The Tragedy of King Ichabod the Irritating

It is difficult to know when King Ichabod the Irritating first became aware of the conspiracy against him, and it is tempting to make up a simple and plausibly banal story to explain it, as he was in the habit of doing before his mendacity reached more ambitious heights.

Certainly he was well aware of the existence of a plot by the time he made the monumental mistake of dying.

Though he had suspected it for some time, his first direct evidence of the conspiracy came when a sycophantic newspaper article on his cactus collection let slip the existence of the Nevada desert and he realised that information was being withheld from him. King Ichabod had always believed that the larger part of the Earth's surface was covered in narrow strips of red carpet. This was quite understandable as every trip he had made to another part of the planet had been greeted with a ceremonial roll of carpet laid out beforehand, ready for him to step out of the car, train or aeroplane, and not removed until he was well out of sight. Nobody had told him that the carpets were not a permanent feature of all airports, stations, cities, towns and villages - perhaps they feared his wrath or some other imagined consequences or perhaps it had simply never occurred to them.

By this time, the period of his greatest power, his personal staff of valets, chauffeurs and bodyguards had grown to several hundred, and the King's fanciful ideas about the nature of the world were established as a peculiar form of dogma – an unwritten code of rules made it unthinkable for any of his numerous servants to mention in the King's presence that any of his delusions were at all at variance with reality.

It has been speculated that this environment influenced the King in developing his theory and practice of lying. Certainly very little of what he heard from those around him contained any truth by this time. New recruits, who were taken on by a specialist personnel department, were obliged to undergo a week's training in what mundane facts should be concealed from his knowledge lest he take offence at not having been told earlier. Not only was the predominance of oceans, forests, grasslands, deserts, ice sheets and asphalt over red carpet not to be mentioned, the staff were also required to maintain the illusion of the vast extent of the country, which the King believed to be several times its actual size due to territory captured in wars which had not in fact taken place, although nobody had had the nerve to tell him so.

Another requirement imposed on new members of staff was that they humour the King in his strange misconception of the nature of dreams, which came to light during the Three Years' War - one of the many military campaigns which never actually happened, though the King was deceived into thinking otherwise. The King had renounced his faith in astrology and tarot cards as decision-making tools, declaring them to be irrational superstitions and ordering the destruction of all archives which recorded his reliance on them during previous glorious and imaginary campaigns, and instead hired a succession of specialists in the interpretation of dreams.

His dreams were colourful and highly original, and before he was struck by the alarming idea that they might mean something he had considered publishing them as a series of short stories, thinking it would increase his reputation and standing among the world's high and mighty if he became known not only as a leader of conquering armies but as a literary figure as well. They often concerned exotic animals, especially if he had allowed himself a glass of whisky before retiring to bed – this tended to induce frightening dreams about multi-coloured kangaroos, which the King speculated could be turned into literature of the fantasy horror genre.

The first of his dream specialists, a Freudian, lasted approximately a week before, at the King's orders, he was arrested by a secret security agency and never seen again. It was never revealed what had occurred between them but the King's cactus collection vanished equally mysteriously at around the same time. A number of others came, were denounced as charlatans, and went. The last and longest-lasting was an elderly woman whom, with various different wigs and coloured contact lenses, he had already unknowingly employed and fired five times as a card reader, astrologer, clairvoyant, medium and cook. Her interpretations of his dreams were subtly ambiguous and tantalised him into keeping her in his service.

He took to wearing his spectacles in bed in case he needed to read something in a dream which might contain the vital information which stood between him and its complete interpretation. His dreams, however, continued to yield vague and equivocal meanings and his attempts to throw more light on them became more elaborate. Obsessed by the idea that he was failing to notice some minute but essential detail, he began taking a professional-standard camera to bed with him in order to make a permanent record for his "dream-woman", as he called her, to examine, had the former cactus-house converted into a darkroom, and employed a sizeable staff of photographic technicians, all of whom he dismissed a few days later when his flash photographs of blankets failed to bear any resemblance to what he remembered from his dream. He had his bed wired with microphones with similarly disappointing results, and after one memorable dream in which his most respected adviser refused to speak anything but Russian to him, he bought a large Russian dictionary and slept with it on his pillow.

Finally running out of patience, he dismissed the "dream-woman", reinstated the cacti and turned to an expert in reading the I Ching, whose enigmatic prophesies kept him busy for weeks at a stretch while his staff occupied themselves with the far simpler task of governing the country.

It was probably during one of his more peculiar dreams, shortly after his suspicions regarding his staff had been stimulated by the news that there was such a thing as the Nevada Desert, that King Ichabod was struck by the idea which he considered his greatest triumph. He discovered that lying is quicker in general than telling the truth.

Randomly telling lies, he realised, apart from the fringe benefit of getting back at those who were lying to him, would save him a considerable amount of time – and time is money, which is power and a number of other desirable things as well. The consequences could, he thought, be immense.

Excited by the idea, he experimented with it over a number of weeks, inventing a simple but untrue answer to every question he was asked. He concluded that lies on average take approximately thirty-five per cent less time to tell, including repetition and explanation at the request of listeners, and are over fifty per cent more likely to be believed than true statements.

The idea of indiscriminately deceiving everybody appealed to King Ichabod and dealt with the problem that despite the evidence of a widespread plot he had no idea who the plotters actually were, and he soon arrived at his historic decision never to tell the truth again. He kept to this principle rigorously as he believed communication would become impossible if he mixed truth and falsehood, and employed a team of logicians to interpret his declarations to those few among his staff who needed to understand them.

Over the following years he used the extra eighteen weeks of each year freed by his time-saving falsehoods to return to his literary ambitions. He invented what he considered to be a new art form, involving the creative use of lies. From the first of January to the seventh of May each year he retired to his office every day, telling his butler that he required a large bottle of Siberian tea or some such nonsense, and set to work attempting to invent the most outrageous fibs imaginable and issuing press releases about them.

Thus he patented his entirely fictitious invention of a new highly elastic variety of spaghetti, designed to grip the fork more effectively than the conventional kind, and considerably increased his already vast wealth (unless he was also being deceived about that) with a business enterprise selling the spaghetti to customers unaware of the fact that it didn't exist. He also staged an imaginary wedding to a non-existent woman named Julia Seizure who according to newspaper reports had promised to wear edible rice-paper underwear, imported at great expense, throughout their married life. As the years progressed, he became more convinced than ever of his discovery, as the most ridiculous tales he had printed in the national press were also the most universally believed.

Unknown to King Ichabod, doubts were already being raised concerning his sanity. Long before the mistake which led to his downfall, it had come to the attention of the public that he had taken to remarking on the hot January weather and the number of elephants one sees in the streets these days, and people were increasingly seen to tap their heads when his name was mentioned. The fateful idea, however, was the one which occurred to him one New Year – he decided to tell the world he was dead. He saw this as the supreme lie and was so carried away by the aesthetic value of the idea that he failed to take into account the advantage it would give to the instigators of the conspiracy against him, whoever they might be. Refining his idea over the following weeks and unwittingly making things worse for himself, he finally decided to announce to the world that he did not exist at all, and never had. This, he was sure, was so far-fetched that it could not fail to be believed, and he was burning with curiosity to know how long the illusion would last.

It is not known whether the miscarriage of his plan was due to the conspirators' taking advantage of the situation, or indeed whether or not there ever were any conspirators, or for that matter whether there was ever a King Ichabod. However, nobody is recorded as having believed in his existence since the beginning of March that year, when the great project was put into practice. Some sources claim that a Mr Ichabod Recks is currently undergoing treatment in a well-known psychiatric hospital, where he has made himself unpopular with the doctors by repeatedly telling them that they are dismissed from his service, but otherwise the illustrious King Ichabod the Irritating appears to have entirely – and completely accidentally – written himself out of history.