… if you base it off Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides and hire demigod Ian McShane to play demigod BLACKBEARD. Holy hell, Hollywood, are you going to do something right?

I was lukewarm on Powers until I read the mind-blowingly great Anubis Gates; now I am enthusiastic. And Ian McShane elevates anything he’s in, even Kung Fu Panda. He should be in everything. EVERYTHING. And playing Blackbeard? How badass is Blackbeard? Example: (in history) when he was killed, he had six gunshot and seventeen sword wounds on him. The seventeenth took his head off. Then they threw his body overboard and it swam to shore. No fooling.

Yes, this could be a good movie.

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At EDF, a few weeks ago - I didn’t notice, and they didn’t tell me. But here it is! I see from the comments that many people didn’t get it, which is about right.

Am I alone in that I find it okay for art to confuse or mystify me? In that I even enjoy it when art provokes that reaction? In that I do not think difficulty equals pretension?

P.S. Back from vacation, updates to resume soon.

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Did you see this one on Thousand Faces? No? Et voila.

Tears of Clobbersaurus
By Jens Rushing

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, designed by the masterful Tadao Ando, is that city’s foremost cultural treasure. Its five shining concrete-and-glass pavilions are surrounded by a glittering reflecting pool, beyond which the skyscrapers of downtown thrust into the blue prairie sky. The Modern’s galleries hold some 2,600 works of art by the likes of Picasso and Pollock, Serra and Serrano. The high glass walls are designed to flood the galleries with natural light; they are not designed to repel an attack by Clobbersaurus.

Two blows from his scaly fists sufficed to shatter the tall front doors, even though it was the first Sunday of the month, when anyone can enter for free, even half-ton lizardmen. A sweep of his spiked tail destroyed a stand of reasonably-priced Yoshitomo Nara collectibles. Anselm Kiefer’s masterwork Papst Alexander VI: Die goldene Bulle hung on the far side of the entry gallery; “Monstrous pile!” snarled Clobbersaurus, and ripped the canvas in half with his powerful claws. “Flee, ye sons of man!” he shrilled in his lizardly voice, and the patrons did just that, streaming through the destroyed doors and to the safety and security of the nearby Kimbell Art Museum, which displayed works no later than the Post-Impressionists. Its limestone vaults were built during the Cuban missile crisis; Clobbersaurus would be no threat to them.

From the top of the obscenely ugly forty-three story Burnett tower, the Lone Wrangler brooded over his city. As near as he could tell, all seemed to be at peace, and – Land o’ Goshen, was that the sound of forty-foot glass walls shattering?

The Lone Wrangler dove off the tower, clicked his thrustospurs together, and rocketed westward along 7^th Street. By Gum, the east wall of the Modern was down, the shards reflecting in the reflecting pool like so many shredded goldfish, and someone was mangling his favorite Josef Havel sculpture.

“Clobbersaurus! I shoulda known! All right, ya varmint, drop that there exquisite leadcast and let’s get to fisticuffs!”

“Wrangler! My quarrel is not with thee, but with this so-called ‘art’. I would fain wipe my crevasse with this Diebenkorn’s Urbana #6, but since my transformation, I no longer excrete, so the act would be symbolic rather than practical – I will settle for spindling and mutilating within my mighty talons! Urbanal, more likely! Ha!” And he shredded the hapless painting.

“All right, Mr. Saurus, you step away from the neoplasticism, nice and easy-like. Let’s step outside and have us a tussle. I reckon I kin whip you six ways from Sunday.” Keep his gums flapping, the Wrangler thought, and get him away from the priceless art. “Let’s settle this like man and lizardman. If’n ya ain’t yeller.” His hands moved slowly to his pair of 1876 Colt Laser Action Revolvers.

“My quarrel is not with thee, Wrangler, but with the masters of De Stijl! Regardless, I will not hesitate to pulp thee into pallid palimpsest, shouldst thou seek to cross swords. Avaunt, varlet!” And before the Wrangler could draw his guns, Clobbersaurus vaulted to Carl Andre’s Tau and Threshold sculpture, which he hurled at the Wrangler with all his might, smashing through Dan Flavin’s irreplaceable Diagonal of May 25, 1963. “My true objective awaits upstairs. Harry me not, for I smash for the greater good!” Clobbersaurus tromped upstairs, flinching briefly at Andy Warhol’s self-portrait.

The Wrangler clicked his boots together and rocketed up the stairs, crashing into Clobbersaurus and knocking him forward, where he sprawled beneath Rothko’s Light Cloud, Dark Cloud. The Lone Wrangler’s heart sank. Once confronted with abstract expressionism, Clobbersaurus would enter a killing rage.

“Maybe we ought to parlay a little,” the Wrangler said, leveling his Laser Actions at Clobbersaurus’s head. “What’s got yer hackles up?”

“These execrable canvases,” Clobbersaurus growled. “Look at them! What have we here? Three rectangles on an orange background, rendered with the consummate skill of a palsied six year-old! How many millions did the museum pay for this dreck? Once art sought to uplift, to eludicate, to move! Now it only confounds, confuses, obfuscates! It creates barriers where it ought to pierce them. It corrupts where it ought to beatify; it is an elitist exercise in absurdism that destroys hope and the quest for meaning, engineered with its own extinction!”

The Wrangler considered the piece. “I always understood Rothko was about the interplay of colors and such-like.”

“And Rembrandt isn’t?” said Clobbersaurus bitterly.

“Well, now, that’s just backwards-lookin’,” said the Wrangler. “We got to move forward.”

“We are under no obligation to innovate for its own sake. So-called innovation gave us this abortion!”

The Wrangler scratched his head. “Well, I don’t know about that…”

“Allow me to phrase it this way. Wrangler, what is the income of your everyday persona?”

“I do okay. Maybe forty-five big ones a year.”

“And Messire Rothko splashed this dross out in a month, and earned seven million for it. You could do this. Your child could do this, could he not?”

“Well, yeah! It doesn’t seem fair, really! How do they get away with it?”

“Obfuscation, Wrangler. It is a stranglehold on our creative throats. It is an insult to the intellect of a nation. It is injustice on a national scale. For every Joseph Beuys, there are a thousand unburied corpses.” And Clobbersaurus shed one crystal tear.

The Wrangler holstered his guns. “Get on up, Clobbersaurus,” he sighed.

“Thou wilt not stand in my way?”

“Shucks! I’ll help you! Then I’ll take you to Jamba Juice and buy you a smoothie.”

“The Blueberry Blaster is rich in antioxidants,” Clobbersaurus rumbled, raking his talons across the canvas.

The End

Yes, I hate all art. Next week we’ll have a story about cowboys.

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Who knows what I was thinking?

Delectation
By Jens Rushing

Grinning like horses. Clapping staccato like mad moths or iron swallows dying in gilt barbed-wire cages. The great man takes the stage. Nod horse’s head, left-right, up-down, flattening flashbulb fusillade.

“I don’t deserve your appreciation. It’s all for the kids. Let’s hear it for them.” Thunder applause, Vulcan’s drum of war, drum of horses’ hooves on miles and miles of sun-stripped skulls. Crush like coconuts. Ham-hooks slap and slap, and meanwhile the horse-head shines smiles. Slip of paper, humble bifocals revealing human weakness in moment of triumph. The discus thrower transfixed by a javelin.

Dredging of silt and historical mud and garbage. “My wife, of course.” Spotlight smites cocktail-dress scarecrow. They all look the same when they smile. “And my kids, who taught me how to learn.” Not pictured. “And Joey in the mail room. Where are you, Joey?” Straw makes a compelling form but does nothing in the way of function. Absolutely frightful.

Words wind backward into mouth, finish with a grinding chew and lengthy swallow, centipedes clawing against the intestinal undertow. The great man returns to his seat, too many desperate handshakes en route, and the banquet begins.

Such a feast! Solomon and his court will never know such sumption. Entrée of hammered quail between sheets of gold, crusted with iridium and corundum and all the fruits of terra australis; roll in powdered permanganate parrot-tongues before baking. Aperitif of finest polypset. Nothing too fine for our marquess in the making.

Bring in the burnished bronze platters, heaped high with horseflesh, strung and striated like ribbon candy. Seeping blood like an old surgeon’s sponge. The stars in their spheres are knit from poorer stuff. Knives out, hands in.

Our marquess eats and eats. Horse-head plunges into a burlap bag of oats, scatters grains and the good things of this earth.

A broth of ox-tongues wagging. And – chief delight! Pudding of putrescent platypi, prostrate and prayerful prior to penetration. Teeth out, knives in.

And the marquess! Such an appetite. Never mind the tiny grasping hand as it disappears down his glutted gorge – when it’s gone, it’s gone. Best to laugh and hold your quaking belly. Folks like to laugh.

The marquess, wasn’t he rather a corporal man? Hardly obese. I’ve seen him in the bath, and his belly is scarcely distended, scarcely blue from lack of heart’s blood to that extremity. Not one of these sufferers of four square meals a day, with fingers thick as Havana cigars, fingertips loose and fibrous as leaf tobacco – but corporal nonetheless. Strange, then, that he should seem so thin. Yet fitting.

Look at him! Just now, under the glare of our own eyeballs, the skin tightened around that famous skull, bringing it more into relief. Like a Goya painting. Saturno devorando a su hijo. It makes more efficient use of the light that way. Only a master could achieve such an effect.

Let’s have a further tightening of the flesh on the limbs. A perfect epicure. Someone remove his coat and vest – strip away the tie, use your teeth if you must. Amazing that he doesn’t slip through the collar. He is a positive stick! Like a praying mantis, all arms and legs, rail-thin, thin as the grave, thin as the merry bacchanists in Totentanz. As a child, nothing moved me like Wolgemut’s engraving in the Liber chronicarum: the happy piper, the dancing lovers, the emperor, king, and pope, all grinning skinlessly, all equal at last, sand to sand to sand. Join hands for the Danza Macabra! It is a very great dance, and it goes on indefinitely.

The marquess has stopped eating. Surely he is not sated yet. What an insult to the chef! No – he has only paused for drink. There is barely flesh enough to work the jaw. It’s hanging by a sinew, thin and yellow as old fettucini. He persists, even while his eyes wither to raisins and his tongue to a scrap of leather. Collapse. Crumble like a mud wall. Someone take away his wife; she is laughing so. Let’s have a fiddle and a concertina. Push away the tables! Flog the piano until it sings!

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To get the joke, you must be familiar with Fermi’s paradox. Ready? Go.

Fermi’s Dilemma
By Jens Rushing

One night Enrico was hard at work in his study when there was a knock at the door. He was puzzled to open it and find a slinky blonde and not his graduate assistant at all.

“Pardon me,” she said. “Are you the renowned Italian physicist, mathematician, and thinker Enrico Fermi?”

“That’s what it says on the door,” he said, laughing with his customary modesty.

“The winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Physics?”

“Well, it’s nothing really…”

“May I come in?”

“Certainly,” he said, not a little puzzled by her brusque manner.

She entered his little study. “May I ask what you’re working on?” she said, gesturing at the pile of books and star charts.

“Oh, that,” he said. “Not my usual field, but a peculiar question put to me by my colleagues recently. We were discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life – ”

“Yes, we know,” she interrupted.

“And they posited that, considering the size and age of the universe, there certainly ought to be someone out there,” Enrico said, growing more animated as he spoke of his work. “So I asked, ‘Then where is everyone?’ For, you know, we have yet to hear a thing from the heavens.”

He thought the woman smirked a little.

“So I started looking, and requested data of radio wave receptions from the military, cross-referenced them with these star charts, and began to triangulate points of origin. It’s really rather easy when you know what to look for – ”

“Certainly it is,” she said. “That must be the simple, reductive reasoning for which you are known.”

He chuckled. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m very excited. I had a breakthrough just before you arrived. You see, my colleagues have dubbed the whole thing ‘Fermi’s Paradox,’ when I merely asked what I thought an obvious question. But soon they’ll be calling it ‘Fermi’s Solution’ – the key to locating extraterrestrial life anywhere in the galaxy!”

“Tell me, Dr. Fermi,” the woman said abruptly. “Do you love your wife, Laura, and your children, Giulio and Nella?”

He frowned. “I don’t quite understand – of course I do.”

“You’d be heartbroken, then, if they were, say, torched by a heat-ray or poisoned by deadly black smoke?”

“Of course.”

The woman nodded. “I thought so. And it’s a nice little town you’ve got here. What’s it called again?”

“Chicago.”

“Chicago. It’d be a shame, Dr. Fermi, a darned sorry shame, if sixty-foot tripods were to crush this beautiful skyline under their titanium feet. Wouldn’t it?”

“Gosh!”

“Gosh indeed, Dr. Fermi. Oh, wouldn’t it just be terrible if the few men who survived the global devastation were deported to slave in the plutonium mines of Rigel Seven?” she said, clutching her hands to her breast. “And the millions of Earth women, young and old alike, would be forced to – oh, it’s too terrible to think about – to breed with our many-tentacled overlords and bear their inhuman spawn! Oh, gee, Dr. Fermi, my heart absolutely flutters in fright for all the little children of the world, whose corpses would positively choke the Earth’s rivers!”

He frowned.

The woman rustled his papers. “My astrophysics are shaky, but it seems you’ve made a mistake here. And you forgot to carry the two here. Sloppy work, Dr. Fermi! I hope this doesn’t affect your breakthrough. But it looks like it’s all for the best that Fermi’s Paradox remain a paradox.” She swept around him and lingered at the door for a moment, gazing into his face. He didn’t dare meet her eyes. “Ta!” she chirped, and trotted down the hall. There was a roar of wind, louder than a jet engine, a flash of blue-white light, and she was gone.

He sighed and crumpled up his notes. His medal hung above his desk. Alfred Nobel’s stern profile had never been sterner. “Don’t look at me like that,” Enrico said.

The End

Hee. That Fermi.

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I wrote this while substitute-teaching a math class. When lacking ideas, just look about for any damn thing. This story was modestly published in the British zine Jupiter.

Asymptote
By Jens Rushing

Our course describes a diminishing gyre. The great bowl of the first curve swoops two hundred thousand miles wide – the next, one hundred fifty-seven thousand, give or take, and so doing, we spiral inward. The epicenter of this spiral is RUBY 34-2012, a dwarf planet suspected of titanium deposits. We will never touch the center. We chart an asymptote; our final course will hold us in orbit, each lap of the planet shaving a few millimeters from our orbit. A course approaching zero but never becoming zero – asymptote.

We’re the first to survey this little rock, and we need only photograph it. We come only to behold the thing, not to know the thing. Our craft isn’t even capable of landing. We’ll orbit for a few months, map the surface, and return home.

I use future tense when I should use the conditional: would, could, should. The condition in this exercise is that I, Terrence, am a colossal fuck-up, a mental abortion, a blind tongueless parasite unable to even push the right fucking buttons at the right fucking time, and in my utter incompetence I have graduated from dipshit to murderer.

Our crew is small: me, my brother Mike, and his wife Sara. This job was really a favor to me. I know jackshit about piloting, less about surveying, but they took me along. I needed the money, the direction, the company, et cetera, and they dropped this gig in my lap at just the right time. When I protested on grounds of ignorance, inexperience, and plain terror of spaceflight, Mike just slapped my back and said, “No worries, Terr. Piece of cake, if this monkey can do it,” jerking a thumb at Sara, who laughed and made monkey faces. That’s the kind of guy Mike is – kind, generous even if it kills him.

And Sara, the only soul that means half as much to me as Mike. After Mom died, Mike and I quit talking for a while. We just didn’t want to see each other, and we went our ways. He got into the private spaceflight sector, got so busy we couldn’t have seen each other even if we’d wanted to, and I figured it was all a lost cause. I was ready to drift off, disappear, maybe take everything in my stash at once and float off on a candy-colored cloud, when Mike called. He was in town and wanted to see me. We did Thai. He observed that I looked like hell, glossed over his work, and jabbed a chopstick through a piece of peanut chicken (cold).

Finally: “I’ve been seeing this girl.” And, on this subject, he started talking, really talking, and I knew that the only reason I was seeing Mike at all was because of this girl – that she loved him enough to learn all about him, including the dissipated little brother, the estrangement from whom was a constant source of regret, and that she loved him enough to kick his ass until he did something about it. Ergo: lunch.

Mike loved her, I could tell, more than he realized, and if I wanted to love Mike, I had to love her, too. I met her soon after, and my appreciation for her increased through the meeting. The reality lived up to the expectation. I don’t usually get along with women, or men, really, but Sara was exceptional. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, naturally, and (I can say this with a straight face) a fount of joy to all around her. She had a soothing presence. If flowers did not literally spring in her footsteps, if the lions and the lambs did not lie down together at her feet, it was only for a want of actual sorcery in the world, which I have always lamented anyway.

From the very first, she was determined to love and improve me, though I made it hard for her. But I was Mike’s brother, so I was her brother. She got me a job at their plant (which I lost) and introduced me to her attractive friends (whom I repelled), and she never gave up. And now I’ve killed her, glory be.

Things were good, even pastoral. Most weekends, we went to the garbage-strewn beach, had barbeques on their patio, drank Shiner and swatted mosquitoes and cursed the humidity. Mike unfroze. It was just like Mom had never died.

Through the glass I can see them exhale in slow-motion. The cryo cycle is deep, and the revivification process is damned complex. Their fault. Should’ve known better than to trust it to an unregenerate retard like me.

“Just follow the directions,” Mike said. “We practiced this a million times. You can’t screw this up, Terr. You’d have to be a genius to screw this up.”

When I worked at their avionics plant, I drove a forklift in the warehouse. Day two, still pretty stoned from the post-day one celebration, I ran the forklift into a stack of plastic drums filled with hydraulics fluid. The forks speared the drums, the fluid gushed out, the barrels up top tumbled down and broke with their great weight, and the warehouse was awash in the red-brown liquid. Everything happened so quick; the boss was screaming, someone hit an alarm, so I hid out in the bathroom for a while, then snuck out and never returned. How about that? I can’t even work a fucking forklift, and Mike thinks a hundred hours of training and a certificate will make a tech out of me, just because I’m clean these days. I kept telling him – it wasn’t the drugs that made me such a fuck-up.

So I was horrified, devastated, but not surprised when the klaxon shrieked during the warm-up stage, the crucial stage three that must not be interrupted, and the seals split and spewed ammonia-stinking cryo gasses everywhere. The EKGs went berserk – beepbeepbeepbeep – and I slapped at buttons. More alarms chimed in, and I did what I did in the warehouse: I freaked. I tore at my hair and curled up in the corner while my brother and sister-in-law suffered.

Christ, how they suffered. The cryo gasses dull your senses. In training, Mike numbed my hand with the gasses and ran a needle through my palm – no pain. Yet this agony cut through the drowsy numbness. Torment transformed their faces as a lightning bolt transforms a tree. They moaned, they bit their tongues until blood ran from the corners of their mouths. They choked, they gasped, but they did not wake. I could only watch.

In stage three, the level of oxygen in the mix is slowly increased and higher brain functions are coaxed awake. The mixture must be monitored carefully at this stage, as the autosensors are incapable of the precision required. But I missed something, had to have missed something, the mix swung too far the one way, too fast, and the adreno cocktail was injected before they were ready. They were caught at the brink of consciousness in half-thawed bodies, neurons dry-firing like corroded spark plugs. No wonder, their pain.

When the cryo booth malfunctioned, and I wildly slapped at the controls, hoping for something, a gasket popped, and adreno fluid sprayed across the chamber. We lost most of our supply before I got it under control. The fluid is essential to the reviv process. We have no additional doses.

They’re not dead yet, but it’s not a far trip.

We’re two years away from Earth, so returning is impossible. I don’t have the training. We’ve been taking turns running the ship all this time. Most of the time, it was all autopilot, so I only had to run on the treadmill and read book after book. The only remotely challenging part of my job was the reviv process, which I did a thousand thousand times in training, with great success.

Goddamn you, Mike. Goddamn you for doing this to me. Goddamn you, too, Sara, for trying to make something of me. Consider your lesson learned.

I tear through the tiny ship. I just need to run, to get away from them. Even in half-death, they’re saying, “You can fix it, Terr. We believe in you.” I kick the pilot’s chair and pound on the wall. I attack it, I just go nuts, kicking, screaming, pounding my forehead on it, hard, relishing the good pain. I strike my head again, too hard, and out I go.

When I wake, I’m staring through the port at RUBY. We’ve completed another lap of the planet. We’re a fraction closer to the goal we’ll never reach. I hear a new alarm from the cryo room.

The computer wants to know whether I want to continue revivification, which is strange, as the fluid levels are too low. Hope squeezes my gut, and, hands shaking, I check the fluids again, then fall back in my chair with a bitter laugh.

One. I can save one of them. The other will endure the reviv process without the aid of stimulants. In simulations, this is one hundred percent fatal.

I can’t deal with this right now. I refuse to. My veins itch ferociously: my brain swells and strains against my skull. I need a hit like I’ve never needed one before. I’ve been clean five years now. I owe that to Sara, too. She kicked my ass just like she’d kicked Mike’s. One day when they came over to my place, she surprised me in my room with a trash bag full of hoses, used hypos, spoons caked with dried blood. She dumped them in a heap on my bed. “What the fuck, Terr? What the fuck?” And I didn’t tell her to piss off, didn’t tell her to mind her own business, thank you, didn’t tell her off for snooping. I was only bitterly aware that I’d disappointed her.

Shame is a great tonic. Shame has a bad rap. It drove me through rehab, kept me clean, because I could not stand to disappoint that source of unreasoning and profound love that terrorized me so. Again – it was like having Mom back.

She healed me. I owe her my life.

And Mike – is my brother.

Their lives are in my hands. They put them there.

I watch RUBY for a while. Then I have an idea. A great idea. The substances for reviv are shot, yeah, but what about for cryo? I check. Mike and Sara can stay cold indefinitely. No ship will ever come this way, of course. We’re in the true anus galaxi out here, and this trip is a private venture, so no one is going to come looking for us.

After divorce, something like sixty percent of the newly created singles remarry within two years. They acquire stepchildren, and get to work procreating with their new spouses ASAP, when all logic dictates caution before re-entering the same snare.

If an elephant falls to poachers, the surviving herd will raise its young.

The cuckoo lays its egg in the nest of other birds, and they raise it as their own. My point is, every living creature instinctively seeks to rebuild its family.

So, orphaned, I rebuilt mine. We rebuilt it, with Sara the foundation, Mike the walls, and me – the curtains. Curtains you can do without, but a house without floor or walls is just stupid. Abomination.

I take off my shoes and socks. I set the timer for the freeze cycle. I climb into the cryo chamber between my brother and sister-mother and take their hands in mine. The lid clicks shut and the chamber floods with cryo gasses.

Through the glass, and through the porthole beyond that, I watch RUBY disappear as the gasses strangle my mind. We will sleep indefinitely. We will approach death in a descending curve, running almost but not quite parallel. A course drawing fractionally nearer and nearer to death but never reaching it – beholding the thing but never knowing it. Asymptote.

The End

Now I am sad. So are you. See you next time.

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Our heroes are captured by bestial savages. What’s next? Who knows? I do, and you could, too, if you but read a little further.

“But these croc-men can’t help their origin,” James protested. “They deserve an unbiased judgement. Remember: no one civilization is inherently superior to another. The idea of comparing a race or people to another and calling one ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’ is the imposition of race-hatred and anathema to science.”

Bellows’s eyes flickered from James to Avery. “What do you think, lad?” he asked, and Avery sensed that more than James’s opinion was at stake here.

Avery was quiet for a moment. “I stand by James,” he said at last.

Bellows was not to be deterred. “I say we exterminate the brutes.”

“What about educating and uplifting?” James interjected.

“When it’s possible. These are clearly unrepentant savages, beyond the help of white men. The best thing we can do for them is grind them under our heels.”

“Your logic dizzies me,” James said.

“Can you honestly say these degraded beasts are men?”

James rubbed his chin. “I agree that they exhibit some symptoms of isolated populations, such as overadaptation and inbreeding. I noted that many of them have the epicanthic folds indicative of the syndrome described by Doctor John Langdon Down – a common trait among so-called ‘degenerate’ peoples.”

“It’s like a Haggard story,” Avery said. “A lost peoples, fallen to barbarism…”

“Again, that is a scientific inaccuracy,” James said. “Barbarism and degeneracy are neither vices nor virtues. Mr. Bellows here seeks to assign moral values to the toss of genetic dice; dangerous, foolish, and scientifically absurd!”

“They’re monsters,” Bellow said bitterly.

Larsen spoke up, surprising them; they had forgotten the Swede’s presence. “I agree with Mr. Blankenship. I may not know much about ethno-anything, but I’ve traveled the world, and mixed with Kanakas, Venezuelans, Tahitians, the clean-limbed and able men of Vanuatu and Papao and Brisbane, stout men and true, Russians, Cubans, Chinese, Floridians by way of New York and Reykjavik, cutthroats from Sao Paulo, sinners from Madagascar, scoundrels and saints in skins of white, black, red, yellow, and every shade of brown, and I know one thing for sure. Folks can be reasonable once you learn how to talk to them. I learned a bit of Confucius from a Manchoo exile on a sealing schooner, and he told me the mark of a true gentleman: all within the four seas are his brothers.”

Silence hung over them for a moment. Avery broke it with a slow clap. “Well said, mate.”

The temple door crashed open and ten croc-men entered, led by a tall and powerful-looking specimen who wore a crown that, Avery realized with a shudder, was crafted of human bones and studded with human teeth. Around his neck he wore a small leather pouch on a string. They approached the cage, unlocked the door, flung it open, and grabbed Larsen, who happened to be closest, and pulled him from the cage while keeping the other men at bay with their spears. Avery would have rushed them and given his life if he thought it would free the others; perhaps the croc-men sensed this, and so most of the spears were directed his way. They closed the gate and left a youngling at guard.

Larsen struggled but made no cry, until he saw the knife. It was a single long piece of jagged flint, and the king wielded it viciously. The croc-men forced Larsen down on the altar and tore his shirt open. “They’ll kill him!” Avery said.

“We are witnessing some degradation of an eons-old Atlantean ritual,” James said. “I am fascinated even while I am mortified.”

“Sucks to that! I’m getting us out of here,” Avery said, and he put words into action; his mighty arms shot between the bars of the cage and snared the guard around his thick throat. Avery choked his enemy’s alarum to a gurgle, squeezing him between granite-hard forearms and the sturdy cage. The croc-man kicked and struggled without weakening; Avery could not squeeze the half-human’s windpipe through the armored skin.

Bellows appeared at his side. “Here, lad,” he grunted, and, reaching past Avery, sawed at the croc-man’s throat with the penknife. It opened in an incarnadine spray, and the croc-man expired after a frantic thrash. Avery dropped the corpse after taking the knife and spear.

The remaining croc-men were absorbed in their ritual. Fortunately for Avery (unfortunately for Larsen), Avery had assaulted the guard at the precise moment the king sank his knife into Larsen’s abdomen; Larsen’s tortured screams and the Stygian cackling of the croc-men covered the sounds of the scuffle.

“They’re removing his liver,” James said. “You know, the Egyptians considered the liver, rather than the heart, the seat of emotion. That’s another point in favor of my theory of a prehistoric pan-Mediterranean culture.”

With his fallen foe’s flint knife, Avery hacked at the cage lashings. A bar loosened, and he knocked it from the cage, weakening the structure and allowing him to work more effectively.

Avery reduced the cage to poles, splinters, and shreds of ancient rope, and burst free. He took the dead croc-man’s spear, brandished it, and addressed the king and his company with a ferocious yell: “Now you will know the price of slaying a helpless man!”

He leapt among his enemies and laid to. Cold fury possessed him; he would see Larsen’s murderers slain and allow no weapon to touch him before that happened. He killed three or four before he had his next thought. Avery put his spear through the soft underbelly of the king, rammed the butt into an oncoming croc-man, and delivered a vicious sideways kick to Red Stripe. He pulled the spear from the king’s belly and plunged it into a croc-man’s eye, then withdrew it with a fatal twist. He noted Bellows holding a croc-man off with the flint knife; in one smooth movement, Avery scooped a broken chunk of marble from the floor and hurled it at Bellows’s opponent, knocking him to the ground. Bellows jumped on him, knife-first, and then Avery’s attention was occupied by Red Stripe, who slashed diagonally with his spear, the point nicking Avery’s square chin.

“Let’s settle this like men,” Avery said. He dropped his spear and put his fists up. The croc-man stood nonplussed for a moment, then, comprehending, relinquished his weapon and charged at Avery, claws outstretched. Avery sidestepped his charge, tripped him, put a knee on Red Stripe’s back as he rolled on the ground and wrapped his arms around Red Stripe’s huge jaws. He pushed down with his knee and jerked back. Bones crunched.

“Well done, lad!” Bellows cried.

Avery glowered at him. “I killed a man. I don’t want congratulations.”

“Aye, you killed him, and it was lovely. ‘Let’s settle this like men’ – what was that all about, then? Sometimes, you need to feel it – ” Avery had never noticed how yellow the whites of Bellows’s eyes were, as if they had become stained along with his teeth in a half-century of hard living.

Abruptly, Avery said, “Jim, what’re you doing?” James had his magnox in a hundred pieces and was tinkering furiously.

He looked up, his eyes refocusing as his mind came back from the realm of the purely technical. “I’m sorry – I wanted to be of some help, but – this infernal weapon!”

The temple door groaned open, revealing a dozen more warriors. “No time for that, Jim,” Avery said. “Better make peace with your Indifferent Providence!” The soldiers advanced, spears held high.

“The very idea is a paradox!” James said. “There!” He raised the magnox. “Anticipate antilepton annihilation!”

The torches snuffed out simultaneously, plunging the room into darkness. Blue-white lightning blazed from the magnox and struck the croc-men; in the blackness, Avery swore he saw their dancing skeletons for half a moment, and the electrified image lingered white-hot on his eyeballs after the croc-men fell. The torches burst back to life, revealing the croc-men, dead and steaming, at their feet.

After a few moments’ silence, James said, “I didn’t expect it to work so well. I must say I’m shocked.”

“Not half so bad as them, mate!” Bellows said, and Avery burst into laughter. James laughed, and Bellows joined in. They laughed until their sides hurt.

“To digress,” James said, wiping tears from his eyes, “we’re trapped deep underground, likely under the surface of the lake. We’re surrounded by hundreds of hostile beast-men, probably alert and bloodthirsty, and however many thralls they can set against us. We must evade them and find a way to reach the surface.”

“I say we exterminate the brutes!” Bellows said, slamming his fist into his palm. “Come on, lads. You saw what they did to Larsen. They are creatures without compassion, without conscience. You can’t call them humans anymore than you can call a gorilla a bicycle tire.”

Avery was doubtful. “I don’t know, sir. They walk on two legs, and, as Jim says, they’re descended from humans…”

“Bollocks!” Bellows said. “They’re monsters. I address your attention to poor Larsen.” Avery did not look. “What do you say, Jim?”

James scratched his temple with the magnox. “I withhold my opinion on their humanity. I do not enjoy the slaughter of animals, monsters, or men. But they have placed themselves between us and liberation, and we cannot be responsible for the consequences. That said, I would avoid shedding blood however we can.”

Avery shook his head. “I feel on the first step to something dark and unfathomable,” he said, “but I must agree. We’ll do what is needed, and we’ll breathe British air again!”

Bellows grinned and hefted his spear. “That’s the spirit, my son! Let’s skewer these bastards!”

#

The croc-men charged again, and, like the last wave, they fell twitching and smoking as bolts of electricity cooked their flesh and burst their eyeballs. James was the conductor, the magno-ray his baton, and the screams and snarls of their enemies the many-voiced requiem. The blue bolt cut a swath through the croc-men and their armed slaves, and where it touched it left smoking ruin.

“I say,” said Avery, “I haven’t seen so much scorched flesh since my last holiday on the seaside!”

James laughed and replied, “Fortunately for them, the magnox delivers a relatively swift death, though that death is terribly excruciating in recompense for its brevity. An unintentional quirk of its construction, I assure you.” He blasted a squadron of murderous croc-men as they lifted their spears to throw. Their blackened corpses crumpled to the ground.

Meanwhile Bellows and Avery worked with their spears, killing any croc-men who slipped past James’s electric web of death. Though the croc-men were stronger and tougher, they lacked skill; for years, they had fought nothing fiercer than an obstinate slave, and it told on their poor coordination and virtually nonexistent tactics. Avery had no difficulty turning their strength into clumsiness, and his superior agility allowed him to overcome multiple croc-men at once.

A croc-man of great size broke the ranks and ducked a magno-beam. His size bespoke many years, and his animal eyes gleamed cunningly. He beat his scaly chest and howled a tirade at them; Avery listened for a moment, fascinated, then ran his spear through the roof of the croc-man’s mouth, lifting him upward with the tip and ramming the flint head into his foe’s septum pellucidum, via the frontal lobe and gyrus cinguli.

“What was he saying?” Avery asked, as he struggled to withdraw his spear.

“That he remembered the golden days of Crocodopolis, when man lay with croc in peace and harmony, and learning was revered above all – a golden era, when philosopher-crocs walked with gods in the many-tiered gardens, and all was light and goodness, a civilization against which Athens was an anthill and Troy a pigpen.”

“A right shame, that,” Avery said. “Look sharp, Jim, there’s a whole troop of the buggers!”

The blue lightning crackled, and fifteen more of the croc-men fell dead. By the size of their jaws and number of teeth, Avery guessed that some of them were mere adolescents.

“I haven’t seen so many butchered reptiles since turtle soup night at the Savoy!” Avery said jovially.

#

“The problem of our escape remains,” Avery said, after the croc-men were scattered and fleeing. “We’re under more tons of stone than Samson in the temple, and under more fathoms of water than Sir Francis Drake. Can you rig us up a bathysphere? Or perhaps a bathyscaphe?”

James shook his head. “I have no salvage from which to work. The only post-Stone Age implement I’ve found amongst these sad degenerates is the king’s pouch, and it contains nothing more than… a whistle.” James piped it disconsolately.

As the shrill sonorations of the whistle faded away, Avery heard a low rumbling roar from the end of the chamber, the end through which they had entered a few hours ago. An alien sensation gripped him; a second later he realized that, for the first time in his life, he was experiencing fear – for the rumbling roar heralded the arrival of none other than Eustace, king of beasts!

The leviathan came rampaging into the room, jaws open. Avery’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of those teeth, measurable in handspans, and he braced himself to fight as best he could. Under normal circumstances, he would welcome this contest, but he was poorly armed, and, after personally dispatching almost a hundred mutant croc-men, slightly fatigued. Still, he would not go quietly. Eustace would work for his dinner.

The monster was almost upon him.

James blew the whistle again.

Eustace stopped inches before his saberlike fangs rammed into Avery’s skull. His jaws gaped. He seemed to be waiting for something.

“By Gad!” Avery crowed. “Jim, you’ve hypnotized him, like a Delhi snake charmer!”

“Impossible,” James said. “Reptiles have no true ears; they sense vibrations in the ground. It’s the waving motion of the charmer’s flute that hypnotizes, not the actual sound.”

“Yet we’re unchewed! After all, he’s trained to carry men to and from the surface. We’ll just step inside and away we go. By Gad, Jim, I knew you’d get us out of this somehow!”

“Yes, well… genius, you know.”

“I’m not chomping at the bit to do this, exactly.” Avery tentatively stepped onto Eustace’s slippery tongue. “But it seems our only escape. Gentlemen, kindly step inside the crocodile.”

Bellows shook his head. “I never thought I’d hear that again. All right, lads, old men first.” Bellows stepped into Eustace’s maw; a spasm of the enormous tongue, and he was gone.

“Take a deep breath and hold it,” Avery said. “I’ll see you topside, mate!” He threw himself into the pink throat.

#

Blinking and dripping, they emerged from Eustace’s gorge and into the bright sunlight on the Tanganyika lake shore. Avery patted the crocodile’s snout.

“Thanks, old boy. To think I wanted to shoot you, you magnificent animal. Jim, think how clever he must be to play the cabman! What training, and what brains behind this scaly skull! It just goes to show, even the roughest-looking creatures can be almost like people at times. So long, chum!” Eustace slid back into the water.

“You might have said ‘see you again,’” James said. “I intend on returning to this place, better prepared and better equipped, and wresting its secrets. We have much yet to learn from Crocodopolis.”

“And the Royal Geographic Society will be happy to help, lad,” Bellows said. He extended his hand. “Or should I say Fellow Blankenship?”

“I say,” James murmured, dumbfounded, as they shook hands. “Quite an honor, quite an honor.”

“Now,” Avery said, “just where are we? He didn’t deposit us at our camp, for sure. We must be a fair piece south.”

“Judging by the flora,” James said, studying a blade of grass on the bank, “I’d say we’re on the Congo shore.”

“Aye,” agreed Bellows. “And these corpses bear the paint and jewelry of the Bakongo. We must be on the Congo side.”

They followed his gesture; the grassy land stretching away from the shore was thick with fresh corpses, perhaps sixty of them. Blood covered the grass so thickly that the stalks bent with its weight. Judging by the screams and moans, not all the men, women, and children were quite dead yet. A few very tall men, whom Bellows identified as highland cannibals, walked among the Bakongo with machetes, hacking off hands and stuffing them in pouches.

“For currency,” Bellows explained. “They can give the severed hands to the Belgians instead of meeting their rubber or ivory quotas. A good system, practical and efficient.”

A white man approached them warily. He was dressed in khakis and carried a rifle. Bellows gave a cry of joy at seeing him. “Henry Morton Stanley, I presume?” he said, his hand outstretched.

“Why, yes,” said the fellow, in a Welsh accent. “Pleased as hell to see you, Bellows.” They made introductions. “But, pray tell, what are you doing in the Congo?”

“Oh, a little field work for the Royal Geographic Society. You?”

“Working for the Belgians now. His Majesty Leopold the Second owns all the lands between the lake and the western branch of the Congo River, where the Frogs are. Administration sent me out here to stop an uprising. They were turning violent, these Bakongo, and His Majesty won’t take any chances with the rubber quotas. So administration gave me a detachment of these cannibals to put them down before anyone was hurt.”

“And thank God for that,” Avery said.

Stanley glanced at Avery, then back to Bellows. “Nasty business, sometimes, but it’s all for their own good. The International African Association’s bringing money into the region, money, and doctors, teachers, and missionaries. They provide the rubber and ivory, and we’ll do our part to bring them into the nineteenth century.”

“God’s work,” Bellows said.

“This is a damned frightful country,” Avery said.

“I was not always convinced of the wisdom of interfering with foreign cultures,” James said. They strolled through the field of massacre as he pontificated. “But if the experience of the past two days has taught me anything, it’s that these savages will enslave, butcher, or sacrifice each other in weird liver-excising rituals. They need a guiding hand, and if it needs be European, it may as well be Belgian! I always liked the Belgians – smart, efficient fellows, hard workers and good organizers. I’m pleased to see the Congo in good hands, Mr. Stanley, and I daresay it augurs well for this country’s future, and other nations lucky enough to fall under European influence! I see nothing but good things to come for Africa!”

The End

Hahaha… oh, man. That’s rough. But, seriously, colonialism is one of the worst crimes perpetrated by man, and Leopold II’s Congo is the ugliest example. (Elucidation is a wiki search away, dear readers… oh, fine, I’ll do your work for you.)

Anyway, if you’d like to argue about this buggaroo of an ending, send me an email and we’ll talk about it. See you next week!

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A slightly shorter segment today, the better to whet your appetite - for murder!

Last time, our heroes uncovered strange and perplexing clues as to Crocodopolis’s origin; they confronted the dread reptilian menace known as Eustace, and now they appear to be dead. What’s next?

…

In the milky darkness, James heard the voice of the man who could only be Francis Bacon.

“Greetings, apostle.”

“Apostle?” James squinted. “I assure you, sir, while I may greatly admire your invention of the scientific method, I worship at no man’s altar.”

Bacon chuckled, rippling his lacy collar. “Your subconscious summoned me. It’s amusing how even the most steadfast nontheist will call on a greater force in time of distress.”

“Greater – greater force?” James stammered. “Listen, you foppish Elizabethan, I’ve invented more at the age of twenty-five than you had at sixty-five, when, I might add, you died from going out in the cold without a scarf! Some polymath you are!”

Bacon bristled. “You whelp! I perfected the process of inductive reasoning! I wrote three of Shakespeare’s plays!”

“Oh, Coriolanus, a triumph named in the same breath as Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet…”

“Fine! I won’t impart my dazzling insight from the afterlife! You’re on your own, you insouciant cur!” Bacon receded into the haze, and James snorted, glad to be rid of the intruder and able to devote his concentration to the difficulty at hand. He was dreaming – one needn’t be the Viscount of Saint Alban’s to know that – and his dreams were getting stranger by the second. Now, he dreamt that a muscular rhythm propelled him through a sticky passage toward a pool of light, almost as if he were being vomited forth; but his agile mind quickly rejected this possibility. He scraped across a row of teeth, which seemed surprisingly real and painful, and then he was floundering on a sandy floor. Strong hands lifted him.

“Avery!” James cried. “You just woke me from the most peculiar dream. If only I had my somnophone!”

Avery gave him a Dawesian grin. “No dream, mate. I’m dripping with croc spittle as well.” And it was so. James heard a terrific croaking belch, and a litany of fiery curses announced Bellows’s presence. Avery rushed to the old man, and James peered into the darkness beyond their ring of torchlight; that was definitely Eustace sliding into the water.

“By the flaming rings of Saturn!” James gasped. “Were we really transported via crocodile?” Avery shrugged. “And it’s still more comfortable than the Underground. Faster, too. There’s Larsen,” he said.

“Aye,” Larsen said, staggering to his feet and wiping mucus from his eyes.

“But where are we?” Avery said.

James cleaned his glasses, which had miraculously remained on his face through the ordeal. The torches illuminated a small chamber sealed at one end by a ponderous stone door, terminating at the other in the watery passage down which Eustace had vanished. Hieroglyphs covered the marble walls. “By the architecture – Crocodopolis.”

“Blimey!” Avery offered.

“I don’t care if we’re in bloody Shangri-la,” Bellows growled. “Nobody commandeers Archibald G. Bellows, F.G.S., Q.G.M., C.B.E., and gets away with it. You retain your firearm, lad?”

“No, sir,” Avery said. “I lost it somewhere between ingress and egress.”

They took stock. They had retained a penknife, James’s magnox, two cheroots, and Bellows’s flask. Larsen had a tin of pickled herring.

“I say we swim for it,” Avery said.

James checked him. “Not a chance. If we’re really in Crocodopolis, the water pressure must be tremendous. No doubt there’s a lock at the end of this passage to equalize the pressure, or else our skulls would be imploding at this very moment. If you could clear that lock – and I doubt the powers that opened it for Eustace would open it for you – then you would merely have the pleasure of instant death.”

“Then we go through that door.”

“How? It must weigh a ton.” James reviewed their supplies. “If I had a bit of manganese, I could fashion an ion cutter…”

“I’ll just put my shoulder to it,” Avery said, and did so. He strained until sweat beaded on his forehead, to no avail.

“Calm, Mr. Dawes,” James said. “Whoever brought us here will surely return soon enough – or else, between these torches and our own respiration, we’d exhaust the oxygen in this small room and suffocate within an hour!” He laughed. “That should comfort you.”

“You’re right, Jim. I feel better already!”

The door groaned and began to open; Avery tensed, and James recognized the tension. “Stand down, soldier,” he said. “We don’t stand a chance of overpowering them – let’s see what they want first, anyway.” James rubbed his hands. “I’m quite a bit excited to meet our ruthless captors. Imagine the secrets they might hold! Did my sketchbook survive the trip?” James began to pat his pockets, then froze in horror.

Their captors entered the room, nightmare shapes in the shadow of the doorway, and not much better in the torchlight. Avery remembered the impression that he had dismissed as fantasy or illusion – and here it was in the flesh. Bipedal in construction, with a large, saurian head, counterbalanced by a muscular, ridged tail – crocodiles with human ambitions, walking upright and speaking human speech!

“Where do they fit in your evolution theories, Jim?” Avery whispered.

“I sincerely doubt they are the product of natural design.” James was white-faced.

Only Bellows retained control of his nerve. “Ugly bastards, aren’t they?” he growled.

Four of the croc-men came in. They carried flint-headed spears. One of them, whom Avery assumed was a leader, had a red-tinted stripe on his back; he carried a rusty iron axe. He addressed the humans in a rolling, growly speech that, though distorted, sounded almost human.

“Jim?” Avery asked.

“It’s strange,” Jim said. “Similar to the proto-Greek of the hieroglyphs, but distorted with the passage of millennia and the inadequacy of their tongues and lips; a workable comparison is our English to Chaucer’s. But I think I can manage.” James replied, tentatively at first, then with growing confidence as his tongue and mind became accustomed to the strange language.

The leader registered surprise – the reptilian face was hardly expressive, but Avery read animals and people alike with ease – and grumbled a question to James. James laughed and replied.

“He wants to know how I can decipher their strange language. I told him I used to have a Cockney manservant, but I fear the reference is lost on him.” James doubled over as a croc-man drove the butt of his spear into James’s stomach. Avery tensed. The leader, whom Avery named Red Stripe, gurgled and growled into James’s ear.

“He reminds me that laughter is the privilege of the ruling class,” James gasped. “What an interesting taboo.”

The croc-men jabbed at the four humans with their crude weapons, prodding them through the door. Avery tolerated the jabs; now was not the moment. He was sure that he and Bellows could overpower at least one of the terrible beings, and Larsen looked like he could hold his own, but James might be killed before Avery could do anything. Best to bide his time.

James scanned the torchlit walls as they walked. “The architecture is the same as that above – marble construction in the Greek mode. Neither Corinthian, nor Athenian, yet a style that combines elements of both – and covered with these runes halfway between Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, describing proto-Greek. It seems, Dawes, that this culture is a synthesis of all Mediterranean and Fertile Crescent cultures of the ancient world!” He mused for a moment. “Yet populated by monsters.”

“You’re saying that they collected bits and pieces from two thousand years of history and combined them in the heart of Africa,” Avery said. “That’s a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?”

“But that means…” James pounded his fist into his palm, startling the guards, who jabbed him accordingly. “I’ve fallen into my characteristic error, Dawes, and applied too much brainpower to the problem. The blunt instrument of your brain has smashed the barrier which the incisive scalpel of my own mind could only slice to entangling shreds. Kudos, my good man. What you have suggested is that this culture is the common origin of the ancient world! Africa is the cradle of mankind, after all!” He rubbed his chin. “Yet why the monsters?”

“Perhaps it’s like your Darwin fellow says,” Avery suggested. “Evolution.”

“And those with crocodile-like features have a greater chance to reproduce? No, Avery, natural selection could never bridge this gap.”

“Thank God. I’d hate to think these beasties might have come from men.” Avery shuddered. “Or vice-versa.”

The tunnel opened to a large chamber, lit by hundreds of torches, the light magnified by shining mirrors. Hundreds of croc-men moved in their daily business. Some pulled slaves on leashes. Avery peered at them and uttered a cry of surprise. “Their slaves are human!”

“Just the little lake-dwelling niggers,” Bellows said.

“I suppose if Eustace has lived for hundreds of years, and has the training or intelligence to capture people as he captured us, then the many reported devourments were actually abductions!”

A few large buildings dominated the chamber. Avery had visited enough lost civilizations to recognize them as temples and palaces. Some of the croc-men lived in brick or mud houses around the foot of these buildings, but many simply slept in the mud. Their captors directed them to the grandest of the temples. They passed before a very worn statue of colossal proportions. It depicted a human form, and Avery, who had scrabbled around many ruins, put its age at – very, very old indeed. It stretched almost to the ceiling of the chamber forty feet above.

They entered the temple. Inside were a large, flat altar, the ubiquitous hieroglyphs, and two stone tablets on the far wall. Something about the altar warranted a second glance; Avery noted with disgust that dark dried blood caked its surface.

The croc-men herded them into a wooden pen at the rear of the temple, near the tablets. Red Stripe growled something. James’s face lit up and he bowed as the croc-men retreated.

“He says we’re to meet the king,” James said. “And receive, additionally, a very great honor, an honor beyond our comprehension.”

“Meaning, no doubt, that they’re going to sacrifice us to their heathen gods,” Bellows said.

James’s face fell. “Very interesting from an anthropological viewpoint,” he said. “Human sacrifice is astoundingly widespread in antiquity – the Aztec and Maya of the New World, of course, and, occasionally, in the classical world, though in extreme circumstances. Iphigenia, for example, perished at the mandate of the gods; however, in the Egyptian Old Kingdom, and even in the Hebrew culture…”

Avery tested the bars of the cage. They were lashed together with time-hardened leather thongs; they might as well have been iron.

“One thing I notice,” Avery said, “is these gents didn’t build Crocodopolis.”

“Of course not,” James said. “They are necessarily the descendants.”

“And however Crocodopolis was built, they lost the means. Did you notice? Most of them don’t even live in houses. They just wallow in the mud. They’ve lost civilization.”

“Well, if one equates standards of physical shelter with civilization, yes. I follow your point.”

“And Red Stripe has an iron weapon, but it’s older than he is by far. I’m thinking, if these chaps are a branch of the Atlantis family tree, it fell off and withered up.”

James frowned. “I hate to pass a qualitative sentence on an entire people like that, especially on so brief an acquaintance.”

“I agree with the lad,” Bellows said. “They’re a bunch of degenerate bastards.”

“That isn’t quite what I meant…” Avery said.

“They should never have crawled from their pit!” Bellows said. “These parodies of man – these grotesqueries! Walking on two legs, like humans!”

James studied the tablets. “I believe they may still have a claim to the species,” James said. “These tablets appear to be a creation story of some sort. See, the hieroglyphs have greater refinement than those of the temple; if I am correct (and I always am), they’re much older than the temple. Here is the word I translate as ‘Ensi-ka,’ and you want to call ‘Atlantis’. Here is the name for their people – again, the link to ‘Ensi-ka.’ It translates as those sent forth, to colonize and – hmm – uplift the savages of these lands. Yet distant ‘Ensi-ka’ was lost, and in the same cataclysm, this city, Erdu-kan, was submerged. Rather than abandon the uninhabitable city, they used – this translates as ‘magic,’ but undoubtedly they refer to some lost technology – to breed with the crocodiles.” James blinked. “I must have read that wrong.”

“Makes sense to me,” Bellows said. “A degenerate race born of bestiality and black magic. They’re as bad as the bloody French!”

Ha! Those French are the worst!
(Fun PowerReader™ fact: Eustace is based on a real-life killer crocodile named Gustave.)
Next, prepare for the thrilling conclusion of “Crocodopolis!”

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