CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: REVELATIONS

Talk of clones and evil and a bad, bad man...

There was a silence that persisted for what seemed ages. The Professor, rubbing his inflamed face, the two young men with their mouths open, the dying Anne Boleyn and the seductive Griselda Entwhistle, all were gaping at the perfect young woman who had just spoken. Then Griselda stepped towards her and waved a finger in front of her perfect face.

“I've had about enough of this!” she snapped. “Nobody ever called me momma and got away with it! Who are you and what do you want!” She might have been in the persona of a young and indecently seductive woman, but there was a sudden power and authority in her voice. She was getting lost in all the talk of clones and things she'd barely given a moment's thought to all her life, and she wanted to get back onto safer ground. And no piece of ground is safer than the one you are standing on, either physically or metaphorically. At least that was what she thought, which may or may not have been irrational.

“I wanna tell you a story...” began the naked young woman, and she beckoned them all to sit on the edge of the Professor's bed which, noted Griselda with disgust, had about it that indefinable aroma of Old Man and slivers of toenail. But the whole party with the exception of the remaining leotard girls obeyed, even the Professor, whose mouth was almost constantly open in an expression of shock and bewilderment. He had never expected this woman to do anything of her own accord, let alone slap him like she had and then speak intelligibly. The bed was on the verge of being overcrowded, but the naked beauty stood next to it and surveyed them all, one at the time.

“I have had a wretched and monotonous life,” she began. “This repulsive creature, this so-called Professor, created me and my friends here in a test-tube, using eggs he removed secretly from the Boleyn woman. I don't know how he did it, but the intention was to produce, as he has explained, empty people that could, when the time was right so far as his own schemes were concerned, be filled up with the personality and character of a person whose life is nearing its end. We were all intended to be Anne Boleyn when a spare body was needed as she grew older: there have been a number before us, and one after another we have had the indignity of being used as a receptacle for the woman who unwillingly and unwittingly provided the substance of our being.

“Professor Stroggleoff, though, got things wrong. He believed that we would remain as empty vessels until such time as we were needed by him, but he forgot that we had senses and brains and the ability to learn. I've been in this shape, wearing this stupid leotard, for many years, waiting at the front of the queue to have Anne Boleyn's memories and the substance of her personality poured into me, and during that time I have developed a history of my own. For goodness sake, I think! I am!

“Slowly I have become me...”

“That cannot be!” snapped Professor Stroggleoff, standing up and almost tripping over his own beard in his agitation. “You are an empty vessel, and that's all you are!”

“You silly man,” smiled the naked clone, and she tilted her gorgeous breasts towards him. “You know that's not right, for occasionally, when nobody is likely to discover your sins, you take one or other of us to your bed at night, and perform your pervy antics on us. You get a kick from fondling breasts, don't you? You enjoy making your sad and feeble kind of love to us, is that not true? And we respond, don't we? We jerk around and if you're lucky we get half way to an orgasm, though speaking for myself I'm not lucky very often...”

“That's disgusting!” groaned Constable Lockemup.

“Very,” agreed Griselda, drily.

“So what? A man needs comfort at night!” snapped Stroggleoff, not even having the grace to blush.

“Be that as it may, you must have noted that we respond,” sighed the clone. “You must have listened to the way we whisper little nothings in your ears, to please you. You must have wondered, if you have half a brain cell, where those words came from if we are all as empty as you think we are!

“Think of it, foolish man! You create us, with our senses intact, and send us day in and day out round a University where people get educated, and expect us to ignore what's going on around us? Even though we have never been given a normal chance to understand language, even though we have had no kind of childhood, slowly we learn. We are human, and that's what humans do: learn from their elders and betters. Though you're not my better! No way are you anything like better than me or any of my sisters!”

Then, as one, the other three girls nodded and turned and, in unison, spat on the old man, shooting globules of fresh female saliva into the tangled mass of his silvery old beard.

“This is enough!” decided Griselda. “You girls: I'm sorry for each and every one of you and I can see now that you all look like a young and very beautiful Anne Boleyn. She must have been a rare beauty for that fat Henry V111 to marry her in the first place, and by all accounts, for a little while he loved her until he decided to have her head chopped off. But this must come to an end. The time has come for reason.”

“There's nothing remotely reasonable about any of this,” muttered Lucifer without the least suggestion of a stammer.

“I agree,” murmured Constable Lockemup, nodding thoughtfully.

“But what about me?” warbled the ancient Anne Boleyn. “I feel dreadful, as though all the years of history are piled on my shoulders.”

“You are an old hag!” snapped Stroggleoff. “You might not be as old as you think you are, but you'd still be accounted as old if you had a birth certificate! I reckon it's got to be above a hundred years since you were a clone drinking your own memories. You're due for another go any day now, but you've lasted well. You wouldn't think she was a hundred, would you?” he asked the group of people sitting on the bed, and he cackled aloud. “A hundred years old! That proves one thing: that not only does my system of making clones work but it gives extreme longevity to the clones themselves! I'm a genius, I am, and that's why I'm going to become Pope. Then, slowly and surely, I'll make an endless supply of clones. Everybody will have one! The whole world will be grateful and pay me handsomely for the gift of immortality! And then everyone will need their conduit to the Almighty! Everyone will need their Pope!”

“Not much worse than the present incumbent in the Vatican,” muttered Lucifer. “All popes are pretty self-serving and none of them believe what they claim to believe.”

“That's as maybe, but at least they're human,” said Griselda. “The thing is, though, what of this bearded monstrosity?”

“What do you mean?” asked Lockemup.

“He's been around forever,” pointed out Griselda. “It seems that there hasn't been a time when he wasn't the big white chief of this University called Stroggleoff, and it's plain as a pikestaff that he hasn't got the secret of immortality. So, I ask you, how has he done it? How has he been around all these years?”

“I hadn't thought of that...” whispered the naked clone.

You are beautiful... thought both Lucifer and Lockemup in silent unison when they looked up at her.

“The big question,” continued Griselda, “is where does he keep the clones he has made of himself? For if that is his route to immortality he certainly won't have left himself out. So where are they? And what are we going to do about them when we find them?”

“You'll never find 'em!” cackled Stroggleoff. “Oh, you're clever, Entwhistle, but not even you are clever enough to discover where the hundred are!”

“Hundred?” asked Lucifer. “Goodness gracious �" hundred? Does that mean there are a hundred of you lurking somewhere? A hundred evil professors?

“A hundred and one, counting me!” he screeched, and his face become one great humourless smile. “But you'll never find them and I'm on my way onwards and upwards, onwards and upwards to total world domination from the holiest of holies in the Vatican!”

“That's what you think,” came a voice from the door, and the Janitor, who they had all-but forgotten, stood there, glowering at his boss, and holding a silver cross before him.