Short Stories

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The Autopsy of a Gnome
Arnulf Vibler's Special Friends
Clockwork Mice
Doreen and Noreen
Life on a Cake

The Elgin Marbles

A longer story of a boy whose grandfather is responsible for the creation not only of the Elgin Marbles, but of the world itself...

The Elgin Marbles

Windscale Tales

New stories about the huge hero of Plethora of Gits, Wilf Windscale, describing incidents from the long and distinguished police career he managed to fit in between meals.

Plethora of Onion Men
Plethora of Prime Ministers
Shaving Grace

The Autopsy of a Gnome

A gnome has died, only the third ever to die, the third in as many years. The hiding places of his possessions have been known for centuries. So his rods, hats, clay pipes and cudgels have already been distributed among the other gnomes and are hidden in new places. These places also are plotted on the intricate map of his world that each gnome carries in his head - a map which includes every leaf and blade, plus the history of each spot going back to the Ice Age. This, with their slyness, their quick insights and telepathic bent, means that gnomes have no secrets from each other. But a ritual of secretiveness dominates their relationships, which they can't put down.

The autopsy of the latest fatality takes place in the shiny new glass medical centre, built on rocks beside the lake where these same gnomes have always lived. After the last gnome died the old clinic was replaced with this modern, fully-equipped facility. This will be the first autopsy performed there, or indeed ever in gnome history. They need to know what is happening to them.

The two gnome doctors knew their subject for countless thousands of years. They saw the face which they now intend to lift from its skull in all its shades of grumpiness and laughter, all its different eye-rolls and twitches in the anxiety of a secret discovered. They are herbal remedists, these two, not surgeons, have never had a proper look around inside a fellow before and have no idea what to look for. But they are going to do it anyway. Maybe they will find something. They move slowly, flushed under the powerful lights of their theatre.

The medical centre's walls are black mirrors full of lake, clouds and treetops, impenetrable even to a gnome's supernatural eye. But the autopsy is also not to be a secret - those powerful lights make a trick, projecting the autopsy through the black glass onto the rippling surface of the lake. The gnomes are all out in their coracles, pretending to fish, but they are watching, waiting, each with a secret intent of which the others are well aware.

The fact is that a gnome is not made of ordinary flesh, but of trapped seasons, condensed memory that contains all details of days gone by. His closeness to the earth has created this. Long after his animal body should have died, the gnome remains as the world turns, a living illusion to himself and others, too intense to perish. A gnome is - and this is no secret but something they trumpet at the beginning and end of all the mumbo-jumbo they speak - an essential element of nature, without which all existence would come to a halt. So why are two essential gnomes buried in hollow oaks in the copse in the middle of the meadow? And why is a third, a tidge rarer still, white and naked on an aluminium table?

This may or may not be discovered. But what is certain is that when the doctors cut into the deceased, seasons will escape. They will fly like sycamore seeds, but as big as the medical centre's revolving doors, around and around the lake, before floating for an instant, darkening and fading away. The gnomes are waiting for this. They will chase the image of a season until they are into it, rowing on their lake long ago in safer, healthier times. Then they can live the season through again. What better holiday for them than that?

The doctors open the dead gnome from throat to groin, disgusted, frightened, sharp implements in their hands, lumpy noses hanging over the cut. One pokes the huge heart with a saw. It spasms and hisses - a summer day pours over the doctors and they are gone. Outside, on the lake, coracles bump into each other, overturn, ripe oaths become splutters, as seasons flick, blink just beyond their reach like holiday snaps flying in the wind. Then the images are still, floating over the lake. One gnome makes a dash, using his fellows' heads as stepping stones. He is gone. Another surfaces, swims like a whirligig, joins him. A snatch of laughter and raspberries from the other side. Then silence as the phenomenon fades to nothing.

The remaining gnomes dry out on the shore, miserable like unpicked cricketers. No doctors till autumn, when they will drop from nowhere into the lake to receive a crotchety reunion. But if another gnome dies in the meantime, the rest will have today's chance over again - a chance to jump into an old season. It could be any one of them that keels over first. They are none feeling too well. But they do not speak of it because it is a secret.

Inside the medical centre the dead gnome reeks on the aluminium table, drying under the hot lights. The image of his face floats on the lake. Perhaps also - they discuss this with many meaningful grunts - this ghastly reflection was scooped up by an escaping season and will float all whichever-summertime long, keeping the sticklebacks deep, the waterboatmen jittery, while the doctors and those other two ugly mugs gad about in nature's gift, keeping the brief joy of their extra season hidden behind glumness.

Arnulf Vibler's Special Friends

When Arnulf Vibler returned to his small apartment in Imst on Friday the 13th of October 1989, looking forward to a quiet weekend, he found it full of men. He didn't count them rightaway, but there were fifty similar-looking men in new olive green suits and Tyrolean hats in a room that was crowded for two people.

His first thought was that it was some enormous police raid. Second thought was that they were the full set of male relatives of a girl he'd been rough with in Innsbruck during the summer.

But no. Their spokesmen said - though he was so deep in the crush that Vibler couldn't see him - that they came from the future and had been sent by the powers then prevailing to watch over him and make sure he did something.

"What something?" asked Arnulf Vibler.

They wouldn't say. But very affably they filed out, each shaking his hand upon leaving - that was when he counted them. They booked themselves into lodgings all over Imst from where they could keep a constant eye on Arnulf Vibler.

Was he perhaps going to save some important person, somehow? Step in the way of a bullet or car? Father a new Jesus? He had no clue about the something. They wouldn't say.

Three years passed in this way. Every morning on his walk to work he said a good morning at least a dozen of his minders. At lunchtime the park was full of them. Sometimes he had one over for a meal, or went to a restaurant with a group of them. In the winter they went snowboarding together. Truth be told, they weren't good company, being humourless and sometimes downright glum. But he was glad that they were there.

One morning Arnulf Vibler felt ill. He mentioned it to one of these special friends of his, who advised a doctor. The doctor gave Vibler less than a year to live, and even then he'd have to spend most of his time having his blood changed, sucked out and changed again.

The less than a year was four months and it passed quickly, like a very few days. On Wednesday December the 2nd, 1992, all fifty of the strange men filed into Arnulf Vibler's hospital room, its window full of the mountains. They'd each told the nurse that he was Vibler's uncle. All weepy over him herself, she hadn't the heart to turn even one uncle away. Not when it was probably the young man's last night.

Just like that first time, three years ago: it was a little room, and full of them.

"Won't you tell me now? What was the something that you had to make sure I did?"

"You have done it," said the spokesman. He was at the end of the bed, but poor Vibler couldn't see whose lips were moving.

"What did I do?"

"Last year."

"What?"

"You smiled at a certain man and improved his day."

"Who?"

"Does it matter who?"

"I would like to know."

"Meyrick Hödler."

Many names, faces, names without faces, faces without names flicked through Arnulf Vibler's mind.

"You passed him in the street. A stranger. The quality of your smile was such, it conveyed....."

The spokesman paused to find the right words for what the smile had conveyed. But before he found them Vibler asked, weakly: "But if this was last year, why didn't you all go back to where you come from? Your job was done."

The spokesman couldn't say why. He was sobbing.

Another finished for him: "Because we've all become so terribly fond of you, Arnulf."

At this, the whole fifty burst into tears and wails, holding each other's hands tightly.

The nurse came in and had never seen a more peculiar sight. It dried up her own tears for her. Meanwhile, the men screwed their hats into their faces and showed no signs of recovering their composure.

During every moment of his last three hours, Arnulf Vibler regretted that he would never see a future that was set to contain so much love and compassion as he saw in the tears of his special friends.

Clockwork Mice

Hermann Stuvv lived his whole life in a small elegant trafficless cobbled square in Zurich. In one corner of the square: an oak tree as tall as the houses. In the other: a pale grey and creamy white church, almost baroque, or perhaps recovering from an infection of the baroque, simplifying itself as time healed. The buildings on all sides were residential, six floors tall, two doors sharing a set of steps, the houses sliced so thin that each had only one room and one window per floor. Exit from and entry to the square was gained by either a narrow cut beside the church, or through a dark tunnel behind the oak tree.

Hermann Stuvv's nursery or later bedroom was nearly in the middle of the side facing the church, on the sixth floor, overlooking the square, a few branches of the tree cutting into his view. From infancy it was his hobby, his daily meditation, to stare out of the window at the quiet square below and at any movements in the windows around the square, or at worshippers or tourists visiting the almost baroque church. There was never much to see except the changing light on the buildings, pigeons and the shadows of pigeons.

Three windows away, her view obscured by the leaves of the oak tree during the summer months - so that she only stared in the manner of Hermann Stuvv during fall and winter - was Erika Stuvv, his cousin. They were born on the same day, May 12th 1939, and grew up in close proximity. But during their childhoods they never met. Their fathers had a falling out during the war and the two families did not mix.

Hermann Stuvv was totally unaware of his girl cousin. She entered and exited her house through the tunnel under the cover of the oak tree, so in all his years of staring dreamily out of the window he had never seen Erika Stuvv even once in the square, and though Zurich is a small and intimate city he had never happened to see her about town. He didn't go out much anyway. Erika, meanwhile, had seen Hermann many times at his window and wondered about him a bit, but not much.

When she was 17 Erika entered a religious phase. In all her life she had never entered the almost baroque church across the square. Then one windy day she did. Hermann Stuvv, staring from his window, saw her and all his romantic and sexual passions became aroused. From six floors up all he could really see was her shape, her step, the ash-blonde of her hair. But it was enough. He saw her again when she left the church. She stopped in the middle of the square and looked up. The wind unhooked her hair and it stood on end, hair that had never been cut. She crossed herself and went under the oak tree and indoors.

Soon, for Hermann Stuvv, the church-going girl was a familiar sight. She walked, often rushed, across the square to the church and while she was in there saying her prayers, Hermann Stuvv was at his window thinking about her, waiting for her to come out. When she did, she always looked up at his window.

On her twentieth birthday in 1959, May 12th, which was also Hermann Stuvv's twentieth birthday, Erika Stuvv was wearing a pale lemon dress and with a pale lemon ribbon in her hair. And white gloves. Lots of bicycles were in the square that day. She hurried into the church. Hermann Stuvv was already in there, in a pale blue suit, sitting in a front pew like a groom waiting for a bride he has not yet met.

Erika abandoned any idea of praying and said her first words to her cousin.

"It's our birthday today. Happy birthday to us!"

"Happy birthday, cousin." A servant had told Hermann Stuvv that the beautiful worshipper was his cousin.

"There is a party," she said.

"There is a party for me also, but I am hiding from it. You are the only person in the world I would like to see there, and you were not invited."

"Our fathers hate each other."

"Apparently so."

They sat in silence for a while, holding hands.

"I'm not as religious as I was," she said, looking up at the devils painted on the ceiling.

"But you come into the church every day. You'll not stop, will you?" A note of anxiety there.

"No, no - it's my private time. My family, sisters, are terrible people. Even if I don't pray any more, this is still a pretty place to think."

Hermann Stuvv was kissing his cousin's hands. She was twenty today but had never cut her hair. Cousin Hermann's hair was also long, shoulder length, and the same ash-blonde. Then they were looking closely at each other. She was smiling. He not. Then he smiled too.

She giggled. "We look very alike, don't you think?"

"Mm." said Hermann, meaning yes.

Using the cover of his party, Hermann Stuvv was able to sneak his cousin up the stairs into his attic bedroom. They kneeled at the window together and looked out. Erika was thrilled.

"Wow, this is a much better view than mine! You can see everything."

"I see you going to church."

"I know. I know."

Bicyclists arrived in the square to either birthday party, carrying flowers, little presents.

Erika Stuvv kissed her cousin on the lips, a very long kiss indeed, then said: "When I look out of my window into the square I have a silly idea. I would love to see the square filled with clockwork mice, running all over it. Clockwork mice. Every time I look out of my window I think of clockwork mice. For years the same little fantasy. I don't know when I first thought of it."

They kissed some more, kissing eyes, ears, chins, longer on the lips. Then suddenly the square's pigeons, who had been off somewhere else, all arrived at once, surprising a lean lizardy youth on a gleaming silver scooter whose arrival coincided with theirs. He bore flowers for Erika and in his head a proposal. The pigeons swirled and bumped into each other, grabbing places on the oak tree or diving onto the cobbles below, dropping white packets of dung towards Erika's boyfriend. Both cousins had watched the pigeons invade the square a million times, each alone at their respective windows. Today they watched it together and had never been more thrilled by it. The flashing green of the neck feathers of the pigeons was the same colour as the watchers' eyes.

Hermann Stuvv's father broke in on them just then.

"We were watching the pigeons," said Hermann.

He was summoned to attend to his party guests. Erika slipped away back to her own party, where she refused the proposal of her lizardy boyfriend but was in such a happy mood with herself that he blamed himself for her delight and wasn't the least bit put out.

The two twentieth birthday parties passed without further incident. Hermann left his early to watch the bicyclists collect their machines and pedal away, including young lizard face. The last party-goer had just gone when his father returned to the old nursery room on the sixth floor and gave Hermann Stuvv the beating of his life. His cheekbone was smashed, his jaw dislocated, four teeth completely knocked out, all his left ribs cracked. He was in hospital till June and came home without his spleen and had a gap-toothed smile if he smiled at all.

In the weeks that followed several large packages arrived at Hermann Stuvv's door. He needed help from the servants to carry them to his room. They sat unopened on his bed, his desk, his floor, while he stared out of the window at the square. Cousin Erika seemed to have given up the church. But she rode a bicycle around and around the square, doing tricks, waving to Hermann at his window. But though he longed for her company, he did not rush out to see her. No secret tryst was made, no rendezvous of any kind was contemplated by him. Nor by her. But both were comfortable in the faith that they would be together again and kiss and talk and look into the square.

Erika was having dinner with her family - it was September 3rd, 1959 - and the light had just gone from the sky above the square, when a strange clicking whirring sound reached everyone's ears. Erika was the slowest to stand. The narrow window, with a narrower view because of the oak tree outside it, was already fully occupied by her sisters. She ran to the front door, suddenly full of excitement, an apprehension she could hardly believe, and snatched at the door handle as if fleeing for her life. When the door at last was open she saw that the square, her square, Hermann Stuvv's square, was full of clockwork mice, maybe five hundred mechanical rodents, of various manufacturers, trundling about, climbing and descending the cobbles, rolling around the oak tree, dropping over the step into the almost baroque church, where they dodged between the pews, their whirr echoing like a Second Coming arriving by a part heavenly, part mechanical means.

She walked out into the square to be among them, stepping nicely, laughing, alone with the mice running over her bare feet in the square. The pigeons made one of their returns but thought better of it this time and broke away, leaving Erika Stuvv with her mice and their wild painted faces hurrying by, their little rubber wagging tails slapping the cobbles. She looked up at Cousin Hermann's window, but he was not looking down. His father had just beaten him to death with his fists.

The clockwork mice went on and on. They didn't run down. The police came and made idiots of themselves, capturing only five during the first day's efforts and only twelve more during the concerted week of effort that followed. Citizens attacked the clockwork mice with brooms and mallets, even shot pistols at them in sleepless impotent fury. But the clockwork mice were indestructible and wouldn't run down. They wandered the square at their even pace, clicking, whirring, around and around.

Erika, her hair cut dead short, stood at her window for days, weeks, months, laughing, weeping, cheering, while the clockwork mice ran amok in the square. Until this day she has thought of nothing else. Though her family have taken her far away and shouted and shouted at her, all she sees - whatever is really before her excited green eyes - are the clockwork mice in the square, and all she hears is the clicking whirr of their infinite aimless journey.

Though eventually they were all captured, the clockwork mice have never wound down, and somewhere today in a bank vault under the paves of Zurich, with gold and other treasures as company, the clockwork mice roll over each other, whirring and clicking eternally in a row of tin boxes, the paint rubbed off their faces by the wheels of other mice.

Doreen and Noreen

When it was obvious that Doreen and Noreen Cudlips, from Leeds in northern England, had not aged at all in the last five years it was thought to be a twin thing. A twin expert came all the way from Minneapolis in the USA to examine them. Doreen and Noreen were 15 years old, but to the eye, and most importantly according to exhaustive medical tests, they were biologically ten years old. It was true. They had not aged in five years.

But it was not a fatal condition. Their parents were not too upset and their various doctors only excited. It was assumed to be an anomaly of some sort and it was expected that the two rather unpleasant little girls would soon shoot up and age normally.

But they did not.

At 18 Doreen and Noreen were still, physically, also mentally, 10 years old. At 25, no change. They were adults, but did not count themselves as adults. They were old 10-year-olds. A quarrelsome, unconformist pair, they put their tongues out at the grown up world. They had a scornful contempt for everything that constituted society and any remark that defended or apologised for it. Doreen was the most scathing. Noreen the angrier of the two - she loved to swear.

They qualified as teachers, the only profession they ever seriously considered, and both did stints in primary schools, teaching the infants. They loved the kiddies. But order was a problem, with them joining in all the games, and Noreen's petulance usually reduced her class to tears before lunch every day. Plus: they were never shy of outpouring their jaundiced views of adult behaviour on the little ones, who were befuddled rather than indoctrinated. Parents' complaints grew loud. So the twins were found jobs marking exam papers and this, though boring, suited them better. They had the house to themselves when their parents died. They were comfortably off.

But relationships were, of course, a major difficulty. The girls entered their 30s with the feeling that they should start dating men their own age - men in their 30s this is - and that the succession of 10-year-old boys who had held annual office as boyfriends for the last quarter of a century should be replaced with something more solid.

Doreen found what seemed a suitable candidate. Derek Winterton-Effray was of the landed gentry. At weekends he hunted, rode, fished, shot. During the week he managed his own discotheque. He was picked because there was something very boyish about him. On their one date he was perfectly pleasant, but started breathing fast whenever Doreen did anything childish - swang her legs, talked about dollies. Her bouncing enthusiasm when a pop song she liked came on his car radio evoked a trembling smile on Winterton-Effray's face which she did not like. She fled him. There was no second date.

But Doreen and Noreen had each other. They fought. They teased. They played. They loved and hated each other. When they gave up their boring jobs, they stayed at home most days, TV addicts. They created their own private unaging childhood world, were like children left alone for an afternoon that lasts a hundred years. They became dotty. Their collection of dolls and plastic ponies filled their succession of houses. Over the years on their bedroom walls hundreds of pop stars were removed and replaced with the faces of the latest craze.

When Doreen and Noreen Cudlips were celebrating their 100th birthday they were visited by Françoise Cloporte, a journalist from Le Monde. They were by then living in Paris, a favourite city, and close to Eurodisney, where they sauntered in delight every weekend. Both were plump from a lifetime of sweeties and fast food, but to one who did not know their story they were obviously about 10 years old and it would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise. They were sinister, cross little bodies, but their laughter was as fresh as any child's.

"Have you had any contact with the others?" asked Madame Cloporte. She had been issued with a party hat and was sipping lemonade.

"What others?" - The twins never read newspapers or watched the TV news.

"The other children who have not aged, like you. There has been almost an epidemic of them the last few years, all over the world. I am amazed you did not know."

Doreen and Noreen danced around the room holding hands until they were breathless and sitting on the floor.

In the voice of a wise child Doreen said: "It has begun at last!"

Her expectation was, she later explained to the dismayed journalist, that soon all people would stop aging at 10 years old. A hundred years on, when she and her sister would be a childish 200, there would be no adults left alive. Millions of 10-year-olds, alone in the world, forever. Doreen kept putting out her tongue as her sister made up a list..... No cars. No factories. No pornography. No policemen. No newspapers. No long-winded reasons for doing things or not doing things. No lies and bombast. Just freedom and fun.

As Françoise Cloporte walked away in the busy Paris street she looked back at the window of the girls' apartment. They were at the window, waving to her. She did not wave back. But children in the street, they were returning the happy little wave.

Life on a Cake

Gassy, the terrier dog, had been licking the surface - the icing - all day. He probably guessed first. But it was his master, Withold, who must be fairly credited with the realisation.

"We're walking on a cake!" he said. "A huge cake! This is a cake!"

The others, there were twenty of them, were furious in their condemnation of his bizarre idea. But when, shortly afterwards, the light went out, and they were hungry, they jumped and kicked at the surface, breaking through to soft sponge, which they greedily ate. Most of them, however, were still vehement that this vast space across which they were exhaustively walking, was not, not, could not possibly be, a cake.

Dogs were barking far away in the mountains - since they first saw them rising up in the distance, all the travellers had believed they were mountains. Most still insisted and would continue to insist that they were mountains. Sometime during the night Gassy trotted off to join the other dogs. Their brutal and plaintive cries were irresistible to him. When the light returned and Withold saw that his pooch was gone, he was distraught and in his sorrow and loneliness shouted insults at the others.

"Of course it's a cake, you knuckleheaded mediocre cretins! Look! See! It's not my fault if the answer to every question doesn't fit into your banal idea of life! We're on a cake! A cake! It's a cake! What's wrong with you? It couldn't be more obvious that this is a cake!"

Withold did not walk with the group from now on, but ahead or to one side. They kept on walking towards the mountains. Late in the day, at the end of their journey's first week - or was it longer? - they came to a line of large silver balls, each one 20 metres high. They camped beside one, eating yet another meal of soft sweet nauseating cake and brittle toothache-making icing.

The light went out again and they slept in a queer darkness, where the line of silver balls shone dimly, seemingly to infinity, but perhaps just to the mountains at the end of the cake. Withold did not sleep. He sat, alone, staring at the nearest silver ball. All night the reflection was still, simple, explicable. But when the light returned the ball's reflections were hectic, complex and mysterious. It mirrored the white and pink of the cake's surface, the line of other balls, the slow waking individuals surrounding it. But also hurried movements in the pale blue sky: faces, huge faces, hands, windows, rushes of colour that could maybe be cars or aeroplanes, and a dark distorted slowly-moving shape like a vicar lifting his hat over and over again.

Withold was so studiously studying these peculiar reflections, wondering what they meant - was it too bizarre to believe they were on a cake in a cake shop window? - that his eyes were not focused on the nearer reflection of his companions rushing up behind him. They dragged him to a hole they had kicked in the cake's surface and stomped him into it. Strawberry jam soaked up through the sponge. Withold was stuck there, glued in place like a wasp in a jar. He struggled, with only one man pushing down his head while the nineteen other murderers shoved at the silver ball - hands, shoulders, backs. The icing around the base of the ball cracked and they manoeuvred its unpredictable roll towards the man-sized trench where Withold struggled. He was getting the better of the man left in charge of him and escape now seemed almost certain.

The silver ball was hard to control - it toured the area, reluctant to drop into the hole prepared for it. The ball reminded Withold of one of those tiny ballbearings in a cheap little game his mother had given him one Christmas long ago. You had a palm-sized plastic box with a picture of a cow in it. You had to wiggle five little balls into holes in the picture: two on the cow's eyes, one on its udder, one on a daisy it was about to chew, and where was the other one? To get all five into the holes was the toil of a whole afternoon. In all his childhood that he shared with the thing he achieved a completion maybe only a dozen times.

He was thinking about this - had he really had a mother, a childhood, or had he lived his whole stupid life on this sickening cake? - as the huge silver ball pushed him back into the jammy hole and forced him down. The hard ball was a mirror smeared with jam as his face turned from it into the soft cake. He tore and swam in the cake, cutting through it like a scalpel mistakenly left in a patient after an operation. Deeper down the cake's sponge was full of wide bubbles. He climbed down them, his own weight breaking through from one moist chamber to the next.

When he reached the bottom some days later he did not know what to do. It wasn't totally dark - soft little balls of light were all around him, like golden moons put into a cake. He was knee-deep in jam and under his feet was a hard cake stand - cardboard covered in silver paper. He supposed that, a cake being round, whichever direction he took would eventually lead him to the outer wall of icing, out, to freedom. But for a while it seemed easier to lie down and die.

And how easy it would be not to walk straight, but to be turned by the convolutions of the cake's structure! - to walk in circles, wandering like an aimless worm in the cake. He removed his boots and felt the cake stand carefully with nude feet as he pushed forward through the jam. He lost count of the days. Then at last his toes felt what he had hoped to feel - the edge of a band of decorative paper doily which ran right across the cake stand under the cake. If he followed this it would lead him straight and he would certainly find the outside.

Withold was feeling elated, victorious. He waded through jam singing every song he could remember, sometimes just a line from a remembered song, over and over. His hands chopped at the jam-soaked cake in front of him, sure of success, with no wilt of exhaustion setting in. It was getting darker - those golden moons were rare now - but nothing dampened his confidence. He had just shifted a stray lump of dense burnt cake out of his way, when he heard a strange noise above him. It stopped, then started again louder: a violent, tearing, rushing sound. He took fright, hurried forward as fast as he could.

It was a small silver coin making the noise, put in the cake for some lucky scoffer to find, or an unlucky greedy soul to choke upon. When Withold shifted that lump of burnt cake he released the coin from the cake's grip and it cut through the delicate sponge and slid on top of him. A small coin, yes, but it was the size of a cathedral floor to poor Withold.

It was when he began to struggle that he realised how tired he was. He could struggle no more. The weight of the coin was too great. He gave up. He allowed the coin to push him under the layer of jam. He would drown now.

But the coin shifted as it settled, just a little, and Withold's face bobbed out of the jam. He lay there, pinned down, stuck, but hopeful of a release. There was strawberry jam all around his face for sustenance, and cake within reach of his free arm. He could lie here forever if need be.

On the surface, the others - the twenty who had tried to murder Withold because he insisted this thing they were living upon was a cake - at last reached the mountains. These were a whirling corrugated wall of crumbly pink icing, embedded with red and white and green and blue candies. The travellers were arguing about what to do next when the dogs ran out of the mountains and found them. They attacked right away.

Gassy, Withold's dog, was among them. He had no objection to the pack pulling down and eating up these others. But he was passionate that Withold should not be harmed. (Withold had been among the group when he abandoned him, so he trusted, with the dog's logic that says a buried bone stays put, that Withold was still among the group.) So Gassy fought with the other dogs while he sought his master, barking and lunging with such a speed and unrestrained fervour that the dogs gave up their attacks, turned suddenly meek, retreated to a distance, and stood, some with snarling bloody faces, some just licking their muzzles, confused and curious. Gassy walked among the survivors, sniffed the fallen. Withold was not there. He looked into the face of one man, woofed a question. No answer. Just a sickly apologetic grin.

Gassy's instinct told him something. He did not know what exactly. But he knew this nasty lot had done ill to his man. His yap was inaudible to the people, who were groaning and weeping from their wounds. But the dogs heard it, as an invitation, and returned in a delighted, furious rush.

Later that same day a portly vicar bought the cake which he had admired several times in the shop window. His bishop, more portly still - with whom he had enjoyed a lifetime of platonic friendship since their brief days as lovers at college - was coming to tea. The cake was grand. They would have it all to themselves and gossip till late while their jaws and teeth ached. The shopkeeper warned the vicar about the coin in the cake, but he had forgotten this by the time the cake stood proudly on his conservatory table. But he remembered the warning later, when it was too late.

When the slice of cake that contained the coin was lifted onto the bishop's plate, Withold was freed. He fell on a crumb into the deep carpet. He wandered there, among the tall brown and green and dark yellow strands, for the rest of his life. He met others. But he never found Gassy and Gassy never found him.