bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2010) — Fall 2010 // Automne 2010, pp. 43–48
Liebnitz set his tankard down. “They say, if you can remember the 60s, you were never really there. The trouble with my brother Leo is that he fell head-first into 1968 and has yet to come up.” He gazed with rueful fondness across the low-beamed room at a figure in bell-bottoms, paisley shirt, beads and gray-blond hair to his shoulders, who was talking avidly to a bemused old man trapped in a corner table. “Leo’s convinced that Jim Morrison of The Doors found an immortality potion and has been hiding here since faking his death in “71. The story about Morrison is rubbish but, weirdly, the potion may be real.”
The Doors of Perception Inn stood just far enough from London down roads just bad enough to discourage the Sunday lunch crowd. Outside the bow window where they sat, aproned barmen roped off a square enclosure in the courtyard, while people gathered before signs reading “Dwile Flonking Today”. In the taproom, Liebnitz was surrounded by his crew: Hamish MacBannock, Felix Africa, Inspector Wa, Don Gordo, Esmeralda, Manitoba Jones and others. Past the bar sat Rialto Sleazewagon amidst the likes of Papa Jack Paridy, Billy van Salmon and Bertha de Kuhl.
“What are they, and for that matter we, doing here?” asked Hamish, a last-minute substitute who hadn’t been briefed. Liebnitz replied, “Sleazewagon thinks some wizardly weaponry was dug up in the 19th century and is still hidden in the inn. He also believes this dwile flonking nonsense plays a role in uncovering the treasure. We have to stop him, since our sources indicate that the trove may be both real and dangerous. After he convinced all the other teams to go elsewhere, Sleazewagon realized he needed someone to play, so he hasn’t opposed our coming.”
The innkeeper, a grizzled ancient named Solomon Grits, stuck his head into the room and called, “Here y’go t’gither! The dwile’s a-waiting. Flonkers to the courtyard!” The two teams strolled to opposite sides of the enclosure while Grits addressed the crowd. “Gentlefolk all. I be the jobanowl, the referee of today’s flonking and I call the teams into the square for the first of four snurds of play. Let the captains of the Centre and the Sleaze approach for the toss.”
Liebnitz and Sleazewagon strode up in traditional attire, complete with porkpie hats and hobnailed boots. Grits tossed a sugarbeet in the air, asking Sleazewagon, “Roots or tops?” Sleazewagon called it correctly and chose to girt. The Centre’s first flonker, Hamish, stood in the centre of a ring of Sleaze, who linked hands and began to shuffle clockwise. MacBannock dipped his three-foot drivelling stick into the beer bucket at his feet, to pick up the wet cloth dwile. Raising the driveller, he begun to spin the other way from the girters. Dizzy, he let the dwile slip off without aiming. It sailed over the girters and nailed a passing cow in the buttocks, causing no little ribaldry and a surprised bellow from the animal.
The jabanowl grinned. “The first flonk is a swadger. Sir, that means you must drink the penalty.” He handed a chamber pot to MacBannock, who looked askance. “There’s only beer in that gazunder,” Solomon assured him. “But the container bodes ill for its quality,” replied the Chief, before quaffing the lot in a single long swallow. The crowd cheered and the girting began again. MacBannock’s second flonk hit Sleazewagon full in the face (A wonton! Three points!) and his third took Papa Jack in the backside (a ripper for one point).
The first snurd ran through the whole Centre team and then the driveller passed to the Sleaze. What with frequent penalties, both decorum and coordination deteriorated rapidly. Sleazewagon put all three of his flonks into Don Gordo’s belly for two-point marthers and was booed for taking cheap shots. In the second snurd, the jabanowl began calling randomly on the girters to reverse direction. Collisions were increasingly frequent.
In the halftime interval, Sleazewagon walked over to Liebnitz. “My old colleague,” he said to the ace logician, “Thank you for coming. You’re going down, or course, but that will only add to my pleasure.” Liebnitz replied, “I know why you’re here, Rialto, and we’re going to stop you. And we’re only three points behind.” Sleazewagon laughed. “This is the autumn equinox, the day it comes together. You won’t be able to stop us, because we’re going to win.” “You always were a flat-whacker, Sleazewagon.”
The third snurd was marked by increasing rowdiness among players and spectators, as kegs emptied and spirits rose. While the teams changed for the last round, Grits strolled over and bent to inspect the dwile. Liebnitz saw him pour something into the bucket from a small crystal bottle. Then the innkeeper backed away and pulled out an old-fashioned pocket watch. Nodding, he gestured to start the final snurd.
From the off, it was different. The players began to glow, the Centre team in ice-blue and the Sleaze in pale green. The jobanowl flickered like worn-out neon, strobing in and out of visibility. From Hamish’s first flonk, the beer dripping from the dwile remained suspended in the air, forming a spiral tracery overlaid by each successive flonk. Soon the enclosure was filled with a crystal lattice that the sun turned into a mesh of rainbows. Felix said, “Mother Macree, I’ve got to take a case of this stuff home.” And that was before he noticed the Sleaze were girting a hand’s breadth off the ground.
The crowd was going mad. Liebnitz ended the Centre’s last half-snurd with the team 29 points ahead, but the Sleaze still had their own innings to come. The Centre began girting clockwise, but the jobanowl, staring closely at his watch, told them sharply to reverse direction.
Startled by the shift, Papa Jack put his first flonk between Don Gordo and Esmeralda, causing the immense caudillo to rear back, knocking Manitoba Jones into a manure spreader and snapping its brake lever. The cart began rolling backwards down the hill. Jones struggled to his feet only to be brained from behind by a low branch, dropping head-first into a cage on the moving Ferris wheel in the adjacent travelling fair, tumbling from there onto a water-flume which shot him out and straight through a paddock of bemused sheep, bouncing off a trampoline in the playground behind the inn and into an empty keg. The keg twirled like a top back into the square, rebounded off Don Gordo’s recumbent form and came to a halt upside down. The spectators gazed in silent awe and then cheered wildly as it rose smoothly to reveal Manitoba’s bowing form.
Liebnitz covered his eyes with one hand. Solomon consulted his watch and ordered everyone back into play. Leo, who had been lounging on the steps of the inn, looked around and crept surreptitiously into the building. Minutes later, Don Gordo, using a barbeque fork to probe the freezer for a pie, shorted out the power (lighting up his electric “Kiss Me in the Dark” tie), but it was quickly restored.
The Sleaze picked up the driveller and the pace. The Centre’s girting was masterly, the crystal lattice grew and began to pulse with light. The jabanowl reversed direction again and again. The breathing of both teams grew rougher as more and more beer was toped from the gazunder. The score narrowed. It came down to Sleazewagon’s last flonk, with the Centre only one point ahead. As he spun, the glow around all the players intensified to a blinding brilliance. Then Papa Jack reverted to type and tried to foul the girting. Without missing a step, Esmeralda hip-checked him onto the playground round-about, in turn flipping Bertha de Kuhl up and over the square. Sleazewagon’s flonk, heading for Don Gordo’s stomach, caught the heel of Bertha’s Manolo and was flung back into Rialto’s face. Beer dripping from his pencil-thin moustache, he watched the crystal lattice shatter in a rainbow of sparks. An answering flash lanced from the Inn’s upstairs windows.
Surrounded by drunks whopping and pouring beer over each other from the pewter trophy or, like the Sleaze, being carried out unconscious, Liebnitz found himself unaccountably sober. So was Solomon Grits, who stared at his watch, a smile of relief on his face. The ace logician strolled over. “Perhaps a word, now that what had to be done is done.” The innkeeper paled as Liebnitz continued. “It occurs to me that jobanowl is close to Djeb-anullah, which would mean ‘guardian of the mask’. Specially if the mask was the Djeb al-Huki, the ‘mask of annihilation’ I’ve been reading about. Which is maybe…upstairs?” Solomon’s face took on a pensive look. “You know enough to be dangerous but you seem an honest man. Maybe I should tell you the rest and plead for silence.” Liebnitz signalled to Esmeralda and Manitoba Jones, the least blitzed of his team, and followed Grits up the stairs to the second floor, where the innkeeper punched into the electronic lock hidden behind a tapestry of Queen Victoria.
The group stepped into the vast 10-sided expanse that filled the second floor. The room was a jewel-box of dark wood, sensuous line and colour saturated with hints of malice and menace: the pre-Raphaelites on bad acid. Each facet of the wall but one featured a door, each decorated differently: gold with a writhing dragon picked out in garnets, plain whitewash with a yellow rose spiked to the centre, a full-length mirror reflecting the room darkly, a long-haired naked woman looking regal on a white horse, a long-haired naked man looking abashed on a pink rhinoceros, a magus with a tarot deck holding up the Hanged Man, a rabbit in a waistcoat playing chess with a flamingo, plain plywood with a sign reading “This Way to the Egress”, and a street scene with strongman, acrobats and a juggling mime. The tenth facet featured a carved fireplace that put out a welcome heat.
In the middle of the room, Solomon Grits sprawled in one of the dark padded chairs surrounding a huge old table. Motioning the others to join him, he spoke without preamble. “The story begins in the early 1860s. A farmer down the road was plowing his field when the blade hit something and stopped dead. Going forward to calm the horse, the farmer noticed a gleam of metal. With a lot of work, he pried a heavy chest out of the ground. Being a long way from his croft, he ran to the inn, where he persuaded the keeper and his sons to help him carry the chest back. After closing the inn, the four men used an axe to open it on the taproom floor.”
“Inside — treasure, but not the usual. Gold, Roman gold, sure. But two more important finds as well. First, as it turned out, that potion of immortality everyone remembers. It’s gone now, the younger son drank it on the spot, thinking it old wine. And secondly a fancy bronze helmet with a full face-mask. The Djeb al-Huki, as I learned from my studies. The farmer and the innkeeper started to fight over it and things went downhill. By the morning, the inn was a pile of rubble and three men were dead, torn to shreds. The younger son was the only one left alive. He was injured too, but recovered, the potion doing its work.”
Esmeralda said, “What a great storyteller you are, señor. It is just as if you were there.” “I was, young lady,” the old man replied, “For I am that younger son. But I didn’t know the words that gave the potion its full effect. Instead of eternal youth, I got permanent old age. So I have been 70 for a century and a half.” Liebnitz shook his head. “What happened then?” “I used the gold to rebuild the inn, renaming it from Blake, that line in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. And I created this room to hide the mask — I couldn’t let others find it. A computerized system — I keep up with the technology — shuffles it randomly among the crystal mazes behind those doors, so not even I know where it is.”
“Why the mumbo-jumbo?” asked Manitoba Jones. “What happens when you put it on?” Solomon lifted a piece of paper from the table. “Sir John Tenniel’s illustration for Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky, a depiction of the dreaded monster itself. You remember: ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves’ and so on. Carroll and Tenniel visited the inn around 1870. The place was full, I was away and my wife, not knowing, gave them this room. The poem and picture come from their nightmares. As soon as I saw the print, I recognized the monster my Da became when he tried on the helmet, killed his best friend and my brother, then turned on me. The bravest thing I ever saw, him already dying, tearing off the mask before he could be forced to finish me.”
“I see,” mused Liebnitz. “Jabberwocky was the closest Carroll could come to the name Djeb al-Huki he heard in his dream.” Grits went on, “After Carroll’s visit, I knew I had to do more. I already knew from trying that there was no way to destroy the mask. And I couldn’t do anything dramatic without attracting attention. I found old records of rituals to sedate the beast, involving ring dances and holy water. So I invented dwile flonking. Good thing, as it turned out the beast had become stronger from drinking my family’s blood and was almost able to manifest without anyone wearing the mask.”
“You mean Sleazewagon was right for a change? The game really is a magic rite?” asked Esmeralda. Grits nodded. “But he was wrong about the purpose. It is not meant to release the trove but to confine it. The whole thing was easy to set in motion. The country in that era was in search of new ‘authentic’ English rites. I just had to ‘discover’ an apparently ancient manuscript about an obscure but traditional harvest festival and write down ridiculous rules that would make people carry out the ritual unawares. Every 10 years or so, I hold a flonking here, spike the beer with water from the font and make sure everyone drinks enough to forget any odd special effects.”
“People really fell for this nonsense?” asked Liebnitz. “Why not? They were having fun. To keep the custom from dying out, I pulled off the same ‘discovery’ in the 1960s and nobody caught on then either. Now there are dwile flonking websites, God’s truth.”
The door with the “Egress” sign crashed open and Don Gordo forced his bulk into the room. “Has anyone seen Leo? He was supposed to meet me downstairs for a snack but no-one has seen him since the end of the game. He told me this morning he had figured out where Sefior Morrison was hidden and would soon bring him back to the world. And Caramba! I’m faint with hunger.” The ex-dictator attacked a bowl of fruit from the centre of the table, as Liebnitz whirled and glared at the old man.
“OK, Grits, where’s my brother?” he snarled. “No idea,” was the reply. “But if he came up here, his presence would have registered.” He plucked a doily off what looked like a family Bible on the lectern near the fireplace. He booted the laptop inside. “Yes. He entered half an hour ago and hasn’t left.” They scanned the room, but there was no place to hide a full-grown man. The innkeeper sighed. “If he was looking for Jim Morrison, there is some basis. He did visit in the late 60s. The Doors were named from the same Blake quotation and I think it tickled his fancy. I told him a bit of the history and showed him this room. But I know he left alive, since I took him to the airport myself”
“Where’s Leo?” repeated the ace logician. Grits mused, “The only place he could be is through one of these doors. The one to the hall is always electronically locked, but that was knocked out when Don Gordo blew the fuses. Your brother must have walked in just before it kicked back in. If he found the one with the Jabberwocky, he’s probably dead. But either way, if we try to enter any door but the one he used, the mazes will all self-destruct and he’ll be lost forever.”
Esmeralda broke the silence. “Is there any way to know the one Leo’s behind?” The old man pointed at the fireplace. “Look at the pillars of the mantelpiece.” Carved in the dark wood, they saw a column of symbols arranged in two rows of three clusters, one on each side of the fire. On the left side were:
KAHIT
And on the right:
“What does it mean?” pressed Esmeralda. “No idea,” said Solomon. “That carving wasn’t there when we came in. The presence of the Jabberwocky makes reality a bit fluid”’ He tapped at the keyboard. “The computer knows what happened. It won’t tell us directly — that would be a security breach — but it can give us a hint.” A printer hidden in the lectern spat out a grid chart and the following instructions.
The words defined by the clues below fit into the skeleton grid. Each answer contains the name Alice or a word that sounds (more or less) the same. The numbers in parentheses indicate the number of letters in each word of the answer. Note that two answers contain apostrophes that fill a separate space in the skeleton. The answers come out in alphabetical order (ignoring the apostrophes) for ACROSS and for DOWN. In the skeleton grid are two letters (A and P) to help siting the answers. There are also 15 symbols (* etc). To read the inscription over the fireplace, replace each carved symbol there with the letter that falls on that symbol in the skeleton.
ACROSS (alphabetical order)
1 Cry of despair (4)
2 1935 Katharine Hepburn / Fred
MacMurray movie (5,5)
3 Horseshoe-shaped hair retainers (5,5)
4 Azure dress worn by 7 down or
Sinatra song about it (5,4,4)
5 Enduring rocker who sang 13 down
(5,6)
6 2010 Tim Burton film (5,2,10)
7 The girl Lewis Carroll wrote for (5,7)
8 Town in central Australia (5,7)
9 Arlo Guthrie eating spot (7,10
including a separate apostrophe)
10 Tractor maker Chalmers (5)
11 Soundtrack album for 6 across (6,5)
12 Quebec chanteuse from the 30s and
40s who made a comeback in the 90s
with Laissez-moi encore chanter (4,4)
13 Countess of the Vexin, 1160-1220 (4)
14 What Jefferson Airplane told us to
go and do in White Rabbit (3,5)
15 Noir DC comics character introduced
in 2005 (5,5)
16 2005 TV drama set in 8 across (3,5)
DOWN (alphabetical order)
1 She ran 9 across, in the song and
real life (5,5)
2 Gertrude Stein’s life partner (5,1,6)
3 1974 Scorsese film with Ellen Burstyn
(5,7,4,4,7 including a separate
apostrophe)
4 English star of this year’s movie
She’s Out of My League (5,3)
5 Seattle hard rock band since 1987, first
big hit was Man in the Box (5,2,6)
6 Jackie Gleason’s Ralph threatened to
send her “to the moon” (5,7)
7 She said “If you haven’t got anything
good to say about anybody, come sit
next to me” (married name — 5,9)
Patrick Senécal’s Montreal fantasy
novel of 2000 (5)
Nevil Shute’s 1950 novel, later a
movie, set in 8 across (1,4,4,5)
Popular UK children’s book by
Jean Ure, with sequels (3,5)
1969 comedy drama about a semi-
liberated foursome (3,3,5,3,3,3,5)
Military outpost in Sri Aman, Sarawak
(4,5)
Song about a tough woman, from the
album “Muscle of Love” (4,7,5)
Fourth track from I across,
identification by Shinedown (3,4,2,5)
Town in northern Vancouver Island
(4,5)
Protectress of the blind and the
paralyzed (5,5)
Liebnitz rubbed his jaw. “Some references are a bit obscure. This laptop have an Internet connection?” Solomon nodded. The ace logician quickly filled the skeleton and deciphered the carvings. Striding over to one of the wall-panels, he tugged at the door handle, to no avail. Turning, he asked for help. Manitoba Jones rushed across the room, slipped on a kumquat peel Don Gordo had tossed and slammed head-first into the panel, which burst into shards. Liebnitz shook his head. “A lock-pick would have been fine, but open is open. Thanks.”
A tall paisley figure staggered over the ruined threshold. His dazed face brightened when he saw Liebnitz. “Louie, I knew you’d save me. Look what I found!” He held out a dusty reptilian figure the size of a large zucchini. “It’s a mummified iguana, You see, I was right, the Lizard King was here!” He collapsed in a snoring heap. Solomon gingerly plucked the dusty reptile from the recumbent figure’s hand. “Hell, this was the Jabberwocky. It must have just started manifesting when we flonked that last dwile. We and your brother had a narrow escape, but the mask should be quiet for another decade.” He carefully placed the figure in the fire and they watched as it flared up and disappeared in a cascade of blood-red flame.
Leo snapped open his eyes and lifted his head. “Oh, and Louis,” he said. reflection, I’ve decided that Mimsy and the Borogoves would be a terrible name for a heavy metal band.”
Can you duplicate Liebnitz’s feat by deciphering the six words carved in symbols on the fireplace? And can you say which of the room’s panels they pointed out as the one where Leo was trapped? bout de papier will choose the winner by drawing one entry from all those with correct answers submitted by March 15, 2011. The prize will be a book autographed by A Aalto.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2010) — Fall 2010 // Automne 2010, pp. 43–48. Read the rest of this issue →
