CHAPTER THIRTY PROFESSOR STROGGLEOFF'S WEAKNESSES

A miserable Professor Stroggleoff becomes determined to rid himself of Griselda Entwhistle once and for all.

Professor Stroggleoff was crying.

His shoulders were heaving and floods of tears were finding a way through his enormous beard and finally dripping onto the floor at his feet. Professor Stroggleoff, to put it mildly, was upset.

He had been upset by the apparent disappearance of his favourite and oldest (in years but not in appearance) student. It seemed a very long time to him since he had taken the young woman under his wing, and he had treasured every moment, every second, of the years she had been with him in the University, by his side for much of the time, taking his tincture without complaint and never appearing to grow any older, though in her apparent endless youth there was a dark secret that not even she knew.

And now, suddenly, she was gone. She was nowhere to be found. He had called her in his special silent way, and she'd been beyond the range of his silence.

He knew who to blame, of course. It was the Entwhistle woman. It had to be that particularly noxious b***h!. For centuries he'd selected his students and moulded them into priests, bishops, all manner of clerical supermen. They'd been nurtured as if they were precious things, and he'd even reluctantly recently accepted the need for female students in addition to the one he'd always had, and nurtured them just as thoroughly. Why, convents were full of them!

He'd imbued both male and female with a sense of where they were in the Universe, to whom they owed their good fortune (himself) and gratitude for the life they were going to live. He even allowed one or two of them the odd drop of his tincture, and they grew to be older and wiser than most men before they popped their clogs and ended up in various churchyards across the globe. But during their lives they huddled in their churches and cathedrals and took the tithes from the poor, growing fatter themselves. Like priests and vicars and even pontiffs before them, they grew rich on the toil of peasants. They had good and wonderful lives.

And his one aim during all those years was to emerge, one day, as the man at the top of the pile. He wanted to be Pope himself, and not just any Pope but an immortal one, and his nudgings and pushings and little tricks were all to that end. Stroggleoff as Pope!

But it wasn't a natural course because before that elevation he had to keep his very immortality a secret, and that wouldn't be easy. He knew that if it got out, if the rumour that there was a man who owned the secret of immortality, became common knowledge then he would be bigger than the god his churches claimed to support, and that would be the end of all his aspirations.

He didn't want to be big, he merely wanted to be rich. As rich as the Catholic Church, and that was very rich indeed. And because of his wonderful tincture he had all the years under the sun to achieve his goal. He could afford to play the long game.

And that was why he was crying. The secret, his big secret, was on the verge of being let out of the bag. The Entwhistle woman either knew or guessed, and she had her claws in the lovely Anne, who he had long worshipped in his own rather perverse way. He particularly liked her in that skimpy leotard, the way it clung to her breasts, the outline of her beautiful buttocks (he'd always had a fondness for female buttocks, it was one of his very few weaknesses besides a belief in hie own magnificent ego), her hair, fine and lovely and always fragrant, even her pearly white teeth which looked brand new despite the long years they'd been in her mouth. In fact, there was very little that he didn't particularly like about her, and that dreadful old witch, that Entwhistle catastrophe, was leading her away from him.

Anyone watching would have noticed him visibly pulling himself together. His shoulders became more firm and his back, always bent, verged on the point of straightening without actually doing it, his eyes became clearer, and more than that, dried.

Professor Stroggleoff was about to assert himself. He was about to regain control of his own destiny after an uncharacteristic and rather self-indulgent weeping fit. He was going to reclaim the love of his life, the clear-eyed beauty who had shared his bed and his heart every now and then down the long centuries.

Without giving the matter any more thought he stomped out of his dusty old office with its mess of instruments and jars and glinting coloured bottles more reminiscent of an apothecary's inner sanctum than a University Professor's study, and swept down a long corridor.

All might have been well for him, or at least he might have been prepared for something unwelcome, had he not bumped into the trio comprising of Constable Lockemup, Lucifer aka Spotty and the unexpectedly ancient Anne Boleyn. But he did bump into them, physically, because he wasn't properly looking where he was going. He was too intent on sweeping along, black gown billowing behind him like the sails of a tea clipper in a steady sou' sou'wester.

He narrowly avoided Constable Lockemup, not liking to assault a man in uniform, made sure he avoided Lucifer on account of his unhealthy acne and knocked the Tudor queen to the ground, not recognising her on account of her sudden acquisition of old age.

“Get out of my way, you hag!” he squeaked. “How dared you impede me when I'm in full sail! And what is a creature so painfully old doing in the hallowed world of Scrumblenose University in the first place! Get on your feet, you foetid, foul-breathed noxious old bat, and answer me!”

The verbal assault had the affect that any sensible person would imagine it might have and Anne Boleyn started weeping herself. Her tears, from eyes ravaged by age, were little more than damp patches on her eyelids, but they were still tears.

After all, there are two sides to every equation and not only had the elderly professor shared long, steamy and rewarding nights with her but she'd shared those same nights with him. In the way that some physical contacts can live in the flesh for some time after they occur, things that the professor in his more masculine and nocturnal moments had done to her started making parts of her quiver. Her breasts (now more like empty sacks than real breasts) started reminding her of the gentle touch of his quaking hands and other, more southerly components of her flesh started responding to a half-forgotten but extremely welcome intrusion. And for he who had caused the origin of those sensations to use such unacceptable language at her made her feel more upset than she had when Henry V111 had decided to remove her head from her shoulders when she had been Queen of the greenest land on Earth.

And she started howling with the agony of tears that were almost dry on account of her desiccated physical state.

“What in the name of goodness are you making that row for, woman?” demanded the good professor. “Isn't it bad enough that you're old and feeble and completely loathsome?”

“Oh, Stroggly!” she wept, “to think you could be so cruel to your little Annikins! Stroggly, Stroggly, Stroggly, what have I done to displease you?”

Only one person in the history of the Universe had ever called Professor Stroggleoff by the affectionate nickname of Stroggly, and he knew instantly who she was despite the apparent contradiction provided by her physical appearance.

“Anne?” he asked. “Is that you? Is that my little Annikins? What have they done to you, the monsters?”

And he turned towards the two young men, anger in his eyes, and shouted “what have you done to her?” in a loud and most unprofessorial voice.

“It wasn't us, squire,” murmured Lockemup. “We wouldn't do anything quite so ageing to the young lady!”

“It was Entwhistle!” screamed Professor Stroggleoff. “I knew the moment I first saw her that she was trouble! Well, I'm off to sort her out once and for all! You, you Tudor Rose,” he said to Anne, “you go and wait in my office and I'll see if anything can be done to change you back to your proper self once I've sorted the Entwhistle witch out! Maybe another reincarnation �" I don't know �" but the clones are ready and waiting, so that could be the answer.”

And with no more ado and making no effort to explain his rather extraordinary suggestion he sailed off, gown floating behind him like an enormous black shadow, in the direction of the students' residential rooms.

The last they heard was his imperious voice calling down the corridor, “Hagman! Hagman! Take these urchins and incarcerate them in the deepest dungeon, and do it now!”

And then the janitor appeared, almost limping, moving like a menace from hell towards them.