RATATOUILLE - THE FINAL CHAPTER

 "Captain!  You're back!", said an elated Mr. Spock as James T. Kirk climbed in the window of the Starship Enterprise dragging a semi-conscious Frenchman behind him.  Marcel Ratatouille blinked and stared about him.  There was a fog in front of his eyes which soon cleared to bright spells and showers.

The Captain resumed command and immediately began barking orders.  "Spock!  Get me a progress report!  Uhura!  Take this man to the sick bay!  Sulu!  Get the cleaners in here!  I want this place shining from the bow to the ah...to the ah...."  "That's stern, Captain", said Sulu.  "You bet it's stern", said Kirk, checking the Captain's log for woodworm.

Suddenly, an alarm bell sounded and a terrified voice called across the speaker.  "Captain!  There's an alien on board and we think it's eaten Scottie!  "Good lord!", exclaimed Kirk, "are you sure?"  "Well, sir", replied the voice "it's in the Engineer's Room and it's drunk and screaming for a haggis!"

"We'll need a volunteer to go in there", said the Captain, looking about and noticing that everyone had disappeared except Marcel.  "Good man", said Kirk, pushing him into the corridor and locking the door behind him.  "It's that way", he said through the window, and then, as an afterthought, "Incidentally, do you have any reservations about doing this?"  "I didn't know I had to make reservations", said Marcel, as he hesitantly approached the Engineer's Room.  

From inside came the sound of bagpipes being strangled and Marcel gulped as he opened the door.  Before him stood the most hideous sight since the discovery of Attila The Hun's underwear.  The alien was green and covered in hair and warts.  It stood ten feet six inches tall and weighed about 400 pounds or 468.66 euros.  It had six large eyes on one side of its head and one huge ear on the other.  Other than that it looked fine.  "Dinner!", it grunted as it caught sight of Marcel.

Back on the bridge a new crisis was developing.  "Captain", reported Spock, "the Klingons are closing in and we appear to be heading for a black hole!"  "A black hole?  In space?", laughed Kirk.  "Don't be ridiculous!  If that's a black hole, I'll eat my....."  The rest of his sentence was lost as the Enterprise hurtled forward and was sucked into the black hole where it was violently tossed upside down.  

In the Engineer's Room Marcel, who was being held in a half nelson by the alien, was thrown against the door which flew open sending him, the alien and a set of crushed bagpipes flying helplessly into the dark void.

Marcel's life flashed before his eyes - a pathetic series of events which inevitably resulted in his coming off the worst.  For some reason he recalled the time when, as a love-struck teenager, he attempted to impress the object of his desires by standing in her living room and singing 'I love you with all my heart and spleen'.  As he braced himself for the last great note, he leaned backwards and fell out the window.  

Fortunately, he was on the first floor and succeeded in only breaking a daffodil.  However, too proud to admit his clumsiness, he returned to her house each night for a month and repeated the fall.  Eventually he was taken to hospital suffering from a concussion.  The girl married a butcher and her father sued Marcel for vandalizing his garden.

"Either he's dead or my watch has stopped", said Dr. Eiffel Tower, taking Marcel's pulse and replacing it with a fresh one.  Marcel opened his eyes.  "Say 'aaahhh'", said the doctor.  "Aaahhh", his patient obliged.  "Just as I thought", said the doctor.  "A severe case of alphabet deficiency.  Here", he ordered, handing Marcel a dictionary.  "Take two pages every three hours and call me when you get to Q."  "Are you sure you know what you're doing?", asked Marcel, eating pages 1 and 2.  "Trust me", the doctor told him.  "Here's a piece of bacon I cured last week."

"Darling, thank goodness you're all right!", said a voice at Marcel's side.  'That's funny', he thought, 'my side never spoke to me before.'  He turned and saw a very beautiful woman sitting beside the bed and knitting vegetables.  "It's your favourite", she said, lovingly, "vegetable stew."  "Who are you?", he asked, unable to take his eyes off her face.

"Why, I'm your wife, darling", she said, handing him back his eyes.  "But try not to speak.  You've been very ill and having such terrible hallucinations.  You were screaming about being imprisoned in the Bastille and then you thought you were being shot for deserting the Foreign Legion.  And just now you were mumbling something about strange men on some kind of ship."  "You mean...?", asked Marcel.  "All dreams", she said, handing him another page from the dictionary.  "Now take your medicine and rest."

Marcel Ratatouille leaned back on his pillow and sighed a long sigh of relief.  "All a dream", he said, smiling.  "I have nothing to worry about."  As he closed his eyes he thought he heard a faint tapping sound on the window.  Turning sleepily he caught a glimpse of a large, green, hairy, warty thing sitting in the tree outside his window and wearing a set of crumpled bagpipes on its head.  "Dinner!", it said, pointing at him.

The little Frenchman gazed imploringly out of the page.  "For the love of God", he said.  "Oh, all right", I said.  "I suppose you've been through enough."  And with that the monster fell out of the tree and broke its neck.