Beneath Unwashed Robes
Being a Prophet: Noel's autobio­graphical novel

 

Front cover

Prologue: Awakening
1: Discovery
2: Adolescence
3: Submergence
4: Preparation
5: Escalation
6: Recreation
7: Inflation
8: Prophetry
9: Preachery
10: Diary
11: Trial

Chapter 4: Preparation

I was gliding through the water, making as little noise as possible. Complete darkness surrounded me. I felt the heavy weight of the harpoon in my hand, a monstrous instrument I would never have been able to lift on land. "Where are you?" I whispered to myself.

A shadow appeared in front of me, a patch of even darker darkness, dead and still. A rock, a building, a shipwreck? Carefully I opened my backpack and took out my dwarf dolphin. I squeezed it until it emitted protesting ultrasonic squeaks, and the echo told me I was indeed approaching a shipwreck. And the ultrasound informed me of something else. Something, or someone, was moving across the ancient deck, just as stealthily and quietly as I.

The being down there doubtless had noticed my ultrasonic shower, and I had but a split second to act before it would escape again. With a menacing war bubbling I shot forward, raised my harpoon, landed directly in front of my prey and held the weapon to its wobbly breast.

"Not bad!" said the prey. "You may become a decent underwater warrior yet." The being took an anglerfish out of its pocket and lit it with a slap on its buttocks, and in the faint green glow I saw Pseudonymus' usual quizzical grin. "But you were way too loud when you searched the coral reef over there. I could have easily killed you there, had this been a real fight and not a training simulation."

My triumphant mood dwindled somewhat. "I'll bractise dhat, Mr. Bseudo", I promised. Lots of training had greatly improved my underwater pronunciation.

"No doubt you will, Noeel", Pseudonymus answered. "Just keep in mind, one day it will not be training anymore. One day these reefs will be brimming with the sounds of enemies, and your only chance to survival will be to be better than them." Suddenly, he started to grimace, and a drop of inky saliva formed on his lips and dissolved in the water. "Of course you could also buy my Underwater Survival Pack for an 1ncredibly l0w pr1ce..." He began to shiver, and one of his tentacles quickly fetched something out of another pocket of his black battle dress. It was a syringe, and he injected its content into his own gelatinous head. He sighed in relief. "That's better. Sorry. Where was I? Right, you did well, but now go back to the castle. I will meet you there later." I bowed and started to swim away from the training grounds.

Underwater warfare was one of my favourite subjects in Udunvagor's training camp. Pseudonymus' classes were rare chances for me to get out of the castle, out of the labyrinthic corridors damp with the sweat of a thousand hard-working students. Despite the rocky start of our relationship, I rather liked old Pseudo, and felt sorry for him, because there was something odd about him, a terrible secret he carried around, some sort of horrible illness or addiction. All I knew was that his speech sometimes drifted off to weird, disconnected sentences and half-sentences reminding me of bad salesmen or spam mails. Then only a shot from his syringe could restore him to normalcy. But when properly drugged, he was a friendly, relaxed guy.

***

Neither 'friendly' nor 'relaxed' were words I would ascribe to Horus Engels, who was responsible for the theoretical part of my education. I had thought of myself as a Tolkien scholar before, but nonetheless it took all my energy and concentration to follow this enigmatic man's lectures. He spoke in complicated sentences, wildly mixed metaphors and imagery, drifted off on tangents and returned to the original topic in bold loopings. To describe his lessons as a rollercoaster ride would hardly do them justice. It was a rollercoaster that would not have passed safety regulations in any theme park of the world.

"Behold!" thundered Engels, who was standing in front of us, in front of a class of perhaps fifteen or twenty students. We were the elite of Udunvagor's young followers, the best, brightest students. Only these were admitted to Engels' classes. The others were foot soldiers, taught only the basics of Tolkien lore, and we would be their officers, their leaders.

"Behold", thundered Engels, "the words of knowledge! Our topic today is cats. For Tolkien hated cats, and to understand why is to shine a sun on the dark backside of Osiris' underwear. Open Letter 219. 'Siamese cats belong to the fauna of Mordor', indeed. What fauna, old man? Open Lord of the Rings, page 902: 'all seemed ruinous and dead, a desert burned and choked'. What fauna?" He triumphantly cracked his fingers, as I furiously searched through two books at once. "Ruinous indeed, like Queen Beruthiel for the fate of Gondor, but who was Sauron's queen? Hear my words: There was no Luthien of Mordor to fill the feeding plates of ferocious felines! Ha!" Engels slapped his desk with the flat hand, and a cloud of chalk dust rose and obscured his crooked figure. "Open Book of Lost Tales I, page 22", he commanded. "Tevildo, Prince of Cats, eh? How he lusted for Luthien! Proof is inscribed in the book like holes, nay trenches, nay craters of an explosion of the creative abilities of men, and of those who are more than men!" He gesticulated wildly, wiping his pencil-case from the desk in the process. Pencils flew through the room and crashed into the walls like spears. "Open Encyclopaedia Britannica, volume CVII, page 1769! Compare!" I hastily grabbed another book out of my backpack and heaped it onto my already severely cluttered desk. "Open Lord of the Rings!" Engels screamed, the heap on my desk collapsed and books fell down, and all windows burst asunder from the sound of Engels' voice. Books and debris were swept from the ground by a sudden wind, and they started to spin around his head, this gravitational center of wisdom. "Open everything! Open your minds! Let the truth in! Open, open, open Sesame! There were no cats! Cats do not exist! No box for you, Erwin Schroedinger, no litter box full of exploding atoms! You lied! Everyone lied! Only Tolkien tells the truth! Quod erat demonstrandum!" His voice rose to a triumphant crescendo, a thunder from the center of a tornado forming in the rapidly disintegrating classroom. I hid under my desk. "Only Tolkien enlightens us! From Osiris to Re! From darkness to a new day!"

Over the howling inferno I heard a faint cry from my bank neighbour. "He's weak today, eh?" he shouted into my ear.

"Yes, unusually quiet! I hope he's not ill!" I yelled back at the top of my lungs.

***

While Pseudonymus and Engels were responsible for educating the students' minds, Hecate Mensenlarger took care of their souls. This massive female, impressive in all aspects, was the school psychologist, and in this job, she was very much the mother of the camp - not literally, none of her twenty-three biological children lived here. But she was the person we all went to with the little problems students have, the kind that look towering and insurmountable at first, but fade away after a good, honest talk. Problems like the fear before a test, the loneliness of being stuck in an underwater fortress six kilometres below the ocean surface, or being bullied by classmates. The fear problem she solved by giving us candy and hugs. The loneliness she solved by taking us into her bedroom, which was inexplicably - or maybe explicably - located just behind her office. The bullies she disciplined by threatening never to take them into her bedroom again.

It must have been near the end of my second year underwater when I had a very interesting talk with Aunt Heckie, as we affectionately called her. One of my weaknesses always has been math. Yes, I admit it freely. I speak three hundred languages fluently, I can juggle a dozen raw eggs while blindfolded, and I have won the Tour de France six times in a single year, but I am just not good at remembering big numbers. And this became a problem in Engels' classes, when he tried to pump more and more page numbers into our brains, and I started to mix them all up. I was really worried to get behind in his lessons, when I time and time again checked page 825 instead of 852. So I went to Aunt Heckie for a little counseling.

"Oh, my poor boy!" Hecate Mensenlarger boomed. She wrapped her arms around me, which felt like getting caught between two snowploughs, and pressed me against her bosom, which felt like a frontal collision with two adjacent zeppelins. "Everything's gonna be alright! Just remember, one day you won't have to do these calculations anymore. You'll have servants who do it for you!"

"Mmmbmmgh", I commented.

"What? Oh, excuse me." She loosened her embrace a little, and I struggled to free my head from where it had been stuck. Only now she noticed the surprised look on my face. "What's wrong?"

"Why..." I gasped, "why would I... have servants?"

"Well, it's a prestige thing", she said. "What do you think you're training for?"

That was an easy question, I thought. "To defend the words of Tolkien", I echoed the phrases that had been imprinted in my mind. "To keep his image clean. To honour-"

"-No, no", Aunt Heckie interrupted. "How will you achieve that?"

I frowned. "Well, I guess we'll be some kind of guerilla warriors", I said. "That's what the underwater warfare is for, isn't it? We will go everywhere, unseen. We'll strike quickly at those who dishonour Tolkien, and then get out again. Like some kind of ninjas. Tolkien ninjas... Sounds good to me. They'll never know what hit them."

Aunt Heckie grabbed me and pushed me into her bedroom, an experience not dissimilar to being swept away by a minor avalanche, and closed the door behind her. "Listen, boy", she whispered, her usually so sonorous voice lowered to the volume of an ordinary Boeing 747. "That's what Morrie wants us to think. Can't be too careful. The enemy has ears everywhere." I shivered as she called our leader Udunvagor 'Morrie', something not even Pseudo or Engels would have dared. "But look at the size of all this, the castle, the army, everything. Does that look like a bunch of guerilla fighters to you? No, Morrie's up to bigger tasks. We're gonna take control. One day, and that's coming soon, we're gonna go public. We'll conquer the world! And then nobody will ever defile Tolkien again!"

I gazed at Aunt Heckie in wonder, as I suddenly became aware of the size of the operation I had been drawn into. Now everything made sense - the war training, the army, all those nuclear warheads in the broom closet that we students had to polish every Wednesday. The thought was big and scared me a little, but at the same time it felt oddly... satisfying.

"Think of it", Aunt Heckie said. "What we're doing now is fighting the symptoms. This system's sick, my boy. It's in terminal decline. There's no honesty in the world anymore. Children are going through school without ever reading a single book about Tolkien! Small wonder they won't like him when they grow up! We call'em heretics and hunt them down, but in reality, they were never given a chance in the first place." A painful expression crept over her face as she thought about all these poor miseducated children, and from her left eye rolled a tear that could have solved the water supply problems of northern Sudan for approximately six months. "We have to grab the problem by the root. Have to impose our education system on them. The world's a big place, my boy. Lotsa space for all of us. Morrie promised me Italy as my personal kingdom. Five years from now, I'll be sitting in a Tuscany vineyard and have my servants cook spaghetti all day! I'm worried already I might put on some weight." She patted her belly, which produced a sound similar to these gongs you find in Buddhist monasteries. "You'll get something too. I dunno what. I think Germany's still up for grabbing."

"Wow", I finally managed to say.

Aunt Heckie patted me on the shoulder, a process that rammed me approximately five metres into the ground, but I quickly climbed out of the hole again. Aunt Heckie opened the bedroom door. "Now go, my lad", she boomed. "Go back to your studies. Work hard. Become a leader. Now you know what you're working for!"

I walked out, my knees still shaking. Indeed I knew. Images floated through my mind, daydreams of myself, sitting on a throne in Castle Neuschwanstein in gold-embroidered lederhosen, strands of sauerkraut dangling from my beard, while a choir of happy children sang praises in Elvish to me, the man that had saved them from a terrible fate.

***

You will have noticed, dear reader, that I write much about my teachers, but hardly mention my co-students at all. The reason for this is that I spent very little time with them. From the very beginning, and increasingly so after my talk with Hecate Mensenlarger, I felt that I was different. They were nice fellows, yes, but they lacked what I had - an idea what I was doing, an aim to work for. They studied when they were asked to, and partied when not. They boozed or flirted or watched TV all night long, all these activities I now found boring and distracting. I, on the other hand, wasted no time on such stuff. I worked hard, spent my nights in the library or the closet, where I polished Morambar Udunvagor's shoes. And my diligence payed off. Soon I surpassed everyone else in knowledge. Of course the teachers noticed and started to favour me, which in turn did not exactly boost my reputation among my co-students. In my third year, Udunvagor promoted me from cleaning his shoes to ironing his trousers, a great honour. In my fourth year, I became the personal assistant of Pseudonymus Roghater and was co-opted to the Board, and though I had no active voting right, I was involved in all discussions regarding our now imminent attack on an unsuspecting world. And in my fifth year, Horus Engels remembered my name for the first time.

I still remember, as if it had been yesterday, the last board meeting in the underwater fortress. We held it on the evening of a quiet, unexciting Friday, five years after my arrival - one thousand eight hundred ninety-two days after it, to be exact. A number that equalled the year of Tolkien's birth, and that, I thought, was a good omen.

"The boss!" Pseudonymus announced, and Morambar Udunvagor entered the room. Though I was older now and more mature, his presence still filled me with awe just like it did when we first met. His eyes glowed like fire, his shoes shone like the sun on a bright summer day, and the creases on his trousers were so sharp that a butterfly, which just happened to pass by and touch them, was immediately cut into two halves and fell down dead. Udunvagor walked over to his place, bowed over the table and smiled triumphantly before he spoke.

"It is time", he said.

"Rejoice!" Pseudonymus said. "R U feeling fat? Buy weight l0ss p*i*l*l*s now for a low pr1ce. Become a cHiCk mAgNet..." He searched his pockets frantically for his syringe, but apparently he had misplaced it.

"I will await you all on my flagship tomorrow noon, which is towed out of its construction yard as we speak", Udunvagor announced. "Roghater, you are my oldest and most trusted servant. Yours will be the honour to give it a name."

"Th@nk you, sir", the Old Pseudo said somewhat helplessly. "R U fat?" he started to repeat.

"U-fat?" Udunvagor said with a frown. "What an idiotic name. But so be it, if this is your wish." He nodded at all of us. "Dismissed."

***

It had been nearly a week since my awakening in the hospital, and I felt a growing unrest within me. I had not written down anything in the last few days, in fact, I felt somehow stuck. I remembered my time in the underwater fortress quite clearly now, but what had happened afterwards kept eluding me. The doctor kept telling me everything was alright, I should take my time, I could not expect progress to be always as rapid and linear as it had been in the first days. He told me I needed more rest, so I rested, but to no avail. I read multiple newspapers every day, hoping to find a clue, but none of them mentioned Udunvagor, and though the name Tolkien appeared now and then, it usually was not in a very important article. Clearly the world conquest had not worked the way it had been planned. I gazed at the tattered remnants of my beard in the mirror, but there was no trace of sauerkraut, so I obviously had never been installed as king of Germany either.

As I was not progressing any further, I thought of external stimulation to give my brain the much-needed kickstart. For nearly two hours I hit my head against a bedpost, but the only result was a headache. I ordered three Russian prostitutes, and the ensuing night was pleasant, but it helped even less. Slowly I began to accept that the only way to speed up my recovery was to face my inner demons, to confront my greatest fear and overcome it. I had to talk to Bqggz again.

Bqggz arranged our meeting in a café in the city centre, because he said that it was time for me to get some fresh air. To bypass the security system of the hospital turned out to be surprisingly easy. One of the cooks in the kitchen was in secrecy a member of Bqggz' communist sect-thing, and the noon after I contacted my former friend, I was given a lump of meat for lunch that tasted even more leathery than usual. I subjected it to closer scrutiny and found out that in reality it was a rolled-together latex mask. I put it on and just walked out of the room, gave a friendly nod to a bored-looking security guy and then just marched right through the protesting crowd in front of the hospital. I guess I was a less than convincing Britney Spears, with strands of my beard, still about half a metre long, constantly slipping out of the mask and dangling from my chin. But strangely enough, nobody suspected anything. Whatever I had done to these people in my prophet years had probably done some harm to their minds.

I walked down the sunny boulevards until I found Bqggz sitting beneath a sunshade in front of a cute little café. We drank the best espresso I had in three years - well, it was also the only one, to be exact - and chatted about the past.

"So what about my parents?" I asked. "Do you have any information on them?"

"Not much, I'm sorry", Bqggz said. "At the height of your... fame, they were forced to emigrate to northern Greenland. Last I heard, they were well, but that was over two years ago."

I nodded sadly. "I'll check that once I'm out of here", I said. "And the others? You know them, don't you? Old Pseudo, that weird Engels, Aunt Heckie..."

"Oh, they've mellowed a bit with age", Bqggz said. "I think they have started a private university of some sorts, where they can teach Tolkien-lore as it pleases them. I can give you the contact info if you like."

"Yes, please", I said. "Now, please tell me more about this trial against me. When will it begin? I guess I should hire a lawyer or two, or a dozen."

For some reason this topic seemed to make Bqggz feel uneasy. He shifted around on his chair. "Can't help you there either", he admitted. "You see, this is a matter of national security, and I'm not really popular with our government right now. But if they treat you like they treat me, they'll probably let you wait a month or two. To wear you down before they even start interrogating you."

"Ah well", I sighed. I would have preferred a clearer answer, but at the same time it was comforting that I had a few more weeks to sort myself out before this stuff required my attention.

Bqggz looked at his watch. "Well, it's getting later", he said. "Shall we move to a place where there's beer? I know a nice pub not far from here. The owner is from Belgium, and he has really good stuff that-"

"-What was that?" I interrupted, suddenly alert.

"Good stuff", Bqggz repeated.

"No, no, the other thing", I said. "Where did he come from?"

"Belgium", Bqggz said, frowning in confusion. "What about it?"

"That's it!" I yelled. "That's what happened then! Belgium! How could I forget! Give me these napkins." I grabbed a pile of paper napkins from the table and, lacking a pen, dipped my finger into the sweet brown coffee grounds in my cup. Hastily I began to scribble, lest I forgot again what washed to the surface of my mind like a rising tide.

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