrey called out. “Who’s next?”
Then the explosions started up
above.
Mumphrey looked at Miss Canterville. “Yours?” he asked.
“I thought
they were yours,” the lady replied.
The dungeon door splinted and an orange
and green streak rocketed into the room. “Alright Molestro, the game’s up,” it
said. “Let those people go…”
“How very Exodus,” Miss Canterville noted as the
young man with the floppy lock of hair falling over his face throttled back his
jetpack and looked at the scene in the cellar.
“Dey broke my node!”
complained Molestro the Merciless. “Kill dem, my Si-Fan Catamides!”
Mumphrey
and CrazySugarBlast-OffLad! winced as Miss Centerbury stamped down hard on the
fallen leader of the Sinister Oriental Stereotypes. “Did you… did you hear a
pop?” CSBL! asked Mumphrey.
Thirty catamites crowded through the
doorway.
“Coming though!” CSBL! called, twisting a dial on his
impossibilityium-powered backpack. He jetted into the cluster, clearing a path
for Sir Mumphrey to lead Miss Canterbury to safety.
“Where to now?” she
wondered.
“The Baghdad airstrip,” CrazySugarBlast-offLad! called. “We have a
plane waiting for us.”
“We’re supposed to meet a fellow name of Lucas,”
Mumphrey remembered. “Terry Lucas.”
CSBL! held his hand out. “Yep. Nice to
meet you guys.”
After that it was just a question of a screaming car chase to
the airport and a take off while machine gun bullets rattled across the
fuselage, and so away.