#42 Untold Tales of the League of Improbable Gentlemen - Omnibus Edition
Wednesday, 29-Mar-2000 03:59:04
207.140.138.195 writes:
Untold Tales of the League of Improbable Gentlemen
“I found this in one of those boxes in the cellar area we’re not supposed to have,” spiffy told Troia. “Any idea what the hell it is?” The Lair Legion’s supply of Doritos was entirely exhausted, Donar was getting irritable, so the fern-wielding houseguest had been forced to desperate measures in search of food.
The amazon administrator looked at the device her brother had unearthed. It was a mechanical device, sort of a cross between a mutant radio and an explosion in a valve factory. “Something Enty cobbled up, a long, long time ago?” she suggested. “Perhaps it would be safer to lay it down over there and back away quietly?”
“I don’t think it Jaimie’s,” spiffy reassured her. “I found it in this tea-chest of stuff that was real old. There was a cricket bat, and a corset, and a stack of Gothametropolis Times’ for 1876 with bits clipped out, and this photograph.”
“A picture?” Troia 215 noted. “Let’s have a look at it.”
Fin Fang Foom joined them as they examined the sepia-tinted lithograph. It depicted five Victorian gentlemen and a lady looking stiff and wooden for the camera outside the front door of the Lair Mansion. “Isn’t that Mumphrey Wilton there with the handlebar moustache?” Finny observed.
“And Whitney?” spiffy puzzled.
“Her grandmother,” the Makluan dragon corrected. “Old Hagatha Darkness must have been young sometime, right?” he asked uncertainly.
“They’re outside our house,” Troia puzzled.
Finny beckoned Asil to come over and join them. “Any ideas why Mumphrey and a group of Victorian specimens are doing group shots outside our mansion?” he asked Lisa’s clone.
“Oh yes,” Mumphrey’s occasional amanuensis replied. “That must be the League of Improbable Gentlemen. They were a bunch of adventurers who had a club in this mansion from about the 1820’s up to the late eighties. Mumphrey was one of them. If you want to know about the others, you’d better ask him.”
“Where art mine Doritos, coat rack?” came a bellow from the lounge.
“Er, perhaps I’ll take a Lairjet over to England and ask him personally,” suggested spiffy.
Chapter One: Mysterious Evidence of a Gas-Lamp Wick-Trimmer
“I say!” spluttered Mumphrey, “There’s an awful lot of smoke, ain’t there?”
“A necessary side effect of the flash that provides the light to take the image,” assured Phineas Quimby, the EccentricEtherInvestigatorInventor! “And that patch of grass will grow back soon enough. Now all I need do is take this plate into a dark room, splash a few chemicals on it, make use of my new phased spectrum light prism device, and lo, a permanent image of the group who solved the Puzzle of the Aether Spectre once and for all.”
“Except for discovering who he was or where he went to or how he managed to fill the Gothametropolis Opera House with jello,” corrected a voice from Colonel Blanchford Bertram’s waist. At first one got the impression (as did many fainting ladies) that his groin was addressing one, but in fact it was the sentient blade concealed in his cherrypicker pants which was contributing to the conversation.
“Well yes, except for that,” Quimby admitted to Knifey.
“And the team included our mysterious friend, the ‘Greyhound’,” Dr Hakenfakir added.
“But he’s on Her Majesty’s Covert Service,” Mumph reminded them, “some kind of top-secret Messenger. He can’t court publicity by having his picture taken.”
“We don’t know he works for your Queen Victoria,” Miss Darkness objected. Her mystic senses warned her there was more to that Greyhound fellow than met the eye.
“He said he served a Higher Power,” Mumphrey pointed out. “Who else could it be?”
“Who can say?” Hastings Vernal, the club secretary, asked diplomatically. “Perhaps he was with the same people who sent that Access chap to lead us to those Catamite Si-Fan assassins, or he’s one of Lady Circe d’Aeaea’s people, or something else entirely. It’s pointless to speculate when there’s another case awaiting us inside.”
“We don’t have a case awaiting us insi…” objected the Colonel, but was interrupted by Jakes the Butler appearing.
“My apologies for intruding, sirs and madam, but a tradesman has arrived in a state of some disarray and wishes to speak with you as a matter of urgency.”
“How does he do that?” Mumphrey hissed to the Colonel, glancing over at HV who was already passing off into the interview room to meet their visitor.
“I don’t know,” Blanchford Bertram admitted, “but he’s been doing it as long as I’ve been in the League.”
The newcomer was huddled in one of the leather armchairs, downing a stiff brandy by the time the six club members took their customary places around the room. HV chose his usual seat in the shadows by the door. Miss Darkness took the window-seat. The Colonel dropped down into his own vast Chesterfield, where today’s racing papers were already folded awaiting his attention. Dr Hakenfakir, always happiest near a musical instrument, settled on the piano stool. Quimby took the first chair he saw. Mumphrey stood by the fireplace.
“I’m sorry to be disturbin’ you ladies an’ gents,” the worried man in the shabby jacket told the League, “but there’s no-where else to go. Nobody’ll believe me!”
“Let’s hear your story from the start, man,” Mumphrey suggested. “Start by tellin’ us who you are and how you got involved.”
“Jebediah Crown, sir, that’s ‘oo I am. I’m a gas-lamp wick-trimmer. I trim gas-lamp wicks.”
“A lamplighter?” Dr Hakenfakir summarised.
Crown shook his head. “Oh no, sir. I’ve not got the seniority to light lamps. I just does the wick-trimming, at night, down along the river. That’s where I saw it.”
“Saw what?” Blanchford’s groin apparently said.
Crown was clearly too distracted to notice anything was amiss with this. “Saw this bloke, a-hangin’ from one of the street lamps. Dead.”
“I say!” Mumphrey exclaimed.
“You summoned the police, I trust,” prompted the Colonel.
“’Cause I did, sir. There was a cop on the beat nearby an’ he came running when he heard me shout. Then ‘ee blew ‘is whistle and another officer came. Me an’ the first cop cut the pore hanged bugger down while the other one went for ‘elp.”
“Was there anything unusual about the body?” Hastings Vernal asked from the darkness. “Describe the corpse.”
“He was a city gent,” Crown remembered. “But although he was hanging by his cravat from the lampost he ‘adn’t choked to death. Oh no. There was this gory ‘ole right into ‘is forehead, about two fingers thickness, right through to ‘is brain.”
“Interesting,” said Dr Hakenfakir, leaning forward. Grisly medical puzzles were what had lured him from his native Bombay in the first place. “Carry on.”
“Well, soon after that a big posh carriage turns up, an’ a coachman opens the door for this lady to get out.”
“A lady at such a gory crime scene!” Mumphrey disapproved.
“Scandalous,” Miss Darkness agreed dryly.
“This coachman, ‘ee was big. Very big. While the lady’s talkin’ to the two coppers he’s lifting the body with one ‘and and putting it in this chest on the back of the coach.”
“Didn’t the constables object?” the Colonel puzzled.
“No,” shuddered Crown. “When this lady talked to them, she just sort of ordered them not to have remembered anything about this. And they just nodded and tipped their helmets and a-walked off as if nothing ‘ad ever ‘appened.”
“Hypnosis of some kind?” wondered Phineas Quimby, glancing at Hakenfakir.
“As for me, when I saw this I decided to leg it for all I was worth. I ‘eard her ‘ighness shout something after me as I ran but I couldn’t make it out. I just kept running.”
“What did you do then?” Mumphrey asked.
“I went to the police station house,” Crown recounted. “I told them what ‘ad ‘appened. But when the cop I’d called first off came in he swore blind ‘ee’d never seen me before, and they threatened to lock me up for wasting police time and threw me out.”
“And then?” HV interrogated.
“And then I got the idea that someone was followin’ me. I saw a couple of rough-lookin’ blokes lurking about as I walked home. When I got home I noticed my door was a little bit open, so I didn’t go in. I just ran and ran all night. And then I got the idea of comin’ ‘ere. What else could I do, sirs? What else could I do?”
“There there,” the Colonel reassured the lamp-wick trimmer. “Have another brandy and be a man. If what you say is true it’s a very mysterious business but we’ll get to the bottom of it.” As he spoke he glanced across to Hastings Vernal.
“He’s speaking what he believes to be the truth,” the club secretary confirmed. “We should investigate.”
“But where to begin?” worried Dr Hakenfakir. “No body, no clue to the identity of this mystery woman, no motive…”
“Excuse me sirs,” Jakes the butler interrupted them. “A number of unsavoury persons who have been lurking around the house for some time now are seeking to gain unlawful ingress through the rear windows.”
Chapter Two: Dastardly Sneak Attack of the Secret Order which Ruins the Begonias
“Excuse me, uncouth intruders. This is a Smith and Wesson .455 double barrelled shotgun with modified hair-trigger mechanism, loaded with steel-point grapeshot with an estimated range of twenty yards and a spray radius you don’t want to experience,” Colonel Blanchford Bertram explained to the thugs trying to lever open the French windows at the back of the clubhouse. “If you do not wish to experience it, you will now raise your hands over your heads and offer your surrender. Otherwise, our butler’s going to have one devil of a time mopping blood off our patio.”
The four armed intruders froze with looks of horror beneath their half-masked faces. One made to move but another click as of the hammer of a .33 Webley repeater convinced him not to. Hastings Vernal had come around the side and pointed the weapon straight into his ear. One by one all the League appeared. Mumphrey had his service revolver. Quimby carried some strange and futuristic-looking ray-gun. Dr Hakenfaker pointed an old gnarled walking cane at the intruders. Even Miss Darkness had temporarily loaned Knifey and was ready for trouble.
“We cannot be taken alive,” declared the first invader. He bit down hard and slumped to the floor dead. The other three followed suit and fell beside him.
“Oh no, y’don’t, laddies,” Mumphrey warned them, fumbling for his temporal pocketwatch. He reversed time on one of the intruders so that Dr Hakenfakir could remove the poisoned tooth before he committed suicide. HV rendered the thug immobile.
“They’re damned lucky they didn’t manage to get the door open,” Miss Darkness pointed out. “Otherwise the House would have got them.”
“I’ll send the boy for the police,” the Colonel announced. “Jakes, where is young Hopkins anyhow?”
“I don’t think we want to involve the police just yet,” warned Hastings Vernal. “If Crown was right, we’re up against a lady who can make the police believe whatever she wishes, and who is sufficiently aware of police business to be able to appear at the scene of a strange and sudden crime before even officers from the local station had attended.”
“Look at their bodies!” gasped Miss Darkness.
“Fascinating,” Dr Hakenfaker considered. “They appear to be deliquescing, clothes and all.”
“And taking any clues they had on them with them,” complained Phineas Quimby.
“Well, we’ve got the one blighter,” pointed out Mumphrey. “Dr H, perhaps you could do some of that mesmerism hoodoo of yours?”
“Of course,” the doctor agreed. “Have Jakes show Mr Crown into one of our guest rooms and we’ll interrogate this chappie in the interview room.”
“We’ve got to work out how they did that disintegrating trick,” Quimby enthused. “Some sort of catastrophic chemical reaction, obviously, but how? It’s as if their bodies lost all organising force.”
“Later, Quimby,” Mumph suggested. “Let’s just be grateful that we dealt with this incident with no casualties on our side.”
“My begonias will never be the same again,” Miss Darkness complained.
“I am an Agent of the Order of Order,” the hypnotised would-be assassin said neutrally, his glassy stare fixed on Dr Hakenfakir’s swaying cane. “I work for the Mistress…”
“Her name,” prompted HV.
“O’Toole,” the intruder told them, “Perfection O’Toole…”
“The philanthropist?” the Colonel frowned. “She’s one of New Paradopolis’ leading citizens.”
“He’s speaking the truth as he knows it,” HV confirmed. “Tell us why Miss O’Toole sent you here.”
“To silence the lamplighter.”
“Why did this woman want to take that body that was on the lamp-post anyway?” Mumphrey wanted to know. “Did she kill him?”
“No,” the assassin gasped. “No… the Mistress is good. The Mistress sought the killer. The Mistress concealed the body that the world might be protected.”
“Who was the murdered man?” Miss Darkness asked impatiently. “And who did kill him.”
“I do not know the victim’s identity,” the League’s prisoner admitted. “But the killer was… aaaaggghhh!”
“Watch out!” the Colonel shouted. “He’s catching fire.”
It was true. Wisps of smoke were coming from the assassin’s ears, nose, and mouth. A few moments later he was blazing like a Roman Candle.
“Something’s preventing me reversing time on this,” warned Mumphrey, frantically pushing buttons on his chronometer.
“Somebody set something deep in his mind to protect a secret,” Hastings Vernal growled.
Phineas Quimby practically utilised the soda syphon to douse the ashes which were all that remained of their prisoner.
“I think we’d better have a word with this Perfection O’Toole,” Blanchford Bertram scowled.
Chapter Three: Seeking Perfection and Finding Treachery
“So what brings the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to my door?” Perfection O’ Toole asked Colonel Bertram and Sir Mumphrey Wilton as she looked up from a set of architect’s plans as her inscrutable Chinese retainer led in the two adventurers.
“You… you know who we are?” Mumph puzzled. The League was a rather exclusive gentleman’s club and liked to keep it’s doings private.
“I make it my practise to keep an ear to the pulse of my city,” Perfection told them. “Your association has been… involved in a number of events which have affected New Paradopolis over the years – the Kabuki Shoggoth Affair, Eric the Ripper, the Man with the Golden Eyes, the terrible AbHuman, the tragic Hippopotamus Man…”
“Yes well, if you know so much about us Madam then you know we have an interest in the unusual,” the old Colonel answered.
“I’m flattered,” Perfection told them. And she was perfection: five feet eleven of willowy blonde dressed in impeccable London fashion with the grace and deportment of a Queen. She had been an opera singer until her marriage to the late Hiram O’Toole, and after his death had inherited enough to make her the second wealthiest citizen of New Paradopolis. But to look at her now one might have thought her the daughter of an emperor.
“To be blunt madam,” Mumphrey told her, “we know about the Order of Order, and we want to know why you sent four of them to silence a gas-lamp wick-trimmer named Crown simply because he witnessed you remove a corpse left in a public place after a grisly murder.”
Perfection continued to stare at the plans in front of her for a new foundations she was planning, the Holy Order of Little Sisters of Discipline Orphanage. “You’re the Englishman who brought down Symmetry of Synchronicity aren’t you?” she noted. “That must make you the office-holder known as the Keeper of the Infinity Chronometer.”
“What?” stammered Sir Mumphrey, “How…?”
“Since that is the case I feel I can extend you a little bit of professional courtesy,” Perfection continued. “You and your friends are out of your league here - no pun intended. You’re interfering in business that it is my right and responsibility to conclude, and if you get in my way I shall crush you without a second thought as I destroyed those minions who failed me at your Mansion. I too have a role in the high cosmic order, serving the greatest of the powers. You shall not prevent me from fulfilling my duties.”
“What duties?” the Colonel demanded. “What role?”
“I am the Ice Queen, the Instrument of Order in this sorry Parodyverse. One day Order shall reclaim this broken creation, bringing the pristine stamp of organisation back to the nine worlds. This has been ordained.”
“Jolly good,” shrugged Mumphrey, “Nice to see a gel with a hobby.”
“Fool!” Perfection scorned, “I was nothing, nothing, a mere actress mired in sin and chaos until I was saved by my dear late husband. It was he who offered me up with the due ritual, who arranged for me to be the next emissary of Order, who had placed within my mind the experience and understanding of every Ice Queen who has served before. Now I am the true power behind Paradopolis, and I will recover the Serious Matter which is my tool by right from the Brain Butcher.”
“The Brain Butcher!” Blanchford Bertram repeated. “Is that the person who ripped a hole in the missing corpse’s head?”
“And you hid the evidence since you didn’t want anyone but yourself findin’ this Butcher because he’s got something belongin’ to you and you’re huntin’ him yourself?” Mumphrey speculated.
“Near enough,” the Ice Queen admitted. “But this is all quite irrelevant. “I was forced to tell you this much so you would know what thoughts you were to avoid in future. Now hear my command.”
“What?” stammered Mumph as Perfection’s absolute authority stabbed into his brain. Beside him the Colonel staggered.
“You will recall none of this when you leave. You will instead remember a bland and pleasant interview. And you will consider the case unsolveable. You will do all in your power to convince your colleagues to do the same. And you will never cross my path again. Do you understand?”
“Yes m’am,” Blanchford answered.
“Absolutely,” Mumphrey mumbled.
“Then you may go,” Perfection dismissed them. “I have important things to do.”
Mumphrey and Blanchford walked down the street back to where an urchin was holding the reigns of their carriage. “You tole me to give you this note and I’d get a nickel,” the child reminded the Colonel. Strangely the note was in Bertram’s own handwriting.
The Colonel read his own letter, paid the boy his due and dismissed him, and then pulled out Knifey from it’s concealed sheath. “Alright old friend,” he asked the sentient blade. “What did we miss in our interview with Mrs O’Toole?”
The Police Morgue smelled of formaldehyde and strong coffee. Phineas Halifax Quimby and Dr Hackenfakir were well acquainted with old Dr Waltz, the dour pathologist who reigned supreme here. They had shared many cases together.
“What brings you gents down here today?” Dr Waltz worried. Last time Quimby had arrived it was bearing the body of a Morshlock, one of the albino race who apparently dwelled deep beneath the city, incestuous and cannibalistic, worshippers of a blind writhing deity they called the Groper out of Grossness. Waltz still had people trying to get the slime off lab number two.
“You’ve been hypnotised,” Hackenfakir got right to the point. “Somebody used mesmerism to make you forget.”
“I don’t remember,” Dr Waltz said predictably.
The Indian improbable gentleman quickly outlined the salient points of the League’s case to the pathologist. “We tracked down the constable involved, and I used my own not inconsiderable talents at mental magnetism on him,” Dr Hackenfakir explained. “Once we’d managed to break down the commands that this mystery woman placed on him, the officer was able to tell us what actually happened. Apparently he and his comrade helped the woman and her giant companion to bring the body here. You were placed under the influence too and ordered to do an autopsy.”
Dr Christopher Waltz shook his head. “I don’t remember anything like that at all,” he told them. “It seems rather fantastic. Then again, I am talking to the EccentricEtherInvestigatorInventor and a man with a magic walking stick!”
“Would you mind terribly if I try and break the hypnotic hold on you?” Hackenfakir asked. Receiving Waltz’s consent he raised his cane and again brought his own mesmeric skills to bear. “Remember,” he urged the pathologist.
When the memories returned it was like a dam breaking. “I remember that woman! That devil! I remember not just one autopsy but five! First that City Banker she brought, then the Thieves’ Guild man, then the Historian, then the Private Detective, and finally the Civil Servant you knew about. And after I had examined them we destroyed the bodies in the incinerator.”
“Five?” Quimby gasped. “Busy little lady, isn’t she?”
“They were all the same?” Hackenfakir checked, “All died by trauma wounds to the forehead?”
“It was almost as if they had had their brains sucked out,” shuddered Christopher Waltz.
Deep in the subterranean stacks of ancient books beneath the Paradopolis central library Hastings Vernal and Hagatha Darkness sought out the almost-forgotten senior librarian emeritus’ office. The route took them down long dark aisles of mouldering volumes, and both travellers knew that if the occupant of that mysterious distant room so wished it they could wander a lifetime in this confusing labyrinth of books and never locate his door.
Yet locate it they did, an unassuming little portal with a frosted glass panel upon which was written the name of the occupant: Mr Lucius Faust. It gave his official library title underneath, but more honestly it should have read Master of the Mystic Crafts, Sorcerer Supreme.
“Come in,” Faust called to them before they could knock. He closed up the volume he was writing in as they entered. Hagatha just had chance to glimpse ‘…teleporting, energy manipulating, and matter transforming cousins together are a sign of the end times…’ before he hid his secrets away.
It was a strange conversation. “You know why we’ve come,” HV told Faust.
“Yes,” the sorcerer supreme answered. He was a thin man of indeterminate age with an unquiet look on his face. “You want to know about Serious Matter.”
“We do?” Miss Darkness asked. “I thought we wanted to know about a murdered man and the socialite perfection O’Toole.”
“Your comrades are discovering all about those things,” Faust told her. “You need to find out about Serious Matter.”
“And you’ll tell us?” Hastings Vernal checked. “Free?”
“I suppose so,” Faust sighed. “After all, I learned it from Heisenburg Vanderdecker, so it seems only fair.”
“Who?” puzzled Miss Darkness.
“A man who failed,” snapped HV. “He is of no consequence.” He turned back to the librarian. “Tell us of Serious Matter.”
Lucius Faust sighed again. “The Parodyverse has some very… peculiar properties,” the mage explained. “That’s partly because so many great powers take an interest in it, and their interactions cause… ripples. But it’s partly because when it was designed, our continuum had five unique substances built into it to enable special things to happen here. One of them was Serious Matter.”
“A manifestation of… universal order?” HV almost remembered.
“A tool of Order, certainly,” Faust agreed. “It empowers a minion to organise reality around them, to assimilate information into an orderly whole. Most practically, it enables someone to duplicate the skills and abilities of another, combining them into the wielder to bring them closer to perfection.”
“And is that tool what makes Perfection perfect?” demanded Miss Darkness.
“No. it is the tool she desires to make her perfect,” answered Faust. “But it has been lost, is being misused.”
“The brain-scooping?” Hagatha speculated. “Someone was draining skills and knowledge from the victim.”
“Victims,” the Master of the Mystic Crafts corrected her. “Yes. That is what is happening. A madman is out there with the Serious Matter. Your job is to stop him before he destroys the universe.”
“A bit of an overstatement, don’t you think?” HV snorted.
Faust merely looked at him.
“We’ve got to get the whole club together again,” Hastings Vernal told Miss Darkness as they walked down the library steps. It was just getting dark. “We need to pool our information and then seek out this Brain Butcher before he can kill again.”
“Excuse me, mein Herr and Damen,” one of the six sinister foreigners with pistols said to the adventurers. “You vill please to come with us so ve will not shoot you.”
HV and Miss Darkness exchanged glances. “Who are you?” the witch asked.
“Ve will ask the questions. Now come, the Baron is vaiting…”
Chapter Four: Gruesome Affair of the Agent of a Foreign Power and the Butcher of Brains
“Who I am does not matter!”, the Teutonic nobleman screamed, slapping Miss Darkness across the face with his gloves to silence her. “It is enough that I am your master.”
The witch of Covenant Manse looked up at him with such burning fury in her eyes that her captor actually took a step back. “I have a far darker master than you”!” she spat. The room felt suddenly cold.
“Your spying mission is going quite badly wrong, isn’t it?” HV called out from the rack where they had stretched him. “You must have thought that an operative who could suck information out of people’s minds was a dream come true. Too bad he’s gone rogue and you’ve lost him.”
“On the contrary,” Helmut Hermann Groppler Zemo, Ninth Baron of Saxe-Lurkburg gloated, his voice filling the low cellar where he and his agents were conducting their interrogation. “I did not go to the trouble of having the finest mathematical minds in the Austro-Prussian Empire deciphering the inscriptions on the old Abhuman ruins in Syria to invest the fruits of the miracle-metal we created on a treacherous minion. My Brain Butcher works only to my orders.”
“So that’s how you got hold of the Serious Matter,” Hastings Vernal mused. “I thought somebody would have had to work it out for you. In crayon.”
The Baron gestured for his henchman to turn the rack wheel another quarter. “Silence!” he screamed. “I will not be mocked!”
“With a face like that?” Miss Darkness scorned. “Listen, little spy, our friends are already on your trail and they have resources you could never dream of.”
Zemo pressed his face in close to her, allowing his lingering gaze to play over her torn bodice before glaring into her defiant eyes. “Then you had better pray they get here before my Brain Butcher is back, my dear, because once he had stolen your mind and gained your skills he will know everything about your friends that you do.”
“This is where they were scrobbled,” Mumphrey confirmed, replaying the temporal echoes on the darkened steps of the City Library as ghostly images through the power of his pocketwatch. “They took them off in that carriage you see, but I don’t have the temporal energy to keep up this reconstruction all the way through the streets to wherever they ended up.”
Dr Hakenfakir was looking closely at the crest on the side of the coach, and at a receipt for oats sticking out of the coachman’s scrip, and humming Mussorgsky. “No need for that,” he told Mumph. “If we can identify this crest and then ask the feed company where it delivers to this coach’s owners we’ll have the address.”
“Then we can find out where this Brain Butcher is, and what he’s planning next,” the Colonel added.
“We can do that anyway,” Phineas Quimby suggested, “Now we know about this Serious Matter stuff all we have to do is work out a way of detecting it. I’m pretty sure I could come up with a gadget for that.”
“Using your improbable aether, no doubt?” Mumphrey winced.
“It works, doesn’t it?” smiled the EccentricEtherInvestigatorInventor!
“Oh yes,” breather Blanchford Bertram. “It works all too well. Very well then. You head back to the lab, Quimby. I’ll go with Hakenfakir and Wilton and we’ll track down these kidnappers. Let’s begin.”
“Your resistance to pain is remarkable, Herr Vernal,” Baron Zemo congratulated the mysterious secretary of the League of Improbable Gentlemen. “But my time is short, and my men are eager to commence work on your charming companion Miss Darkness. If you wish to spare her the sort of pain you have just experienced – and worse – you will explain what you know of this affair and beg my forgiveness for taking up so much of my valuable time.”
“You got the wrong man to try that threat on,” sneered HV. “Besides, your other prisoner is arriving.”
There was a complicated knock on the cellar door. When it was opened, three of the Baron’s agents returned carrying a large, squirming sack. It was spilled open to reveal the trussed, gagged, and furious form of Perfection O’Toole.
“Ah, welcome to my little soiree, Mrs O’Toole,” Zemo told her. “You will forgive me for keeping you gagged, but I hardly think we need you using your remarkable powers of command, do we?”
“It was easy to grab her, given the information your Brain Butcher got off that Civil Servant she had working for her, wasn’t it,” HV surmised.
“Of course,” the Baron chuckled. “We even knew to use cold iron bullets on that giant companion of hers. Now the lovely Mrs O’Toole will be fodder for our operative as well. Our revised plan is going well.”
“Revised?” Miss Darkness noted. “You had to change your plans?”
“I set out to get information to make my nation masters of the world,” Zemo answered. “I stumbled across information that will make me master of the universe!”
Perfection O’Toole tried to break free of her bonds to claw the gag from her face, but Zemo gestured to his retainers to manacle her to the brick pillar opposite Hagatha. “And be sure to rip the front of her nightgown,” he instructed his lieutenant. Baron Zemo was a traditionalist.
There was a knock on the cellar door. The agents of a foreign power froze because this wasn’t the coded knock of one of their kind. Zemo gestured for one of the men to take his gun and answer. “Ja? Er, yes?”
“I say,” came back the distinctive tones of Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “Is this where the rotten cads who carried off Miss Darkness and Hastings Vernal are hidin’, what?”
The spy looked down to Zemo for instructions, but while he was distracted the whole cellar door moved one minute forward in time, effectively vanishing. Dr Hakenfakir’s pointed cane released a massive bolt of energy which sent the agent arcing across the cellar to a bone-shattering impact on the opposite wall. And the Colonel moved with a speed belying his age to vault over the stair-rail and land in the cluster of henchmen where could could put Knifey to good use.
“You’re in trouble now boys. It’s not just my appetite that’s whetted,” the sentient blade told them in perfect German.
“Stop them, you fools!” Zemo shouted, reaching for a control lever. Suddenly a series of explosions rocked the cellar, filling it with smoke and fire.
Hagatha Darkness concentrated on the gag restraining Perfection’s mouth. The knot was looser than before, it was unravelling even now, it was slipping free… The gag dropped to the floor.
“You, foreigner!” the Ice Queen called to a fleeing spy. “Release me!”
The agent stopped abruptly, drew a knife and sawed through Perfection’s bonds.
“A-hem!” prompted Miss Darkness.
“Oh very well. Release her too,” Perfection conceded reluctantly.
“Where’s their leader?” Mumphrey called, quite unnecessarily gathering Miss Darkness in his arms to protect her. She would only protest later when he tried to carry her out using a fireman’s lift.
“Secret passage over here,” HV told them, striding from the smoke completely free of the bonds which had held him earlier. “He’s got away.”
“For now,” added the Colonel.
“We had best depart along that passage as well,” Dr Hakenfakir advised. “Those booby-traps our adversary set off have blocked the stairs, this place is filling with smoke, and the fires are getting rather hot.”
“We’ve got to stop him!” Perfection O’Toole told them urgently. “I know who he’s sending the Brain Butcher to kill next. He’s after the Mayor of Paradopolis himself. He wants to kill Wilbur Parody!”
Chapter Five: The Mayor of Paradopolis and Other Sinister Enigmas
The Butcher of Brains used the abilities of the thief he had consumed to gain access to the Paradopolis Town Hall. The historian that was now part of him informed him of the rococo architecture, of the marble edifice erected eighteen years earlier by the man the Butcher was here to kill. The civil servant whose knowledge he had drained well knew the layout of the darkened, sprawling building, and recalled Mayor Wilbur Parody’s habit of working into the wee small hours of the morning, slaving over every detail of the city he had effectively rebuilt in the last two decades.
But it was the merchant banker, the first of the Butcher’s victims since coming to Paradopolis, who had the key knowledge about the Mayor. The banker knew who Wilbur Parody had been, and what things he had learned, and what he planned to do with them. That discovery had led the Brain Butcher and his master to plan an entirely different campaign from the subversive espionage they had originally intended.
Simply put, Wilbur Parody had once been the Shaper of Worlds, one of the principal cosmic office-holders, privy to the secrets of the Parodyverse. When he had renounced that title and role, that knowledge was stripped from him, yet somehow Parody had cheated the system and found ways of retaining the information which had prompted him to give up his power and glory. The old man had taken up residence in the quiet seaport which was now Paradopolis, reforging it into the economic and cultural heart of the Eastern seaboard.
On the trail of more knowledge about Parody, the Brain Butcher had absorbed the skills of a private investigator, who had led him in turn to the historian that was part of Parody’s elder-entity worshipping secret cult. Thus the Brain Butcher knew how to unpick the arcane as well as the mundane defences which protected the former Shaper from dangers like Zemo’s minion.
The Butcher was at the door to Parody’s office now. He could hear the old man cackling to himself as he scratched away with goosefeather quill in a massive ledger he was preparing. “We’ll call this one… hmm, yes… the Ninja. No, the Green Ninja. Yes, that works. Damn sight better than ‘ManMan’ anyway.”
Parody looked up as the heavily-wrapped up intruder kicked open the door. “Who the devil…?” he frowned.
“Just somebody who wants to pick your brains,” leered the Butcher, throwing off his hat and unwinding his scarf to reveal the changes the Serious Matter had made to him. The top of his shaved head was completely transparent, revealing the brain inside the skull pulsing with strands of silver fire where the Serious Matter had replaced the dendrites. He was also completely mad, of course, but that was because he was using the Serious Matter without the direction of an Emissary of Order. The voices of those he had absorbed just wouldn’t stop screaming in his mind.
One more wouldn’t matter. The Brain Butcher stalked forward, carefully making the mystical gestures which neutralised Parody’s unseen occult protectors.
“Serious Matter?” Parody realised, staring at the shimmering brain-pan of his aggressor. “I hadn’t realised Perfection was that ambitious yet.”
“I work for Herr Baron Zemo,” the Brain Butcher proclaimed.
“Ahhh, Zemo!” Parody understood. “Of course. Ever the opportunist, and dangerous if not properly channelled. Does he understand the true nature of Serious Matter?”
“He will soon,” the Brain Butcher promised, reaching silver-glowing fingernails towards the old man’s forehead.
“I was referring to the balance of power between Order and Chaos, the threefold cycle of Creation, Maintenance, and Destruction.” The fingers were almost brushing Parody’s brow now. “The equal and opposite reaction of opposing forces.”
“Hold it right there, you Brain-Butchering cad!” the EccentricEtherInvestigatorInventor! Shouted, levelling a strange two pronged futuristic rifle at Zemo’s minion. “Did you think I couldn’t find a way to track your foul emissions?”
“Like that,” smirked Parody.
The Butcher swung around and glared at the waistcoated scientist who had arrived in the nick of time. Phineas Halifax Quimby still had his hastily-cobbled detection device slung around his neck with a leather strap. Somewhere between a wax cylinder gramophone and a barrel organ it gave out little metallic pings as it sensed the nearness of the Strange Matter within the villain. Most importantly, it, like all Quimby’s inventions, was powered by the reality-twisting substance the scientist had discovered and which he called Improbable Aether; later generations would dub it Impossibilityium, and it was the very antithesis of Order.
“Slightly behind schedule,” muttered Wilbur Parody, “but what do you expect of a manifestation of the Chaos Trickster?”
The Brain Butcher wasn’t listening. As soon as Quimby had spoken the Serious Matter had burned through the villain’s mind, its own voice drowning out even the screams of its victims, it’s timeless imperatives ruling out all disobedience. This was the enemy, it told its host. This was the one who must be destroyed, and the vile substance he wielded with him.
With a bestial roar the Butcher of Brains leaped for Quimby.
The EccentricEtherInvestigatorInventor! pulled the trigger on his weapons and a crackling green lightning caught the intruder in mid leap.
There was an explosion.
Phineas Quimby picked himself up from under the pile of plaster and furniture and wondered what the hell had happened. The Aether in his weapon was utterly exhausted. His ray-gun was dead.
His opponent wasn’t. The shattered body of the Brain Butcher rose from the wreckage of Parody’s office, mangled and terrible. “Nice try,” the villain spat through bloody lips. “Now it’s my turn.”
“Not necessarily,” Quimby replied. “I suspect it was the Aether Fluctual Charge coming into contact with the alien substance pervading your physiology which caused such a fascinating kinetic event rather than any specific property intended for my weapon. And it just so happens that I have another packet of the said energy here in my detector device.” The eccentric scientist staggered to his feet and unhooked the Serious Matter detector from round his neck. “So stay back. I have a gadget and I’m not afraid to use it!”
Baron Helmut Zemo shot the box from his hands. “I’m afraid not, Herr Quimby,” the sinister foreigner gloated. “You see, I have arrived to personally supervise the situation now. Come out from under your desk, Herr Mayor. You may witness the execution of this troublesome interloper.”
The Mayor of Paradopolis emerged from beneath his explosion-pocked writing desk. “Serious Matter and Impossibilityium coming together without Continuual Noise to buffer them… Madness!”
“So much knowledge,” smirked the Baron. “With what you know I shall rule the universe! But first, any last words, Herr Quimby?”
“Well actually, yes,” the battered scientist admitted. “I…”
Zemo shot him in the head three times. “Not interested,” he replied.
Then time reversed itself, the bullets unsplattering the EccentricEtherInvestigatorInventor!’s brain and returning to Zemo’s gun as Sir Mumphrey Wilton utilised his temporal pocketwatch. A deft press of a different button and as Zemo raised his pistol to eliminate Quimby his weapon vanished one minute into the future.
The League of Improbable Gentlemen had arrived.
“Did you really think we couldn’t get out of your little trap?” Hastings Vernal challenged.
“I take it you rescued Frau O’Toole as well?” the Baron snarled back.
“Of course,” answered Mumphrey. “We’re not bounders.”
“But I decked her to keep her quiet,” Hagatha added with a bitchy grin. “I’m not as trusting as the menfolk. I suppose I might be a bit of a bounder, actually.”
“Very wise,” Zemo admitted. “But pursuing me here was less so. Kill them all, my Brain Butcher!”
Dr Hakenfakir only just managed to interpose himself between the maddened Butcher and Miss Darkness. He raised his cane and released a bolt of devastating force from it’s tip. The Butcher reeled but did not fall. “Magic?” the villain spat, “Magic is not properly organised.”
“But so very potent,” the Indian gentleman suggested, releasing another bolt from his gnarled walking stick.
“Not… potent… enough…” growled the Brain Butcher, actually bearing down on the doctor despite the now-continual beam of force that sprayed into him. Pieces of flesh were flayed away, but the shimmering silver that pervaded his nervous system kept him approaching.
Mumphrey unloaded a full pistolsworth of ammo into him. He didn’t notice. “By Jove!” the Englishman mumbled.
Dr Hakenfakir staggered as the butcher reached out for him.
“Miss Darkness,” Quimby called from then corner of the room, “My device! The Aether!”
The young woman understood. She scrabbled over the rubble, grabbed the shattered instrument, and tossed it to HV.
Baron Zemo produced his second Luger and calmly took aim at Hastings Vernal’s head. “So it ends,” he proclaimed. “It always pays to have more than one weapon.”
Colonel Blanchford Bertram made one swift overarm movement and Knifey embedded itself into the foreign agent’s throat. “Sometimes you only need one weapon when it’s the right one,” Knifey told the dead Baron.
Hunter Victorious hurled the Improbable Aether at the struggling Brain Butcher.
There was a second explosion. Well, it was more the sort of multidimensional impact of two fundamental and opposite substances meeting, disagreeing, and deciding to sort this out outside reality.
Whatever actually happened, this explosion did the job. The monster was no more, and there was no sign of either the Serious Matter or the Impossibilityium it had met with.
“By George that was a close one,” breathed Mumph, picking bits of plaster from his whiskers and passing his handkerchief to Miss Darkness.
“So perish all villains,” the Colonel harrumphed, retrieving Knifey and wiping him clean on Zemo’s coat.
“Are you alright, Mister Mayor?” Miss Darkness checked, looking towards the old man who had resumed his place behind his scorched desk in his shattered office.
“Indeed I am. My thanks to you and your colleagues for a timely intervention. The city will deal with matters from here.”
“Your book, Mayor Parody,” HV said, handing over a large volume called The Laws and Ordinances of New Paradopolis and closing it shut before Wilbur could work out the new paragraph Hastings Vernal had just added.
“Thank you.” Wilbur Parody was almost sorry that he was going to have to disband this group now. However, they had come too close to discovering what he was really up to, his long-range plans for Paradopolis and its heroes, perhaps even the persuasive, velvety, Latvian-accented voice that sometimes spoke in his head. Besides, the time was coming when Parody would again need the Mansion of the Lair of the Parodyverse’s Secret and it would be best if these adventurers were dead or disbanded by then. He would see to it. “Thank you for everything,” the Mayor of New Paradopolis told them.
“Lady and gentlemen, I give you a toast,” Sir Mumphrey called, standing at the head of the dining table at the Improbable Gentlemen’s clubhouse. “To the League.”
“To its many members past, present, and future, and to absent friends,” Dr Hakenfakir added.
“And to working out what’s really going on in the Parodyverse,” grinned Phineas Quimby.
“To many more successful cases like the Notorious Affair of the Bloody Brain Butcher,” contributed the Colonel.
“And to being close to one another,” added Miss Darkness, with an odd sideways glance at Mumph.
“To the League of Improbable Gentlemen,” agreed Hastings Vernal with an odd sense of regret and nostalgia in his breast. “And to those who come after.”
And they drank their wine.
NOTES & INCUNABULA:
A number of readers have raised questions about the Improbable Gentlemen and their time period, so here is a summary of what we know of them:
The origins of the League remain something of a mystery, as does it’s early membership. The main wing of the Lair Mansion was built in 1811 as the meeting place for the League, although it may have been operating informally for a while before this date. They were written up in the society columns as a club who dabbled in mysteries and suchlike. Little else is known of the League’s founders, although the work orders for building the neo-gothic flanking wings and rear courtyard block were signed by the club secretary Headley Valentine.
The Club as we meet them in the late 1870’s consists of a core of:
Colonel Blanchford Bertram, a retired U.S. Cavalry officer, world explorer, and adventurer. By the 1870’s the Colonel has been a member for a good three decades and is a man in his late fifties. Somewhere in his adventures he has picked up Knifey, a sentient blade of as-yet-unrevealed origins carried in the modern day by the superhero ManMan. Lee, ManMan’s writer, speculates about an African expedition as being the possible venue for Bertram and Knifey’s meeting. I suggest that they met when some nefarious villain – possibly the horrifyingly hairy King Mungo the Huge from the lost Rape Ape City now I come to think about it – hurled Knifey into the Colonel’s back.
Sir Mumphrey Wilton, an English knight and general all round good sport. In the 1870’s Mumphrey has only recently acquired his temporal pocketwatch from the sinister Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity in another adventure which is yet to be properly documented (sigh). He has still to learn the nuances of his chronometer but is aware that it makes him some kind of minor cosmic office holder. He hasn’t yet worked out that he has stopped ageing while he carries the instrument. He won’t meet his future wife, Madge, for several decades yet, because she hasn’t been born.
Hagatha Darkness, the witch of Covenant Manse. Miss Darkness 1870’s style is a young woman with a problem. Her sorcerous lineage comes with a familiar spirit who is somewhat over-familiar. The Demon Lover has been breeding Darkness line witches for thousands of years, impregnating them to create a stronger witch each time so that one day a child can become his vessel for human incarnation and subsequent dimensional domination. The independent Hagatha has disobediently taken a human lover – Mumph - instead, and this is all going to come to a head very soon after the Untold Tale that’s been, um, told. Mumphrey will unknowingly become the father of Hagatha’s daughter, and ultimately grandfather to Abandoned Legion member Sorceress. The Demon Lover subplot gets sorted out once and for all in Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #34: True, Dare, Kiss, Promise.
Phineas Quimby, the EccentricEtherInvestigatorExplorer!, the late nineteenth century CrazySugarHero! After discovering his Improbable Aether, Quimby and his companion and chronicler Fogherty undertook a series of remarkable adventures utilising the various gadgets this mysterious substance powered. One such caper is detailed in The Journal of Sir Mumphrey Wilton, Extract Ten: In which we visit with an old friend and get the finest tea ever brewed on a steam-powered extrophohelioscope. Many people suspected that Quimby and his flatmate “Froggy” Fogherty were more than friends. Few realised that Fogherty was actually the cross-dressing Lady Alicia Redmayne. Quimby and Redmayne vanished in the early years of the 20th century testing an experimental time-sled and have not been heard of since.
Dr Hakenfakir, surgeon, musician, hypnotist, and wielder of a suspiciously familiar cane. native of Bombay, India, Dr Hakenfakir was murdered while exploring a lead to the mysterious Floating Island of Chemmis. By a serious of curious coincidences he had just unearthed one of the Egyptian staffs of life and death from its Syrian tomb, and this granted him a new half-life so long as he retained it. This same cane would later do the same thing for the Late, Great, Donald Blake, one of the Scourge of Baron Zemo’s Lair. The circumstances of Dr Hakenfakir’s loss of the staff and it’s current ownership have not yet been explored.
Hastings Vernal, intertemporal man of mystery. A number of inexplicably similar characters with the initials HV have shown up all through history. The modern age, for example, has seen Hollywood V and later Hunter Victorious interacting with super-heroes. HV has often shown an interest in joining or guiding teams of adventurers, and has a special care for the Lair Mansion, which he appears to have directed both the League of Improbable Gentlemen and the Lair Legion towards using. He was also illicitly accessing the building when it was under the ownership and control of Wilbur Parody in the latter years of the nineteenth century. On the whole, however, HV’s motives, background, and origin remain to be discovered (read: we’re waiting for Neil to write them).
Jakes the butler was never described as a hunchback but he should have been. He was, in fact, a closet hunchback. The Hooded Hood’s manservant Flapjack is his great-nephew, grandson, and great-grandson, depending on how you calculate it. Young Hopkins was a page for the League in their final years who explored one cellar too many and got his descendants roped into the narrative.
Helmut Zemo was the more familiar Heinrich Zemo’s great-grandfather. Whether the current Zemo is aware of the circumstances of his ancestor’s death is unknown. The Brain Butcher’s Serious Matter manifested again at an appropriate and orderly point in the time space continuum, and eventually became bonded to Hatman, whose powers are a much more benign variant of the same principle as that used by the Butcher. This has been touched upon in Untold Tales #41, the Last Will and Testament of Hagatha Darkness. Perfection O’Toole died in 1912 and was replaced by a new Emissary of Order. Only Kirk Boxleitner can reveal who that is now. Dr Christopher Waltz may have been a distant grandparent of a familiar (with everybody) First Lady of the Lair Legion, and some may recall her choice of name for her recent offspring.
Wilbur Parody was a complicated and cunning adversary. His main appearance to date was in The Secret History of the Parodyverse: The Most Untold Tale of the Lair Legion of All, where he takes on Lisa and Goldeneyed as they strive to uncover what he’s been plotting all this time and encounter none other than Hastings Vernal to help with their bafflement. The final showdown with Wilbur is described in Lair Legion: Year One, part 6, but that’s not available just yet.
There are a number of other connections to be made with throwaway lines in the narrative about the League of Improbable Gentlemen, but it’s more fun letting folks spot them for themselves. Let me know if you really want in on the jokes.
Finally, we know that the League ended shortly after this adventure, although the circumstances again remain unrevealed. Their spirit lived on in at least two subsequent groups, the Golden Age Matadors who fought in World War II, and of course the Lair Legion themselves, who are only now delving the rich heritage that they have inherited. More of that in future stories.
The history of the Parodyverse shouldn’t only be my playground, by the way. It’s great fun, the League has a long history that has never been documented, and there’s plenty of other eras too. Feel free to contribute.
HH
The collected works, as told to the Hooded Hood
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