Life, the Universe, and Everything [40]
The echoes of his voice roared up and down the corridors. Arthur stood silent and cold, his head shaking with disbelief.
"Here's the moment, Dent," shrieked the voice, now reaching a feverish pitch of hatred, "here's the moment when at last I knew!"
It was indescribably hideous, the thing that suddenly opened up in front of Arthur, making him gasp and gargle with horror, but here's an attempt at a description of how hideous it was. It was a huge palpitating wet cave with a vast, slimy, rough, whale-like creature rolling around it and sliding over monstrous white tombstones. High above the cave rose a vast promontory in which could be seen the dark recesses of two further fearful caves, which ...
Arthur Dent suddenly realized that he was looking at his own mouth, when his attention was meant to be directed at the live oyster that was being tipped helplessly into it.
He staggered back with a cry and averted his eyes.
When he looked again the appalling apparition had gone. The corridor was dark and, briefly, silent. He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and would rather have had a chaperone.
The next noise, when it came, was the low heavy roll of a large section of wall trundling aside, revealing, for the moment, just dark blackness behind it. Arthur looked into it in much the same way that a mouse looks into a dark dog-kennel.
And the voice spoke to him again.
"Tell me it was a coincidence, Dent," it said. "I dare you to tell me it was a coincidence!"
"It was a coincidence," said Arthur quickly.
"It was not!" came the answering bellow.
"It was," said Arthur, "it was ..."
"If it was a coincidence, then my name," roared the voice, "is not Agrajag!!!"
"And presumably," said Arthur, "you would claim that that was your name."
"Yes!" hissed Agrajag, as if he had just completed a rather deft syllogism.
"Well, I'm afraid it was still a coincidence," said Arthur.
"Come in here and say that!" howled the voice, in sudden apoplexy again.
Arthur walked in and said that it was a coincidence, or at least, he nearly said that it was a coincidence. His tongue rather lost its footing towards the end of the last word because the lights came up and revealed what it was he had walked into.
It was a Cathedral of Hate.
It was the product of a mind that was not merely twisted, but actually sprained.
It was huge. It was horrific.
It had a Statue in it.
We will come to the Statue in a moment.
The vast, incomprehensibly vast chamber looked as if it had been carved out of the inside of a mountain, and the reason for this was that that was precisely what it had been carved out of. It seemed to Arthur to spin sickeningly round his head as he stood and gaped at it.
It was black.
Where it wasn't black you were inclined to wish that it was, because the colours with which some of the unspeakable details were picked out ranged horribly across the whole spectrum of eye-defying colours from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Burnt hombre and Gan Green on the way.
The unspeakable details which these colours picked out were gargoyles which would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch.
The gargoyles all looked inwards from the walls, from the pillars, from the flying buttresses, from the choir stalls, towards the Statue, to which we will come in a moment.
And if the gargoyles would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch, then it was clear from the gargoyles' faces that the Statue would have put them off theirs, had they been alive to eat it, which they weren't, and had anybody tried to serve them some, which they wouldn't.
Around the monumental walls were vast engraved stone tablets in memory of those who had fallen to Arthur Dent.
The names of some of those commemorated were underlined and had asterisks against them. So, for instance, the name of a cow which had been slaughtered and of which Arthur