Read Online Nostradamus Ate My Hamster by Robert Rankin - Free Book Online Page B

trudged, he did not have a jog or a march left in him. Frank was a natural trudger anyway, and Morgan, who was easy about such things, was prepared to give trudging a try.
    Geographically, the distance between the sales office and Mr Fudgepacker’s office was a little more than twenty feet. But due to the imaginative layout of the place, the route was somewhat circuitous. About a five-minute trudge, it was.
    So, while this trudging is going on, now might be a good time to offer a bit in the way of description regarding Fudgepacker’s Emporium. As has already been said, it was housed within the deconsecrated church and, as has also been said, it contained many “wonders”.
    The visitor, entering by the fine Gothic doors at the front, will find a pleasant vestibule with a glazed tile floor and walls of York stone. Here is offered a taste of things to come. To the left stands a torture rack,
circa
1540, a wax mannequin stretched thereon, its sculptured face expressive of considerable discomfort. Several suits of samurai armour are mounted upon stands. A row of human skeletons, two lacking heads, and a Dalek.
    Through the vestibule and into the main hall. The word “cavernous” springs immediately to mind. It is not a word you normally associate with the interior of churches, but it is appropriate here. From low tiled floor to high fan-vaulting, the space has been divided into numerous levels, constructed in finely laced cast-ironwork. And the name Escher now springs to mind, that amazing artist who drew all those wonderful pictures of staircases that lead forever nowhere, yet somehow join onto one another in a never-ending, mind-boggling, continuity. Galleries and catwalks and stairways. And items. Items strung from the ceiling, rising from the floor, suspended between the catwalks, stacked along these walks and ways and housed in racks and cases, bags and boxes.
    Stuffed beasts proliferate. A bear in battle with a tiger. A swooping eagle snatching at a piglet. A row of baboons clad in Regency garb standing to attention, glazed eyes alert. Pickled specimens also abound. Tall glass jars, many being the preparations of the famous Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch, who supplied curiosities to the collection of Peter the Great. Are the faces that stare out at you real? Were they once human? Yes, they are and were.
    All human life is here, suspended in time. Preserved in formaldehyde. Here a diseased kidney. Here a distended bowel. Here a lung far gone with tumorous canker. Here a brain all –
    “Here we are,” said Morgan.
    “I’ll knock,” said Frank. “I’m the manager.”
    “I’ll just skulk then,” said Morgan. “I’m the packer.”
    “I’m the salesman,” said Russell. “What should I do?”
    “Just stand, I suppose,” said Morgan. “But not quite so close.”
    Frank did the knocking.
    “Come in,” called the crackling voice of Mr Fudgepacker. “That is, enter those who are without. I’m inside, as it were, the one who’s calling you to come in. It’s me. Who
is
that?”
    “It’s us,” called Frank.
    “Sounded like just the one of you. Did you all knock together?”
    “I did the knocking,” called Frank. “I’m the manager.”
    “Oh, it’s you Frank. Come on in then, if you’re not in already. And I see that you’re not. Enter.”
    Morgan rolled his eyes. “I’ve been sacked plenty of times before,” said he, “but this should be a new experience.”
    They entered.
    Mr Fudgepacker’s office was housed in the old belfry. The bells were gone, but the bats were still there. It wasn’t a very big office, because it wasn’t a very big belfry. There was room for about four coffins lying down, not that anyone had ever tested this. And they might well have, there were plenty of coffins downstairs, several with their original occupants.
    The walls of this minuscule office were made gay with posters. Film posters. Film posters of the nineteen-fifties persuasion.
We Eat Our Young, I was a