As Pooley and Omally struck the fag-scarred carpet, their last glimpse of anything approaching reality was of Professor Slocombe. The old man stood, the hell-fire painting his ancient features, hands raised towards the burning sky now visible through the Swan’s shattered roof, his mouth reciting the syllables of a ritual which was old before the dawn of recorded history.
Above came the deadly whine of engines as Lombard Omega and the crew of the Starship Sandra moved in for the kill.
“Finish them!” screamed the Captain. “Finish them!”
The ship rocked and shivered. Needles upon a thousand crystal dials rattled into the danger zone. A low pulsating hum set the Captain’s teeth on edge and caused the navigator, who had suddenly found Christianity, to cross himself. “Finish them!” screamed Lombard.
The ship’s engines coughed and faltered. The air about the craft ionized as a vague image of something monstrous swam into view. It wavered, half-formed, and transparent, and then, amid a great maelstrom of tearing elements, became solid.
Lombard Omega stared in horror through the forward port. “What’s that?” he cried drawing up his hands. “What in the name of F…”
His final words, however obscene, must remain unrecorded. For at one moment he was steering his craft through empty air above Brentford Football ground and at the next it was making violent and irreconcilable contact with the capping stone of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
Whoosh, wham, crash, and bitow went the Starship Sandra as it lost a goodly amount of its undercarriage and slewed to one side. It plummeted downwards, a screaming ball of fire, narrowly missing the roof of the Flying Swan, cartwheeled over the Piano Museum, and tore down towards the allotments, the last men of Ceres, who were standing around looking rather bemused, a very great deal of carefully-laid explosive, and the few sparse and dismal remnants of a former postman’s prize-winning cabbage patch.
There was a moment of terrible silence and then an explosion which rocked the seismographs at Greenwich and had the warlords of a dozen nations reaching towards the panic buttons.
A very great silence then fell upon what was left of the Brentford Triangle.
EPILOGUE
The sun rose the next morning at three a.m.
This came as a great surprise to those folk of Brentford who felt in the mood to enjoy the dawn chorus, but no more so than it did to the peoples of the Nile delta who, somewhat bewildered at the sudden disappearance of their greatest tourist attraction, noticed also that the nights were definitely drawing in a bit.
Had the Memorial Library clock been still extant, it would just have struck the hour when an impossibly long low-loader turned up the Ealing Road, demolishing Brentford’s two remaining lampposts, and cracking a hundred paving-stones beneath its many-wheeled assault.
High in the cab, illuminated by the green dashlights and the first rays of the rising sun, sat a bald-headed man in a saffron robe. He puffed upon a Woodbine and stared through the tinted windscreen at the blackened wreckage which had once been the town of his birth.
There had been more than a few changes while he had been away, this was clear. Another council housing project, he assumed, or road-widening scheme, although it appeared a little drastic. He pulled the five-hundred-foot vehicle up through the gears and rolled it over the railway bridge, whose girders groaned beneath the strain. Where had the New Inn gone, and surely the council would not have demolished two of their cherished flatblocks?
The great vehicle’s front wheels plunged into a pothole, dislodging the driver’s Woodbine into his lap. He would have harsh words to say about all this and no mistake. Here he was, delivering the greatest archaeological discovery in the history of mankind, and they had let the roads go to ruin.
And what in Dante’s name was that? Archroy brought the mammoth loader to a shuddering halt. Retrieving his fallen Woodbine, he climbed down from the cab.
In considerable awe he stared up at the vast structure which now stood upon the site formerly occupied by Brentford’s football ground. That was the Great Pyramid of Giza or he was a clog-dancing Dutchman.
The man of bronze ground out his cigarette with a naked heel and scratched at his hairless pate. Whatever had been going on around here?
He climbed back into his cab and put the mighty vehicle into gear. He was rapidly losing his temper. Where was the reception committee? Where was the bunting and the Mayor? Had he not written to Neville detailing the time of his arrival? This was all a bit much.
Ahead, in the distance, faint lights showed in a window: the Flying Swan, surely, but candle-lit?
Archroy applied the brakes and brought the low-loader to a standstill outside the smoke-blackened and shrapnel-pocked drinking house. He fumbled in his dashboard for another packet of cigarettes, but could find nothing but a bundle of picture postcards displaying now inaccurate rooftop views of Brentford.
He climbed down from his cab, slammed shut the door and, kicking rubble to left and right of him, strode across the road to the Swan’s doorway. With a single curling backward kick he applied his bare foot to the door, taking it from its hinges and propelling it forwards into the bar.
Four startled men looked up in horror from their drinks at the bar counter. Jim Pooley, John Omally, Professor Slocombe and Neville the part-time barman.
“Archroy?” gasped Neville, squinting towards the terrific figure framed in the Swan’s doorway. “Archroy, is that you?”
Archroy fixed the part-time barman with a baleful eye. “I have the Ark of Noah outside on my lorry,” he roared. “I don’t suppose that any of you after-hours drinkers would care to step outside and give it the once-over?”
Omally struggled to his feet. “The Ark of Noah, now, is it?” he said. “Could I interest you at all in a guided tour around the Great Pyramid of Brentford?”
