CHAPTER ONE

Heading Down The Tracks Like A Freight Train To Hell

This story begins, as most stories do, on a train. In this case the 9:14 express from London to Birmingham with stops at Middletown, Westport, Hillsdale, and for some inexplicable reason, the remote rural hamlet of Weasel-in-the-wold. It was to this bucolic retreat that our hero, Bastable, was returning after a four year sojourn in the East London Institute For The Extremely Nervous. It had not been a pleasant four years, by anyone's reckoning, least of all his, and unusually enough he was almost looking forward to an indefinitely long stay at his aunt's country retreat. In the past, before his long and painful recovery, stays at his aunt's house had always been fraught with the kind of terror normally associated with the less popular circles of hell. This time, however, things would be quite different. They had to be.

Bastable slid open the door to his first class compartment and, with an inward sigh of relief, noted that it was empty. The compartment held the usual compliment of six impossibly uncomfortable seats, in this case each stained a different color of the rainbow, and a small table, which had been carefully designed by British Rail engineers to cause any kind of drink put on it to slide straight off into the owner's lap at the most inconvenient time possible. Bastable slid closed the door and tossed his solitary bag onto a luggage rack above the seats. Miraculously it failed to fall back down. Bastable nodded with approval. Things seldom seemed to go his way in life, and he was grateful for any help, however small it might appear.

Depositing himself in the less mangled of the two window seats, Bastable unfolded his newspaper and began to pray, to whatever deities he felt might be watching over train passengers, that no one else would enter his compartment. Bastable didn't mind train travel by itself, it was the people that he inevitably met on trains that he couldn't stand.

It seemed to him that every lunatic, every drooling psychopath, who inhabited the world's public transportation systems immediately homed in on him as if drawn to him by some inexplicable and unfathomable force of nature. Never having learnt to drive, and being far too lazy to actually walk anywhere, Bastable was doomed to suffer the eternal perils of public transport. Sometimes, in his darker moments, he had a vision of himself, dead and condemned to hell, where he was forced to spend an eternity on busses, forever having to give up his seat to the elderly and the handicapped, constantly being jostled by assorted disease ridden maniacs, and continually being reprimanded by Iranian bus drivers for not having the exact change. In his stronger moments he merely wept openly at the thought of not being able to take a cab.

After a brief interlude, the train slowly pulled out of the station, and accompanied by an assortment of clangs, whistles, and strange metallic thumps, began its journey North. This brought out the ticket collector, who, strangely enough, found Bastable's ticket to his satisfaction and departed with only a few strange murmured threats about people who put their feet on the seats. Bastable was just beginning to feel comfortable when the door slid open to reveal a tall, immaculately dressed, man wearing a three piece suit and carrying a thick leather briefcase. He smiled benevolently at Bastable and took a seat opposite him.

Bastable fought hard to control his panic. The man seemed normal enough, he told himself. He was well dressed, and not wearing a leather apron dripping with blood and smeared with assorted entrails. He wasn't even carrying an ax. He seemed to be a member of that rare species; sane people who rode on trains. Feeling more comfortable, Bastable turned to his newspaper and began reading an interesting article about a woman who claimed to have met God at Disneyworld. She had been in the news for weeks, sharing every detail of her life with her adoring public, and Bastable felt strangely drawn to the story. He had avidly devoured every episode, and was still eager for more. In this exert she was telling the interviewer how much she, and the supreme being, had enjoyed Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

"I am frequently visited by aliens" said a voice from nearby. Bastable dropped his paper in panic, and focused on the man across from him. He was sitting quite still with his briefcase on his lap, and an enormous smile on his face.

"What did you say?" asked Bastable, who was still too confused to realize that this was the worst possible thing to say.

"I am frequently visited by aliens" the man repeated

"Oh,...ah...that's nice" replied Bastable, who thought that it was nothing of the kind.

"They come in large silver space ships on the first Tuesday of every month"

"Ah, do they"

Bastable was slowly beginning to realize that it was happening again. That in all his years safely ensconced in the East London Institute For The Extremely Nervous, nothing had changed on the outside. Public transportation was still the last resort of the truly disturbed.

The man very carefully removed a large fish from his briefcase.

"When they visited me yesterday they gave me this" he explained

"It's a fish" Bastable pointed out.

"A turbot. A sacred turbot."

Bastable quickly grabbed his newspaper, and began to leave.

"Wait!" yelled the man, "you must bow before the sacred turbot"

"I can't" explained Bastable as the man scrambled from his seat and began to follow, "I just remembered I have an appointment, if you wait for me here I'll be back later."

He quickly stepped out and slammed shut the door before he was struck by the sacred turbot. As he staggered down the aisle of the train his mind reeled. It was happening again! Was he safe nowhere? Why did they pick on him?

Bastable checked a number of compartments before he found one that met his rigid specifications. He entered and threw his bag onto the overhead rack before he realized that the compartment's solitary inhabitant was not only a priest, but a priest whom he knew. "Bastable?" blurted the priest in surprise

"Reverend Turbot! I mean Reverend Turnbull!"

A brief look of confusion crossed Reverend Turnbull's face before he rose unsteadily to his feet and grasped Bastable firmly by the hand. Reverend Turnbull was, if one judged by appearances, about four hundred years old and a dwarf. He had been the parish priest at Weasel-in-the-wold for as long as Bastable, or anyone else, could remember. In the village it Was often speculated that he had witnessed the birth of Christ first hand. Despite an overwhelming affection for cheap whiskey and even cheaper tobacco he was in robust health and never actually seemed to age. On the day Bastable had been born Turnbull looked exactly as he did now. Whether or not this was due to the fact that the amount of alcohol in his system had acted like embalming fluid and pickled him alive, or because he was a particularly vigorous member of the living dead was a matter of great debate in the bars of Weasel-in-the-wold. Nobody had ever discovered his secret, and nobody was actually sure that they wanted to, least of all Bastable, who had always viewed the Reverend as being only slightly less unstable than the San Andreas fault. Despite all this, Bastable felt somewhat glad to see a familiar face. He couldn't help thinking that the evil he knew was better than the evil that attacks him with a dead fish.

When he managed to disentangle himself from the Reverend's surprisingly vice like grip he collapsed in a heap on what remained of one of the compartment's seats. Reverend Turnbull struck a match on a faded no-smoking sign, and began to puff furiously at a pipe the size of a small blast furnace. Presently he disappeared inside a cloud of thick blue smoke, and began to cough contentedly.

"So my boy. What brings you here?" sputtered the Reverend between coughs.

"I was chased by a man with a fish"

The Reverend eyed him cautiously.

"You haven't been drinking have you?" he asked

"No, not yet"

At this revelation the Reverend's face lit up like a signal flare.

"Good boy, good boy. I never drink before the first five minutes of a train ride either. I find it better if one waits for one's inner workings to acclimatize to the motion before imbibing." He pulled a small silver flask from his coat pocket and extended it towards Bastable.

Bastable regarded the flask critically, uncertain that it wouldn't, upon being provoked, transform into a large dead fish. Experience had taught him to be cautious.

"Go on boy, it's good for the nerves." said the Reverend, as he dangled the flask below Bastable's nose.

Whether he knew it or not, this was exactly what Bastable had been waiting to hear. He seized the flask and, opening it, took a drink of what could only have been battery acid.

"That'll put some hairs on your chest" said the Reverend approvingly, as Bastable exploded into a manic fit of coughing, rasping and particularly vigorous retching.

When his visions finally cleared to the point where he was able to see one Reverend Turnbull instead of a large spiraling herd of them he firmly grasped the base of his seat and emitted the single syllable "Wow!" It was all he was capable of.

The Reverend, lowering the flask from his mouth, returned it to his pocket and smacked his lips in approval.

"That's a bit better, now what were you saying about fish, my boy?"

The question took Bastable by surprise, and he found himself answering it without hesitation.

"A man chased me with a fish" he said.

"A fish?"

"A turbot actually. He told me it was sacred."

"A sacred turbot? I've never heard of anyone worshipping turbot before, or any kind of fish for that matter. Cows, yes, but never fish. Well my boy, it just goes to show you."

Bastable paused for a moment, waiting for the Reverend to continue. He didn't.

"It just goes to show me what?" Bastable asked.

"Er...a lot of things which we don't have the time to go into now. Would you like another drink my boy?" said the Reverend as he pulled the flask out again.

Bastable declined as politely as he could.

"Well, I can't let it go to waste" sighed the Reverend, who gulped down about half the flask.

Reverend Turnbull was not the type of person Bastable would normally feel comfortable talking too, or, for that matter, even being on the same continent with, but after four years of being locked in a mental institution, Bastable felt the need to communicate with someone who was not likely to drool on his shoes. Bastable was normally very careful about telling people his troubles. Honesty had caused him problems in the past. The prime reason he had been sent off to the institute was that he had been too free in telling people his problems, and too open in his criticisms of the world around him. That, and admittedly, a certain misunderstood incident involving squatting naked in his neighbor's fish pond at three fifteen in the morning. Despite this, and despite all the years of what passed for therapy at the institute, Bastable felt compelled to confide in the Reverend. Perhaps it was because he knew that the Reverend, not being in a position to question anyone else's sanity, would refrain from judging him too harshly, or perhaps it was because he was just too damn stupid to care. Whatever the reason he needed some questions answered. He didn't exactly know what they were, but he needed them answered anyway.

"Reverend," he began "have you ever had the feeling that the whole world was running completely out of control? That the entire universe was just an enormous unguided, undisciplined mess galloping towards its destruction like a race horse on cocaine? That nothing you do, and nothing you see ever makes any kind of sense? That everyone except yourself was totally, undeniably, raving mad, and that you, yourself, were only hanging on by the barest thread?" The Reverend stared at him blankly.

"No." he said.

Bastable jumped

"Oh,...er...well neither have I, I was just curious."

"Are you feeling all right my boy?"

"No, not really" replied Bastable, who was beginning to feel a little out of sorts.

Reverend Turnbull reached over and comfortingly patted him on the knee with a bony, and somewhat misshapen hand.

"You just relax and tell old Reverend Turnbull what's the matter, and we'll see if we can make everything all right again." said the Reverend in a manner which suggested that he had a great deal of experience in dealing with people with I.Q.s below 45, and that Bastable easily fitted in to this category.

"Well Reverend," said Bastable, getting into his storytelling mode, "it all started a long long time ago. When I was a child of five, I used to have an imaginary playmate name Norman, and on nice days Norman and I..."

Bastable was interrupted by what sounded like a Boeing 747 taking off inside Reverend Turnbull's nasal cavity. The Reverend had, mercifully, fallen asleep. The conflicting emotions of betrayal, frustration, and relief battled inside of Bastable, with relief coming out on the winning side.

Bastable was in an unusual position. Actually attempting to sit for more than ten minutes on a British rail seat will put any one in an unusual position, but in this case Bastable's problem was more philosophical than purely contortional. Bastable had been under a great deal of strain in the past few years. He had been bewildered, confused, and generally just plain nuts. Bastable was not one of those people you read about in self help books; the kind who devise fourteen thousand easy steps to successfully manage your career and achieve inner peace whilst raising eleven children, taking care of an aging mother, and surviving in railroad cars during a depression. He was not the type of person to build an international business empire in his garage (he didn't have one,) and he was certainly not the type of person for whom joyous masses threw ticker tape parades. People did, however, often throw things at him.

Bastable was not a take charge kind of guy. He was a run away at the first sign of trouble and hide behind the sofa kind of guy. It wasn't that he didn't want to try and solve his problems and didn't want to make the world a better place to live in. It was just that he wasn't very good at it.

Bastable's own nerves had ganged up on him in the recent past, and caused him to have, he was told, a mild nervous breakdown. He would, he always thought, have been fine if everyone had just gone away and left him in peace instead of constantly trying to make him consume gallon upon gallon of chicken soup, and patting him on the back saying "Don't worry, we know how you feel." when if fact, if they did know how he felt they would go away and leave him the hell alone. What he learned from the whole experience is that if a thousand overbearing relatives are convinced you are insane then there is no use arguing about it and you may as well just get up, take a long run, and leap of the diving board of madness head first. Bastable had, very sensibly, done exactly this.

Bastable's time in the hospital had done little for his sanity, except to allow him to avoid his relatives, although this in itself was a great deal. He had just begun to realize that the whole affair was a monumental waste of time, and that, however hard he might try, he would never learn how to weave baskets, when a new intern named Dr. Flounder had arrived and mysteriously ordered his release. In such circumstances there is only one thing that the well adjusted mental patient can do. Bastable, being unusually well adjusted, immediately fled.

Fleeing from something can, of course, have its drawbacks. One must, of necessity, have somewhere to flee to. Bastable was slightly lacking in the fleeing to department, and after making the rounds and finding out that everyone he knew was either A: out of town on business B: out of town on vacation or C: still in the mental hospital, he was left with the unavoidable, and unsavory knowledge that he had to return to his aunt's.

Mulling all of this around didn't seem to be helping much, so, making a calculated decision, Bastable set out for the dining car, and left Reverend Turnbull to suffer in peace. He swayed, weaved, and wobbled, down the aisle of the train, bouncing of two conductors, a pregnant woman, and a small irritating boy, who, unbeknownst to Bastable, was named Norman.

It is always a difficult task to navigate one's way through a crowded moving train, but with skill, diligence, and no more than two or three near fatal blows to the head, Bastable arrived at what passed for a dining car. Actually, nowhere, but on a British rail train would Bastable's destination have been considered acceptable as a dining car. Discriminating proto-eukaryotes living in small jungle ponds would have burnt this dining car to the ground and attempted to build a better one out of whatever primordial ooze they had lying around. Primitive Homo-Habilis, had they been given this dining car, by benevolent aliens, as a means to help them evolve and develop a higher level of technology, would simply have slinked off into their caves and beaten themselves to death with stone hand axes rather than face what the future held. It was not, in short, very pleasant.

The delights that the dining car had in store for Bastable consisted of nothing more than a small, badly stained, bar, festooned with plastic wrapped triangles claiming to be sandwiches, and a number of small tables which were unsurprisingly unoccupied. Bastable's purchased a beer from what he presumed was a bartender, but could have been more easily described as a cross between a water buffalo and Benito Mussolini, and made his way to a table by a window. The fact that the table was next to a window was relatively irrelevant, as the window was caked with enough soot, dirt, and mysterious oily residue to provide a good argument that the dining car was built before the invention of trains. Bastable was, with a great deal or effort, able to see out, but the prospect of seeing the pleasant green landscape of rural England transformed into something the color of Brown ale was slightly less than appealing. Thus he turned his gaze across the car, and was rewarded by seeing, wobbling unsteadily towards him, the tall and well dressed fish wielder he had so recently escaped from.

Before Bastable could react, or to be more accurate, locate a suitable weapon, the offending individual deposited himself in the seat opposite and began to look disturbingly happy.

"thank god I found you" he said, with evident relief.

"er.....yes." said Bastable, not wanting to provoke him, and therefore begin any situation that would appear in the newspaper headlines the next day along side such words as "Homicide," "lunatic," or "beaten to death with a fish."

"I've been looking for you everywhere." he continued, shaking his head, and for a brief moment looking very pained indeed "everywhere!...I had to find you"

"what?" asked Bastable who was, as usual, becoming more and more confused by the minute

"I was looking for you" the fish enthusiast said distantly, with the air of one either remembering something very distant, or beginning a particularly viscous acid flashback.

"er... to show me the turbot?" asked Bastable in a vain, and particularly reckless attempt to clarify matters.

"Turbot?" The man blinked "that's a type of fish isn't it?"

"er...yes, I think so" replied Bastable who was rapidly beginning to think that life in the mental hospital probably wasn't as bad as it had seemed. Maybe he could learn basket weaving after all.

"no, no, it has nothing to do with fish." said the man thoughtfully. "at least not directly. the thing is, I was... I was...."

"confused?" suggested Bastable, "taking too many drugs?"

"I was sent!" blurted the apparent psychopath, as if suddenly, and after a great battle, drawing a memory, kicking and screaming from the depths of his brain. "I was sent to find you."

"to find me?" Bastable was getting the sense that all was not as it seemed.

"to find you, and...and..."

"yes"

"to find you and... and..."

"what? what?"

The man jumped in his seat, his eyes suddenly losing whatever remnant of focus they possessed.

"I am frequently harassed by Gumby"

"What?" yelled Bastable, his brain reeling under the impact

"Gumby AND Pokey " the man continued "they come to me at night and sing sea shanties."

"Oh my God." Bastable leapt from his chair backing rapidly away as the man began rummaging in his briefcase.

"last night they gave me this." He proclaimed as he once again flourished the sacred turbot. "behold it, for it is our savior."

Bastable, with all the available speed that his adrenal glands could muster, rushed past the man, bounced briefly of the bartender, and fled for the door.

"Wait. Wait." he dimly heard as he flung open the door and dived into the adjoining car. "I really was sent for you. I'm..."

The rest of his words fell on deaf ears as Bastable dived into the nearest bathroom, locked the door and prepared to wait out a long siege.