PART NINETEEN: After the Blackout:
Post-Swooning Adventures. Mother Nature on a Bad Hair Day.
If we were to wind back the clock a modicum to see the terrified Gadfly, bereft of his breastplate and medals and perhaps even of his sanity, throw up his arms in surrender and drop into a dramatic facsimile of a swoon, we might have thought that this was a rather spineless way for the Tormentor to cover up what must have been for him a serious loss of face. But since gadflies technically have neither spine nor face it seems irrelevant to quibble about the epithet best suited to his cowardice. We would have seen him evaporate into the chocolate darkness behind the stem of a bulrush, after which our ignorance of his fate would have been complete until he reappeared dressed in cobwebs to re-unite himself with the Carp, the Fly and the plot.
After this vanishing act, if we had wondered with understandable curiosity what further trials and tribulations the dictates of his particular dysfunction had in store for him and what other misadventures actually befell him during this missing interlude we would have been at a loss. For all we knew nothing worth noting had happened to him at all.
However honest curiosity deserves to be satisfied, except in the case of cats where, it is said, it is dangerously fatal. But if curiosity killed the cat we have nothing to worry about, for we are not cats and there are no cats at all in this story. Which is a pity for those who hate cats. Still, you cannot satisfy everybody.
After his spectacular swoon the Gadfly had fallen in a rapid tumble no less spectacular than his unexpected loss of consciousness and had passed speedily through the outermost rings of the Spider’s lair. So hurried had been his fall and so fortunate was it in the avoidance of any unpleasant stickiness, that he had passed through the whole insidious construction without adhering to any part of its geometry and had continued on his way down trailing clouds of glory in the form of the more breakable pieces of the cobweb.
He continued to fall until his progress was stopped short by something rubbery and smooth which gave easily under his velocity and on top of which he bounced and bounced and bounced for a while and then stopped. Now that he had put some distance between himself and immediate danger his terror subsided and his senses returned. He opened his eyes, which had remained clamped tight shut since the recent encounter with the Triple Alliance of Doom, and looked about him.
He saw that he was lying motionless on his back, stretched out on a rather leathery but exotically pungent surface. The smell was unfamiliar, but deliciously appealing, and the thing, whatever it might have been, had an odd hood-like shape similar to the awning often observed over the entrances to expensive restaurants. He had, if truth be told, landed on the pointed outer canopy of the Cuckoo Pint.
As he lay in the dent produced by his arrival he noticed that the whole plant seemed to be vibrating beneath his body in an inexplicable but strangely attractive way.
It did not occur to him immediately that this strange and aromatic plant was a very very dangerous place to be. That indeed the sole purpose of its existence, apart from the lesser sideline of reproduction, was to devour flies like himself for breakfast. In the Cuckoo Pint’s favour it could be said that she was happy to make them drunk first. This might well be applauded by those who had never taken the Pledge. However the downside was that after making them drunk and incapable the Cuckoo Pint then cooked her victims alive in a bubbling bath of acid for an unpleasantly extended period of time, before eating them, which would be by anyone’s account a cruelly sobering experience. The Gadfly did not know that the pleasant smell was a cunningly baited trap of pheremonal deception and guile. And that the vibrations he could feel were more than likely the smooth and well oiled functioning of a superbly tuned carnivorous digestive system.
The Tormentor’s mind, blustering and heroic in its set and prejudices, was not tuned to the subtler refinements of doom thought up in the dark by Mother Nature during those black and bilious nights when her aging digestion troubled her and she was quite unable to fall asleep. Having just escaped the jaws of a perfectly comprehensible kind of Armageddon he was completely unprepared for the snares and arrows that might be devised on a bad hair day when Ms Green Machiavelli starts to ponder the question of amino acidic recyclables. We might say that for the first time in many moons the Gadfly was an innocent abroad.
Post-Swooning Adventures. Mother Nature on a Bad Hair Day.
If we were to wind back the clock a modicum to see the terrified Gadfly, bereft of his breastplate and medals and perhaps even of his sanity, throw up his arms in surrender and drop into a dramatic facsimile of a swoon, we might have thought that this was a rather spineless way for the Tormentor to cover up what must have been for him a serious loss of face. But since gadflies technically have neither spine nor face it seems irrelevant to quibble about the epithet best suited to his cowardice. We would have seen him evaporate into the chocolate darkness behind the stem of a bulrush, after which our ignorance of his fate would have been complete until he reappeared dressed in cobwebs to re-unite himself with the Carp, the Fly and the plot.
After this vanishing act, if we had wondered with understandable curiosity what further trials and tribulations the dictates of his particular dysfunction had in store for him and what other misadventures actually befell him during this missing interlude we would have been at a loss. For all we knew nothing worth noting had happened to him at all.
However honest curiosity deserves to be satisfied, except in the case of cats where, it is said, it is dangerously fatal. But if curiosity killed the cat we have nothing to worry about, for we are not cats and there are no cats at all in this story. Which is a pity for those who hate cats. Still, you cannot satisfy everybody.
After his spectacular swoon the Gadfly had fallen in a rapid tumble no less spectacular than his unexpected loss of consciousness and had passed speedily through the outermost rings of the Spider’s lair. So hurried had been his fall and so fortunate was it in the avoidance of any unpleasant stickiness, that he had passed through the whole insidious construction without adhering to any part of its geometry and had continued on his way down trailing clouds of glory in the form of the more breakable pieces of the cobweb.
He continued to fall until his progress was stopped short by something rubbery and smooth which gave easily under his velocity and on top of which he bounced and bounced and bounced for a while and then stopped. Now that he had put some distance between himself and immediate danger his terror subsided and his senses returned. He opened his eyes, which had remained clamped tight shut since the recent encounter with the Triple Alliance of Doom, and looked about him.
He saw that he was lying motionless on his back, stretched out on a rather leathery but exotically pungent surface. The smell was unfamiliar, but deliciously appealing, and the thing, whatever it might have been, had an odd hood-like shape similar to the awning often observed over the entrances to expensive restaurants. He had, if truth be told, landed on the pointed outer canopy of the Cuckoo Pint.
As he lay in the dent produced by his arrival he noticed that the whole plant seemed to be vibrating beneath his body in an inexplicable but strangely attractive way.
It did not occur to him immediately that this strange and aromatic plant was a very very dangerous place to be. That indeed the sole purpose of its existence, apart from the lesser sideline of reproduction, was to devour flies like himself for breakfast. In the Cuckoo Pint’s favour it could be said that she was happy to make them drunk first. This might well be applauded by those who had never taken the Pledge. However the downside was that after making them drunk and incapable the Cuckoo Pint then cooked her victims alive in a bubbling bath of acid for an unpleasantly extended period of time, before eating them, which would be by anyone’s account a cruelly sobering experience. The Gadfly did not know that the pleasant smell was a cunningly baited trap of pheremonal deception and guile. And that the vibrations he could feel were more than likely the smooth and well oiled functioning of a superbly tuned carnivorous digestive system.
The Tormentor’s mind, blustering and heroic in its set and prejudices, was not tuned to the subtler refinements of doom thought up in the dark by Mother Nature during those black and bilious nights when her aging digestion troubled her and she was quite unable to fall asleep. Having just escaped the jaws of a perfectly comprehensible kind of Armageddon he was completely unprepared for the snares and arrows that might be devised on a bad hair day when Ms Green Machiavelli starts to ponder the question of amino acidic recyclables. We might say that for the first time in many moons the Gadfly was an innocent abroad.
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