The Brentford Triangle by Robert Rankin Page A

a slender finger, which terminated in a tiny girlish nail, along the leathern spines of a row of dusty-looking volumes. Selecting one, bound in a curious yellow hide and bearing a heraldic device and a Latin inscription, he bore it towards his cluttered desk. “Clear those Lemurian maps aside please, John,” he said, “and Jim, if you could put that pickled homunculus over on the side table we shall have room to work.”
    Pooley laboured without success to shift a small black book roughly the size of a cigarette packet, but clearly of somewhat greater weight. Nudging him aside, the Professor lifted it as if it were a feather and tossed it into one of the leather-backed armchairs. “Never try to move the books,” he told Jim. “They are, you might say, protected.”
    Jim shrugged hopelessly. He had known the Professor too long to doubt that he possessed certain talents which were somewhat above the everyday run of the mill.
    “Now,” said the elder, spreading his book upon the partially cleared desk, “let us see what we shall see. You have brought me something of a poser this time, but I think I shall be able to satisfy your curiosity. This tome,” he explained, fluttering his hands over the yellow volume, “is the sole remaining copy of a work by one of the great masters of, shall we say, hidden lore.”
    “We shall say it,” said John, “and leave it at that.”
    “The author’s name was Cagliostro, and he dedicated his life, amongst other things, to the study of alchemic symbolism and in particular the runic ideogram.”
    “Aha,” said Omally, “so it is a rune then, such I thought it to be.”
    “The first I’ve heard of it,” sniffed Pooley.
    “It has the outward appearance of a rune,” the Professor continued, “but it is a little more complex than that. Your true rune is simply a letter of the runic alphabet. Once one has mastered the system it is fairly easy to decipher the meaning. This, however, is an ideogram or ideograph, which is literally the graphic representation of an idea or ideas through the medium of symbolic characterization.”
    “As clear as mud,” said Jim Pooley. “I should have expected little else.”
    “If you will bear with me for a while, I shall endeavour to make it clear to you.” The Professor straightened his ivory-framed spectacles and settled himself down before his book. Pooley turned his empty glass between his fingers. “Feel at liberty to replenish it whenever you like, Jim,” said the old man without looking up. The pendulum upon the great ormolu mantelclock swung slowly, dividing the day up, and the afternoon began to pass. The Professor sat at his desk, the great book spread before him, his pale, slim hand lightly tracing over the printed text.
    Pooley wandered aimlessly about the study, marvelling at how it could be that the more closely he scrutinized the many books the more blurry and indecipherable their titles became. They were indeed, as the Professor put it, “protected”. At length he rubbed his eyes, shook his head in defeat, and sought other pursuits.
    Omally, for his part, finished the decanter of five-year-old scotch and fell into what can accurately be described as a drunken stupor.
    At very great length the mantelclock struck five. With opening time at the Swan drawing so perilously close, Pooley ventured to enquire as to whether the Professor was near to a solution.
    “Oh, sorry, Jim,” said the old man, looking up, “I had quite forgotten you were here.”
    Pooley curled his lip. It was obvious that the Professor was never to be denied his bit of gamesmanship. “You have deciphered the symbol then?”
    “Why yes, of course. Perhaps you would care to awaken your companion.”
    Pooley poked a bespittled finger into the sleeper’s ear and Omally awoke with a start.
    “Now then,” said Professor Slocombe, closing his book and leaning back in his chair. “Your symbol is not without interest. It combines two runic characters and an