The Antipope Read Online Free PDF

peering into its bottom.
    “What are you looking for?” queried Norman.
    “Aha,” the tramp said, tapping his nose significantly. “Now you are asking me a question.”
    “I am,” said Norman.
    “And I shall answer you,” said the tramp, “with a short tale which although brief is informative and morally satisfying.”
    Norman said, “Many a mickle makes a muckle,” and it was clear that his thoughts were elsewhere.
    “A friend of mine used to drink coffee, I say used to, for all I know he still does, but as I have heard neither hide nor hair of him for five years I must remain uncertain upon this point.”
    Norman yawned. “Sorry,” he said, “I had a rough night.”
    The tramp continued unabashed. “This friend of mine used to drink coffee in a glass cup not dissimilar to this and one day as he finished a cup do you know what he found had been slipped into it?”
    “The King’s Shilling,” said Norman. “I’ve heard this story.”
    “The King’s Shilling,” said the tramp, who was plainly ignoring Norman’s remarks, “He tipped it into his hand and said the fatal ‘Look at this lads’, and within a trice the pressmen were upon him.”
    “I’ve had some dealings with the press myself,” said Norman.
    “The pressmen were upon him and he was dragged away screaming to a waiting bungboat and thence to who knows where.”
    The tramp made this last statement with such an air of sombre authenticity that his voice echoed as if coming from some dark and evil dungeon. Norman, who was lining up another sarcastic comment, held his counsel.
    “You said just now that you had heard the story,” said the tramp in a leaden tone.
    “Did I?” said Norman, perspiring freely about the brow. “I don’t think I did.”
    “You did.”
    “Oh.”
    “Then let me put you straight on this, Norman.” Norman did not recall telling the tramp his name, and this added to his growing unease. “Let it be known to you that this story, which although brief was in its way informative and morally satisfying, was a true and authentic tale involving a personal acquaintance of mine and let no other man, be he living, dead or whatever say otherwise!”
    Norman fingered his collar, which had grown suddenly tight. “I wouldn’t,” he said in a voice of tortured conviction. “Not me.”
    “Good,” said the tramp. Leaning forward across the table he stared hard into Norman’s eyes much in the manner of a cobra mesmerizing a rabbit. Norman prepared his nostrils to receive the ghastly reek of dereliction and wretchedness generally associated with the ill-washed brotherhood of the highway. Strangely no such stench assailed his delicate nasal apparatus, rather a soft yet strangely haunting odour, one that Norman could not quite put a name or place to. The scent touched a nerve of recollection somewhere in his past, and he felt a cold shudder creeping up his backbone.
    Norman became transfixed. The tramp’s eyes, two red dots, seemed to swell and expand, filling all the Plume Café, engulfing even Lily’s giant breasts. Two huge red suns glittering and glowing, gleaming with strange and hideous fires. Awesome and horrendous, they devoured Norman, scorching him and shrivelling him to a blackened crisp. He could feel his clothes crackling in the heat, the skin blistering from his hands and the nails peeling back to reveal blackening stumps of bone. The glass melted from his wristwatch and Mickey’s face puckered and vanished in the all-consuming furnace. Norman knew that he was dead, that his wife had slipped from his grasp and that he was far, far away watching this destruction of his human form from some place of safety. Yet he was also there, there in that blazing skeleton, there inside the warped and shrinking skull watching and watching.
    “Are you going to drink these coffees or shall I pour them down the sink?” said Lily Marlene.
    Norman shook himself awake with a start. The tramp had gone and the two coffees were