The Garden of Unearthly Delights by Robert Rankin Read Free Book Online Page B

that you
would not be moved from your faith. And as such I now reward you.’
    ‘We
shall be taken at once to Terminus?’ The old woman thrust out her arm towards
the road. Her son and the lady with the non-foldaway foldaway thrust theirs out
also.
    ‘Hold
very tight please,’ they chorused. ‘Ding ding.’ Maxwell raised a hand as in
benediction. ‘All will be rewarded in Terminus,’ he said kindly. ‘Varney will
call for each of you when the time is right. You have no further need to wait
here. Return to your homes. Live useful and caring lives. Tell others of the
faith that The Inspector came unto you and that no longer need any serve at the
shrines.’
    ‘What?
No more waits?’ A look of transcending relief appeared upon the old woman’s
face. ‘No more must we stand throughout the wind, rain and chill?’
    ‘No
more. I hereby relieve you of all such obligations. And through my relief of
you, so also all others of the faith. No more waits for anyone. Any more.
Ever.’
    ‘We can
just go home and live caring lives? This is enough?’
    ‘More
than enough. You have kept the faith well. Such is your reward.’
    ‘Gosh,’
said the lady with the non-foldaway fold-away.
    ‘Such
is as Varney wills it.’ Maxwell mimed a little steering-wheel motion. ‘Now be
gone.’
    The
queuers looked at Maxwell, looked at each other, opened their mouths to speak,
closed them again and began to sink to their knees.
    ‘No
kneeling,’ Maxwell told them. ‘No more worshipping of any kind. Varney has had
worshipping enough. This is his message that I pass on to you.’
    ‘Thanks
be. Thanks be,’ was the general feeling all round.
    Kevin
said, ‘What of you, Inspector? Will you not come with us? Spread the word to
all yourself?’
    Maxwell
gave this a moment of thought. As a visiting god he might expect to receive a
great deal of hospitality at the tables of his worshippers. Comfy beds would be
offered and possibly young maidens to share them with. Maxwell came within a
gnat’s organ or saying, ‘Yes indeed,’ but did not.
    It
occurred to him also that a visiting god would like as not be expected to show
some proof of his divinity, such as turning water into wine, for instance, or
munching hot coals. A god who failed to perform such trifling feats might well
find himself called upon to demonstrate his invulnerability to shotgun shells.
    ‘No,’
said Maxwell firmly. ‘I must travel on. To other shrines.’
    ‘Pity,’
said Kevin. ‘I’d have liked to have seen you swallowing hot coals.’
    ‘Another
time perhaps,’ Maxwell breathed an inward sigh of relief. ‘So farewell.
Farewell. And don’t forget what I have told you.’
    The
lady offered Maxwell her non-foldaway. Maxwell took it. ‘Go in peace,’ he said.
    And so
they drifted off across the wretched moor-land. Maxwell watched them, waved
when they turned to wave to him, then flung away the non-foldaway and resumed
his trudge to the north.
     
     
    The troubled sun was
heading down the sky as Maxwell struck off once more along the ruined road. But
it didn’t detract from the curious sense of wellbeing he felt.
    True,
he was all alone in this strange new world and true and terrible the knowledge
that his loved ones were now nothing more than memory. And the anger he felt
towards Sir John had not died away.
    For
surely it was he who had somehow bucketed Maxwell into the future by nearly one
hundred years — a somewhat drastic course of action to insure that Maxwell did
not get home and change the ending of the book. An efficient one also.
    But, of
course, that was all now in the past. Considerably so in fact. Sir John would
now be long dead, but here was he, Maxwell, in the present. And, if he was to
be honest with himself, well pleased to leave the past behind him. Especially the
wife behind him. He was here, now, in the new world, with everything to
look forward to and not very much to look back on. And he felt very much alive.
He, Max Carrion, Imagineer.