Saturday, July the 17th, 2004

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Frustum, Tang, Sluice

One of Confidential Agent Blot's earlier investigative triumphs was cracking the case of the dishevelled marmalade man. Let us recall the facts. The whinnying of horses had disturbed the sleep of the little village of Spraingue for two months. There was a damp, hideous thing in the corner of the post office that none dared approach. Perhaps most jarring of all, an illegal cafeteria had been built slap in the middle of the village, surrounded by menacing guard dogs whose fangs glistened in the moonlight. Agent Blot arrived on the scene on a Tuesday afternoon frantic with gales. His dazzling cone-shaped hat made the villagers wonder what frustum it had once topped. His complexion was paler, more drawn and anguished than usual, possibly because a change in diet had given him a recent attack of the seeds, from which he was not yet fully recovered. His breath was tanged with the fumes of his weird pills, those tiny pink spangles Dr Glag had insisted upon. Agent Blot commandeered an abandoned birdseed silo as his headquarters, and subjected every single villager to a lengthy interrogation. His manner was charming but curiously unnerving. The clinic was soon filled with haunted-looking patients demanding to have their brains sluiced with Baxter's Terrible Fluid. By Saturday afternoon, with no let up in the gales, Spraingue had an air of almost Biblical calamity. And yet, and yet… as soon as his last interview was done with, Agent Blot sprang upon the dishevelled marmalade man and carted him off to the dungeon in his cave. The horses' whinnying ceased. The thing in the post office evaporated. A law was passed to make the cafeteria legal, and the dogs bounded away across the hills, their atrocious yapping growing ever fainter, until it could no longer be heard at all.