The Exploits of Engelbrecht Read online

  A full account of the tricks which those cunning clocks play on us would take me into abstruse realms of physics and philosophy. As little Charlie Wapentake says, “It’s bad enough not knowing where you are, but not knowing when’s the very devil.”

  Soon after the start, Lizard Bayliss, who is the look-out man, emits a fearful, if correctly nautical, cry of “Horror on the port bow!” and falls overboard.

  We look where he indicates and see ourselves on the way back, deplorably aged and much changed for the worse in every respect. We are followed immediately by Ourselves as We Might Have Been if only we hadn’t wasted so much Time.

  This is dismal enough but there is plenty more to come. Somehow they have got at our works so that our rhythms and rates of growth are all different. Thus it takes Nodder Fothergill, who is rowing stroke, the best part of a week to clear his throat, while Badger Norridge, at bow, has brought up and reared a family before you can say Jack Ratcatcher. Some of us seem to be growing younger and some older, all at the same time, and what with school caps here, and skull caps there, it really is all very confusing indeed.

  By the time we arrive at the point of disembarkation we are utterly disoriented, and the landing party that follows Engelbrecht ashore appears to consist of a brace of toddlers, three dotards, and something that looks as if it died a very long time ago, which we identify, from its expression of extreme dejection, as Lizard Bayliss. Before we can move a step we have to expend all our precious hoard of contributed Hours, intended for bribing the alarm clocks, on restoring ourselves to some semblance of vitality.

  The Dance of the Hours is at its height. The Whittington Chimes are getting ready to swing their introduction to the dread Zero, as we file through the gate into the Astronomer Royal’s private garden. Miss Cuckoo Clock, a very sizable model, is waiting for her lover beside the historic sundial. She’s ticking away like mad.

  Engelbrecht steps forward to claim her and all the alarm clocks planted by the Special Chronological Branch, who’ve been revelling on borrowed time, go off with a hideous jangle.

  We start to run for it. I hear Lizard whisper to Engelbrecht: “Quick, put her hands back so she can’t strike!” But it’s too late. Miss Cuckoo Clock strikes midnight. And instead of a Cuckoo, a dear little carved Swiss cuckoo, there’s a harsh whirr and a great bird of prey, something midway between a vulture and pterodactyl, dashes out at us. It does for Badger Norridge, severely prangs Lizard Bayliss, and the last we see of it is heading north with Engelbrecht in its beak.

  We make our way back to the boat sadder and not much wiser men with nothing to show for our losses except an outsize cuckoo clock.

  But who should greet us when we get back to the Club but Engelbrecht. It seems he overpowered his captor in mid-air and wrung its neck. The chef is even now cooking it for the wedding breakfast.

  When, however, we remove Miss Cuckoo Clock from her travelling case, we find that marriage is absolutely out of the question. She is hopelessly fast and Dr. Sadismus has to send her to the excitable ward of the Clock Hospital. On which rather sad note I must close the story of Engelbrecht’s elopement.

  THEY WRESTLED ALL NIGHT

  The decision of my friend, Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer, to hazard his tiny person in a season of All-in Wrestling, is not taken lightly.

  I well remember the preliminary discussion that rages in the Screaming Room of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club. It is precipitated by a leading article in the Fly Paper complaining of the decline of surrealist boxing, the occasion for which is the dreadful fiasco of the fight between Nitzy Nusselbaum and the Mighty Atomiser.

  Nitzy Nusselbaum, you should know, is a nonogenarian cripple with such a complicated surgical history that it’s whispered in the Dressing Rooms that when he goes to bed at night he unscrews his navel and his bottom drops off. As for the Mighty Atomiser, its reputation as a Tanker is so well known that its appearance in any ring is the signal for a massed chorus of “Rockabye Baby”. Neither of them would have got a licence if it hadn’t been for Chippy de Zoete straightening out the board of control. The resulting set-up bears, as the Fly Paper’s boxing critic points out, about as much resemblance to a fight as a marriage blanc. Nitzy wins on points—points of etiquette, if you ask me; Chippy de Zoete, who has been plunging heavily with all the borrowed time he can lay hands on, cleans up a packet, and everyone says this rings the death knell of surrealist boxing.

  But when I turn to congratulate Engelbrecht, who retired undefeated champion way back, on having no more to do with the decadent sport, the gallant dwarf glares at me and grunts. I observe that he is looking dangerously senile, and am all the more dismayed when I learn from his trusty but pessimistic manager, Lizard Bayliss, that he is meditating a come-back.

  It appears that the up-keep of Engelbrecht’s finance, Miss Cuckoo Clock, in the private mental ward of the Clock Hospital (Medical Superintendent: Dr. Sadismus) where she has been ticking away like an infuriated mob of death-watch beetles, ever since the night of her unfortunate elopement, has been making frightful inroads on my little friend’s precious hoard of hours. Unless he can find some supplementary source of Duration he will be compelled, ere long, to keep an embarrassing and painful date with the Grim Reaper.

  This, then, is the somewhat tricky background that has to be taken into consideration. Now you will understand why the tears are streaming down poor Lizard Bayliss’s cheeks as he shakes his trembling head and piercingly flutes: “So help me, kiddo, I never thought to see you clowning it in the mud bath with an electric eel, but if it’s the only way we can foot our bills then what must be must.”

  For all are agreed that, although boxing may be finished, and a come-back into the straight surrealist ring inadvisable, yet the jaded palates of the Fancy will find the psychopathological glamour of All-in Wrestling under the Salvador Dali code irresistible.

  The plan is simple enough. Engelbrecht is to be the star turn on a mammoth bill, promoted by Lizard Bayliss. What with the gate, which is expected to be astronomical, to say nothing of a few side bets, they reckon they ought to make a really big killing, enough to keep the dwarf out of the red for an indefinite Time to come.

  There’s a lot of organizing to be done, and, as usual, I find myself being pressed into service. My first job is to book suitable talent for the supporting bouts. Accompanied by my old cronies, Tommy Prenderghast and little Charlie Wapentake, I nip off on a lightning tour of the backblocks of Time and Space, to see what we can pick up.

  I am watching, through a spy-hole, in the wall of a toughish little boîte called The Bottomless Pit, a promising free-for-all between Zombies and Giant Black Widow Spiders, when I receive a frantic message from Lizard Bayliss, summoning me hack to Nightmare Abbey, where Engelbrecht is conducting his training in the ancestral swamp, by kind permission of his old friend and patron, the Id.

  I find Lizard in tears as usual, shredding the gorse wig which we make him wear to prevent him tearing his hair out. “Where’s Engelbrecht?” I ask.

  Lizard points to a fifty-foot anaconda which is coiled up on a bed of reeds, licking its lips. “His sparring partner’s just swallowed him,” he hiccoughs through his sobs.

  “Come, come, Lizard,” I tell him. “Pull yourself together, boy. This is no time to give way. We must get him out of there before he’s digested. Have you tried an emetic?”

  He nods glumly.

  “Then we must shoot the brute.”

  Lizard shakes his head. “Can’t do that. Might hit the dwarf or crush him in the convulsions. Beside, we need the snake on the bill.”

  “If I were you,” says a reedy voice behind us, “instead of standing there ringing my hands I’d ring a bell.”

  We turn round and see the wraith-like form of the Oldest Member of the Surrealist Sporting Club, supporting himself on a forest of shooting sticks.

  “Ring a bell,” he repeats solemnly, “and the snake will think the round has come to an end and regurgitate its opponent.
”

  We do ring a bell, and with the precision of a trained all-in wrestler the anaconda disgorges Engelbrecht. It appears it never meant any harm. The holds they were rehearsing in that particular round were so tricky that it just got confused.

  After a bath and a rub down the dwarf is as fresh as a daisy again. I report progress from my talent-spotting tour and we go into committee over the details of the billing. There is any amount of fixing and framing to be done and it’s got to be totally hush-hush because if Chippy de Zoete gets wind of it the odds will be all at sea.

  Engelbrecht, however, with typical sportsmanship, is more intent on giving the public a really first-rate show than on making sure that his set-ups are water-tight…

  Comes the big night and the vast Sportsdrome round behind the gasworks is crammed to extinction. The queues are so long that some of those who began lining up when they were quite young are qualified for the old age pension by the time they get abreast of the box office. Chippy de Zoete’s ticket spivs are doing a roaring trade.

  At last the band of the Asylum Workers Union, ably conducted by Bandmaster Bulimia, which have been playing the Paranoiacs’ Polka for as long as anyone can remember, switch over to that old favourite, The Black Waltz. The lights die away and the whole of that limitless arena is in darkness except for the spot playing over the twisted form of Crabs Felkin, our MC, who announces the bouts, and introduces Dreamy Dan, the surrealist referee.

  I must say we certainly have done the fund proud. It’s a bill to make your mouth water. First comes a little Free for All or Battle Royal between a dozen selected characters from English History: Strongbow, The Black Prince, John of Gaunt, Og, Gog, and Magog, Burke and Hare, Charlie Peace, Lord Roberts, and the Little Princes in the Tower.

  There follows as close a spell of gouging and twisting as you could wish to witness. To those unacquainted with the elements of surrealist sporting set-ups, the cunning behind this selection may need a little emphasis. It is obvious that on form neither of the Little P’s in the T stands an earthly. Ergo, argue the surrealist bookmakers, it’s been fixed for one of them to win. But which one? Ah, that’s not so easy. And so Engelbrecht’s mob, who alone are in the know, get evens about a dead cert.

  It’s a pretty gory set-up, the way they play it. I won’t bore you with the details. The heavy mob cancel each other out, as arranged. Then Burke knackers Hare and Charlie Peace coshes Burke. Lord Roberts, with a surprising turn of speed, whips off his cholera belt and garrottes Charlie Peace with it. The Little P’s in the T gang up on poor old Bobs and do him brown. Then they pummel each other to a standstill. Dreamy Dan raises the hand of little Prince Edward and we score our first victory over the book.

  Next comes a needle match if ever there was one. A five-round grapple between Jack the Ripper and Lucy, Lady Houston. For this ploy we are essaying a double bluff. On form Jack’s got it in the bag. Ergo, argue the bookies, it’s been fixed for Luce and Jack is due to take a dive. So Luce starts a firm favourite at three to one on. Moreover we arrange for her to receive Chippy de Zoete in her dressing room, hung with Union Jacks, and she tells him she is confident of victory and tips him off that that nice Mr. Engelbrecht will never allow that horrid Mr. Ripper to win. So Chippy de Zoete puts everything he’s got, including the Lady Houston Cold Cure, which she has kindly presented to him and which he wraps up in the tail of his shirt, on the old battleaxe at three to one on.

  Meanwhile our mob has fixed for Jack to win after all and we stand to collect a packet.

  But we have reckoned without Lucy, Lady Houston. When she comes into the ring in her Britannia outfit she gets a cheer such as you never heard, and Jack the Ripper, all in black, is booed nigh unto death. This goes to Lucy’s never overstrong head. She forgets about her contract and goes all out for a win.

  When Jack comes out of his corner for the first round, taking it easy so as to let the old girl toss him over her shoulder into the mud a few times, she pulls a hatpin on him, and the next thing we know his black shape is heading for dreamland as fast as thought. The only thing Dreamy Dan can do is to give Lucy the bout and when we’ve counted up our losses we’re a long way behind what we had when we started.

  Nor is this the only one that comes unstuck. A friendly five-round grapple between Salvador Dali and a Haunted Case of Surgical Instruments—one of Tommy Prenderghast’s discoveries—is thought to be such a dead cert in favour of the inanimate objects that Engelbrecht hasn’t even bothered to frame it. Despite the odds of “Fifty to one on the bloodstained carving knives,” which the surrealist bookies are calling hoarsely, we decide to plunge heavily in the hope of recouping ourselves.

  At first all goes according to form. Midway through the third session Dali is stretched out flat on the operating table, awaiting the autopsy. The crowd are singing “Good night, Salvador, see you in the next world!” The bookies are opening their calendars, clocks, and hour glasses, preparatory to paying out. But we have all of us reckoned without the Catalan sportsman’s indomitable fighting spirit. Just how he wriggles out of the hold those bulldog forceps have got on him we cannot quite see, but there is no doubt it is one of the most spectacular come-backs in the history of All-in.

  There is worse to come when the Invisible Man throws Jack Doyle, on whom we have our shirt. In the post-mortem that follows this upset it transpires that little Charlie Wapentake has omitted to give the Invisible Man his instructions. Asked why, he says, “I couldn’t find him so I assumed he wasn’t there.”

  What with all these disasters, by the time we arrive at the interval, before the main event of the evening, Engelbrecht has lost nearly all the profits on the takings, and is looking, as Lizard Bayliss remarks, so horribly old that anyone’d think it a kindness to send him to the vet in a cardboard box to have him put out of his misery.

  We are in some confusion about our tactics. It had been our intention for Engelbrecht to win all his bouts except the last, and bets had already been placed with this end in view. But now we have grave doubts as to whether our champion can stand up against a packet of pins. There’s only one thing for it and that is to give him a Time-transfusion. We call for volunteers and everybody whips out his calendar. By the end of the operation most of us are looking mighty doddery and all that remains of one or two are wigs and spectacles; but it’s a pleasure to see little Engelbrecht restored to his pristine state of vigour. Presently the siren sounds and we file out of the Changing Room and emerge at the ringside.

  The first three bouts are treated more as exhibitions than anything else, and the bookies aren’t taking any bets on them. Engelbrecht is in smashing form. He throws the Flying Scotsman out of the ring and gets a toe-hold on Moby Dick in no time.

  He then proceeds to wrestle against an assortment of frightful phantasms of the unconscious, skeletons from the well-stocked cupboards of Nightmare Abbey, who appear by courtesy of the Id.

  All this is just a little bit of limbering up preparatory to his main bout of the programme against the Great Kraken.

  The giant cuttlefish is wheeled in in a tank. It clasps its sixty-foot tentacles above its head in acknowledgement of the plaudits of the crowd. Crabs Felkin introduces the contestants and we observe that Engelbrecht is wearing a frogman’s suit. Obviously he intends to carry the fight to his opponent. Nor has he long to wait. Scarcely has Dreamy Dan pronounced the dread word: Time! than a tentacle flows over the edge of the tank, coils round Engelbrecht’s ankle and drags him into the water. He goes down bubbling.

  You would never think, to see that mass of thrashing tentacles and semi-ingested dwarf that the fight has been carefully rehearsed. We’ve even fitted the Kraken with an artificial scream that sounds under water at suitable moments, when the struggle seems particularly grim, for instance, when Engelbrecht is butting him in one of his giant eyes.

  Backwards and forwards the battle rages. Once Engelbrecht manages to get a lock on the Kraken’s beak; once he succeeds in throwing it right out of the tank but the tir
eless monster scrambles back into its home ground again, dragging with it not only the plucky dwarf, but also the occupants of half the ringside seats.

  It really is an awe-inspiring spectacle and the crowd are in hysterics. The odds when it starts are two to one on Engelbrecht, because it’s never occurred to any of the bookies that he’d drop the bout to a Cephalopod; but by the end of the fourth session the performance of both contestants has been so convincing that they’ve shortened to evens.

  But in the fifth round something very unfortunate happens. The Kraken lets out a jet-black cloud of ink, which is direct violation of its contract. We see no more of Engelbrecht until he climbs out of the tank at the end of the round, black in the face, black all over, and fuming. “So help me, I’ll do that ruddy Cephalopod if it’s the last thing I do,” he says. “He fouled me with his beak under cover of that ink cloud.”

  We try to restrain him but he won’t listen. He clambers back into that tank and disappears into the black water, just like our old Saxon hero, Beowulf going into the mere after Grendel’s mother.

  You can’t see a thing because of the ink and the crowd are beginning to beef for their money back. Crabs Felkin tries to pacify them. “Things,” he says, “dear things, the grapple that’s going on in that tank is so horrible that we’ve had to darken the water lest the sight of it should send you out of your wits. Dreamy Dan, our referee, who is right in there seeing fair play, has just sent a message out to say that he doesn’t think he can stand a moment more of it.”

  This, of course, is no way to pacify a surrealist sporting crowd, as Crabs should well know, and there is an ugly demonstration. Some of them try to rush the tank but the Kraken whips out two tentacles and pulls them in, and all is comparatively quiet again.