A fourth
audience with
Lord Geoffrey Rapture BA (hons)
...Where was I? Oh yes, Old Corkhill. A lovely chap, used to breed the finest horses in England. They had five legs you know, for greater stability in strong winds. Sadly the Government didn't see it that way, and they closed down his stables and declared the whole area a biological hazard. I think it was the radium he used to mutate the foals that upset them, but Corkhill never would talk about it. Even in court.
I never used radium for mutation myself - there was an entrance to Hell in the basement of my old bungalow, and I recruited any horrific abominations of nature I needed from there. The demons in charge were quite friendly, I don't know why they get such a bad press. Satan himself was another matter though - after he discovered I'd got a few Hell-spawned imps to cut my hedge and put up the new curtains, he demanded a virgin sacrifice in return! I tried to oblige him, but I was arrested whilst trying to discover if ladies were virgins or not. They should wear special hats, it would save a lot of bother. Satan got a bit nasty after my failure and took back the imps and the fire breathing hell-hound I had guarding my rosebushes. I never used the gate again... I suppose it disappeared after the council tore down the bungalow to make room for a torn-down bungalow.
The council were always destroying things in those days. They were nasty blighters in the planning department, extremely vindictive. Mrs Scrog, my neighbour back then, had erected a fence without prior permission and they cut off both her thumbs in retribution. Tragic - she could never play with her Nintendo again. The local knitting club were incensed and decapitated the civil servant responsible, but two heads grew in its place. I would probably have taken matters into my own hands, but I was too busy colonising the Sun to get involved.
It was bloody hot on the Sun - the scientists aren't joking, you know. It was all right for me as I have a high tolerance for extreme temperatures, but the millions of degrees of heat proved too much for some. I remember taking a young couple to look around a nice little cottage I'd had built there, and they completely evaporated before I even landed my space rocket. I had to keep them in a couple of old lemonade bottles I had handy, and recondense them when I got to Jupiter. They were very upset at first, but they saw the funny side later.
The whole Sun colonisation project was a flop, really. I think it was the heat that put people off. I tried sticking a few cooling fans on the surface but it was a waste of time. I would probably have gone bankrupt if I hadn't have invested heavily in the Asian mucous market, which was enjoying a boom at that time. Five of my cottages remain on the Sun to this day. You can see them on a clear day if you look at the Sun, squint, then turn away and look at a photograph of them.
I took a lot of photographs back then, it was a good way to pass the time as I travelled back and forth from the Earth to the Sun. Long old journey, you know. There was a surprising amount of things to photograph in space - it's not as empty as people think. There was a large arrangement of ornate soup spoons which provided the subject of my best photography. They were orbiting a small asteroid near the remains of the alien mothership, if I remember. I sometimes think I should have taken some shots of that mothership, but the spoons seemed much more interesting at the time. The crtitics weren't impressed though - they claimed I had just photographed some old spoons in front of a black blanket! I still sold the photos for countless millions of pounds, but my pride was hurt.
There was an American collector, Ramsey Foss, who became obsessed with my work. It was he who suggested that I try my hand at scuplture when I accidentally ate my camera. He was a marvellous chap - he held the most wonderful barbecues in the Vatican until the Pope found out. He claimed my photographs held the secret of life and were the highest form of art. He nearly bought one once. I decided to present my first sculpture to him as a gift after he introduced me to my fourth wife, Sizmanidar.
I bought some clay from a local maniac and set about creating my sculpture. Sizmanidar sat at my side, playing the harp with two of her arms whilst knitting with the other three. I crafted the clay into a rough cube, and put grit on top of it. I then cut off some of my hair and sprinkled it on top of the grit. To finish, I took one of Sizmanidar's paintings (they were awful, bless her), broke it in half and stuck it to the sides. When the clay had set I jumped on my glass pogo stick and hopped over to Ramsey Foss' English retreat. Unfortunately, the scuplture was so hideous that he clawed his own eyes out after glimpsing it for a second. Things were never the same between us after that.
I found comfort with Sizmanidar, but after a while she had to return to her underground kingdom to fight off the invading Keystone Kops. Their on-screen antics may have been hilarious, but they were really brutal fascists dedicated to wiping out the troglodytes. They would have succeeded too, if Fatty Arbuckle hadn't have switched sides at the last minute. I discovered Sizmanidar's broken body in the post one day - she had mailed herself to me in the hope of receiving treatment for her horrific battle injuries. But it was too late... She was dead. I can still remember the blood-soaked jiffy-bag... severed ear... all nine legs, broken... truncheon up her nose... tentacles limp... antennae bleeding, bleeding... uaahhh...
...Where was I? Oh yes, Old Corkhill. A lovely chap...
All text copyright and intellectual property of Stuart Ashen