Link Arms with Toads! Page 2
Baring-Gould and Purnell, two fellows of a prosaic turn of mind, ignored the Abbey and made their way straight to the Island Hotel. It was a great redbrick house with a stone-pillared porch; the windows of the house were not many (thirteen to be precise) but they were tall and narrow, with small panes and thick white woodwork. A pediment, pierced with a hexagonal window, crowned the front. Our travellers desired no more than complete peace and solitude; their wishes were explained to the landlord; and, after a certain amount of thought, Wilhelm Magnus suggested that it might be best for the gentlemen to look at one or two of the quieter rooms and pick one for themselves.
It seemed a good idea. The bottom and middle floors were rejected as being already occupied by a group of amateur geologists. Similarly, the top floor had two of its three rooms presently engaged; there was, indeed, a limited choice of only one room – number thirteen. But there was no time for unfounded superstition now; this was the only available room on the entire island and, as such, suited admirably.
There was no fireplace in the room – a handsome stove stood in lieu of more civilised heating apparatus. Something of the character of an oratory was imparted to the room by a broken mast that stood like a crucifix and almost reached the ceiling on one side. Under this stood a sea chest of some age and solidity which, when thrown open, revealed an interior full of brightly coloured shells and seaweed. Baring-Gould was at once much disturbed by the room – the en-suite bathroom contained an old lead-lined bath affixed to the wall. But Purnell pointed out they were far from home and had to make do. They tossed a coin to determine which side of the grand double bed was to belong to whom and then made their way back down the stairs to lunch.
The salle à manger was almost full when they reached it. Purnell counted thirteen guests, including themselves. They sat down and awaited the attentions of Wilhelm Magnus. The menu was a curious mix of Swedish and English cuisine; beside each dish was a number. The wine list was composed with similar numerological bent. Feeling determined to loose the grip of superstition from his rational collar and muffle the chill breath of the unknown on his nape, Baring-Gould ordered no.13 on both lists: the smörgåsbord with mushy peas and gravy, washed down with a rare, and not altogether unfruity, Lincolnshire rosé.
Swedes are habitually slow, perhaps, in answering, or perhaps this castaway landlord was an exception. He spent at least a minute looking at his guests before saying anything. Then he came up close to the pair and said, “My friends, I can only say that I understand you; I too was washed up on these shores during an unnatural storm. But here you have made a very good choice; do not expect things to ever be the same. Why have I remained, do you think? Personally I yearn for Uppsala, my home. But I may never return there; I am an exile.”
So cryptic was this outburst that both Baring-Gould and Purnell instantly decided to ignore it. Purnell followed his friend’s choice and they tucked into the meal. Afterwards, back in their room, they debated the matter endlessly. Finally, no closer to a solution and rather tired of the enigma, they took a walk out across the island in the direction of Appletree Bay. It was a glorious late afternoon; the sun slanted low in the west. Baring-Gould felt ready to dance through the fields of flowers that stood on either side of the road; Purnell reminded him that it was probably illegal to do so. Before long they had reached Valhalla, one of the strangest of Tresco’s institutions. This is in reality a sort of museum, whose exhibits consist of the remains of local shipwrecks – chiefly figureheads and the like. They were admitted into the confines of Valhalla just before closing time, but were there long enough to tease their curiosities all the more.
Once inside the museum, the ticket collector or curator (I prefer the latter appellation, inaccurate as it may be) took it upon himself to guide them through the dark chambers of shattered exhibits. He was a hunched sort of man; he was perpetually half-glancing behind him. He recognised the academics at once for what they were and told them, in a low nasally voice, that he too had once been involved in college life. Certainly his accent had less of the Scilly in it than might be expected of a crouching figure that smelt of fish. He looked like an islander; but he utilised words lengthy enough to confirm his previous standing as a lecturer from no mean institution.
“I was a professor of Archaeology,” he said; “and came to Tresco to explore traces of early human settlement; but my dinghy was washed onto the rocks in rough seas, and all my equipment lost overboard. Lucky to escape with my life, I thought it best not to tempt fate by attempting a return journey. I have been here ever since.” He then went on to discuss the few studies he had since been able to make without his instruments. It was here that he used the lengthy words. Though, as I have already said, I am not writing a guidebook, a little of his speech (omitting the lengthy words) must be alluded to here:
In the annals of folklore, the Scillies are the peaks of the lost land of Lyonesse, a fertile plain that extended west from Penwith before the ocean broke in, drowning all but one of the inhabitants. There was some evidence that Lyonesse had, in fact, existed; that its populace were a thriving merchant people who specialised in brewing seaweed beer and carving dragons out of blocks of salt. This evidence (the curator tapped his nose at this point) was in his sole possession; one day soon he would publish his results. Besides, he had also discovered the tooth of Pytheas of Massalia, the first documented visitor to Britain, who arrived in Salakee, the islands of tin, circa 308 BC. Besides, even if this also proved to be false, Tresco was still a very nice place to live: there were some excellent beaches on the eastern side, many of them looking out to a submarine-shaped rock offshore.
Baring-Gould and Purnell both realised that the little man was trying to convince himself he was happy here. It was obvious, therefore, that he was not. After interrogating him further, Purnell was astonished when he broke down in tears. This was a scene they had little wish to witness. They ignored him until he had regained his composure. To change the subject, Baring-Gould encompassed the figurehead collection with a wave. “There are so many of them. I had been reliably informed there were but a score. Here you have a hundred.”
The curator wiped his eyes on his sleeve and nodded feverishly. “That is because thirteen is not an unlucky number on this island, not now.” These words had on Baring-Gould and Purnell an effect presumably akin to that of a lightning-bolt. It seemed to them that something was amiss; something awry in the very fabric of reality. They stood and trembled and sought to shake a deep unease from their minds. By the time they recovered, it was time to close the museum, and the curator wanted to go home to his tea; there was no more to be had out of him. They had learned only that he, like themselves and Wilhelm Magnus, had experienced stormy waters when crossing from the mainland, and also that he shared with their Nordic landlord the talent of uttering seemingly meaningless, yet oddly affecting sentences.
Back at the Island Hotel, the Swede in question confirmed the previous status of the hunched fellow. There were, apparently, a number of people on the island who had arrived in a tempest; for some reason this stormy fact precluded them returning home. Apart from Wilhelm himself and the curator, Baring-Gould ascertained that the entire party of amateur geologists who shared their hotel were also of this fraternity, a group that the Swede liked to term ‘self-imposed exiles’. Purnell was much annoyed by these revelations. “I certainly do not intend staying here longer than a fortnight,” he informed the landlord. “When I am quite rested, I intend to return to my Department.”
“We all want to return,” Wilhelm Magnus replied, “but a little thought of the consequences dissuades us. There is no room for us back on the mainland now.” Here came a strange pause of irresolution, as it seemed; then, with a sort of plunge, he went on: “We are no longer in the world we know. We are in a universe next door!”
“What?!!” It was Baring-Gould (so Purnell tells me) who, ever the hotheaded one, seized a nearby croissant and made as if to strike the hapless Swede. “What manner of nonsense is thi
s? Do you take us for fools?” Only with great difficulty did Purnell manage to restrain his colleague from lunging with the crescent roll. The Swede fell back with a look of abject terror and then muttered something about them all being ghosts, in a dimension that was not their own.
“Explain yourself further,” Purnell demanded, and he hinted that he might release Baring-Gould if the landlord did not quickly comply with his demand. The Swede sighed, told them that they had to find out about the whole business sooner or later and invited them into a back room where he kept his own quarters. On a desk were a handwritten book, half completed, and a paraffin lamp, doubtless washed up from some wreck. He bade them be seated and idly fingered the leaves of the book. It was, he confessed, his second work: The Vampire Book Of Mammoths. This was a serious subject, and not one to be mocked; evidence of a blood-sucking type of woolly elephant had turned up in the grounds of his Hotel. At any rate, it gave him something to do.
Somehow (and he would not dare to venture any theories about this, not being a scientist) they had all – that is Baring-Gould, Purnell, the curator of Valhalla, the geologists, a Mrs. Bunch of the Abbey Market Gardens and he, the seafaring Swede – drifted into a dimension parallel to the one they had formerly inhabited. The storms they had experienced had knocked them into a cosmos existing adjacent to our own. This new universe was identical to the old one in every respect save one: the unluckiest number was no longer 13. It was, instead, 13½.
“Well it is an idea!” cried Baring-Gould, whose belligerence had been transmuted into enthusiasm by this intellectual notion. “The concept of the multiverse is not a new one.” He then went on to explain that quantum theory had given rise to the possibility of an infinite number of universes, each slightly different from the other, that existed simultaneously. Heisenberg, apparently, developed an experiment in which a single photon was directed at a screen with two slits. The fact that the photon could be measured as having passed through both slits at once seemed to indicate that there were actually two universes next to each other, in one of which the photon passed through the first slit, and in the other through the second. This experiment gave rise to the famous Uncertainty Principle. But I am not writing a layman’s guide to physics. Seek, if you will, his Über Quantentheoretische Umdeutung Kinematischer und Mechanischer Berziehungen.
Eventually Purnell – who hated photons and felt that any theories concerning them were lightweight – was also tempted to consider the possibility they had strayed into another dimension. But how was the Swede to know that nothing had altered save the value of the unluckiest number? And why did this prevent him and the others returning to the mainland? Puffing out his cheeks, Herr Magnus began to illustrate how, over years, his suspicions had been subtly confirmed.
The first thing, he said, was the collection of figureheads at the museum. There were simply too many of them; it indicated that in this world there were a great many more ships plying the oceans than in his own. And the visitors who arrived on calm days (this is a very important difference) were much more affluent and noble of bearing than those who arrived during storms. They were better nourished and in trimmer shape. Thirdly, the coming of the curator had acquainted him at second hand with an ancient text, recently discovered in Hull University’s archives. (The curator was a lecturer from those hallowed halls.)
This text was the aforementioned Pytheas of Massalia’s lost book, Travels With My Aunt’s Trireme. As the first Greek explorer to venture into Britain, Pytheas had approached from the south, arriving first at the isles and then crossing to Cornwall. During this crossing he had encountered a violent storm that had buffeted his modest vessel with astounding fury. He had feared for his life; he had raced to the deck in order to ascertain whether they were anywhere near land, when he had a curious, though momentary, vision. He seemed to see an endless seascape of distorting mirrors rising out of the ocean in all directions. It had suddenly occurred to the Swede that this might represent an account of a rare sighting of one of those points where several universes converge. Needless to say, Pytheas made it safely to Cornwall.
“Each parallel dimension would indeed be slightly different,” Baring-Gould here interposed; “in some, sheep would have six legs, and in others, mice would be green or cats would be able to talk. But you have not explained why in this one the unluckiest number is 13½ and not its integer. What has a tiresome preponderance of figureheads to do with it?” He sullenly sat back in his chair and took a vicious bite out of the croissant he still held in his hand.
I do not know what is the ideal course to pursue in a situation of this kind. I can only tell you what Wilhelm Magnus did. He repaired to a bookshelf in the corner of the study and took down an old dictionary. Then he opened the volume under Baring-Gould’s nose. The worthy academic glanced at the word before him and sneered. “Triskaidekaphobia? Fear of the number thirteen? It is not unusual.”
“Yes!” cried Herr Magnus; “but do you know exactly what it entails? Most cultures in the world – our world, that is – have an irrational terror of that number. Here there is no such fear. The number to be avoided here is a whole half greater. Can you not see what this means? In our world, some people stay home on the 13th of each month; they are reluctant to conduct business transactions; they are loathe to travel. There is more illness and consequently, a loss of efficiency in the workplace. Millions upon millions of man-hours are lost every year simply because of this fear – billions of pounds!”
Purnell rubbed his jaw. “I should have thought that fear of the square root of two would have been an ‘irrational’ fear.” But the Swede did not understand the mathematical joke, so he proceeded: “You are absolutely right, of course. Triskaidekaphobia wastes a vast deal of resources. This still does not answer my question.”
Baring-Gould was quicker on the uptake. “You are saying that in a world where thirteen is not an unlucky number there would be no such depression in the global economy on the 13th of every month? And thus it would be a richer world than the one we know? You are suggesting that people would be more ‘affluent’ as a consequence, that they would be ‘trimmer’ than we are due to a healthier diet?”
Wilhelm Magnus nodded his head, and with growing excitement and nervousness, as our two travellers thought, continued: “Yes and more shipping would sail on such dates; and thus more would come to grief, and the museum of figureheads on Tresco would be more full than it has any right to be. And hotels with thirteen windows would be as popular as those with more or less; and a meal numbered 13 on a menu would not be shunned by gourmets on account of superstitious aversion!”
Purnell frowned. “Perhaps this does illustrate why 13 is not an unlucky number here; but it does not suggest that 13½ has taken its place. And why does it signify the impossibility of you returning home?” He chewed his lip and fixed the landlord with a fierce stare. “If this is some sort of Nordic joke!”
The Swede took a number of deep breaths. “I shall say simply that we are ghosts in this dimension – attenuated echoes of our old selves. We can no longer cope back on the mainland. Just imagine: this world is more advanced than the one we were familiar with. A healthier economy equals more investment in scientific research; this means, in turn, that technology is ahead of anything we have experienced. You may have been experts in your own fields when you left; now your knowledge is less than that of the average undergraduate. The same applies to me. I was once the greatest chef-explorer in the whole of Uppsala. The Roving Cordon Bleu, I was called. No longer; in this new world, cooks sail round the world in coracles as a matter of course.”
Baring-Gould was disgusted. “Good God, what a man is this! Yes, I have better teeth than that of any storm and shall brave the waters back, come what may!” And so saying, he took a second bite out of the much-bruised croissant, spitting crumbs with his contempt. He then went on to reflect upon the probability that the writings of Pytheas, Herr Heisenberg and Wilhelm Magnus himself may have been instrumental in bringing about this disa
ster. “But what of 13½?”
The poor landlord threw up his arms, reflected for a moment in this most solemn attitude; then moving swiftly to a sea chest identical to the one in the travellers’ room, he opened it and produced therefrom a large book, wrapped in a white cloth. Even before the wrapping had been removed, Baring-Gould and Purnell had ceased to be interested in the size and shape of the volume. It was a conventional scrapbook filled with photographs of famous paintings, not dissimilar to those as are often encountered in bargain bookstores. The Swede cleared his throat, and with a good deal of effort he spoke:
“Messrs, I can tell you this one little tale, and no more – not any more. You must not ask anything when I am done. This book was washed up from the outside world – that alien place – at the same time as one of the many figureheads. Why is it that 13 is deemed so unlucky in our own dimension? Is it not because that was the exact number of guests at the Last Supper? Take a look then at this – you will find what you seek soon enough. You will then be horribly satisfied.”
Baring-Gould and Purnell opened the book and leafed through it. At first the familiar paintings yielded no answers. But then they came across it; one of the most well known of all works of art, it jolted their sensibilities as no other sight had ever done. Identical in every respect to the picture they knew, save in one minor detail. I entirely despair of conveying by any words the impression that this detail made upon those who looked at it. Purnell’s face expressed horror and a rare kind of loathing. He pressed his hands upon his eyes in some agitation; his friend, holding up the half-devoured croissant in a sudden cold sweat, began counting his atomic weights feverishly.