‘That’s an excellent suggestion,’ he said rather sheepishly. ‘How about it, Pancho? Shall we jump into the lake?’
‘Of course,’ said Pancho, who was gazing at the crocodile with rapture, ‘but only if I get eaten too. Could that be arranged?’
‘I’m pretty full already,’ the monster gurgled, ‘but I’ve still got room for half a horse or so. I could at least rip your belly open and nibble your guts a bit.’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’ Pancho cried eagerly. ‘Let’s go!’
He pranced backwards another two steps, flexed his hind legs, and got ready to jump. Very slowly and without a sound, the crocodile opened its huge jaws to reveal a glistening green tongue awash with slime and blue blood. Surrounding it were mountain ranges of sharp-edged teeth with shreds of knightly armour lodged between them.
Gustave let go of the reins and dug his spurs in. ‘We’re coming!’ he cried joyously.
Pancho bounded towards the edge of the precipice. The monsters in the lake emitted a collective sigh, a voluptuous sound expressive of avid anticipation. Strangely enough, the sound trans-fixed Gustave’s chest like an icy blade. At the same time, a thought shot through his mind: How can I love the Most Monstrous of All Monsters if my heart belongs to the beautiful damsel? Something inside him seemed to rip like canvas. Feeling faint, he clutched his chest, lost his balance, and fell off just as Pancho leapt boldly over the cliff. He landed on his back with a clatter of armour, but crawled to the edge on all fours as fast as he could. From below came a pandemonium of splashing, whinnying and grunting. Gustave was just in time to see Pancho disappear, hindquarters first, into the monster’s maw. There was a blissful—nay, ecstatic—expression on the horse’s face.
‘I love this crocodile!’ Pancho cried fervently. Then he was gone.
The saurian’s jaws closed with a snap. It gave a huge gulp, then redirected its attention to Gustave.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ it cooed, gazing at him lovingly. ‘Why don’t you jump?’
‘I, er,’ Gustave said haltingly. ‘My heart …’
The crocodile’s heavy eyelids drooped.
‘Oh, no,’ it groaned, ‘don’t tell me your heart belongs to another?’
Gustave nodded.
‘Well, well, so you’re a genuine knight errant, eh?’ The creature’s tone was coldly contemptuous now.
Gustave seemed to awaken from a trance. What had he almost done? What had happened to Pancho? Why was he crawling about on all fours, talking to a crocodile?
‘Not bad, eh, that trick with my voice?’ the monster said with a grin. ‘No idea how I do it, but it works every time. Must be some kind of acoustic hypnosis. I could join a circus.’
Gustave scrambled to his feet. ‘It seems you really are the Most Monstrous of All Monsters,’ he called. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and he noticed that the crocodile kept glancing nervously at the sky.
‘You’ve eaten my horse,’ he went on, his voice trembling with rage and determination. He drew his sword. ‘I’m going to come down and kill you and take one of your teeth. You’ve asked for it, Most Monstrous of All Monsters!’
‘Hush, not so loud!’ whispered the crocodile.
‘What is it? What are you talking about?’
‘That bit about the Most Monstrous of All Monsters. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind lowering your voice a little.’
‘What do you mean? You are the Most Monstrous of All Monsters, aren’t you?’ Gustave had no intention of lowering his voice. It was thundering loudly now.
‘Ssh!’ hissed the crocodile.
‘Answer me, Most Monstrous of All Monsters!’
Gustave was in a rage. His injunction was underlined by a violent thunderclap.
‘Er, well, of course I’m a monstrous monster, but … well, I’m only averagely monstrous,’ the crocodile mumbled, gritting its teeth and anxiously scanning the sky with its saurian eyes.
‘Just a minute!’ Gustave exclaimed. ‘Does that mean you aren’t the Most Monstrous of All Monsters at all?’
The sky above the seething lake was growing dark. Propelled across it by fierce gusts of wind, grey clouds circled over the valley in ever darker, ever denser spirals. All the monsters on the rocky shore dived headlong into the lake. The giant spider toppled backwards out of its crack, fell through the air, and sank beneath the seething surface, frantically waving its legs. The crocodile gave a furious snarl, and remnants of its penultimate meal—a head, a foot, a mailed arm—came flying out of its mouth. It lashed its tail wildly, then dived head first into the blue waves, creating a gurgling whirlpool that sucked the few other remaining monsters into the depths. Within a few moments, there was no sign that the lake had once been alive with them.
Out of the whirling clouds there now came a menacing sound, a loud grunting and panting that drowned the roar of the wind and the rumble of the thunder.
The clouds parted like a curtain, and through the dark cleft between them came a creature that almost defied description. It was too grotesque to seem genuinely malign and too hideous to be comical. Bigger than any dragon, it was a pig with the clawed forefeet of a lizard, the hind legs of a goat, a serpent’s tail, and the wings of an eagle.
With a few majestic wing-beats, it swooped down and hovered above the cliff on which Gustave was standing.
A dark swirl of cloud, which had followed the creature down, dispersed beneath it into a pall of mist swarming with vague grey forms. They seemed to materialise from one moment to the next, only to disappear once more, forever merging or passing through one another.
‘I am the Most Monstrous of All Monsters,’ snorted the flying pig—less to Gustave, it seemed, than to the monsters lurking in Lake Blue-Blood, for its voice was excessively loud. ‘I, and I alone!’
Gustave had to summon up all his courage to accost the creature, but it was high time to clarify the situation.
‘With respect,’ he said, ‘several different individuals have already made the same claim, so I really must insist on proof. No offence intended, but I’ve just seen some even more monstrous-looking creatures—a spider the size of a horse, for instance.’
The huge pig’s dark eyes gave Gustave a lingering look. Then it sighed and said, in a perceptibly milder voice, ‘Aesthetic criteria aren’t the issue here.’ There followed a pensive grunt, as if the creature were marshalling its thoughts in preparation for a lengthy dissertation.
‘It’s a question of effect, not appearance,’ it went on. ‘I possess the wings of an angel and the face of a demon. My skin resembles the coarsest sandpaper and my tongue … oh, I can’t remember what my terrible tongue consists of! I eat everything: meat and vegetable matter, mud and sand, wood and stone, iron and gold, stars and planets. I eat water and air. I devour light itself, and I’ll also devour you. I’m already doing so, in fact, though you’re still too young to notice. One day I shall choke on myself and the universe will implode—not that you’ll be there to witness the event. No one will.’
Gustave found this such a thoroughly self-assured and impressive performance, all he could think of to do was to ask, in a subdued voice, ‘So who exactly are you?’
‘I am Time!’ the winged monster squealed triumphantly, and the grey shapes beneath it milled around in a state of even greater agitation.
‘Those,’ the Time Pig explained, indicating the nebulous figures, ‘are my army of microseconds.’ It made a dismissive gesture with its claw-tipped forefoot. ‘They’re just moments, instants, twinklings of an eye, cannon fodder. I get through vast numbers of them.’
The pig fluttered down, landed on the cliff in front of Gustave, and remained standing on its hind legs. It was many times his height.
‘So much for me, but who are you? Who is it that wants to make the acquaintance of the Most Monstrous of All Monsters?’
‘My name is Gustave. Gustave Doré.’
‘Never heard of you,’ said the Time Pig, enveloping him in a miasma of foul-smelling brea
th.
‘That’s not surprising,’ said Gustave. ‘I’m still pretty young, so I haven’t had a chance to make a name for myself. I’m not here of my own free will, either. I was sent by Death.’
‘Death?’ the Time Pig thundered. ‘That silly ass? What’s he after this time? He’d do better to carve his soul-coffins and attend to that demented sister of his.’
‘So you aren’t a servant of Death?’
‘No. Yes. No. Er, that’s to say … What a stupid question! I’m no one’s servant! Death and I, er … We cooperate from time to time, but that’s all.’ The Time Pig looked irritated. ‘Anyway, what business is it of yours?’
‘Well,’ Gustave said haltingly, ‘it’s a long and complicated story. All right, to be frank—please don’t be angry!—I’m supposed to extract one of your teeth.’ There, the truth was out.
The huge pig’s whole demeanour changed in a flash. It bent down and looked at Gustave with an expression of mingled pain and hope.
‘You want to pull one of my teeth?’ it grunted. ‘That would be a godsend!’ It opened its jaws, enabling Gustave to see far into its maw. ‘The thing is, one of my molars is badly abscessed. The whole of the root has filled up with sulphur. You see the stench that comes out of my mouth? It’s almost unendurable.’
Gustave peered into the creature’s mouth. It was true: he could not only smell but actually see the effluvium that rose from the right-hand side of the lower jaw. Like fumes from the crater of a volcano, it was issuing from an exceptionally rotten tooth flanked by other neglected brown stumps.
‘I’ve never managed to persuade anyone to relieve me of it,’ the Time Pig went on. ‘If you’d take on the job, I’d be more than grateful.’
Gustave ventured another look into the stinking mouth. The smell almost knocked him backwards, and he couldn’t help retching.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said manfully, ‘—as long as I can keep the tooth when it’s out.’
‘Say no more!’ the Time Pig exclaimed. ‘Of course you can have the confounded thing. I’ll be glad to be rid of it.’
‘Then please go down on all fours,’ said Gustave, drawing his sword. ‘And open your mouth a bit wider.’
The Time Pig complied. It hinged down its lower jaw, and Gustave bravely planted one foot on the slimy tongue, which really did look as if no one could have told what it consisted of. The stench was almost unbearable, but Gustave tried to hold his breath and act as quickly as possible. Inserting the tip of his sword between the gum and the neck of the tooth, he called, ‘This may hurt a bit!’ and resolutely thrust it in. The blade severed several nerves, the pig gave an agonised grunt, the ruined tooth’s crater vented a jet of blood and pus the thickness of a man’s arm. Gustave was un-deterred. Using the sword as a lever, he threw his full weight against it and prised the rotten tooth from its inflamed socket with a sound like a gumboot being yanked out of a bog. Then he seized hold of the tooth, severed the remaining nerves, and, gasping for breath, regained the open air.
The Time Pig reared up with a groan, then doubled up in pain, whimpering and wailing and flapping its wings hysterically. Meanwhile, Gustave carefully wiped the tooth clean on some tufts of grass and stowed it inside his breastplate.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘feeling better?’
The monster, which had quietened a little, was moaning and clutching its right cheek. ‘That was a unique experience,’ it groaned. ‘Many thanks, though. I do feel considerably better.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Gustave. He decided to get down to brass tacks. ‘Would you think it very impolite of me to ask you a favour in return?’
‘You’ve already got the tooth,’ the Time Pig grunted. ‘Besides, I’m very busy.’
‘It’s only another question,’ said Gustave. ‘My next task is to meet myself, and I’ve no idea how to set about it.’
‘That’s impossible,’ the Time Pig said meditatively.
‘I know.’
‘Let me finish! It’s only impossible so long as you’re in your own spatio-temporal continuum. If you changed your continuum, however, you could see your spatio-temporal continuum projection in your future-contingency honeycomb, which would more or less amount to meeting yourself.’
‘I don’t understand. What’s a spatio-temporal, er …’
‘Spatio-temporal continuum projection? It gives you a view of your future-contingency time warp. In other words … Well, I really can’t explain that either. But I can take you there.’
‘Really?’
‘Of course. All we have to do is take a trip into the future.’
‘Could you do that?’
‘Hey,’ the pig exclaimed, ‘I’m Time, remember?’
GUSTAVE SEATED HIMSELF on the Time Pig’s back. It spat a little blood and pus into Lake Blue-Blood, then flapped its leathery wings and took off. Above the clouds within moments, they climbed higher and higher. Time gave another flap of its wings, and they left the earth’s atmosphere behind. The strange pair were surrounded on all sides by a colossal black void sprinkled with stars that glittered so brightly they hurt Gustave’s eyes. Behind them, the earth shrank to a steadily dwindling bluish-white ball.
‘I say,’ Gustave exclaimed, ‘I can breathe! I thought there wasn’t any air in space.’
‘Nonsense,’ the Time Pig replied, ‘there’s everything in space. They also claim there’s no sound here. If that were so, how could you hear me?’
Gustave was surprised at how good the acoustics were in space. He could hear the sun crackling as it burned, and even distant stars rustled like tissue paper. They were just flying past the moon, and he thought he detected a light twinkling at the bottom of one of its craters.
‘The Sea of Tranquillity,’ the Time Pig said, unasked. ‘That’s Death’s house. The light’s on, so he must be at home.’
Before Gustave could reply, the Time Pig flapped its wings several times and they soared past half a dozen planets, some more moons, and a large shower of asteroids. For a while they glided through another black void dimly lit by a few tiny suns in the far distance. Then the specks of light multiplied and condensed until they eventually formed whole constellations in which Gustave seemed to discern familiar shapes, for instance a galloping horse that aroused painful memories of Pancho Sansa. Events had followed one another in such quick succession, he hadn’t got around to mourning the loss of his faithful companion.
‘Yes, that’s the universe for you,’ the Time Pig pontificated. ‘I mean, we’re in it when we’re down on earth, but you don’t realise that until you’re floating around up here, eh? Not even a telescope can convey this sublime impression.’
‘You’re right,’ murmured Gustave, overwhelmed by the boundless panorama.
‘But don’t be too impressed, my boy. Majestic as it may look from here, the structure of the universe is no more complicated than …’ Time searched around for a comparison. ‘Than that of a department store, for instance.’
Gustave remembered the old woman in the forest, who had also blathered about a department store.
‘There are three floors, and a different time prevails on each. The basement contains the past—it’s the storeroom, so to speak, where all that has happened is stacked. The ground floor is the present, where we are right now, and the first floor is reserved for the future—everything that’s going to happen. Or rather, everything that may happen. That’s our destination.’
‘I once met an old woman who also claimed that the world of dreams was like a department store—if I understood her correctly.’
‘I hope she wasn’t a dream princess!’ The Time Pig laughed. ‘The members of that profession like to theorise that the whole of the universe is a dream. A thoroughly subjective interpretation, but quite an interesting philosophy.’
‘If that were right,’ mused Gustave, ‘who would dream it?’
‘Exactly. That would be the next big question: Who is the universe actually dreamt by? Hard to say. By me, perhaps? That would be a
nother very subjective assumption.’ The Time Pig gave a grunt of amusement. ‘But I’m not dreaming. I don’t even sleep. Who knows, perhaps it’s a collective dream—perhaps it’s a kind of porridge stirred by many dreamers. Not a very appetising idea, what?’
Gustave nodded. A meteor not much bigger than his head wobbled past only an arm’s-length away. It was strewn with miniature volcanic craters, one of which was emitting a dainty little flame.
‘But perhaps the universe is being dreamt by you,’ said the Time Pig. ‘Who knows?’
Gustave frowned. ‘I’m certainly not asleep at the moment,’ he said, ‘so how can I be dreaming it?’
‘Right again. Which brings us back to our original question: Who is the universe dreamt by? At least the two of us can be ruled out as suspects. Perhaps it’s dreamt by an ant that lives on Saturn.’
‘Are there really ants on Saturn?’
‘Of course, there are ants everywhere. Did you know that the ants on Saturn have three heads?’
‘Yes,’ said Gustave.
‘You’re a strange lad. You don’t know for sure there are ants on Saturn, yet you know they have three heads.’
Gustave could have enlightened the Time Pig, but he refrained. Instead, he asked, ‘What if the person who’s dreaming it all wakes up?’
The pig gave another laugh. ‘In that case, my boy, it’s curtains!’
Some more little meteors wobbled past, somewhat faster than the first, and Gustave seemed to hear a noise, a roaring, pattering sound like that of a waterfall. Or was it the crackle of a big fire? A sun?
‘We’re nearly there!’ cried the Time Pig. ‘You’d better hold on tight now. We could soon be in for some turbulence.’
A massive asteroid went thundering over their heads. Gustave felt as if he were being tugged at by some mighty, invisible hand that had closed around him and the pig and was towing them along by main force.