Horsehead Soup Read online

  Horsehead Soup

  Rory Barnes

  Dedication

  for Aidan Barnes

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Books by Rory Barnes

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  The ram raid was a bit of a shock.

  Rachel and I were just walking down this tatty old street when there was a bit of a commotion about a hundred metres away. A four-wheel drive backed violently over the pavement and crashed through a shop window. Glass went everywhere.

  ‘Oh, super! Wizard,’ yelled some idiot behind us, clapping her hands with glee. ‘An olden-day-style ram raid! Oh, I do love a good ram raid. I do hope they get away with heaps and heaps of stuff.’

  Rachel leant on my shoulder and muttered in my ear, ‘This place is full of fruitcakes, the sooner we get out of here the better.’

  The four-wheel drive came careering back out of the shop, crunching glass and squealing its tyres as it roared away. The rear door was still hanging open and a couple of figures could be seen in the back. Unless I was mistaken they were trying on stolen leather jackets. People in the street clapped and cheered. Beside us the fruitcake squealed, ‘Oh, ripping! Super! Well done!’

  Two security guards in uniform rushed out of the smashed-up shop with drawn guns. They stood fair in the middle of the street and opened fire at the departing vehicle. The sound of the shots was incredibly loud. The fruitcake clapped her hands over her ears. A figure fell out of the back of the four-wheel drive and lay sprawled on the cobblestones.

  ‘Oh, well shot, sir!’ yelled the fruitcake, still with her hands over her ears. ‘Well hit!’

  The people who’d just been applauding the raiders now started to cheer the security guards. The guards both took a bow and sauntered back inside the shop. In the distance the body lay sprawled on the road.

  Rachel turned to the fruitcake, ‘Excuse me, lady, but I assume this is some sort of stunt,’ she said. ‘Those guns were full of blanks? That guy in the road is a professional stuntman?’

  ‘Eh?’ said the fruitcake.

  ‘Have we just seen a fellow human being shot dead or haven’t we?’

  ‘Well I don’t know if he’s human or not,’ the fruitcake said, ‘but he’s certainly dead. Unless they just nicked him. But he’s not getting up, is he?’

  I looked at the fruitcake, she was dressed in a daggy pair of shorts and a T-shirt. The T-shirt had ‘Born to Shoplift’ written on it in fluorescent pink. Her hands rested on a shopping trolley piled high with cans of dog food. She was a bit overweight and I reckoned she was about thirty years old. Maybe she lived on dog food. An ambulance roared by with its siren wailing. It screeched to a halt by the man on the cobblestones. Two ambulance officers sprang out, grabbed the body by its shoulders and feet and flung it into the back of the vehicle. Seconds later they were hurtling away, narrowly missing an oncoming tram.

  ‘This really must make you feel at home, Spud,’ the fruitcake said to me. ‘I’m so glad we got all this old-world action during your first outing. Sometimes this city is terribly dull.’

  ‘What do you mean – first outing?’ Rachel said. ‘How do you know Spud’s name? And who the hell are you, anyway?’

  ‘I’m Millicent Mouldweed. I’m the Director-General of this city. I’ve come to take you back.’

  ‘Back where?’ I said. I thought for a minute she meant she was going to put us back in the liquid nitrogen tank. We’d only just got out.

  ‘Back to where you woke up, back to the historic sandstone terrace house we’ve provided for you. You shouldn’t have ventured outside without a guide. You woke up sooner than we expected. Perhaps the nitrogen wasn’t as cold as we thought.’

  The fruitcake seemed to know all about us. She knew my name. She knew we’d just woken up from the sleep of the dead. She knew we’d once fallen into a tank of liquid nitrogen. And whatever the fruitcake thought, the nitrogen hadn’t been very warm. It had been minus 197 degrees. Actually, it wasn’t just me and Rachel who fell in. Rachel’s mate Gazza and a dead racehorse we were trying to shove off a forklift truck fell in as well. It had all been a bit of a shemozzle. We’d been trying to preserve the horse for posterity, because it was dead. But we got preserved for posterity ourselves, although we were alive. We all tumbled in and hit the nitrogen. Ping! We were snap frozen. We were solid cool. We’d probably been frozen solid for millions of years, just waiting for some bright spark to work out how to unfreeze us.

  We’d woken up an hour ago in nice warm beds in a pretty average sort of house. It was a terrace house with a cobbled street outside. There were trams in the street, and cars and bicycles – even a horse and cart went creaking past. The cart had a sign on it which said ‘Heritage City circa 2000’. And the horse was our old mate Staxa Fun, the one we’d been pushing off the forklift. They’d gone and unfrozen him too. Rachel had twigged immediately: we were in a Year 2000 theme park. The bright spark who unfroze us must have had the brilliant idea of trying to make us feel right at home by cutting down on the culture shock. No sudden freak-outs for us. We wouldn’t have to cop a load of weird stuff that had been invented while we were ice. They’d gone and made us feel right at home – sort of.

  So Rachel and I had left Gazza, who was still asleep, and gone for a walk in the theme park. But unfortunately they hadn’t got it quite right. It was a theme park that had been designed by a nong who had a funny idea of the Year 2000 – the cart Staxa had been pulling looked like something Ned Kelly might have bailed up. And the bikes people were riding – some of them were penny-farthings, antiques. We’d seen this grotty old building called the Bygone Era Fun Parlour covered in old posters and crap. It wasn’t exactly a cinema complex with total surround sound. And then there’d been the ram raid. Not something I’d ever seen before.

  ‘Look, young lady,’ Rachel now said to this Millicent fruitcake, ‘I don’t think we need to be taken anywhere, least of all by you. We are adults. Well at least I am, Spud here’s just a teenybopper. We are quite capable of going for a walk around this tacky old burg without coming to grief.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said this Mouldweed woman as if she were explaining something to a dolt, ‘but this “tacky old burg” is a similacrum. This whole place,’ she waved her arm in a wide sweep, ‘is Ye Olde Heritage City circa 2000, to give it its full title. We organised for you to wake up here so you wouldn’t go mad. We’ve done it to make you feel safe and secure. Because, believe me, if you’d strayed outside the city walls you might have become totally deranged.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Look,’ said Millicent Mouldweed, ‘many of the people who normally live outside this city are a bit disturbed. And they were born there. They can’t take the rate of change. It’s the most common cause of suicide: change-angst.’

  ‘Well, suicide would fix them,’ Rachel said. ‘There’s no change after death.’

  ‘Yes there is,’ said Millicent. ‘Suicide has no effect – everything keeps changing, just like it did before.’

  ‘Not for the person who’s dead,’ Rachel said.


  ‘Being dead makes no difference,’ Millicent said.

  ‘Look,’ said Rachel, speaking slowly and clearly, ‘if someone is dead, then all his or her neural circuits stop functioning. This means …’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Millicent said. ‘Death has no dominion now.’

  ‘Poetic claptrap,’ said Rachel.

  ‘No, it’s the law,’ said Millicent. ‘Extermination of the individual is forbidden.’

  ‘So what do they do if you jump off a cliff?’ said Rachel. ‘Turn off the law of gravity?’

  ‘Only if they see you do it,’ said Millicent. ‘Otherwise they just scrape you up.’

  ‘Well there you are; you’re in a changeless state. Deadybones. Strawberry jam.’

  ‘Only for about a month. They just get some DNA from the scrapings and grow another you under accelerated conditions. Then you’re back to square one.’

  ‘I don’t believe this.’

  ‘I know you don’t,’ said Millicent. ‘It’s the culture shock. That’s why you ought to take things slowly. Let’s go back to your historic sandstone house.’

  I said, ‘Do you seriously think life was like this where we come from? Do you think this … err … theme park is for real?’

  ‘Oh, we know it is,’ Millicent said. ‘We’ve studied the footage. All the old television programs. And the late night news.’

  ‘Take that ambulance,’ I said. ‘Where we come from ambulance crews are a bit less hyper. They spend some time stabilising the patient. You know, stopping the bleeding, patching the guy up – that sort of stuff. Then they lift the guy gently onto a stretcher. If he’s badly hurt, they drive very carefully.’

  ‘Oh, how tedious,’ Millicent said. ‘There can’t be much fun in that. What on earth do they do it for?’

  ‘To save life,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s right,’ said Millicent vaguely. ‘I keep forgetting. You see, these days death has no dominion.’

  ‘So you keep saying,’ Rachel said. ‘Look, you’re starting to freak me out. If you don’t mind, I think Spud and I will just go and see if Gazza has woken up.’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind,’ Millicent said. ‘I’m your guide. Where you go, I go.’

  So Millicent started to shepherd me and Rachel back down the street. I got the impression that if either of us made a dash for it she’d head us off with the trolley full of cans.

  ‘Tell me,’ Rachel said, ‘if you don’t mind me asking, why have you got all that dog food? Do you own a pack of hounds or something?’

  ‘No, I just stole the cans for fun. From the Hyper-Mall-o-Mart. When I bumped into you I was on my way to abandon the trolley in front of some unfortunate citizen’s driveway.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘So that he’d back his car into it and ruin his duco.’

  ‘Good God!’ Rachel said. We both stood stock still and looked at Millicent. She smiled happily at us. Finally Rachel said, ‘Err … can I ask exactly why you were engaged in this activity?’

  ‘I was just filling in time, waiting for you people to wake up.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Rachel said. ‘What I want to know is, why did you want to park the trolley where some guy would run his car into it?’

  ‘It’s one of the most popular pastimes in this theme park,’ Millicent said. ‘It typifies the late twentieth century: Shoplifting and Trolley Abandonment. But you’d know this, of course, since you come from that long-forgotton era.’

  ‘Actually, no,’ said Rachel. ‘No, I don’t think I’ve ever stolen a tin of dog food in my life. And I’ve never abandoned a shopping trolley either.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Millicent. She sounded dreadfully disappointed. Then she brightened up. ‘Well, perhaps you would like to have a go now.’ She thrust the trolley’s handle towards Rachel. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘It’s splendid fun. Find somewhere really special to abandon it. What about the tram tracks? That’s always a total hoot: the tram comes rattling down the track, the driver sees the trolley and speeds up …’

  ‘Look, woman,’ Rachel said, ‘I am a top neurosurgeon.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Millicent. ‘But you can’t do trivial stuff all the time – you’ve got to have serious fun occasionally. You’ll be hard at work on your debt reduction scheme soon enough.’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘It’s all arranged,’ Mouldweed said. ‘See, there, have a read.’ We were passing the grotty old building called the Bygone Era Fun Parlour, and Millicent pointed at a tattered poster on a billboard outside it. We walked over and had a look.

  * * *

  See the Funny Doctors do Funny Tricks.

  Living Tissue chopped up with Knives!!

  LOTS OF BLOOD

  See real Laughing Gas fed to some poor

  Zombie through a Rubber Hose.

  It’s a Gas. It’s a Laugh.

  Ho Ho Ho Ha Ha Ha

  See a skull opened with a handsaw!

  Thrill to the Lost Art of Brian Surgery

  Performed by genuine Old World Quacks!

  These LIVING FOSSILS

  learnt their primitive craft before

  nanotechnology.

  They know no better. They will amaze you!

  * * *

  Rachel the brain surgeon wasn’t amused. ‘What is this rubbish?’ she said. ‘I suppose they think this is some sort of a joke. I suppose they’ve got a bunch of poor university students who have to dress up like nineteenth-century physicians to amuse the tourists. Just like Disneyland. Poor bunnies, trying to pay their way through medical school by making fools of themselves in a theme park – wearing wigs and old leather aprons and carrying on pretending to pull strings of sausages out of a “patient” who’s really a pair of overalls stuffed with newspapers.’

  Poor Rachel, she was getting totally carried away.

  ‘Quite frankly,’ she went on, ‘if you ask me, it’s that sort of thing that gives surgeons a bad name. Well, I’m not paying good money to see it.’

  ‘I think you’re meant to be it,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Rachel said. ‘I’m meant to be what?’

  ‘You’re meant to be the old-fashioned quack. See. Down there, right at the bottom of the notice.’

  * * *

  Thrill to the magic of Cryonics

  FRESH OUT OF THE NITROGEN

  FROM THE DYING DAYS OF THE SECOND MILLENNIUM

  the legendary

  MS RACHEL WITTGENSTEIN F.R.A.C.S.

  and her Comical Sidekick

  GAZZA!

  * * *

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ Rachel said. ‘I just don’t believe this.’ She turned to Millicent Mouldweed. ‘You seriously want me and Gazza, highly trained neurosurgeons, to caper about pulling strings of sausages …’

  ‘No, no,’ Millicent said ‘That’s not what you’re going to do at all. You are going to do proper old-fashioned brain surgery. Just like you used to do in the old days. See, you’ve become hopelessly old-fashioned. To the audience, everything you do now will be, you know, quaint.’

  ‘Quaint?’

  ‘Yeah, quaint,’ she said. ‘Primitive. Rough and ready. You’ll take the audience on a fun-filled adventure to the distant past. Show them scenes of surgical squalor.’

  ‘Lord help us,’ said Rachel. ‘Let’s get back to base.’

  Chapter Two

  Gazza was still asleep when we got back to the house. Rachel tickled him under the armpits.

  ‘Who …? Wa …? Wassermatter …?’

  ‘Wake up, sport, a new dawn has broken.’

  ‘Broken what?’ said Gazza. ‘Who’s Dawn?’ He opened his eyes blearily and saw Millicent standing next to Rachel. ‘G’day, Dawn,’ he said. ‘Pity about the breakage.’

  ‘This isn’t Dawn,’ Rachel said. ‘This is Millicent. She’s, um, our guide.’

  ‘What? Where are we?’

  ‘We’re in the future. It’s pretty daggy.’

  ‘Oh gawd,’
Gazza mumbled and turned over and went back to sleep.

  ‘Oh, let’s leave him,’ Rachel said. ‘He never was an early bird.’

  The three of us retired to the kitchen.

  ‘Any chance of breakfast?’ Rachel said. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘Umm, yes,’ Millicent said. ‘We’ve stocked the kitchen with everything you’ll need. All sorts of raw food. You’ll have super fun cooking it!’

  I caught Rachel’s eye. She shrugged and looked up at the ceiling. Then she turned to Millicent and said, ‘Well, that is what you do in a kitchen, isn’t it, Millicent dear? Take raw food and cook it.’

  ‘Well, yes. I jolly well suppose it must be,’ Millicent said enthusiastically. ‘Let’s do it now, let’s do some cooking! Look, there’s a basket of raw eggs.’

  I took a frying pan from a hook on the wall. But Rachel said, ‘I’m sure Millicent wouldn’t mind doing the honours, Spud. We seem to be in her care after all.’

  ‘Oh, gosh,’ said Millicent, ‘You want me to cook the eggs?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Rachel. ‘Have a go. Show us how eggs are cooked these days.’

  ‘Well, if you say so …’

  Rachel and I watched as Millicent took the frying pan and gently placed three eggs in it. The eggs rolled around in their unbroken shells. Millicent opened the oven and placed the frying pan, plastic handle and all, on the lower wire shelf. Then she studied the knobs on the top of the stove for half a minute. With a small cry of delight, she reached for the one marked ‘oven’. There was a pop as the gas burners ignited automatically. Millicent sat down and regarded the glass door of the oven in triumph. Rachel and I stared at it too.