Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [39]
Just blackness.
This really unnerved him, and he started to back away from that, back the way he had come.
After doing this for a short while it suddenly occurred to him that he was now backing toward whatever it was he had been backing away from in the first place.
This, he couldn’t help thinking, must be a foolish thing to do. He decided he would be better off backing the way he had first been backing, and turned around again.
It turned out at this point that his second impulse had been the correct one, because there was an indescribably hideous monster standing quietly behind him. Arthur yawed wildly as his skin tried to jump one way and his skeleton the other, while his brain tried to work out which of his ears it most wanted to crawl out of.
“Bet you weren’t expecting to see me again,” said the monster, which Arthur couldn’t help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing that he had never met the creature before. He could tell that he hadn’t met the creature before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights. It was … it was … it was …
Arthur blinked at it. It stood very still. It did look a little familiar.
A terrible cold calm came over him as he realized that what he was looking at was a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly.
He wondered why anybody would be showing him a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly at this time. He wondered whose voice he had heard.
It was a terribly realistic hologram.
It vanished.
“Or perhaps you remember me better,” said the voice suddenly, and it was a deep, hollow, malevolent voice that sounded like molten tar glurping out of a drum with evil on its mind, “as the rabbit.”
With a sudden ping, there was a rabbit there in the black labyrinth with him, a huge, monstrously hideously soft and lovable rabbit—an image again, but one on which every single soft and lovable hair seemed like a real and single thing growing in its soft and lovable coat. Arthur was startled to see his own reflection in its soft and lovable unblinking and extremely huge brown eye.
“Born in darkness,” rumbled the voice, “raised in darkness. One morning I poked my head for the first time into the bright new world and got it split open by what felt like some primitive instrument made of flint.
“Made by you, Arthur Dent, and wielded by you. Rather hard as I recall.
“You turned my skin into a bag for keeping interesting stones in. I happen to know that because in my next life I came back as a fly again and you swatted me. Again. Only this time you swatted me with the bag you’d made of my previous skin.
“Arthur Dent, you are not merely a cruel and heartless man, you are also staggeringly tactless.”
The voice paused while Arthur gawked.
“I see you have lost the bag,” said the voice, “probably got bored with it, did you?”
Arthur shook his head helplessly. He wanted to explain that he had been in fact very fond of the bag and had looked after it very well and had taken it with him wherever he went, but that somehow every time he traveled anywhere he seemed inexplicably to end up with the wrong bag, and that, curiously enough, even as they stood there, he was just noticing for the first time that the bag he had with him at the moment appeared to be made out of rather nasty fake leopard skin, and wasn’t the one he’d had a few moments ago before he arrived in this whatever place it was, and wasn’t one he would have chosen himself and heaven knew what would be in it as it wasn’t his, and he would much rather have his original bag back, except that he was of course terribly sorry for having so peremptorily removed it, or rather its component parts, i.e., the rabbit skin, from its previous owner, viz., the rabbit whom he currently had the honor of attempting vainly to address.
All he actually managed to say was “Erp.”
“Meet the newt you trod on,” said the voice.
And there was, standing in the corridor with Arthur, a giant green scaly newt. Arthur turned, yelped, leaped backward, and found himself standing in the middle of the rabbit. He yelped again, but could find nowhere to