Checking Out- The Complete Trilogy

by T W M Ashford

  He opened the cabinet door, watching the way the light fell through the two bullet holes.

  ‘Or at least you will if I can get this to work. We may have to use another door.’ He waggled a finger through one of the holes. ‘One of the other cabinets should do, but accuracy might take a hit.’

  I sat on the table while Pierre listened to the door. I was beginning to find the sight of a man in concierge’s uniform doing unexpected things in unusual places a little too normal for my liking.

  ‘Sorry if all this is keeping you from the front desk,’ I said, trying to repair the fraying tapestry of our tenuous relationship.

  ‘Oh, they won’t even notice I’m gone,’ he replied.

  ‘Really? I’m sure they will. You’re very… professional.’

  ‘Thank you. But really, they won’t notice. It’s still a little before midnight there, so I’ve only been gone five minutes.’

  ‘What? How? It’s been hours since we left. Yeah, look,’ I said, showing him my watch, ‘it says quarter to three in the morning.’

  ‘Sure, a few hours have passed since we left. But not there. All the time has been spent, well, here or there or elsewhere. But none of it back at home, believe me.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

  ‘Okay. How best to explain?’ He rapped at the cabinet with his knuckles, listening for the echo. ‘You know much about space-time? How time and space are kind of stitched together into a curvy four-dimensional fabric?’

  ‘I do now.’

  ‘Okay. So if you walk across this room, for example, you cross a physical distance. You also cross a time-distance - however long it takes you to get from one side to the other. You following?’

  I nodded.

  ‘But if you walk across this room, you’re not also walking across a room back in your old world, are you?’

  ‘And therefore I’m not crossing any time back there either,’ I said, sort of understanding it. I think. ‘So is everything back home just… paused?’

  Pierre contemplated this.

  ‘In a way, I guess,’ he said. ‘But only from our perspective, not theirs. Imagine a film reel stretched out from start to finish. Sure, you could take a break from watching at any point you wanted… but that doesn’t change the fact that the story still plays out in either direction.’

  Pierre stood up straight, nodded, and moved to the adjacent cabinet.

  ‘Ready to go? Just this one last time, mind you.’

  ‘Just one last time,’ I agreed, then drew in a harsh breath as I put pressure back on my ankle.

  With a swish of his keys the cabinet opened. Out from that world of dirt and violence we stepped, into one in which I finally got my briefcase.

  Chapter Eleven

  The heat wrapped around me like a sandpaper fire blanket, smothering and suffocating as it crawled, sand-like, down my throat. I could feel sweat running down the length of my spine quicker than my eyes could adjust to the new world around me.

  Pierre was to my left, holding open a massive flap of grey-brown material so that I could pass through. His other hand shielded his eyes from a sun that was far brighter than any I’d experienced, and if it wasn’t for the ambient soundscape of men talking and walking about in the distance I would have believed we’d travelled to a whole other planet.

  Great trees reared up to greet a clear blue sky, a sky barely visible between gaps in the rooftop canopy. Greens and browns danced in a never-ending waltz, a kaleidoscope of shades and tones quite unimaginable, and certainly done no service by the magazines and documentaries back home. Yellow petals blossomed from vines that snaked their way up trunks as thick as Roman pillars. Actual snakes, I swear as long as a garden hose, did the same, creeping with all the hurry of a summer cloud. Leaves opened out from the undergrowth - leaves as long as my arm, as wide as my belly and as bright green as a baby’s bile. Some of them had weird antennae leering out from their stigma, like strange alien bugs hungry for a passing snack. I decided to keep my hands to myself. I didn’t want to brush something unpleasant, or barbed.

  ‘God, I wish I’d brought some aspirin,’ said Pierre, letting the fold of material flop back down. ‘I can just tell this sun is going to give me a headache.’

  I looked behind us, realising that the flap was the door to a tent. It was a great big thing, about the size of a small bungalow, and, once the door had fallen past its frame and erased the world beyond, I could see into its depths. There was a large wooden table, covered in paper maps and compasses. A bed lay in the far corner, draped in a bridal veil of mosquito nets. Before the door came to a rippling stop I caught a glimpse of an ornate globe, which I had no doubt doubled as a liquor cabinet.

  ‘I don’t know about tablets, but I’m pretty sure we could find you some medicine in there,’ I said, nodding towards the globe.

  ‘No need,’ said Pierre, fishing around in one of his pockets. In a uniform that lean, I don’t know where he had room for anything. ‘I brought my own.’ He brought out a miniature bottle of red wine, pulled out its protruding cork and took a sip. He nodded approvingly, and tossed me a bottle of my own.

  ‘Where the hell did you get these?’ I asked.

  ‘Viola’s office, while you were fiddling with the television. Seemed a shame to let good wine go to waste, what with the rest all smashed up.’

  I pocketed my bottle; it was too warm to drink red. In front of a roaring fire was one thing - under the gaze of a burning sun was another.

  ‘I hope it’s not too presumptuous of me to say, but you two gentlemen look more than a trifle lost.’

  The voice was grand, the sort you’d imagine coming from a British battle-commander of old. And the face from which it emitted fit the exact same picture; stoic, broad, determined, and with a moustache that drifted well beyond the outline of his head. Its tips curled quite deliberately. Strands of white hair crept out from his ears and nostrils. Finer threads wove their way out from under a classic pith helmet. And his outfit matched; a white shirt broke the monotony of brown - a simple tie tucked away between the buttons - and contrasted with black boots, which reached up to his knees. A belt of ammunition circled his waist and a hunting rifle clung to his back, its strap in a diagonal hug across his chest. It looked like the sort one would take down an elephant with, and it struck me that it most likely had.

  ‘Hello sir,’ said Pierre, stretching out his hand. The explorer shook it, not unwelcomely. ‘I’m Pierre and this is Mr. Webber, and lost might not be entirely incorrect an adjective. This is Peru, am I right?’

  ‘You’d be hard-pushed to be wrong; I’m surprised you got this far through the jungle if you don’t even know which country you’re in. The name’s Montgomery. Manning Montgomery. It’s my camp you’ve wandered yourselves into.’

  ‘And a lovely camp it is too, sir,’ said Pierre. He turned towards me. ‘We’re a little further from where we want to be than I intended, but only a little. We’ve got plenty of time before the thief comes through, so not to worry.’

  ‘Why would I? Everything’s gone so smoothly this far.’

  ‘I don’t know where the hell you fellows came from, but it sounds to me like you could catch a break,’ interrupted Montgomery. ‘Come with me and I’ll show you the expedition.’

  We looked at each other and shrugged. What harm could it do?

  ‘And we’ll get the doctor to take a look at your ankle.’ He seemed amused by my surprise. ‘You’re walking funny and your sock is stuck to your leg with a great deal more than sweat. You don’t want to get an infection out here, believe you me.’

  We followed him away from what I assumed was his private tent and towards the encampment in the opposite direction. I took my jacket off, realising that my shirt was completely stuck to my skin, and folded it over my right arm. Manning Montgomery must have thought our outfits to be completely ludicrous, considering the locale, but his mind must have found a way to mould itself around the strange reality that presented itself to him. A m
an in a suit and a man in concierge’s uniform - what else would you wear to deepest, (not so) darkest Peru?

  A path of sorts had been hacked through the foliage, the grass and fallen leaves trampled underfoot. It led to a clearing, in which a whole host of other tents had been established into a miniature village of sorts. There were small ones, big ones, one which was merely a marquee. Men of all shapes and sizes, but almost all of them dressed in similar get-up to Montgomery, were busying themselves with this or that - packing crates, unpacking crates, drawing circles on maps, checking compass bearings, dismantling hammocks, blowing on ammunition, cleaning their rifles and organising rations. A pony watched from the corner, chewing on a leaf.

  ‘You’ve caught us just as we’re about to head out from camp, unfortunately. Go on, take a crate. Sit.’

  Pierre and I perched ourselves on the crates he was gesturing towards. I thought I could hear something snuffling around inside.

  ‘We’re headed for the fabled Machu Picchu, or so our Spanish point-man tells me. Perchance we can reclaim it for the British Empire. Be a damn good cause for celebration, wouldn’t it chaps?’

  Pierre and I nodded and agreed that it would.

  ‘Though between you and me, I wouldn’t be against pushing on a little further; Tampukancha, perhaps, or even somewhere no white man has set foot before. They say there are still tribesmen stalking these here jungles, and with them tribeswomen,’ he said, knowingly. ‘Not to mention colossal temples of gold and red rubies as big as your head. There’s nothing quite like jumping into the unknown, is there boys?’

  ‘There certainly isn’t,’ I agreed. Then I drew another sharp intake of breath, as my ankle made its dislike of the heat well-known.

  ‘Jonesy? Jones? Where is that blasted doctor?’ shouted Montgomery, looking around the camp. A couple of men glanced up from their sweaty labour but none carried the look of a man of medicine.

  ‘Coming, Captain Montgomery,’ said a stout little man hurrying from around the back of a nearby tent. He looked like a normal, slim man had been neatly squashed by the hand of God, so that all his features were slightly wider than they should have been. I’d have pegged him at around fifty, maybe sliding into sixty, and he peered out at the world through rheumy eyes magnified by thick lenses. Braces strapped his trousers up over the bulge of his stomach. His sleeves had, of course, been rolled up past his elbows.

  ‘There you are, Jonesy,’ said Montgomery, slapping him on the back. Jones had to push his glasses back up his nose to keep them from falling off. ‘We have a couple of unexpected guests, and one of them seems to have had a spot of bother with his ankle. Could you take a look at it, good sir?’

  ‘I certainly can, Captain Montgomery. Come on chap,’ he said, turning to stare at me with his eyes like watery egg whites, ‘roll down your sock and take your shoe off. There’s no women here to see.’

  I did as he said, popping my brogue onto the patch of soil beside me. The sock was reluctant to quit hugging my leg, and was as hard to peel off as a fresh plaster. It too went onto the soil, where it may well still lie to this day.

  The doctor nodded and opened a little bag he’d brought with him. ‘Well, it’s not infected, at least not yet. And it’s a relatively light set of cuts, too. Just needs some attention and dressing.’

  To me, it looked like a cat had scratched my leg - albeit, a cat with two-inch claws. Three lines, almost parallel to one another, looking like a bloody roman numeral, running down towards the ball of my foot.

  Jones pulled out a little bottle of alcohol and what must have been regarded as a clean cloth around those parts, then disinfected the latter. He wiped the stray blood from around my foot and then dabbed at the cuts. I could feel the inside of my flesh burning; my muffled groans made everyone else very aware of that fact, too.

  ‘Chin up,’ said the doctor, discarding the used cloth back into his bag, ‘there’s a man over there who lost a leg to the Scarlet Itch. I don’t see him complaining.’

  There was a man laid out across a table on the far side of the clearing, the stump of his leg wrapped in blood-soaked bandages. He certainly wasn’t complaining. He wasn’t doing a great deal of breathing, either.

  The doctor pulled out a reel of bandages from his bag - as with Pierre’s pockets, I haven’t a clue how his little satchel could hold so much - and proceeded to wrap it around my ankle. ‘Round and round it goes,’ muttered the doctor. ‘Over and under and around and around.’

  He stood up, his knees popping like firecrackers.

  ‘You can put your shoe back on now,’ he said, closing the latches on his bag. ‘Your ankle might itch or even sting but leave it well alone, else it won’t heal. You shouldn’t even be left with a scar.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and meant it. My shoe went back on easily enough, the girth of the bandages replacing that of my sticky, forgotten sock.

  ‘Right, we really must be off,’ said Montgomery as Jones went back to whatever ailment he’d been treating round the back of the tent. ‘Peoples to bring under the British flag, and all that. But tell you what. I can tell you two are gentlemen of honour, so why don’t you stay at the camp a while… until you’ve found your bearings, at least. A few of our group will be staying put a couple days longer.’

  ‘Actually, we have somewhere we need to be,’ said Pierre, getting to his feet. ‘Which direction are you headed?’

  Montgomery went to point in one direction, pursed his lips, then kept his finger pointing directly up.

  ‘Richard?’ he called out. ‘Richard? What’s our compass bearing going forward?’

  A slim, clean-shaven man looked up from drawing lines and circles on a map. ‘North-north west, sir. Then a more northerly route, after about forty miles.’

  ‘Perfect!’ exclaimed Pierre. ‘That’s just the way we’re going. For a bit, at least. Mind if we tag along with your expedition, Captain Manning Montgomery? The more the merrier, right?’

  The captain looked at the two ‘men’ in front of him. At least one of them was in a uniform of sorts, though a man with a bandaged ankle would hardly quicken the exploratory process.

  ‘Are you sure you can… keep up?’ asked Montgomery, pulling his best impression of a headmaster. ‘It’s tiring work, the jungle. Not for women or the faint of heart. And don’t expect it to be anything like home.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘Nothing has felt like home for quite some time.’

  ‘Well, who am I to turn away a budding explorer or two? Fall in line with the other chaps and follow their lead. I’m warning you though: this isn’t your average stroll across Hampstead Heath. I take no responsibility for your safety, nor for any deaths that may arise as a result of my decisions or actions.’

  ‘Do we get rifles?’ I asked.

  ‘Did you bring one?’ he replied.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Then I imagine not. Now quickly, we’re running behind schedule as it is.’

  We hurried over to where the rest of his group were gathered, kicking mud and adjusting their helmets. Montgomery marched to the front. He shouted something he seemed to deem expected of him - ‘Onwards, lads,’ or words to that effect, I wasn’t paying much attention - and the troupe began to stomp its way through the foliage, deeper and deeper still.

  After about an hour of walking in what would, verbally at least, be considered silence, and after a millipede with legs as big as garden worms wriggled its way around an overhanging tree branch and dangled, threatening to drop onto the top of my head, I’d had enough. I was hot, I was scratched and cut, and with the realisation that it should have been about four or five in the morning back at home came a whole tidal wave of tiredness, washing me off my raft of adrenaline and up onto a shore of grumpiness. And like sand, it was getting everywhere.

  ‘Where the bloody hell are we going?’ I asked, trying to peer ahead through the jungle. Montgomery had been carving his way through a wall of flora and trees and grasses that rose higher tha
n my head, guided only by his cartographer, Richard. Pierre broke out from whatever waking dream he’d been enjoying and aimed a furrowed brow in my direction.

  ‘Where we’re supposed to,’ he said. He raised a flask of water he’d pilfered from the base camp and poured a little into his mouth before offering it to me. I accepted and took a couple of conservative gulps. They tasted how a massage feels after a long day.

  ‘Quiet at the rear,’ came Montgomery’s booming voice, far louder than either of ours had been. He continued to hack at leaves as big as lorry wheels, with a machete as long as my arm and the enthusiasm of a samurai on steroids. ‘There are beasts unseen in the undergrowth. You wouldn’t want to make them feel threatened.’

  No I certainly didn’t. In all our walking I hadn’t seen anything particularly dangerous, but that was all the more worrying. What if what I had seen was the danger lurking all around us? Or what if there was danger all around, but I just couldn’t see it amongst the thick jungle? There could have been velociraptors in amongst the grass, for all I knew.

  The plants at ground level grew as tall as trees back home, their petals all the colours of the rainbow and maybe a few more. At one point a hummingbird had landed on one plant’s middle, thirsty for the water that had pooled into its flute-like stem. But it clamped shut the second the bird hovered within its walls, sending a squirt of blood above the heads of our expedition and swallowing the lifeless body down to be digested. I could have watched the latter in silhouette through its thin, green membrane, but elected not to.

  Elsewhere I’d heard monkeys yapping away to one another in the treetops, and even saw one as he swung from canopy to crown. He was small, made more of arms and feet than he was body. A butterfly with the wingspan of a crow fluttered down onto a strange, spindly tree to our right, and thankfully remained uneaten. What looked like a fat relative of the mouse scampered over the feet of a few men behind us, sending up shrieks, which none could look back at with pride.