Gay Phoenix (10 page)

The axe was in a big glass case, along with other impressive objects, only uncertainly identifiable, but including a big coil of fat flattened hose. The entire set-up was for fire-fighting. Or perhaps, since it was so ostentatiously displayed in this showcase fashion, it was just for impressing the clientele of the Amusement Palace with the measures taken for their safety.

Had one to shatter a large pane of glass to get at these things? That would create a frightful din. But perhaps there was a little box containing a key which could be obtained by breaking a piece of glass no more than two or three inches square; Povey seemed to remember noticing such things in theatres. He began to fumble around, gave a tug at something, and felt the whole front of the case swing open. The fire-fighting equipment was as immediately available for use as were the lifebuoys which he had noticed deployed along the esplanade, each oddly labelled
For
Emergencies Only
. Well, the axe was for an emergency too. Povey grabbed it.

What use would the thing be against properly armed men? Arthur Povey simply didn’t ask himself this question. The untoward events in which he had become involved were possibly bringing about in him a regression to a quite primitive state of consciousness; he was like a Fuzzy-Wuzzy warrior who, having successfully grabbed his assegai or whatever, recks not that a platoon of British Tommies are after him with a Gatling gun. He even lifted the axe above his head and brandished it. For that sort of employment it turned out to be rather on the heavy side. But it would really be a terrific weapon at a pinch. He had a sudden and rather heartening vision of himself taking a swipe at an enemy’s neck with it, and of a head tumbling to the ground and rolling away like a turnip. So sanguinary an imagining as this showed that the Povey blood was up. He strode forward. He would round the first corner of the Amusement Palace, come upon poor old Butter ringed by adversaries and with his back to the wall, and himself sail in as irresistibly as Samson when having a go at some Philistines.

This fantasy didn’t realize itself. Round the corner he boldly went, to find nothing but blankness and silence. But that was how ambushes started, no doubt. With a sudden return to caution, he moved close to the big building he was now rounding, and crept forward in its deeper shadow. Then he did hear something, or thought he did. The impression was of voices far inside the Amusement Palace itself, and as he paused to listen he even fancied he saw a moving or flickering light similarly deep within the grotesque glassy structure. Then everything was quite blank again. He walked on.

He walked on and round the next corner – which was the crucial one. He was at the tip of the pier, and suddenly bathed in light from that single brilliant lamp. This was where they’d pick you off; where they’d already, perhaps, picked off Butter. He’d hardly realized his own folly before a kind of resigned terror was flooding over him; it was like knowing you were facing a firing squad in some grossly theatrical midnight execution. But still nothing happened, and he felt a reflux of confidence which was also a sense of irrational frustration. What he was involved with was turning out to be a bizarre non-event. There
was
no ambush; there was no ambush laid either for Butter or himself. The ferocious man’s accomplices (who were no doubt his bosses as well) had turned down the notion that Butter was so dangerous that he must be made away with that night; or, less thick than the ferocious man, they had sensed something phoney about the whole story, and were prudently holding their hand.

So what had happened to Butter? The answer seemed clear. He had walked right round the pier undisturbed, and he and Povey had passed each other when he was halfway back. This had been possible because one of them had happened to go clockwise, and the other anti-clockwise, round the first of the large buildings perched high above the sea. Or Butter may just have happened to drop into the Gents. In any case, Butter must be back in the Cock and Bottle now, wondering what had become of Povey, and with his mind perhaps made up one way or the other in the matter of his proposal of cash on the nail.

This was annoying. Indeed, it was infuriating. Butter wasn’t
meant
to have returned. The idea had been to get rid of him. And now the pestiferous and dangerous fellow was alive and kicking, after all. Arthur Povey had quite forgotten, in this moment, that he had switched to Butter’s side; that he had in fact gone to rescue Butter at great personal risk. His intentions were again entirely murderous. This rapid change of feeling – it was almost like a switch from one personality to another – displays, it must be admitted, a facet of alarming weakness in the bold schemer of the
Gay Phoenix
. It makes evident an almost crying need for a steadying influence upon his conduct.

The present effect of this vulnerability was to render him equally disgusted with these pusillanimous villains and with himself. He peered at the axe; wondered how he could have thought to derive any advantage from lugging along so imbecile a weapon; and decided a little to relieve his feelings by chucking it into the sea. That would teach the local municipality, he told himself, to expose a fairly expensive object of the sort to the whim of any predatory passer-by. So he walked to the tip of the pier (much frequented during the day by anglers under the absurd persuasion that they might there catch fish) and prepared to comport himself somewhat in the manner of the bold Sir Bedivere when finally resigned to casting Excalibur into the mere. But as he hesitated for a moment he not only heard the water wap and the waves wan; he also heard, once again, that faint suggestion of voices – and they were now distinguishably agitated or angry voices – not far away. His grip tightened on the haft. It mightn’t be a bad idea to hold on to the axe just a little longer – until, say, he was in the act of stepping off this accursed pier.

He hurried back to the Amusement Palace and down its farther side. As he did so, he heard a clock chime faintly from the town, and in the same moment found the darkness around him suddenly entire. The bright light at the end of the pier, together with the feeble overhead lamps strung along its length, had been punctually switched off on the stroke of the hour. Five minutes before, Povey might have been glad of the complete obscurity thus achieved. Now, with his sense of crisis still somewhat in abeyance, he cursed aloud. He hadn’t a torch. He hadn’t, so far as he could remember, even a box of matches. And what had happened was like an inky deluge abruptly poured over his head.

He stood still, supposing that, once his vision had accommodated itself to this new situation, the dim forms of things would reveal themselves against the night sky and enable him to grope his way back to the esplanade. But what did happen was quite different. He heard a faint shout – this time, triumphant rather than angry – and in the same instant darkness was turned to light. Darkness was turned to drenching and overwhelming light, so that he staggered where he stood, dropped the axe, spun round, and buried his face in his arms as if to ward off a further brutal blow. It was seconds before he peeped out from this refuge – but when he did so the appalling character of what he glimpsed jerked him into a condition of vivid perception at once. He was gazing into some hideous tropical jungle, and out of this an enormous and savagely grimacing gorilla (or perhaps it was an orang-atan) seemed about to hurl itself upon him from a tree. Moreover (as if this sudden materialization of a large ferocious anthropoid ape wasn’t enough to be going on with), this creature was patently in competition for its evening meal with an even more menacing lion crouched in a thicket nearby. The lion could be seen to be licking its chops. The gorilla had begun to sway in the manner of a trapeze artist on its bough, as if preparing for a particular exhibition of expertness at Povey’s expense.

Before these sudden untoward appearances Povey (it is only candid to admit) had uttered a terrified scream (or at least squeal) before his intellect operated on them. He then reflected that between himself and whatever hazard they represented there was interposed the barrier constituted by the glassy integument of this part of the Amusement Palace. And this clarification was succeeded by another. What he was witnessing was in fact an Amusement, and these monsters were no more than outsize automata designed for the entertainment of the vulgar. He could now see that there was a lot more of the same thing: writhing serpents, trumpeting elephants, giant vampire bats, and pretty well anything else one could think of. The only mystery was why this exhibition – and indeed, so far as he could judge, the entire interior of the ridiculous building – had suddenly burst into brilliant illumination.

‘That’s every switch! We’ve got him!’

This must have been a triumphant shout, since the words reached Povey quite clearly. They also explained what was happening. Butter had somehow escaped from his hunters into the Palace; he had been pursued; and there had been a species of hide-and-seek in the dark until somebody had found the main switches and turned on every light in the place. The result must be that Butter’s chances of escape were now minimal.

At this moment in Povey’s cogitations the wretched Butter appeared. He was running away. Nothing could be more rational than such a course of action. What was disconcerting was what he was running away from. It was not from the ferocious man or his confederates, none of whom were as yet in evidence. It was from a crocodile. A crocodile is, of course, pre-eminently a creature from which to escape; the well-known fact that it is accustomed to weep while gobbling one up is peculiarly unnerving in itself. Only this crocodile (which was opening and closing enormous jaws with metronomic regularity) was of human manufacture. To the comparatively disengaged regard of Arthur Povey it was evident that it moved on some sort of concealed track or railway, much as, on the stage, does that member of its species which has so fortunately swallowed a clock in
Peter
Pan
. That Butter should regard this outrageous toy as for the moment the principal hazard to which he was exposed suggested that he was not altogether adequately in command of his wits. The sudden flood of light had taken him quite as unawares as it had taken Povey. He must be imagining himself to have stumbled into a very live kind of zoo. After all, the great country seats of England now much favoured that sort of thing as attracting the profitable curiosity of the populace; it was not inherently improbable that a large seaside town should emulate them.

But now the real enemy was in sight. Across what perhaps represented itself as a mango swamp two figures could be observed advancing upon the desperate Butter. Since the terrain was difficult their progress was necessarily slow; they ought to have been equipped, it was possible to feel, with cutlasses or jungle knives in order to hack their way through the tropical proliferations here simulated in high-quality plastics of one sort or another. The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes was at this moment impeding one of these pursuers, and the lustre of the long convolvuluses the other – a Tennysonian note which Povey was without the leisure to appreciate. He felt that something must be done, since Butter bore every appearance of being trapped. Perhaps Butter supposed in a bemused fashion that ahead of him lay some free egress to the outer world, since from within, and in the particular conditions now obtaining, he must be looking out into darkness through whatever transparent stuff it was that these walls were made of.

It was, indeed, hard to believe that any solid barrier stood between Povey and the scene he contemplated. The labouring jaws of the crocodile seemed now to be within inches of him, so that he started back in senseless alarm; the creature, however, slewed rapidly to one side, turned on a pivot, and returned as it had come, swinging the scaly horror of its tail. Not so Butter; he had come to a hopeless stand, realizing – or recalling, as it must be – the true facts of his case. He was like a goldfish which has formed the foolish project of moving indefinitely on a straight line, only to be confronted by the unyielding concavity of its bowl. This impression was enhanced for Povey by the circumstance that Butter’s mouth was gaping open. Perhaps he was screaming to be let out.

Let out he had to be – and it suddenly came to Povey like a revelation that he had the very means of this enfranchisement in his hands. He grabbed the axe again, swung it in air, and brought it down with all the strength he possessed on the translucent surface before him. The stuff wasn’t, of course, glass; it didn’t behave as glass, which was perhaps just as well; but it did shiver and give, and two or three further blows punched a big hole in it. Butter, with whom the penny had at last dropped, clawed frantically at the jagged edges with his hands – but not, surprisingly, to the effect of cutting himself to bits. He was excusably in a hurry. It was true that his immediate pursuers were still labouring amid wild nature. But the total area of this particular diversion was, after all, comparatively small, and when Butter finally scrambled through the hole he wasn’t much more than the length of a room ahead.

‘Run!’ Butter yelled, and they both ran. There was no room for manoeuvre: nothing but the catwalk between the long side of the Amusement Palace on the one hand and the edge of the pier and the sea on the other. And they were still bathed in remorseless light. It was just as Povey realized this disagreeable fact that he heard first a shouted order and then a shot. So that was it. They were sitting targets, and they weren’t going to be let escape. It wasn’t only curtains for Butter. It was curtains for Povey as well.

‘Give me that axe!’

Butter had shouted this without checking his pace. Povey had no notion that the beastly axe was still in his possession. It was certainly of no avail against bullets, and he might as well have chucked it away at once. But now Butter had grabbed it, and swerved aside. For a moment Povey supposed he was going to stand his ground brandishing it, fall gallantly under a hail of fire – that sort of thing. But what Butter was dashing at was the side of the Amusement Palace itself. Povey had a glimpse of a box-like structure, and of what seemed a thick dark cable running up to it from somewhere beneath the level of the pier. Then Butter swung the axe, and what followed was like a gigantic flash of lightning at one’s elbow or under one’s nose. There was a very nasty smell of singeing, but Povey was less aware of this than of the instant return of blackest night. He supposed that he had been blinded, and then he felt what must be Butter’s hand on his arm.