Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (5 page)

CHAPTER 6

‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:’

The reader clearly belonged to the school of thought which holds that a sense of the seriousness or greatness of a poem is best imparted by reading it in a silly voice.  He soared and swooped at the words until they seemed to duck and run for cover.

‘Where Alph, the sacred river ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.’

Richard relaxed back into his seat.  The words were very, very familiar to him, as they could not help but be to any English graduate of St Cedd’s College, and they settled easily into his mind.

The association of the college with Coleridge was taken very seriously indeed, despite the man’s well-known predilection for certain recreational pharmaceuticals under the influence of which this, his greatest work, was composed, in a dream.

The entire manuscript was lodged in the safe-keeping of the college library, and it was from this itself, on the regular occasion of the Coleridge Dinner, that the poem was read.

‘So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.’

Richard wondered how long it took.  He glanced sideways at his former Director of Studies and was disturbed by the sturdy purposefulness of his reading posture.  The singsong voice irritated him at first, but after a while it began to lull him instead, and he watched a rivulet of wax seeping over the edge of a candle that was burning low now and throwing a guttering light over the carnage of dinner.

‘But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’

The small quantities of claret that he had allowed himself during the course of the meal seeped warmly through his veins, and soon his own mind began to wander, and provoked by Reg’s question earlier in the meal, he wondered what had lately become of his former... was friend the word?  He seemed more like a succession of extraordinary events than a person.  The idea of him actually having friends as such seemed not so much unlikely, more a sort of mismatching of concepts, like the idea of the Suez crisis popping out for a bun.

Svlad Cjelli.  Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, ‘popular’ was hardly right.  Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated about, those too were true.  But popular?  Only in the sense that a serious accident on the motorway might be popular -- everyone slows down to have a good look, but no one will get too close to the flames.  Infamous was more like it.  Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk.

He was rounder than the average undergraduate and wore more hats.  That is to say, there was just the one hat which he habitually wore, but he wore it with a passion that was rare in one so young.  The hat was dark red and round, with a very flat brim, and it appeared to move as if balanced on gimbals, which ensured its perfect horizontality at all times, however its owner moved his head.  As a hat it was a remarkable rather than entirely successful piece of personal decoration.  It would make an elegant adornment, stylish, shapely and flattering, if the wearer were a small bedside lamp, but not otherwise.

People gravitated around him, drawn in by the stories he denied about himself, but what the source of these stories might be, if not his own denials, was never entirely clear.

The tales had to do with the psychic powers that he’d supposedly inherited from his mother’s side of the family who he claimed, had lived at the smarter end of Transylvania.  That is to say, he didn’t make any such claim at all, and said it was the most absurd nonsense.  He strenuously denied that there were bats of any kind at all in his family and threatened to sue anybody who put about such malicious fabrications, but he affected nevertheless to wear a large and flappy leather coat, and had one of those machines in his room which are supposed to help cure bad backs if you hang upside down from them.  He would allow people to discover him hanging from this machine at all kinds of odd hours of the day, and more particularly of the night, expressly so that he could vigorously deny that it had any significance whatsoever.

By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat.

What did ‘psychosassic’ mean?

It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all.

‘And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted...’

Dirk had also been perpetually broke.  This would change.

It was his room-mate who started it, a credulous fellow called Mander, who, if the truth were known, had probably been specially selected by Dirk for his credulity.

Steve Mander noticed that if ever Dirk went to bed drunk he would talk in his sleep.  Not only that, but the sort of things he would say in his sleep would be things like, ‘The opening up of trade routes to the mumble mumble burble was the turning point for the growth of empire in the snore footle mumble.  Discuss.’

‘...like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:’

The first time this happened Steve Mander sat bolt upright in bed.  This was shortly before prelim exams in the second year, and what Dirk had just said, or judiciously mumbled, sounded remarkably like a very likely question in the Economic History paper.

Mander quietly got up, crossed over to Dirk’s bed and listened very hard, but other than a few completely disconnected mumblings about Schleswig-Holstein and the Franco-Prussian war, the latter being largely directed by Dirk into his pillow, he learned nothing more.

News, however, spread -- quietly, discreetly, and like wildfire.

‘And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.’

For the next month Dirk found himself being constantly wined and dined in the hope that he would sleep very soundly that night and dream-speak a few more exam questions.  Remarkably, it seemed that the better he was fed, and the finer the vintage of the wine he was given to drink, the less he would tend to sleep facing directly into his pillow.

His scheme, therefore, was to exploit his alleged gifts without ever actually claiming to have them.  In fact he would react to stories about his supposed powers with open incredulity, even hostility.

‘Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!’

Dirk was also, he denied, a clairaudient.  He would sometimes hum tunes in his sleep that two weeks later would turn out to be a hit for someone.  Not too difficult to organise, really.

In fact, he had always done the bare minimum of research necessary to support these myths.  He was lazy, and essentially what he did was allow people’s enthusiastic credulity to do the work for him.  The laziness was essential -- if his supposed feats of the paranormal had been detailed and accurate, then people might have been suspicious and looked for other explanations.  On the other hand, the more vague and ambiguous his ‘predictions’ the more other people’s own wishful thinking would close the credibility gap.

Dirk never made much out of it -- at least, he appeared not to.  In fact, the benefit to himself, as a student, of being continually wined and dined at other people’s expense was more considerable than anyone would expect unless they sat down and worked out the figures.

And, of course, he never claimed -- in fact, he actively denied -- that any of it was even remotely true.

He was therefore well placed to execute a very nice and tasty little scam come the time of finals.

‘The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’

‘Good heavens...!’ Reg suddenly seemed to awake with a start from the light doze into which he had gently slipped under the influence of the wine and the reading, and glanced about himself with blank surprise, but nothing had changed.  Coleridge’s words sang through a warm and contented silence that had settled on the great hall.  After another quick frown, Reg settled back into another doze, but this time a slightly more attentive one.

‘A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.’

Dirk allowed himself to be persuaded to make, under hypnosis, a firm prediction about what questions would be set for examination that summer.

He himself first planted the idea by explaining exactly the sort of thing that he would never, under any circumstances, be prepared to do, though in many ways he would like to, just to have the chance to disprove his alleged and strongly disavowed abilities.

And it was on these grounds, carefully prepared, that he eventually agreed -- only because it would once and for all scotch the whole silly -- immensely, tediously silly -- business.  He would make his predictions by means of automatic writing under proper supervision, and they would then be sealed in an envelope and deposited at the bank until after the exams.

Then they would be opened to see how accurate they had been after the exams.

He was, not surprisingly, offered some pretty hefty bribes from a pretty hefty number of people to let them see the predictions he had written down, but he was absolutely shocked by the idea.  That, he said, would be dishonest...

‘Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!’

Then, a short time later, Dirk allowed himself to be seen around town wearing something of a vexed and solemn expression.  At first he waved aside enquiries as to what it was that was bothering him, but eventually he let slip that his mother was going to have to undergo some extremely expensive dental work which, for reasons that he refused to discuss, would have to be done privately, only there wasn’t the money.

From here, the path downward to accepting donations for his mother’s supposed medical expenses in return for quick glances at his written exam predictions proved to be sufficiently steep and well-oiled for him to be able to slip down it with a minimum of fuss.

Then it further transpired that the only dentist who could perform this mysterious dental operation was an East European surgeon now living in Malibu, and it was in consequence necessary to increase the level of donations rather sharply.

He still denied, of course, that his abilities were all that they were cracked up to be, in fact he denied that they existed at all, and insisted that he would never have embarked on the exercise at all if it wasn’t to disprove the whole thing -- and also, since other people seemed, at their own risk, to have a faith in his abilities that he himself did not, he was happy to indulge them to the extent of letting them pay for his sainted mother’s operation.

He could only emerge well from this situation.

Or so he thought.

‘And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’

The exam papers Dirk produced under hypnosis, by means of automatic writing, he had, in fact, pieced together simply by doing the same minimum research that any student taking exams would do, studying previous exam papers, and seeing what, if any, patterns emerged, and making intelligent guesses about what might come up.  He was pretty sure of getting (as anyone would be) a strike rate that was sufficiently high to satisfy the credulous, and sufficiently low for the whole exercise to look perfectly innocent.

As indeed it was.

What completely blew him out of the water, and caused a furore which ended with him being driven out of Cambridge in the back of a Black Maria, was the fact that all the exam papers he sold turned out to be the same as the papers that were actually set.

Exactly.  Word for word.  To the very comma.

‘Wave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise...’

And that, apart from a flurry of sensational newspaper reports which exposed him as a fraud, then trumpeted him as the real thing so that they could have another round of exposing him as a fraud again and then trumpeting him as the real thing again, until they got bored and found a nice juicy snooker player to harass instead, was that.

In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend it some.  Dirk’s regular name changes suggested to Richard that he wasn’t alone in being treated like this.

He felt a tug of sadness that someone who had seemed so shiningly alive within the small confines of a university community should have seemed to fade so much in the light of common day.  And he wondered at Reg’s asking after him like that, suddenly and out of the blue, in what seemed altogether too airy and casual a manner.

He glanced around him again, at his lightly snoring neighbour, Reg; at little Sarah rapt in silent attention; at the deep hall swathed in darkly glimmering light; at the portraits of old prime ministers and poets hung high in the darkness with just the odd glint of candlelight gleaming off their teeth; at the Director of English Studies standing reading in his poetry-reading voice; at the book of ‘Kubla Khan’ that the Director of English Studies held in his hand; and finally, surreptitiously, at his watch.  He settled back again.