A star fell.
It started up high – so high it was just another little white dot in the sky, shimmering from yellow to blue to red back to white again at the fancy of a viewer’s strained eyeballs – and then it came low, and it came low so fast and so furious that it tore the shrieking air in half and came to earth with the power of a very small and intense volcano, sending fountaining earth miles into the sky and shrouding the land in particulate that would linger for days no matter the sweepings and dustings and scrubbings that would be visited upon it all.
It also made Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, Baron of Coopmont and Yorklette-Upon-The-River and a Peerage of the Realm, spit out his pipe into his lap, spoiling his third-favourite Wednesday evening bathrobe.
“Zounds!” he said. “What the devil was that by jove? Why, I say, I should go investigate. Mrs. Biscuits! Round up my carriage.”
“The stablehands just went abed,” said Mrs. Biscuits, who was fifty-six years old and looked a hundred and felt six times that some days. She did not mask the contempt in her voice, as her employer was colourblind to it.
“Well fire the insolent blighters and get me new ones, toodley pip toot sweet! We’ve a sight to see!”
***
The sight was a smoulder glass-walled pit some hundred feet deep covered in burning ejecta that smelled like dying rocks and slaughtered dust. Occasionally it went ‘ping’ and something exploded in a small and sulky manner.
“Astounding, marvelous, miraculous, wondrous, amazing, magical, why, downright providential!” gushed Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, popping his monocle in and out of each eye socket in excitement. “A real-life fallen meteor, exactly as I’ve heard tale of in the Royal Society papers! Why, I reckon they’ll come begging hat-in-hand to me to see such a sight, eh?”
“Sounds liable, sir,” agreed the backup coach driver.
“Strip off your uniform and return to the gutter, you verminous skittering wretch,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. “How DARE you speak to me without permission?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“CLUB HIM!”
“It’s just me, sir. Should I club myself?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington ate his own tweed in anger.
“I say I say I say what what what what what what what what what what’s afoot here, what?” interjected a most gormless voice.
Oh. The horror. Lord Batheley-Tweedlington realized, to his mounting loathing, that he had failed to notice the precise location of the fallen star in relation to his lands. This was just outside No’thuperton (the Lesser), on the Sou’we’st’er’n’ side, which meant it was almost in the Duchy of Bucoolyptus, which meant it was adjourning the lands of…
“Woolthering,” he said coolly. His worst enemy and second cousin waved cheerily back in reply, one long, thin arm jutting loose from a stagecoach that he realized was slightly nicer than his own.
“Oh it’s BASIL, old boy old chum old sock old foot old fish old bass, you know it eh what what what? Lovely to see you oh I do say what’s up have you come along to look at the ol’ thingamabob too? Beautiful thing, beautiful, just beautiful, pity it landed on my half of the land but tell you what my old crown my old crock my old crumpet my old shoe you can take a piece free of charge not one groat nor ha-crown nor not a farthing nor penny nor ha’-penny upon my word as a gentlemen eh?”
While Lord Batheley-Tweedlington took his deepest breath and began to marshall his defenses against such an onslaught, the crater coughed.
“Pardon?” he asked, reflexively.
“Eh what what?” asked Woolthering, vacantly.
“Hrrk,” explained the crater, strenuously.
Then the bottom of the buried pit heaved and roiled and disgorged a body into the mild Wednesday night, wreathed in the smell of burning chemicals and hot metal, and subsided its rotting self deeper into the earth.
***
“Here, hold still you blasted thing! Woolthering! Woolthering! Make the silly blighter hold still, would you – oh, step lively now, come off it, step lively! How am I meant to get nice measurements with his bloody great numpty head swinging about like this?!”
“I say I say I say now hold on hold up hold on now my old tea and pudding my old china my old bean sprout the lad’s got a fierce hunger on him and you see how he growls when I step too close to his pudding, look at the face he makes, bless him!”
The visitor snarled at them over his eighth bowl of Mrs. Biscuit’s best what-I’ve-got-in-the-pantry soup. Lord Batheley-Tweedlington was indeed unable to avoid looking at that face he made: it was almost magnetic. Or at least he supposed it was; the teeth drew the eye so magnificently they seemed to swallow the attention whole. For the first time in his life he was in the same room as Rufus Hibbleghorst Woolthering III without having his entire mind body and soul bent to contemplating his mortal destruction. Instead his being was suffused with intoxicating words like CANINES and INCISORS and FANGS and SHARP to a degree that made him feel quite giddy. Was this terror? He’d never been terrified before. What a peculiar emotion; he couldn’t say that he cared for it. No wonder all the little people seemed so deuced upset to experience it all the time.
A splash shook him out of his reverie; the visitor had inserted his entire brain-pan into the soup-pot. Lord Batheley-Tweedlington seized the opportunity and – with a level of care he had hitherto reserved only for his own personage – placed the set of measuring-tongs about its skull and rattled off the numbers whip-smart.
“Lovely!” cried Woolthering, and he began scribbling away on HIS (Batheley-Tweedlington’s) charts without so much as a by-your-leave or please-and-thank-you, which was NOT cricket at all and – “Done!”
“What?” burst out Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.
“I say I say I said it’s done, my old trumpet my old coronet my old stocking my old grout! Always had a head for figures, I did I say I say I say! Here, take a gander!”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington snatched the document from his cousin’s hands with ill grace and perused it with his typical fierce intelligence.
“Upside down, old chap old chum old –”
“Oh DO shut up!” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. “Says here he’s an……”
“I say I say I say what? Is it still upside down?”
“SHUT UP! No, no, no, this is all wrong, you must’ve measured wrong!”
“But you wouldn’t let me touch the instruments, my old fiddle my old faddle!”
“Then you mathed them wrong!”
“I’m a maths expert, me, always am,” said Woolthering. “I’ve never unmathsed a mathsing. Mathsers are my bread and butter, I’ve never misundermathstimated a thing!”
“Well you’ve mathsed him as a bloody saint of the highest order, you have! I’ve been an expert and fully-qualified phrenologist my entire adult life and in all my years I’ve never seen this low a highwayman-quotient; his nose is a roman as Great Caesar’s Ghost himself –”
“More of a snout, really-“
“-and his brow is noble! High! True! Not the slightest trace of furrowing, of sloping, of, of, of COMMON BLOOD! Why, he’s more anglo-saxon than my Uncle Percivius, and HE perished from exsanguination after chopping his own hand off when a beggar of irish-iberian stock brushed their fingers together while panhandling!”
“I say, he’s the one my mother disowned! Terrible brother he was she said she did to me what what”
“He disowned her first.”
“He said she was ‘a blight on the blood of her highest and holiest house!’”
“Only when she disobeyed him!”
“He wanted her to marry him, what what what!”
“And she should’ve listened! Purity, that’s the ticket!”
The visitor hissed through his beyond-roman snout, expelling a few last droplets of Mrs. Biscuit broth, and then curled himself into a small compact ball on his throne, where he began emitting the most aristocratic of snores.
“Well,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington loudly, in the tone of one who is putting an argument behind them BUT NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE LOSING IT, “I suppose it falls on us to civilize this man before he falls prey to the errancy and debauchery of this fallen, polluted, soiled world. Amongst men such as I”
“-I say, I say, men such as WE-”
“-he may learn how to acquit himself in the manner of a man of his stature.”
“Speaking of which I say old chum are we sure he isn’t a lady?”
“My dear Woolthering,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington in the tones of one speaking to an unusually-thick clot, “this fellow travelled from a far star in a locomotive of fire and metal. A woman’s bloodflow would collapse under such pressures and her brain-pan would explode from anxiety. Obviously.”
“Oh no doubt my word my soul my sakes my word no doubt at all yes indeed indeed well then well!”
The visitor twitched and snarled nobly in his sleep, claws extended and retracting askew.
“Obviously yes let’s be about it,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. A few strands of antique French embroidery began to drip gently from between its grasping fingers. “Urgently.”
***
“No, no, no, you are NOT to pay ANY ATTENTION to that end of the Great Chain of Being, that is where dogs and horses and Irishmen and other useful lower creatures abide, no no no you must look up here! Here! Just above-or-below the angels, under God, and….perhaps a LITTLE BIT above Englishmen? Confound it, LOOK UP HERE damn you- AAAAGH!”
“I say!”
“It BIT me!”
“I say I say I say I saw you, you put your finger in his mouth!”
“That’s no bloody call for him to go and bloody well bite it!”
“I say, language!”
“Go to the blazes you darned harridan!”
“I say!”
The visitor snarled.
“Now look at what you’ve let him do! He’s chewed up the Great Chain of Being! And NOT from the bottom-up as is right and proper! He’s CHEWED UP GOD THE FATHER THE SON AND THE HOLY SPIRIT!”
“Don’t shout!”
“I WILL SHOUT WHEN I PLEASE AND ulk”
“I say!”
“uh”
“Please do let him go sir, I promise he shall stop shouting!”
“h”
“See, he agrees!”
“-ah. Ah. Thank. You.”
“You’re welcome old friend old chum!”
“Please, Woolthering, I beg of you, in – ah, my god – the name of our many years of bitter, spiteful enmity, do not mention it. Ever. To anyone.”
“Lips sealed and solemnly sworn to oath eh what what what what what what what what what what!”
“What,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington mechanically. He dabbed at the marks on his neck. It was the worst he’d had since his dear old father had passed away of the dropsy. “What. Do we do now?”
“Well,” said Woolthering thoughtfully, “we might try-”
“Rhetorical!” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington loudly and a little too quickly. “Rhetorical! Come now! We must correct his notions, and I know just the place.”
***
The Chapel of St. Burleston-Helpmeet-By-The-Starry-Shore-King-Of-Peace-And-Love had served Anglicanism proudly and with distinction since the first days after Henry the Eighth had his little difficulties with the pope, and before that it had been a Catholic shrine, and before that a roman temple, and before THAT some druids had done interesting things in its neck of the woods with knives and mistletoe and a consistent supply of about one and a half galloons of blood in mobile form.
It had been burning most beautifully for five minutes, which was long enough for the panic to die down and the blame to go around.
“You did this!” shouted Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.
“I say!”
“You DID! You said this was a good idea!”
“I say, I say, you said that!”
“No! It was my idea but YOU said it was a good one!”
“I say! I say that I said that it was a bad one!”
“WELL YOU SHOULD’VE SAID LOUDER!”
The visitor growled truculently.
“Shut it,” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. “And drop that piece of the vicar! The poor man only had one leg after waterloo, and now you’ve gone and robbed him of two of his longest and best fingers!”
The visitor obligingly spat them out, covered in a peculiar secretion that dissolved the flagstones at their feet.
“Right! Woolthering, you take them.”
“What?”
“What what?”
“What is what I said, what what!”
“What ‘what’ did you mean by saying what?!”
“What!”
“WHAT!”
A star descended from the heavens as smoothly and as softly as a baby’s sleeping smile. It drifted from bottomless heights to the lowly earth in a single heartbeat and yet never rushed; its mass flattened the smouldering rubble of St. Burleston-Helpmeet-By-The-Starry-Shore-King-Of-Peace-And-Love without a whisper of effort or a creak of protest, and when its passenger disembarked even it seemed to move with grace despite having sixteen legs four faces and an entirely unbelievable number of arms.
“There you are, my sweet baboo,” it sighed in an entire choir’s whispers.
The visitor spat out the third finger it had secreted in its cheek pouches and scampered with a bound to the passenger’s skirts, which it pawed at most pleadingly. It was picked up, and adorned with a crown of writhing appendages and sensors that soothed and fussed over it, and it was loved.
Then the star swallowed them again and was gone. A second later, it had never even existed.
The two men stood there and stared at the empty sky, listened to the creak and crisp of more centuries of pews going up in cinder-spouts.
“Bit of a pity one didn’t remember to bring his phrenological calipers with us, what what? I should’ve liked to see her skull circumference.”
“She had a skull?” asked Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, distantly. And then, “wait, she? You think that…THAT… was a lady?”
“Why not what?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington closed his eyes. “I’m going home. I fear I have become ill.”
“Laudanum’ll do the trick, I say! Swear on it for a dicky stomach!”
“Oh shut it,” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. “What do you know about scientific procedure? If it weren’t for men like me we wouldn’t know anything about these beings from the phlogiston vapours of the luminous ether!”
“What do we know then eh, my old turnip, my old carrot, my old root cellar?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington looked to the skies again. They were darkening and dimming; the smog from London town was rolling in with the winds. He wished he had his pipe.
“They clearly aren’t civilized enough to appreciate the power of Victorian scientific thought,” he said stiffly.
Then he went home and drank half his bar as a medicine cabinet.