The Archfornicator of Canterbury

68 Trippin' the light fantastic

The fact that the two acolytes had utterly failed in making first contact with the long-awaited aliens all but trashed Professor Drøvel's careful plans. Being one of the sharpest minds in Bulimia, he was already halfway through formulating his backup plan. He wasted no time in chiding himself for his arrogance and ill-founded trust in the original scheme. There would be plenty of time for that in case everything fell apart.

The Professor knew he could not risk a second attempt by anyone else. He'd have to try to make contact himself. This time he did not care whether the ghost in the basement saw him leave or not. He grabbed his battered leather satchel and headed in the direction of King Square.

News of the alien landing had already been picked up by international news agencies. There was a continuous flow of buses from the Apollinaris airport in Transvestitia carrying journalists, UFO fanatics and just plain curious people. The sudden increase in the number of tourists was creating problems left and right, as the tourism infrastructure of Bulimia was geared for a number of yearly visitors in the single digits. Nevertheless, as the famous economist sir Thomas More might have once said, supply and demand drive each other even in Bulimia. The souvenir stalls of King Square were no longer selling Cathedral souvenirs, which were yesterday's news anyway. Instead, signs saying "BED & BREAKFAST" were becoming a hot item. Almost every apartment in downtown Nuevo Saunabad was doubling as a guesthouse. Even Rimbaud, definitely outside the Nuevo Saunabad metropolitan area, was filling up quicky, although the hotels still charged by the hour.

Professor Drøvel, however, was not tempted by additional income. His mind was focused on one thing and one thing only: fulfilling the prophesies of the Church. He had to make contact with the aliens. Absolutely everything depended on that.

It was much harder to get close to the spaceship than before. The Professor had to elbow his way through a thick crowd of onlookers, most of whom spoke a foreign language – locals had already seen the new attraction and were now busy relieving tourists of their hard currency. Once he got to the cordon, he didn't even try to brave the dog patrols. Instead, he sat down on the cobblestone paving and took out a small oilskin pouch from his satchel. He opened the pouch and looked at its contents for a brief moment. It was full of dried mushrooms. Even in their desiccated state, a trained mycologist would have instantly recognised them as P. vittuanus specimens.

Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to the Professor, when he took half a dozen mushrooms and put them in his mouth. He chewed on the rubbery mushrooms for quite some time, then swallowed down the lot in one big gulp.

Professor Drøvel knew what to expect. During his postgraduate studies, he had done extensive empirical research on this particular species. Not all of his research ended up in his doctoral thesis. As a Psilocybe species, P. vittuanus was commonly (in mycological circles anyway) known to contain trace amounts of psilocybin, a potent hallucinogen. However, the general consensus was that one would have to ingest about twenty truckloads (an archaic scientific unit still often used in Bulimian scientific literature) of P. vittuanus to get the amount of psilocybin one would receive from a single specimen of the more potent species, so it hadn't received much attention in this regard.

An aspect of Professor Drøvel's research that he had chosen not to share with the scientific community had to do with other compounds that were present in the mushroom. Besides psilocybin, P. vittuanus contained a minute yet significant amount of psilocistin. This alkaloid was similar to psilocybin, but instead of getting hallucinations, whoever ingested even a single mushroom would become telepathic. Professor Drøvel had just eaten six of them.

The Archfornicator of Canterbury by Olli-Pekka Rinta-Koski
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.