CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: ARRESTED!

Constable Lockemup uses his powers of arrest...

Anne Boleyn looked dreadful. Under the gentle ministrations of Griselda's magic she had aged dreadfully, not in the perky, cheeky almost childish way that Griselda aged when she looked her real self, but as an old woman with more than one foot in the grave.

After the Janitor had marched them down several flights of stairs, each rockier and more slippery than the next, and steeper than any stairs have the right to be, and then down corridors that stank of death and decay, he had flung them into a stone cell. Its four walls were unmarked by any window and the only way out was the way in. And that was a door that Hagman, with a dreadful sneer, locked behind him.

“I don't like this,” Lockemup had muttered. “I'm a policeman, and you don't treat policemen like this and expect to get away with it!”

There had been a great deal of self-pitying moaning from the unbelievably ancient Anne Boleyn, and even Lucifer had expressed the hopelessness of their position.

“I reckon we're on the wrong side,” he muttered. “If might equals right then the professor seems to be right!”

“Don't let me hear you say that!” barked Lockemup. “Just let me get at that lock, and I'll have it open in a jiffy! I'm not a constable for nothing!”

And he had been as good as his word, though a jiffy turned out to be half the night. Then he had led them along two wrong passages before finding the right one and the several flights of stairs they had been hauled down by the Janitor.

Anne had been a problem. She had been too weak to manage the whole journey without assistance, and they had resorted to carrying her. But (and this surprised them more than anything else had that day), despite her obvious frailty she was heavy. It must have been the weight of the centuries through which she had lived, remaining youthful on the potion provided by Professor Stroggleoff. They found it impossible to carry her more than a few yards before they had to put her down, exhausted themselves. They even tried sharing the burden, but she was still like a huge weight dragging their weary muscles down towards the Earth. To look at her she should have weighed almost nothing at all, a fragile old creature with no flesh to speak of on her bones, but the reality was she weighed an impossible amount.

And so the night was nudging up towards dawn by the time they got back to from the janitor's hellish cell and found their slow and painful way along to the main reception area. And so it was that they stumbled into Professor Stroggleoff's office It had been Anne's suggestion, and they were too weary to come up with a better idea of their own.

“He likes me to sleep with him,” she whispered, barely capable of any kind of speech after her struggle through the woodlands and along the University's seemingly endless corridors. “He needs someone to cuddle up to at night or he gets scared,” she added. “He likes touching human flesh in the night. He says it makes him feel better, though I sometimes think he feels a bit hoary.”

“Hoary?” the constable had asked.

She had nodded. “Yes, like a breath of winter with the first frosts just setting in,” she had murmured, and shuddered.

“The dirty old man,” muttered the constable.

“I'll second that,” agreed Lucifer with a grimace

“But I want to go there tonight,” she had added. “Winter or no winter, hoary frosts or icy winds from his noxious farts, I need to be there tonight because I feel so wretchedly weak. He can give me my strength back. He's done it before and I need him to do it again.”

And that had had to be that.

But that is how they came to stagger into the Professor's office-cum-bedroom in the early hours of that morning, and ended up face to face with Griselda complete with unbelievably long and sexy legs barely concealed by almost the shortest imaginable skirt, together with Professor Stroggleoff and Damienne Bustthruster in the middle of what looked to their tired minds to be some kind of dispute.

“He called me a cretin!” moaned Damienne in her double-bass voice. “As if I was anything of the sort! I'm a teacher of comparative religions, and as such must be as bright as a silver button! Brightness was part of my job-description, don't forget!”

“You'd not be accounted so bright by me if you actually believed in any one of those comparative religions,” said Constable Lockemup, wanting the night to end so that he could find somewhere to curl up and sleep his weariness off. It had been a painfully long day and he was more fed up with it than he had ever been with any day in all the rest of his life.

“I believe all of them!” snorted Damienne. “Of course they're all true! Gods here and gods there and gods just about anywhere, wars in Heaven and wars on Earth, lovely stuff! If they weren't all true I'd be out of a job, and we can't have that!”

“She's drunk herself!” shouted Professor Stroggleoff, ignoring the philosophical debate beginning to dominate his bedroom and pointing a wavering finger at Griselda and her long legs. “That foul woman has drunk herself and I was going to use the essence of her to create a clone!”

“So that's what you were after, is it?” giggled Griselda. “Well, I feel as pissed as a very pissed creature! I must be intoxicating! I must be the most intoxicating- hic " creature on this planet! I'll have to sell myself to Thomas the Greek, that's the way for me to make my fortune! I'll have a pub built and call it Griselda's and melt myself into everyone's pint pot! That's what I'll do, and I'll go down in history as the richest and most alcoholic woman on Earth!”

“You were being preserved in vodka,” growled the Professor. “It's not you it's the high alcohol vodka, you silly young creature! Vodka's a first class medium for the preserving of human memories! Anne, wherever she is, has been in a flask of vodka for years! I top her up every so often to keep her young and stop her getting fed up with the same lectures year after year after year! But where is the silly creature?”

“How dared you not see me!” moaned Anne Boleyn, but she was in her repulsive superannuated shape and the Professor hadn't recognised her.

“Are you my Annikins?” asked the Professor, suddenly confused. “Is that you under those layers of wrinkles and surrounded by that noxious cloud of stale urine?”

“Of course I am! I came here to spend the night with you because I'm weaker and more frail than I've ever been, and only you can make me feel like myself again,” she moaned.

“What makes you think I'd want an old creature like you, what with all your knobbly bones and the sweet fragrance of stale piss coming out of your no-doubt oversized knickers in bed next to me?” demanded the Professor. “I'm selective, I am. I choose only the brightest and the best for me to grope in the night!”

“That's why you chose me, sweetie,” boomed Damienne Bustthruster with a becoming scowl.

“You made me young!” howled Anne. “You are my creator and you created me to have something to snuggle up to at night!”

“Ah, but that made sure you'd never get old! I don't like old! But now, look at you! I can only make you what you are, not what you were! The only solution is to clone you and hope that it'll work again. I have your essence in a jar of vodka, you know. All I've got to do is send Hagman after a younger version of you and get her to drink the vodka and hey, presto! With a little bit of luck you might get to live a young life again and be desirable all over again.”

“With a little bit of luck?” queried Griselda. “What do you mean by with a little bit of luck? Is that what your magic is? Pure luck and nothing else?”

“I've done it before and I know it works, it's just that I'm not sure how!” snapped the Professor. “I've got clones of her, of course I have, I've had to use them before....”

“Ah! The sad little grave in Targon woods...” whispered Griselda, sobering up.

“So you've seen that, Miss Meddlesome?” snapped Stroggleoff. “How else do you think I've kept the woman young? Look at me: I've aged over the years and I've not been able to keep myself from ageing. If I knew how to don't you think I'd have done it for myself? Every time Boleyn get older and starts to get ugly I take one of her clones and make it drink the essence of Anne, and we can start with her life all over again, from when she was about to have her head lopped off by a greedy king. Easy peasy!”

“That's plain wrong,” muttered Griselda.

“And it's not wrong you making yourself into a teenage vamp?” snarled Stroggleoff.

Griselda smiled. “Touché,” she murmured.

“Anyway, all I need is an empty body and then I could put Anne's essence into it and to all intents of purposes it will become Anne. And there are enough clones of her to last me for centuries if I need them. I could even put her in someone else's clone at a pinch if everything went tits-up!”

“Even it it was a bloke's body?” asked the Constable.

“I suppose so,” shrugged the Professor. “I was going to experiment on the Entwhistle's essence and see what I could come up with. There are loads of students I use for experiment purposes. You might have seen them around. I insist they wear black leotards to identify them. That way I know who they are and don't use the same one twice.”

“You're a very evil man,” growled the Constable. “And I know what to do about you. Now listen hard. You don't have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court.”

“What's the silly man on about?” demanded Stroggleoff.

“That's easy,” grinned Constable Lockemup. “You're nicked, son, and make no mistake about that!”