Nostradamus Ate My Hamster by Robert Rankin

Author:Robert Rankin [Rankin, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: sf_humor, Fiction, General, Science Fiction, Technology, Cinematography
ISBN: 9780385407052
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1996-10-03T07:15:56+00:00

The pub had gone rather quiet. As Sean had been telling this tale to me more and more folk had been gathering around to listen. And they were listening intently, as if somehow they knew the truth of this tale. Or had heard something similar. Or knew of someone who had told such a tale to someone else.

“Is that it?” I asked Sean, when finally I found my voice.

“Not quite,” Sean took a pull upon the pint of beer that had grown quite warm, while the listeners’ hearts had chilled. “The priest was weeping, crying like a child and he ran out of the cubicle. He ran right past me, he looked terrified. And I sat there, I could hear the old man wheezing, he was dying. He had told his awful tale and now he was dying. He had lost all his time and now he was going to die alone. Utterly alone.

“I sat there and I thought, I can’t let this old man die like that, it’s so wrong. Someone should be there with him, to hold his hand. I should be there with him. I heard his tale too.

“So I got down from my bed and I limped around to his cubicle. My ankle didn’t hurt because of the injection, but even if it had hurt, I wouldn’t have cared. I pushed back the curtain and I went inside. He was lying there on the bed and he smelled really bad. The smell of death. I smelled that on my Gran when I was a child. The man was about to die.

“He was all covered up, except for his head and his face looked old. Like really old. Like a hundred years old. It made me afraid just to look at him. I pulled down the cover so I could get at his hand, he was pretty much out of it by then, he probably didn’t even know I was there. But I pulled down the blanket and I took hold of his hand.

“But it wasn’t a man’s hand. It was a child’s hand. A little child and when I pulled the blanket right back I could see his body. It was a baby’s body. This old man’s head on top of a baby’s body. And as I took hold of the hand, this little hand, it was shrinking. Shrinking and shrinking. His time had been stolen, you see, his previous time, his past time. The thing had stolen it all from him and he was going back and back until he wouldn’t exist at all, would never exist at all. I tried to hold the hand, but I couldn’t. It just got smaller and smaller. All of him, smaller and smaller, his head was the size of a grape and I saw the eyes look up at me and the mouth move. And he spoke.”

“And what did he say?” I asked Sean.

“He said, ‘help me, help me,’ and then he just vanished.”

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