Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams Read Free Book Online Page A

down to have a good look, but no one will get too close to the flames.  Infamous was more like it.  Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk.
    He was rounder than the average undergraduate and wore more hats.  That is to say, there was just the one hat which he habitually wore, but he wore it with a passion that was rare in one so young.  The hat was dark red and round, with a very flat brim, and it appeared to move as if balanced on gimbals, which ensured its perfect horizontality at all times, however its owner moved his head.  As a hat it was a remarkable rather than entirely successful piece of personal decoration.  It would make an elegant adornment, stylish, shapely and flattering, if the wearer were a small bedside lamp, but not otherwise.
    People gravitated around him, drawn in by the stories he denied about himself, but what the source of these stories might be, if not his own denials, was never entirely clear.
    The tales had to do with the psychic powers that he’d supposedly inherited from his mother’s side of the family who he claimed, had lived at the smarter end of Transylvania.  That is to say, he didn’t make any such claim at all, and said it was the most absurd nonsense.  He strenuously denied that there were bats of any kind at all in his family and threatened to sue anybody who put about such malicious fabrications, but he affected nevertheless to wear a large and flappy leather coat, and had one of those machines in his room which are supposed to help cure bad backs if you hang upside down from them.  He would allow people to discover him hanging from this machine at all kinds of odd hours of the day, and more particularly of the night, expressly so that he could vigorously deny that it had any significance whatsoever.
    By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat.
    What did ‘psychosassic’ mean?
    It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all.

    ‘And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
    As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
    A mighty fountain momently was forced:
    Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
    Huge fragments vaulted...’

    Dirk had also been perpetually broke.  This would change.
    It was his room-mate who started it, a credulous fellow called Mander, who, if the truth were known, had probably been specially selected by Dirk for his credulity.
    Steve Mander noticed that if ever Dirk went to bed drunk he would talk in his sleep.  Not only that, but the sort of things he would say in his sleep would be things like, ‘The opening up of trade routes to the mumble mumble burble was the turning point for the growth of empire in the snore footle mumble.  Discuss.’

    ‘...like rebounding hail,
    Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:’

    The first time this happened Steve Mander sat bolt upright in bed.  This was shortly before prelim exams in the second year, and what Dirk had just said, or judiciously mumbled, sounded remarkably like a very likely question in the Economic History paper.
    Mander quietly got up, crossed over to Dirk’s bed and listened very hard, but other than a few completely disconnected mumblings about Schleswig-Holstein and the Franco-Prussian war, the latter being largely directed by Dirk into his pillow, he learned nothing more.
    News, however, spread -- quietly, discreetly, and like wildfire.

    ‘And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
    It flung up momently the sacred river.’

    For the next month Dirk found himself being constantly wined and dined in the hope that he would sleep very soundly that night and dream-speak a few more exam questions.  Remarkably, it seemed that the better he was fed, and the finer the vintage of the wine he was given to drink, the less he would tend to sleep facing directly