In which Mandraxe is sort of reminded of his mission by a Scotsman off of a jar of coffee.
Mandraxe the Magician meant business alright. But first he made it back to bed and slept uneasily until early afternoon. He had the same dream again and again awoke to find himself bereft. It was like waking from a dream of togetherness to find himself alone.
This time, he made it to the kitchen and fixed himself a coffee. He held the square bottle in his palm - one of the last of a crate he had bought, cheap, no questions asked. His brain felt like the clapper of Big Ben striking midnight. The sound of the boiling kettle made him wince. The sluggish light seeping through the blind hurt his eyes.
He soaked a his filthy Port Vale scarf (Mandraxe is a massive fan of his local football club) with cold tapwater, wrung it damp and wrapped it around his temples for relief. Feeling himself fit to pass out he steadied himself on the kitchen worktop, where a beetle slept on a butter knife. The beetle could sleep there undisturbed until Friday, when Mandraxe would prepare his weekly meal of lentils, a welcome break from his staple diet of Deleter and Werthers Originals.
The great man sank cross legged to the floor. With his dark, sunken eyes and his football scarf turban, he looked like a fallen Sikh Guru, one subject to a complete set of the vices of Pride, Anger, Greed, Dependency and Lust.
A pair of stout legs clad in red tartan socks, gaiters and splatterdashes entered Mandraxe’s field of vision. Mandrake did not react. After a pregnant minute of inactivity, the owner of the waiting legs delivered a swift kick to Mandraxe’s ribs.
“Lazy degenerate. I,” he said, in a Scottish accent, “Major-General Sir Hector Archibald MacDonald, known to my men as Fighting Mac, have no time for the likes of YOU! I lived and died doing my duty! Fought for King and Country in a dozen wars. National hero. The King himself directed me to shoot myself. That stung I can tell you.”
Mandraxe drew himself up to his full gangling height. He could see now a fair chunk of the left side of the Gordon Highlander’s skull was missing. His own headache seemed suddenly less significant.
Sir Hector responded to Mandraxe’s gobsmacked gaze. “This?” he said, touching the space where his skull should be. “Bloody business. All lies I say. All lies. Can’t trust the word of a bloody boy. None of em! Had to do the right thing. 30,000 people at my secret funeral, don't ya know?”
“Why?" asked Mandraxe. "Why are you here?”
“Ah well now me boy,” a warmer tone infused the Major’s voice. He whipped his leg with his swagger stick. The Order has ordered me here, haw haw," the Major allowed himself a moment of amusement, Mandraxe shuffled his feet nervously.
“The Order?” croaked the hung - over Magician interrogatively.
"The Hermetic Order of the Angelic Keys. In their wisdom they have identified you as a conduit. The Order revealed to Newton the secrets of gravity; Einstein was a recipient of hermetic insights. The Order revealed even greater secrets to Einstein, but! Never trust Johnny Foreigner! The bloody fool absent mindedly flushed the secret of nuclar fusion down his water-closet. They stayed in the U-bend for a month. Thats why at the end he said he wished he had become a plumber instead of a physicist. Pragmatist.”
The prolix chicory sprite was in his stride now. “Werner von Braun stole the secret of interplanetary flight - several of the Order have holiday homes on Mars to my certain knowledge. Heinrich Müller has established a small colony of Nazis up there in the Amazonian Plain, which they call "Werewolf*". Their experiments on Martians are proving controversial. Nothing to do with us, the Bounders."
"No, the Order offers enlightenment. They taught the novice Blaine how to hover and from us the Master Magus Daniels learned his mesmeric power over women. Daniels like many of our most powerful magicians conceals his true identity by masquerading as a stage magician. Little do the audience realise that his tricks are for real!"
Mandraxe, whose secret identity was concealed by his dayjob as a chidren's party entertainer, twitched.
"I could go on,” said the Major. So he did.
“ The renegade Icke was on the World Control Panel for a time, until the..,” he paused to shape his moustache around an unfamiliar and distasteful word “....Americans put their foot down. Some of what he says is true, not the Lizard material though, he misread that secret Enochian text. It’s “Wizards” who are in charge not the lizards. We laugh at him for that error.”
“But the Order exact a terrible price for their secrets. You must think long and hard about what I have proposed to you. You may choose not to accept. If you do not, the earth itself is in peril.”
Mandraxe had stopped listening. He had become suspicious that this was the work of Exardnam but he was wrong.
The garrulous chicory coffee essence spirit continued. “But the dream scrying hasn’t been working with you. We’ve checked our equipment, there’s a bit of bent coathanger in the transmitter so lets hope that works. Maybe the problem is not on our end. Maybe it’s you, laddie. So they sent me here to make sure. Well I don’t mind telling you I was reluctant to agree at first. Anyway. There you have it. Job done!”
The Major walked towards the door, opened it smartly, turned, bowed a shallow bow to the pursuing Mandraxe who objected :
“But!, You haven’t told me anything!” but the Major had gone slamming the door shut with finality.
There came a military tattoo rapping on the door. Mandraxe opened it to the Major who tapped Mandraxe’s chest with his swagger stick and looked down at the Magician from a great height, although he was slightly shorter.
“I say... I did remember to tell you why I came?”The exposed left hemisphere of his brain peeking from beneath his cocked Humble bonnet pulsed and glistened in the afternoon sun.
“No,” said Mandraxe. “You did not.”
“The Major tapped the side of his nose. Keep it under your turban. Top secret.”
His hearing was never the best. He turned in the military manner, marched to the end of the walkway as though on a parade ground and performed a sharp 90 degree turn into the communal stairwell. Mandraxe could hear his boots descending the stairwell. He craned over the balcony rail to watch Fighting Mac march across the carpark courtyard through the loud gang of chavs torturing a cat. But he never reappeared.
Perhaps he had another call to make, thought our hero.
For Mandraxe, with his training, with his powers and with his special abilities, all things were possible if only he could be bothered. His life so far had been a litany of if onlys. No more, Mandraxe resolved. He knew he needed to re-appropriate his life and, if necessary, his death, to re-affirm the truth of his being. This was a truth which implied transcendence of the squalid place he found himself in.
If only he could work out what on earth was going on. He knew that trouble was afoot. And he knew he needed help to understand the realities whose plaything he had become.
He picked up the phone and speed-dialled the number of his good friend George** Wong. Mandaxe was worried about George who concealed his secret identity as sidekick to Mandraxe the Magnificent, Magician (available for children's parties, weddings, stag dos) by masquerading as an Elvis impersonator.
Mandraxe had not seen George for some considerable time. "Where've you gone, Wong?" he murmured as the phone began to ring.
*March 23, 1945, Joseph Goebbel's "Werewolf speech" urged every German to fight the Allied invaders to the death.
**This is George's given name. His true name is Wong Dong. In Chinese culture it is considered extremely ill-mannered to make fun of names.