Chamber of Horrors

‘Don’t you come anywhere near me, you bloody smelly old cow,’ said Brenda as Thrumm waved a hoof in the direction of what she didn’t yet know was the Detoxification Chamber. The hair on Thrumm’s honey brown coat began to ruffle and his tail twitched.

‘Don’t be insulting,’ said Thrumm, annoyed with this pestering Human but at the same time happy that at least he was in part being recognised as a cow according to SWOPP’s plan. ‘And do what I say before I start becoming insensitive to your quaint little Human ways. It really is frightfully simple; all you have to do is to remove your clothes and step into this nice room next door.’

‘Wotcha mean, getcha cloves off?’ said Kevin, beginning to feel that being told to strip by a talking cow was taking things too far, even in this crazy situation.

‘I would have thought that to someone who has been selected by SWOPP as One Of The Two Most Intelligent Beings Around from a Cross-section Of Everyone Alive On Earth Before It Wobbled Out Of Existence, that was a pretty obvious statement. Get your bloody clothes off and walk into the Detoxification Chamber.’

‘If you fink I’m takin’ me knickers orf in front of a man of the cloff, a bloody talking male cow and a ravin’ queen, you got anuvver fink comin,’ said Brenda, looking belligerent and brandishing the Morphy Richards.

Kevin was glad to see that Brenda’s concern about revealing her body didn’t extend only to him. He began to think for the first time since being unceremoniously parted from the lorry that perhaps wherever he was wasn’t so bad after all.

‘Frankly, my dear, I am amazed you can still find three categories of inhabitants of Earth to whom removal of your knickers would come as the remotest surprise,’ sighed Thrumm.

‘Look, if it makes your Earth related hang-ups any easier, I will look the other way,’ Thrumm conceded.

‘Oh, that makes everyfink jist wonderful,’ said Brenda, wondering whether talking Guernsey cows recognised sarcasm. ‘Wha’s in that room anyway?’

‘Oh, er, it’s just a nice little room which is on the way to the other room next to it. Which, as it happens, is even nicer – if you believe that could be possible,’ said Thrumm, trying to sound matter of fact and casual, but feeling a BLOP position thirty-four coming on.

‘You are being evasive, Mr Thrumm,’ said James, beginning to slip into the role of a vicar who has discovered someone fiddling the results of the Sunday School collection. ‘Could you please tell us clearly what is in the room and why you need us to go into it.’

‘Oh, well, have it your own way,’ said Thrumm, fast losing patience with these wittering humans. ‘It’s a Detoxification Chamber,’ he announced, deciding that it was definitely BLOP thirty-four time.

‘A de-what?’ said Kevin.

‘Detoxification Chamber,’ continued Thrumm. ‘In that nice little room your disgusting, germ-ridden earthly bodies will be taken to bits, cleaned and reassembled in more or less the same shape they were before you went in.’

There was a long silence, broken only by Julian’s soft whimpering.

‘You know, Mr Thrumm,’ said James, ‘you don’t make this thing sound terribly attractive. Why don’t we just shake… er… well, shake on it and go back to where we were before… um… before we were where we are now. I mean, no hard feelings and all that. Kevin here could go back to driving fish around, Brenda and Julian could attend to Mrs Thomas, and Helga and I could return to my nice old vicarage. We could just pretend this was all a dream.’

‘Have you quite finished?’ demanded Thrumm. ‘We really don’t have time for all this stupid talk talk talk. The fact is that you are needed inside and you can’t get inside until you have been detoxified. Can you imagine the potential problems caused by allowing into Mallogg proper some nasty little bug that we thought we had eradicated millions of years ago, along with all the animals and other unwanted guests? It just isn’t on, having large chunks of inhabitants of an extremely advanced civilisation falling off the perch stricken with terminal athlete’s foot.’

‘Look. The nice, warm and friendly deto… er… purification ward isn’t that bad,’ continued Thrumm, ‘and what’s more, there are some rather attractive modifications that come free of charge as part of the package.’

‘Oh, Gawd,’ said Brenda, ‘I can’t wait to ’ear.’

‘Don’t be negative,’ continued Thrumm. ‘You will find these small changes extremely useful, and you will probably wonder why you hadn’t popped around to your local medical mechanic and had them attended to before, while you were on Earth.’

‘Like what?’ Kevin wondered aloud, thinking the whole thing sounded rather like a computer upgrade kit.

‘Glad at least one of you is positive about what is going to happen to you anyway,’ said Thrumm, happy that at last he was going to have the opportunity to explain something attractive.

‘Take your sleep rate for instance.’

‘Wassat?’ asked Kevin, intrigued.

‘What it says. The speed at which you sleep. For you Humans this is set at the incredibly slow rate of one somnul per hour. And since you lot seem to think you need eight somnuls every twenty-four hours, this means that one-third of your time is spent doing bugger all. This is equivalent to 2,920 hours wasted every year. Looked at it another way. Thirty-three years of every hundred years of your pathetic lives will be spent sleeping. If you add to that the fact that, according to SWOPP, you seem to need an energy input three times during the sixteen hours you do manage to stay awake, it becomes a matter of some surprise that you have any time left at all. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, you don’t process your energy raw material very efficiently anyway and spend another undefined period of time each day locked away in small rooms, disposing of the by-product and reading newspapers. All in all Humans seem to be about as inefficient as they come.’

Thrumm looked around the room at the wide-eyed Humans, who were looking terrified at the prospect of what Thrumm could possibly propose as a way of dealing with all of these human failings.

‘Don’t look so pathetic,’ snapped Thrumm. ‘Here I am explaining how your lives are going to be made three times as useful and all you can do is to look as though I am going to exterminate you. Not that that wouldn’t be a bad option.’

‘But what in Heaven’s name are you going to do?’ asked James weakly.

‘Very simple,’ said Thrumm, slipping into BLOP posture sixty-two, being ‘One In Which One Can Explain Even Simple Things To Morons With An IQ Lower Than That Of A Rock’, and adopting his authoritative, condescending, soothing tone. ‘It would be too complicated to deal with all of your human shortcomings at once. A bit like digging up the same bit of road six times in two weeks to fix each of the essential services in sequence. With the risk that you connect the telephones to the gas and so on. No, no, we wouldn’t want to do that, now would we?’

Five humans dutifully and vigorously shook their heads in unison as testimony to not wishing to have their internal services rerouted in such a disorganised fashion.

‘Good,’ said Thrumm, smiling quietly to himself. ‘Thought you would all agree somehow. So what we will do is address the largest waste of time first. Your sleep rate. As you are recomposed, we will crank up the dial to three thousand somnuls per hour. That way you can deal with a year’s sleep requirement in forty winks. Not only that, we will install a Reveo for good measure.’

‘What the ’ell’s that?’ asked Kevin.

‘That,’ continued Thrumm, ‘is a really neat piece of kit. You will almost certainly wonder how you lived without it after a few days. If you survive that long, that is.’

The assembled humans were at last beginning to ignore Thrumm’s threats of dire consequences as being part of his extremely warped personality.

‘Assuming that we don’t expire before being able to savour the benefit of this wonderful piece of equipment,’ continued James, ‘could you give us a hint of what might be in store for us?’

‘That’s better,’ said Thrumm, beginning at last to see some light at the end of the tunnel.

‘Since you will be having all your sleep in super-quick time, you won’t be able to enjoy all those nice little dreams you used to have in the same relaxed environment before we made you more sleep efficient. Solution: a Reveo.’

‘For Gawd’s sake, Thrumm, what the ’ell does it do?’ shrieked Brenda, finally losing her patience with the long-winded cow.

‘I’m trying to tell you,’ said Thrumm, looking hurt. ‘If you have the patience to listen,’ he humphed. ‘A Reveo,’ he continued, ‘allows you to store all your dreams for viewing at any time you so wish. Not only that, but you can edit them to get rid of the boring or scary bits and to focus on the bits that you used to wake up feeling guilty about. If you have a really good dream, you can network it with someone else or alternatively persuade someone to share one of theirs with you. So you see how kind I am going to be to you.’

Thrumm looked around at the five Humans who still didn’t seem to be convinced.

‘Look, what else is bothering you about going into that nice room next door?’

‘If we do agree to go,’ said Brenda, ‘’n I’m not saying we do, can we keep our cloves on?’

‘Okay, okay, have it your way. On the count of three, you can all walk into the chamber fully cloved, er… clothed… before being vaporised, cleansed and reconstituted, if that makes you any happier. But go you will.’

Something about the nasty look in Thrumm’s eye and memories of the violent way in which they had recently arrived wherever they were, made the assembled company feel that this was probably about the best deal they were going to get in the circumstances.

With heavy hearts, the Humans stumbled in unison towards the mysterious room next door, wondering what it would be like to sleep at the speed of light and to be able to rerun their favourite naughty dreams at the push of a mental switch.