Posted by The Hooded Hood continues the Saturday Matinee adventures of Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the charming Miss Canterbury in: on June 04, 2001 at 15:20:39:
Part the Third: Doctor Hakenfakir and the Secret Older Than the World
The antique shop
beside the Amjeri Gate was shabbier than the last time Mumphrey had seen it,
albeit that was nearly thirty years before. The toothless old woman who sat
beside the sad collection of broken furniture and threadbare carpets paid no
attention at all to Mumphrey and Miss Canterbury pushing their way past the junk
and debris, brushing aside a bead curtain, and wandering up the filthy staircase
to the upper apartments. In our next exciting instalment: Mumphrey and Miss Canterbury’s
rendezvous with a pilot in Baghdad doesn’t go according to plan, as the
Ever-Active Hand of the Si-Fan Catamites become involved and only
CrazySugarBlast-OffLad can save the day.
“Are you sure this is the place?” the Englishwoman
checked, trying not to wrinkle her nose at the smell of stale curry and old
sweat that permeated the whole area.
“It was,” Mumph answered. He rapped on
the door at the top of the stairs. “Anybody home?”
There was the sound of
heavy bolts being drawn back, and then the door creaked open.
Mumphrey peered
into the darkened interior of the low-roofed apartment. The long louvered doors
to the balcony had been nailed shut, denying almost any light to the cluttered
apartment. The carpet was dank and motheaten, and every surface was filled with
bric-a-brac and dust.
“Hakenfakir?” Mumph called cautiously. “Are you in
here?”
“I am here, Sir Mumphrey,” came back on old, parchment-thin voice. “I
am on the bed.”
Mumphrey and Miss Canterbury picked their way cautiously over
the floor. An occasional cockroach crunched beneath their feet.
Hakenfakir
lay on his side on the canopied bed, his body a rack of bones naked but for
turban and loincloth. He curled like a foetus, but he clutched a polished wood
cane to himself with both arms.
“Hakenfakir?” Mumph gasped. “What’s happened
to you, man? Do you need a doctor?”
“A doctor is the very last thing I need,”
the old Indian replied with a touch of his former authority. “I am simply past
my best, Sir Mumphrey. My methods of denying time are somewhat inferior to
yours.”
“What does he mean?” Miss Canterbury wondered. “How do you know this
man?”
“We were in a club together once,” Dr Hakenfakir answered, and for a
moment he almost smiled. “Or was it supposed to be your father or grandfather I
was an Improbable Gentleman with, Sir Mumphrey?”
“We’ve got to get you some
help,” the English gentleman declared. “You look half-dead.”
Hakenfakir
chuckled until a choking fit stopped him. “I think the time has come to tell you
my little secret, old comrade,” he said at last. “I won’t be around to tell the
tale much longer, and it might explain why some serious people are going to
burst in here and try to kill you very soon.”
“What?” Miss Canterbury
frowned. “Again?”
“We can protect you, old chap,” Mumphrey assured
Hakenfakir. “Tell us what’s the matter.”
“I must tell you how I gained my
treasure,” the Indian wheezed, gesturing to the darkwood stave he nursed. “My
joy, my curse, my burden.”
“I know already,” Mumphrey reminded him. “Back
during the Indian Mutiny of ’57, when the rebels tried to ransack the
Shajahanabad Museum of the Mughal Dynasty, and you protected the artefacts under
your charge and seized up the enchanted cane to defend yourself and
them.”
“Enchanted cane?” Miss Canterbury asked sceptically.
Hakenfakir
concentrated and the door closed and locked itself. “It merely focuses one’s
gifts,” he explained modestly. “I had a minor talent for hypnosis and other
conjuring tricks. But Sir Mumphrey, you have not heard the full story. I was too
slow to realise the cane’s power or to defend myself with it.”
“Then what
happened?” Mumphrey puzzled. “After all, you survived and came out of it ownin’
the enchanted stick. Seen you use it a hundred times.”
The old man’s smile
was parchment thin. “Almost right, Mumph, my dear old fellow. All except the
part about me surviving.”
“What?” puzzled Mumphrey.
“I died back then, in
1857, even as I was clutching this cane. I died. My heart stopped, my breathing
ceased. I died.”
“But then how…?” blurted Miss Canterbury.
“Oh, making
things move is one of the cane’s best tricks,” the old Indian replied. “Whether
it’s bolts on a door or muscles in a body it doesn’t matter. With a little
practise you can even stop the decaying process and pass as entirely
human.”
“You… you’ve been… undead for as long as I’ve known you?” Mumphrey
stammered. “But I’ve dined with you, I’ve seen you bleed…”
“I am a very good
telekinetic, Sir Mumphrey,” Dr Hakenfakir assured him. “But even this cane has
its limits, and I am reaching them even now. I find that it is taking almost all
my will just to keep this old form from crumbling to bits. I no longer have the
energies to devote to other things – such as concealing this device’s
whereabouts from one who has been searching for it a very long time.”
Sir
Mumphrey was troubled by these revelations about his old friend. “I’ve spent
years adventuring with… a walking ghost?”
“Even if that fantastic story is
true,” Miss Canterbury interrupted, “what matters is finding out about the
Blanchford Diary translation – and helping Dr Hakenfakir with this enemy who’s
searching for his cane, of course.”
“Yes, yes, quite right, Miss Canterbury.
Forgive me, Hakenfakir, not done to let myself get shocked like that.” Mumphrey
braced himself, moved forward, and shook the Indian’s hand. “Friendship beyond
death, eh?”
“So who is this person that’s searching for you?” Miss Canterbury
enquired.
Dr Hakenfakir gestured to the stave he clutched. “This is a
remarkable thing,” he admired. “Our legends say it came from another world, you
know, fallen to Earth in a great disaster. It was used to bind the spirit of an
evil demon within it, but the devil escaped when the cane fell to Earth. Now
that demon is free and seeks to destroy its former prison.”
“But your enemy…”
prompted the Englishwoman.
“He is called only the Doctor,” Hakenfakir
revealed. “He commands a sect of Si Fan killers who hunt with strange dogs bred
in the Doctor’s own laboratories. He knows my time is near, and now he closes in
on me.”
“He won’t get you, Hakenfakir,” Sir Mumphrey vowed. “I’ll see to
that.”
“When I am dead,” the Indian replied calmly, “mail the cane to the
address written on the night-stand. Arrangements have already been made. The
stave will have three more owners before its purpose is revealed.”
“Dr
Hakenfakir,” Miss Canterbury prompted gently, “if I may, could you tell us
anything about your old friend Colonel Bertram, the explorer? I had a journal he
wrote with a coded passage in the obscure Vesalian tongue. The book itself was
stolen, but I had taken the precaution of copying the relevant parts. Can you
translate it?”
“Alas, dear lady, there are less than a dozen men in the world
who could do such a thing. I am not one of them, and I do not know how to find
any of them.”
Miss Canterbury swallowed hard. “Oh.”
“But you knew Bertram
for longer than I did,” remembered Mumphrey. “Did he ever tell you how he
discovered the Lost City of Vesalia? Tell you how to get to it? Presumably the
Vesalians could decode that writin’, what?”
“There is a chart somewhere,”
Hakenfakir recalled, “Perhaps in that cabinet there?” His shaking hands pointed
the cane and the cabinet opened, spraying papers across the already-crowded
floor. “The mess is of no consequence,” he told his visitors. “I will not need
these things again. Ah, there. That packet wrapped in oilskin. That should get
you to Vesalia.”
“So there are a dozen men in the world who speak Vesalian
except the Vesalians themselves,” Miss Canterbury smiled.
“Nobody said the
Vesalians were men,” Dr Hakenfakir replied.
Before Miss Canterbury could
reply, the Si-Fan assassins burst through the windows.
Leading the charge
were six frothing animals. They may have been dogs once, before the long
tortuous surgery that had driven them to madness, but now they were merely huge,
slavering, nightblack hunters, predators designed to find and shred human
flesh.
Mumphrey seized his pocketwatch and used it to step out of time.
Effectively the world around him froze.
The first thing he did was lift Miss
Canterbury out of the way of the beasts’ lunges. He gently laid her on the bed
beside Hakenfakir. Then he repositioned the animals so that their leaps would
direct them not at him and his party but at the very Si-Fan who had unleashed
them. He took the time to check his revolver was loaded and to take down an old
scimitar from the collection of curios on the walls before he retreated to
protect the canopied bedstead and allowed time to resume.
“What?” Miss
Canterbury blinked as she suddenly found herself moved elsewhere. Around here
were the unholy snarls and screams of Si Fan falling to the hunting beasts. All
too quickly the assassins were dead and the fell animals turned again to their
lawful prey.
“There is no escape, Hakenfakir,” an Oriental man in a black
silk gown warned, appearing at the doorway. “You have thwarted me long enough,
and now you shall pay the penalty.”
Mumphrey place two shots into each of the
two hounds that flanked the Devil Doctor and two straight through the Doctor’s
forehead.
All his targets simply ignored their wounds.
Mumphrey’s hand
descended to his pocketwatch again, but Hakenfakir clutched his wrist. “No!” he
told his old comrade. “This is my fight. I am prepared for this. Get out of here
with the lady, in no time at all, if you see what I mean. Get far away.”
The
Englishman halted time around himself and Dr Hakenfakir. “What are you going to
do?” he asked in carefully controlled tones.
“I’ve been diverting the cane’s
power to keep me alive,” the old Indian explained. “I’m not going to divert that
power any longer. I’m going to use it to deal with this bastard and his minions.
He shall learn what it means to cross Doctor Hakenfakir!”
Mumphrey opened his
mouth to speak, then closed it, gripped his friend’s hand once and clapped him
on the shoulder. Then he hoisted Miss Canterbury and bore her past the immobile
antagonists and out of the house.
Miss Canterbury blinked as he dropped back
into proper time. “What happened?” she demanded, noting that she was now in the
street again. “Please don’t tell me I fainted.”
“I think it’s time to run,
Miss Canterbury,” Mumph advised her. “Dr Hakenfakir is about to take care of
some business, what?”
They ran. Behind them Hakenfakir caressed his cane one
last time, whispered something to it only he could hear, and released its
pyrokinetic and telekinetic energies.
It was not an explosion, as such. The
heat and impacts that were freed were directional, personal. They devastated
Hakenfakir’s house and destroyed all the lurking minions of the Devil Doctor,
but they did not harm the old lady who trembled below the counter of the curio
shop. They burned the mutated beasts but not the screaming locals in the
marketplace. They evaporated Hakenfakir, and left nothing of the body the Devil
Doctor was using but a charred cinder.
And the cane remained untouched,
sticking up from the ruin of a whole city block, ready for Mumphrey to package
it off to the address its former owner had indicated.