My NanoWriMo — Chapter Seven

There was, of course, only one Asteroth that I knew of — the same Asteroth that everyone knew of. He was the mystical sorcerer from the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I hadn’t thought about him for years, but now that I did, and now that I knew that my sister’s disappearance and the shady business dealings of Hang Gao Stilt Concern were somehow connected to him, in a way it all seemed to fit so well. And yet in other ways, it didn’t seem to fit at all: for example, the entire idea was patently absurd and I felt like I was going mad.

But right now I didn’t have time to go mad — assuming that going mad is a particularly time-consuming process. I remembered when my Uncle Wilf went mad, he claimed to have done it in a single afternoon, and my grandmother claimed to have been married to a man who once went mad instantaneously. Whether that was true, or whether it was simply because my grandmother was herself mad after having fallen off an unusually tall water buffalo in her youth, I couldn’t say, but it seemed unlikely to me: in my experience, going mad was a slow and laborious process and one not to be undertaken unless you had really cleared your schedule for the bulk of the day.

This I had not done, and so I resolved to not go mad until the case was brought to a satisfactory conclusion. The key to the whole matter was Asteroth. But how to find him? Thus far in my career I had never had to locate a character from a non-existent children’s book in a fictional fantasy film, and none of my old textbooks even touched on the issue. Where do you start when hunting down a man who doesn’t want to be found and also doesn’t exist? I decided to go to the source: Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

At my flat, I knelt on the floor and rummaged through my Classic Disney Live Action Movies With Animated Segments crate. As I searched through the masses of jumbled discs, I cursed my feckless younger self who had thought it such a capital idea to own thirteen dozen copies of Pete’s Dragon on laserdisc. But after several hours of searching, I found what I was looking for: the Anniversary Special Edition Blu-Ray of Bedknobs and Broomsticks, including the restored deleted scenes where they’d lost the audio so they got actors other than the original cast to dub the dialogue and it sounded really weird. This was important: if any of those creepy wrong-sounding scenes, while adding nothing to the narrative, contained crucial information about Asteroth, I could not miss it.

Over the next few weeks, I watched the movie several hundred times. I got to know the dialogue and lyrics off by heart. The cherubic faces of Carrie, Charlie and Paul floated before my eyes at night as I struggled vainly to get to sleep. I found myself on buses and trains, unconsciously breaking into choruses of “Eglentine, Eglentine” and only realising my faux pas when I became aware of the resentful glares from other passengers. During social occasions I was seen to be silently mouthing “Treguna Mekoides Trecorum Satis Dee”, and several times, in the middle of an athletic session of sexual intercourse, my partner called a halt to proceedings on the basis that I was moaning David Tomlinson’s name.

And yet I had discovered precious little about Asteroth, beyond the fact that he had discovered the secret of making animals talk, mastered substitutiary locomotion, and reputedly suffered from reasonably severe eczema. I had visited all the more prominent eczema clinics in the city, and indeed several of the less reputable ones, but had come up with nothing but my own reasonably severe case of eczema, for which I had to seek treatment at one of the clinics I’d previously visited, which made for rather an awkward time, given how loud and violent I had been in their waiting room.

Where was Asteroth? This was the question that I kept asking myself, breaking the monotony by occasionally asking other people, mainly strangers I saw on the street, at whom I would scream the question tearfully, waving my hands frantically above my head and kicking my feet up wildly behind me in the manner of an epileptic donkey to convey just how important the answer was to me.

But none of them seemed to know. Sometimes I would show someone a picture of Asteroth, and ask if they’d seen this man. Sometimes I would do the same, but with a picture of Arthur Miller, just to give a bit of variety to my day. Ironically, most people I met had seen neither Asteroth nor Arthur Miller, and even more ironically, one man said he had seen both of them, but was hit by a tram before he could tell me where.

I decided to put the near-insoluble question of whether Arthur Miller was still alive to the side for the moment, and concentrate on Asteroth. I focused on the crucial aspect: who WAS Asteroth, when all was said and done? He was a sorcerer. And where did sorcerers live? In castles. And what was the biggest castle on the East Coast?

Penny Pleiades’s Dance-a-Matic Play Centre and Full-Contact Mini-Golf Chamber. It was so obvious I was amazed I had ever thought of it at all.

When I entered the play centre, breathing in the familiar scent of chicken salt and cheap gin, mingled with juvenile sweat and raw mercury, Penny herself was leaning on the front counter, picking her teeth with a mini-golf club and twirling a strand of her trademark brittle blue hair with a gnarled finger. She hadn’t changed a bit since I’d last seen her, apart from having one leg amputated above the knee and putting on a sombrero.

“Penny,” I said to her, and meant it.

“Stanley,” she smirked. “I didn’t think you’d have the guts to show your face around here again.”

“Why, what did I do?” I asked, taken aback.

“Nothing,” Penny replied airily, “I just have an incredibly low opinion of your personal courage. How can I help you? Would you like to play a round of laser tag? Or our brand new interactive experience, red panda tag? It’s like laser tag but instead of laser guns, each player gets a live red panda to hit their opponents with.”

“You always were an innovator, Penny,” I said, hoping that if I buttered her up enough she’d give me the information I sought.

Penny shrugged. “It’s costing me a fortune, but it’s worth it when I see the smiles on those children,” she said, pointing at a large corkboard on which were pinned watercolours of the Famous Five. They were, indeed, all smiling, and it was as heartwarming as she suggested.

“Let me cut to the chase, Penny,” I said, pushing all my unresolved feelings for this beautiful yet pungent woman down as far as I could. “I’m here on business.”

“Step into my office.”

Once inside Penny’s office, a spacious wood-panelled affair adorned with multiple candid photographs of Nina Simone doing middle-distance training, she plopped into a soft leather armchair and smiled. “Can I offer you some chicken salt?” she asked, proffering a generous bowl-ful. I declined, not wanting to cloud my mind while on duty.

I took a seat on an aluminium bar stool directly behind Penny. “What do you know about Asteroth?” I asked, getting straight to the point.

Penny waved her corncob pipe carelessly. “Only what everyone knows,” she said casually.

“And what is that?”

“Talking animals, mystical medallion, doesn’t actually exist. The usual.” She waggled her enormous tangle of hair saucily. The woman just never stopped.

“Come on Penny,” I said gruffly. “You know more than that. What are you holding back?”

“What makes you think I’m holding anything back?” she shot back, climbing inside her lower desk drawer and falling asleep. Several hours later she came to and continued. “I’m just trying to run a business here.”

“Is business good, Penny?” I asked significantly.

“Fairly good,” she answered insignificantly.

“That’s not what I hear,” I chuckled.

“Why, what do you hear?” Penny spun to face me, panicked.

“Well…nothing actually,” I conceded, cursing her for calling my bluff.