That night Alex wore his orang-utan suit and made mischief.
At the library he scared the staff as he ran through the shelves, leaping and bounding over the stools. Mrs Clore, the Head Librarian, was almost reduced to tears at his antics in the wildlife section.
"Why me?" She was heard to say. "What did I do to deserve this?" But neither the walls of books nor her Nosferatu masters behind the false glue vat in the bookbinding room could answer her.
In the shining towers of the Ventrue he played tag with the security guards and left them tied up in streamers of red crepe paper. Their masters were not at all amused to find them tied up and face down when the constantly moving elevator finally worked through all forty seven floors.
"Crepe," a business suited piece of banality pondered. "What sort of impression was he hoping to achieve here?"
One of the guards considered, wisely, that the obvious answer was best left unsaid.
"What is that," asked the prince of the city, sipping from a crystal goblet as he swept past the gallery windows. The noise from outside repeated itself.
"It sounds like an ... elephant?" His Toreador host looked uncertain.
Indeed it was an elephant, and around it gathered other erstwhile residents of the zoological gardens. Baboons and gibbons scampered along the footpath and began to exercise their muscles on the bounty of high performance motor vehicles pulled up outside. Astride the pachyderm's broad back an orange blur of hair jumped up and down to be certain he'd gained the right attention and then made a gesture with his hand before disappearing into the chaotic crowd below.
"Was that what I think it was," the prince urbanely questioned his shocked flunky. At the nod he raised an elegant hand and directed his bodyguards to find and deal with the fomenter of chaos.
After a pleasant chase through the sewage plant, a brief stop at the fruit and vegetable markets and the inadvertent destruction of a plenitude of public and private property, Alex returned home. He stayed outside, swinging from the trees in front of his house and dropping banana peels for people to trip on. Several early morning joggers fell to his cleverly positioned projectiles, and so did one stately gentleman of pallid demeanour returning home after a hard night of no doubt nefarious dealings. It was Alex's neighbour, Mr Bastard. Mr Bastard was not amused, as is typical of his clan.
Mr Bastard called him "MAD THING!"
And Alex said "OOK! OOK!" and stayed well out of the way of Mr Bastard's grasping fingers and swishing cane. Ozone laced the air.
Grumbling dire pronouncements beneath his breath, Mr Bastard made his way into his house. Soon after, peculiar lights and sounds issued forth, but this was usual and Alex paid it no mind. He was under the impression that Mr Bastard needed the services of a good plumber and electrician. Or perhaps just a girlfriend.
Alex realised that the rosy glow of dawn would soon be overtaking the night and that he hadn't had anything of a sanguinary nature as way of sustenance. "ook." He said, somewhat disconsolately. So he went to bed without eating anything.
That very day in Alex's room a midnight forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling was hung with lianas and the walls encompassed the very globe.
A tall, grey man descended a vine in a stately manner and peered at Alex. "Aren't you going to get uP?" He asked. "There's things to do and places to bE." So saying he extended one long arm and pointed, statue like, toward a path through the forest that hadn't been there before.
With a nod of his head and a grin of his teeth, Alex scampered into the trees and ignored the path, swinging from branch to branch in the direction of his desire. Soon, though, the trees grew smaller and smaller, and he was forced to walk as the forest gave way to rolling hills - first of grass and then of sand. Beyond the dunes an ocean tumbled by, with a pier filled with carnival rides reaching out into it like crooked finger. Alex heard screams of enjoyment over the racket of a rollercoaster, the hubbub of business and a multitude of voices underlying its intrusive noise.
"Join us," said the pretty girl in the purple dress. "The rides are free and the marshmallows are too!"
"Yes," added another girl, with eyes like saucers which blinked most attractively. "There are dreams and stories and home game systems and more anime than you could watch in a lifetime! And no one swears. Ever." She caressed the handle of a spade that Alex must not have noticed before, leaning against the entrance to the pier.
"Ook," said Alex, uncertainly, as he would have preferred some peanuts at about that point and he liked to swear on occasion.
The saucer eyed girl looked at him sharply. From behind her the sounds of gaiety continued unabated, but there seemed to be an edge that had not been obvious earlier.
"Come in, number 4, your time is up!" Rang out over the rest of the chatter, and Alex spied a pedal boat in the water with a large hamster happily steering it towards the pier. Swinging down the stairs in a flash he leapt the gap and commandeered the vessel, pushing the hamster into the water and peddling frantically out to sea. Soon the pier was a dot on the horizon behind him, its lights gently fading into the phosphorescence of the moon lit sea.
On and on Alex splashed in his little boat, through storms and past sea monsters, among jagged rocks and under the gaze of hopeless silent castaways.
"Help us," some cried, perching on their rocks uncomfortably. "We didn't know. Why can't we have another chance?"
And so Alex looked upon them and felt glad that his peddle boat only had room enough for one, as he couldn't take them with him even if he had wanted to. "Ook," he said, and made gestures of an inflammatory nature towards them, especially those that simply sat and sulked. They stared after him with a mawkish intensity in which he suspected haemorrhoids played an element.
Beyond the lurking, salt encrusted shoals he entered an area of archipelagos. The first of the chain of islands had little in way of features but for a dark cave mouth about which was scattered a collection of debris. Lying off shore a yacht was moored, on which sat a gaudily dressed man with a cutlass and an eyepatch, sitting and drinking and facing the cave. When he had finished his bottle he threw it at the cave mouth, where it disappeared into the darkness. There was a grunting noise, a pair of glowing red eyes shone in the place the projectile had gone and a can rocketed out to strike the man and fall into the sea.
"What are you doing?" Asked Alex as he pulled up alongside the yacht.
The man pulled up his eyepatch and looked down at Alex, revealing a second sparkling blue eye. "We are fighting," he said. "What does it look like?"
"Yes," came a booming snuffle from the cave. "And you're in the way. Piss off."
"But won't it take a very long time? Why don't you go to his cave to fight?" He looked at the man, noticing only now that he had a beard. "Or why don't you swim out to the yacht?" He asked the glowing eyed beast within the cave, which he could just about make out the black and white snout of now.
"Too easy," said the man and threw another bottle.
"What would be the fun in that?" Asked the beast and threw another can.
"Ook," said Alex, and continued on his way.
Among the waving trees on the next island were a variety of chairs, stools, benches and logs on which sat glazed eyed aficionados of mathematical arts, if the marks on the blackboard before them was anything to go by. One wan and hopeless figure waved and called out to the passing boat, but could not manage enough energy to maintain the effort and slouched back further than ever into the confines of the threadbare sofa it nested in. It seemed to Alex that more people were content to sit back and let others act than not.
"Why don't you do something?" He yelled out as he passed by. A sparse collection of shrugs were all the answer he received and he pedalled away angrily. He sped past the library made of the very books it contained, past the courthouse where the jury and lawyers were a spiralling whirlpool of self interest and there seemed to be no judge, past a variety of small islands of which some were interesting and most were instantly forgettable.
After all this journeying he came to where the mad things are.
And when he came to the place where the mad things are he found it empty, for they weren't really there at all.
"Ook." Said Alex in equal amounts of frustration, sadness and simple boredom. "Where are the pranks and silliness? Where is the horror and mindless violence? Where are the fantastical insights that man was not meant to know of?" And a man came out of the seemingly deserted woods of the seemingly deserted island and found him there on the seashore, beside his beached pedal boat, saying these things to no one in particular.
"Aren't you going to get up," asked the slight, dark, stranger. "There's things to do and places to be." He raised one slim arm and pointed, statue like, back the way Alex had come.
Alex decided that he had put up with quite enough of this and ooked a terrible "Ook." (which was only marginally better than the swearing he'd replaced it for) and gnashed his terrible teeth (he still had bits of fruit stuck in them from earlier) and rolled his terrible eyes (which had become bloodshot from all the salty sea air) and got back in his boat. When he looked over his shoulder where the man had been was just a stick with a hat on it, jangling slightly in the sea breeze, and he was struck by a need to be home. So he pedalled some more and wondered about his chances of acquiring an outboard motor in the not too distant future.
As he proceeded the winds began to fail and the waves became more and more sluggish, until eventually he was the only moving thing. So he stopped pedalling. When the sea became as smooth as glass Alex got out of his little boat and walked instead, being careful not to slip on the shiny surface. After a while he pulled out his socks, put them over his orang-utan feet and skated over the oceans. He swept past the islands he had seen before, almost hitting the large one filled with people who couldn't make up their minds who they were, easily skirting the one where the inhabitants stalked each other relentlessly - as the screams warned him well ahead of time - and above him the moon fled, the sky shifted from dark blue to red to green to yellow and the stars twinkled bright as lust throughout, mirrored in the surface across which he sped.
Soon he was at the first of the islands, where the pirate and the badger continued to throw their missiles at each other. They stopped and watched him as he headed for the sharp rocks beyond, two sentinels under a now black sky, eyes catching the starlight and multiplying it so that he could still see them long after the island was behind and he was among the rocks.
"Break it," said a denizen of the shoals, and the others took up the call, chanting in a way that grated on Alex's nerves. They rose from their stony seats and began to pound at the obsidian flow that had been the sea, but their efforts had no effect and Alex was soon far beyond them, still accelerating, faster and faster. Indeed, he was getting up such an amount of speed that little more than a blur of images came to him until with a bump he found himself buried in sand. Stunned, he lay there until a pair of hands came through the covering above and pulled him bodily into the light of the stars and the scent of the nearby forest.
"you're up now." Said the large multicoloured man, who now released his grip. "there's places to do and things to be." He waggled his eyebrows.
"Feh...ook" Replied Alex, and leapt into the forest, swinging from branch to branch with a frenzied gait, but as he went, the world dissolved behind him and at last a tree slipped from his sight and grasp and he fell and found himself back in his own room.
The sun was down once more, so he went out and made everywhere he was the place where the mad things are.
