All these real-life luminaries coexist contentedly with things from outer space, broom-riding witches, talking animals, anthropomorphic objects and the supernatural denizens of ACG’s distinctive green-tinged afterlife. This occult region, carpeted in limeade-coloured clouds, is a Rod Serling version of Eternity that features intermittently across the outfit’s other books and is referred to as “The Unknown” on what looks like a hand-painted sign in its cumulus-strewn reception area. The place is an abode of sheet-clad ghosts, trolls, leprechauns and monsters cribbed from Universal Studios’ back catalogue, along with wingless, robed custodians who seem like biliously-hued Frank Capra angels, tubby and avuncular. It distantly occurs to Alma that she may well have been influenced in some way by this secular, fantastical and folksy view of paradise while realising Warry’s childhood vision in the paintings and the illustrations she’s been working on for this last year. Despite the lack of any similarity between their styles, Alma’s elaborate depiction of a higher Boroughs filled with dreams and fiends and phantoms probably owes a great deal to Ogden Whitney’s staid surrealism.
On the other hand she is aware that Whitney’s merits, many though they be, are merely camouflage to mask the actual nature of her interest in his work. This is entirely based on Alma’s extreme identification with the artist’s best-known character. She’d been a portly little lump herself before her frankly terrifying growth-spurt and, like Whitney’s hero, had endured a pudding-basin haircut. She had also shared Herbie’s conviction that the powers and forces of the universe should all know her by name and have the basic common sense to get out of her way. In the adventure that she’s holding in her red-nailed strangler’s hands, “Herbie and the Sneddiger’s Salad Oil”, the omnipotent schoolboy scares away a full grown Frankenstein, a barrage of machine-gun bullets that have worried little faces and which swerve from their trajectory on recognising Herbie, lion-headed alien dinosaurs from the beleaguered planet Bertram, and even such astronomical phenomena as an aggressive comet, which veers from its course in panic at its first sight of the lollipop-addicted human bowling ball. As Alma sees it, this is no more than the same polite respect which she expects rampaging elephants, Cruise missiles, werewolves, corporations, bolts of lightning and invading spacemen to extend to her.
Another reason for her empathy is Herbie’s eyes, both for the heavy-lidded bored look that she knows from her own baby-photographs and for the ugly spectacles that he’s apparently compelled to wear. That’s how she could have ended up, what with the almost useless left eye that she has inherited from her mum, Doreen. She had only managed to avoid a pair of National Health face-deformers by the application of her seven-year-old ingenuity. When taken by her mother for a mandatory school eye-test, Alma had glanced at the chart in passing and had memorised it, top to bottom, utilising the extraordinary powers of recall that neither her school-friends nor family had noticed yet, and which she hadn’t been in any hurry to inform them of. The school optician had clamped Alma’s outsized head in Clockwork Orange goggles, then had pointed to the hovering grey blurs that floated in the fog while she reeled out a list of letters that she couldn’t see for toffee. This technique had kept her glasses-free until her teenage years, when the eye-test procedure had been altered unexpectedly and Alma had been caught out as a half-blind fraud with an almost vampiric sensitivity to light. She’d subsequently been made to endure two years of thin frames and blue-tinted lenses that had somehow managed to make her look even more pretentious than she was already. When one lens fell out and shattered, Alma’s colour-blind optician had replaced it with pink-tinted glass that made her look like someone from the audience of a 3D film. By then, she’d made her mind up that her vision without glasses was deteriorating, and this latest outrage had just piled insult on injury. She’d thrown the two-tone spectacles away, resolving that if she was going to go blind then she’d do it on her own terms, thank you very much. Later she’d learned that wearing no lenses at all produced what was known as a “negative lensing effect” within the muscles of the eye that actually improves the vision. Or is it a positive lensing effect? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that in Alma’s own estimation, she’s been proven right. It’s Alma one, opticians nil, as far as she’s concerned.
Returning her attention to the story she is reading, Alma thinks again of Ogden Whitney, of his sad demise as detailed in Art out of Time, the lovely volume that Mike Moorcock sent her as a thank you for her cover illustration on a recently reissued Elric paperback. Within the wonderful collection of neglected and peculiar comic strips from bygone times, Alma had been delighted to see a characteristically demented Herbie offering included, with accompanying text about the artist. She’d been touched if unsurprised to learn that Herbie’s looks and general physique were based on those of Ogden Whitney as a child, and had filled up with tears to read how he had died, forgotten and insane from booze in an asylum. She imagines Herbie in his sixties, sitting in the day room at the home, white shirt and blue pants traded in for a stained bathrobe and his differently-powered lollipops replaced by bottles. The time-travel bottle-pop would be the only one that worked. His sleepy eyes gazing unfocussed through thick beer-glass lenses and his paunch now drum-tight with the enlarged liver. Greying, bowl-cut head filled with his flat, precisely-drawn dementia, lion-dragons and Sneddiger’s Salad Oil, the many ghosts and featured creatures of a green Unknown.
Taking a last pull on the sepia-streaked stub she grinds it out and stands up with another creaking outcry at the dull ache in her back. She’s barely consciously aware she makes these noises anymore, so constant and repetitive have they become. Sorting amongst the notebooks, comics, pens and paperbacks Alma locates a hairbrush that has somehow managed to survive its daily skirmish with her head. This one, a sturdy wooden item that is capable of ‘MEGA Taming’ if one pays attention to the printed promise on its handle, has already lasted for over a year with no more than a dozen or so of its plastic teeth wrenched out. Its predecessors, that have snapped in two or have been otherwise dismantled by their first or second painful drag through Alma’s tangled locks, were simpering pansies by comparison.
She’s learned early in life that if she doesn’t brush her mane once every day it will develop knots that in a week will have turned to impacted rhino horn; bolls of mahogany that it will take tree-surgeons, chainsaws, ropes and ladders to remove. Closing her eyes she starts to pull the brush down from the crown, her face immediately concealed behind a grey-brown safety curtain as the bristles rake excruciatingly through the unyielding snarls. The sound of ripping follicles and snapping vinyl prongs, she has discovered, make the ritual far more upsetting for anyone forced to listen to it than it is for her. Her artist friend Melinda Gebbie, would sit covering her ears and whimpering if she were witness to a brushing, frightened that Alma would yank part of her skull away while Alma was herself apparently oblivious to this self-scalping. Her relationship with pain has largely been one of indifference since she realised that its actual physical component rarely hurt that much, and that it is the psychological and the emotional attached files that do all the harm. As far as she is able, therefore, she has disconnected hurtful physical sensations from accompanying mental reflexes of shock or fear or anger. As a minor by-product of this largely successful process, Alma is no longer even ticklish. She terrorizes those who are with absolute impunity.