Little Pierre de la Nuit-Pierrot le Fou, he styled himself-was Loup-Garou's best friend and had contributed seventeen canvases to the first show. Magnificent, monstrous things they were, of course-flying saucers, all of them: blue and gold and silver and green and bright orange, shaped like doughnuts or boomerangs or ellipsoids or cones. Every one of them had been reported in the sky by somebody or other in the past forty years.
Loup-Garou circulated news stories about each sighting, you can be sure, to demonstrate again pararealisme's devotion to the REAL.
Then there was Jean Cul's The Sheep-Cow; some claimed it was the greatest of all Pararealiste paintings. It portrayed an animal half-sheep and half-cow, a veritable insult to the laws of genetics. Such an animal had been born in Simcoe, Ontario, in 1888. They circulated news stories about it.
All of this created so much international discussion that the Pararealistes immediately released the second Manifesto. (They had learned something about P.R. from the early surrealists.)
They denounced those who did not like their paintings as fools. They then denounced those who did like their paintings as damned fools, for liking them for the wrong reasons. They went on to fulminate against everybody in generaclass="underline"
We renounce and hurl invective upon the rationalist conducting experiments in his laboratory. Every instrument he uses is a creation of human narcissism; it emerges from the human ego as Athene from the head of Zeus. The rationalist imposes his own order on these instruments; they impose order on the data; and he then proclaims that the universe is as constipated and mechanistic as his own mind! What has this epistemo-logical masturbation to do with the REAL?
And we abominate and cast fulminations upon the irrationalist, also. Behold him, in his drugged stupor, maddened by opium or hashish, gazing inward and depicting his childish dream and nightmares on canvas. He is as limited by the human unconscious as the rationalist is by the human conscious. Neither of them can see the REAL!!!
It reads better in the original French. But it would have been a top news story if it hadn't been eclipsed by the singularly obscene "miracle" at Canterbury Cathedral that week.
The details of the alleged "miracle" had been censored and covered up by high Church officials from the very beginning. Newspapers, at first, printed only short items saying that something strange caused the Archbishop of Canterbury to turn a ghastly white during Mass and stumble so badly that he fell off the altar.
Of course some cynics immediately assumed that His Eminence was as drunk as a skunk. There are always types like that, believing the worst of everybody.
Then the rumors started to circulate. Those who had been in the Cathedral said that the Most Reverend Archbishop had not so much stumbled as jumped, and that his expression was one of such fear and loathing that all present felt at once that something distinctly eldritch and unholy had invaded the church. Others, imaginative types and religious hysterics, claimed to have felt something cold and clammy moving in the air, or to have seen "auras."
By the time the rumors had gone three times around the United Kingdom and twice around Europe, there were details that came out of the Necronomicon or the grim fictions of Stoker, Machen, Walpole. Horned men, Things with tentacles, and Linda Lovelace were prominently featured in these embroidered versions of the Canterbury Horror, as it was beginning to be called.
The press, of course, got more interested at this point, and the Reverend Archbishop was constantly besieged to conform or deny the most outlandish and distasteful reports about what had occurred. At first His Eminence refused to speak to the press at all, but finally, by the time some scandal sheets were claiming that Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god of Khem, had appeared on the altar bellowing Cthulhu fthagn!, the Archbishop issued a terse statement through his Press Secretary.
"Nothing untoward happened. His Eminence merely tripped on the altar rug, and any further discussion would be futile."
This merely fanned the flames of Rumor, of course.
One legend circulated even more than the others, perhaps because it appealed to prurient interest, or maybe just because it was the version given by a few people who had actually been in the Cathedral during Mass.
According to this yarn, a miraculous flying Rehnquist- just like the ones in the murals at Pompeii, except that it didn't have wings-had soared across the front of the church, barely missing His Eminence's high episcopal nose.
The judicious, of course, did not credit this wild rumor. They were all coming around, as the judicious usually do, to the view of the cynics. The Archbishop, they said, had been stewed to the gills.
His Eminence was no fool, however. After the first shock, he had begun his own investigation, aided by a few trusted deacons.
They found the slingshot, abandoned, on the floor of the first pew, to the right. That was the direction the Rehnquist had come from, and they all breathed a sigh of relief.
The Archbishop told them, then, the rumors he had heard about the incident of the Unistat Ambassador who had to be put on morphine after finding It, wrapped in pink ribbon, on a staircase.
"We are dealing with a deranged mind," His Eminence said, "but not with anything 'supernatural,' thank God."
They never found the Rehnquist, but as the Archbishop pointed out, "the perpetrator may have confederates."
Everybody tried to remember who had been sitting in the extreme right of the first pew. They carefully made up a list, including everybody's separate memories, half-memories, or pseudo-memories. The list looked like this:
Lord and Lady Bugge
the Hon. Guy Fawkeshunt, M.P. and
Eva Gebloomenkraft
Ken Campbell and Eva Gebloomenkraft
the Hon. Fission Chips, F.R.S. and
Eva Gebloomenkraft
"One name seems to stand out, doesn't it?" asked His Eminence.
"Eva Gebloomenkraft," said a deacon. "Isn't she that Jet Set millionairess who got into so much trouble in Unistat two years ago for putting laughing gas in the air conditioning system at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?"
The sudden death of Bonny Benedict created waves of confusion and apprehension far beyond what ordinarily would have resulted from such a tragic accident.
The first one affected was Polly Esther Doubleknit, who called down from her executive office to the City Desk at once.
"What the hell happened to Bonny?" she demanded.
The City Editor spoke in a hoarse croak. "It seems to be what the TV news said, a heart attack." He was beginning to feel that he'd be the next victim, since his blood pressure seemed to be rising every minute.
"A heart attack?" Polly Esther was dumbfounded. "But what about the man?"
"He's being held, of course," the City Editor said. "But God knows what they'll charge him with-manslaughter, negligent homicide, who knows? There's never been a case like this before."
"They had better charge him with something," Polly Esther said crisply. "Or this paper will land on the D.A.'s office with all four feet. Do I make myself clear?"
Admiral Babbit nearly jumped out of his skin when the news reached Washington.
"It's those Briggsing Bryanting faggots from Alexandria!" he screamed. "And they're gonna try to pin it on us!"
This was a defensive over-reaction caused by the fact that Old Iron Balls had been contemplating various ways of bringing about the demise of Ms. Benedict. But he distrusted Einstein and neuroanalysis-"Jewish egghead stuff"-and never realized that most of his mentations consisted of defensive over-reactions.
"I'll fix those Rehnquist-suckers," he said to an aide. "Get old de la Plume, and tell him I've got a big job for him."