The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories

by Mike Ashley

  “The place I lived was called Headingley – maybe three miles from the town centre – a big student area: the Leeds University campus is enormous. Anyway, because it was – still is, I guess – such a big student dormitory, Headingley was a really fun place: cheap supermarkets, charity stores filled with used books and record albums – this was before CDs,” he says.

  More nods, more blinks.

  “But best of all were the pubs. There were stacks of them – the Original Oak and the Skyrack, right across from each other next to St Michael’s Chur –”

  “Just keep to the point, Jim,” Edgar says. He’s listened to Jim Leafman’s stories before, of course.

  Nodding and contrite, Jim carries on. “Anyway, this one night I’m in the pub with this English guy –” Jim is about to attempt remembering the guy’s name (it’s Phil, a medical student, but he won’t remember that until two full weeks have passed and this evening in the Working Day has assumed legendary status) but he thinks better of it. “So, anyway,” he says, waving an arm dismissively, “this guy comes in and walks right up to the bar. He’s a little guy –” He turns to Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat and says, “No offence,” to which Greenblat leans over the table and nods sagely.

  “He’s a little guy, balding, skin that looks like he’s just shaved, pant legs that could cut steak, shirt collar tight around his neck, buttoned up with a necktie, knot perfectly in place, sports jacket showing linked cuffs . . . the whole works. You notice that kind of get-up, plus the guy looks like one of the two brothers in the Tintin books . . .”

  “The Thompson twins,” ventures Jack from over behind the bar.

  “Seems you know a lot about all kinds of literature,” Fortesque says and Jack shrugs self-deprecatingly, polishes another spot.

  “Yeah, right – the Thompson twins,” Jim Leafman says with a big grin. “Anyways, the guy doesn’t say anything but the bartender pulls him a half-pint and the guy passes him the money for it. Then the guy downs the drink – in maybe three or four swallows – wipes his mouth and strides right out.”

  “But he paid him, right?” Jack Fedogan asks from the counter.

  Edgar says, “He paid for the drink, Jack – let’s just get on with the story here.”

  Jack mutters something Nigel Bruce-style and returns to his polishing.

  “Anyway,” Jim says after taking a sip of his beer, “I didn’t really think anything of it at the time. It was just, you know, a little unusual, right?”

  Everyone seems to agree that such action was unusual and Jim continued.

  “But it happened again.”

  “The same night?” the little Lorre-lookalike whispers sibilantly.

  Jim shakes his head.

  “Another night – maybe the next one but certainly no more than two nights later. And it was a different pub.” He stops and shrugs at Edgar’s frown. “Okay, we drank most nights – twenty years old for crissakes.”

  Edgar sits back in his chair and holds up a hand. “I didn’t say nothing.”

  “You looked,” is what Jim says to that.

  Edgar takes a deep drink of beer and Jack, leaning over the counter, says, “Will you get on with it?”

  “Can we get more beers over here?” says Edgar, having drained his glass.

  “Same?” Jack asks, straightening up.

  Everyone appears to feel that’s a good idea. “They’re on me if I can join you,” Jack says.

  Everyone seems to feel that’s an even better idea.

  Minutes later, Jack sets fresh glasses on the table and pulls up a chair.

  “And it didn’t end there,” is what Jim says then, and he lifts his glass to everyone’s health before taking a long sip. The others wait patiently as he drinks.

  “The very next night, in a different pub again – this one another mile or so out of Headingly towards Leeds – the guy comes in and sidles up to the bar. Doesn’t say anything but the girl behind the bar pulls him a half-pint which the guy sees off in short order. Then he leaves the pub. And when he leaves, he’s weaving a little, you know what I mean?”

  “He’s canned,” Edgar announces.

  “Let’s just say he’s . . .”

  “Tipsey?” Horatio Fortesque suggests.

  “Tipsey?” says Jack. “What the hell’s ‘tipsey’?”

  “Well,” comes the reply, “it’s what you get when you’ve had a few drinks but you’re not yet drunk.”

  Everyone considers this – Jim included – while they sip their drinks.

  “So,” says Jim Leafman, “I go up to the girl – who’s very nice, incidentally –”

  “Ulterior motive, hmm,” says Lorre, making it sound like Jim had thrown the girl across the bar counter and torn her clothes off. Jim ignores this and continues.

  “And I ask her about this guy. You know, I seen him in the first pub – the Oak, as I recall – and then another . . . which I think was the –”

  “Too much information,” says Edgar.

  Jim nods. “Sorry. So, it turns out that this guy, his wife died on him years earlier. She was only young, the girl told me, maybe in her mid-forties – keeled right over while they were eating their meal one evening, head-first on to the plate. So what he did, as soon as the funeral was over and done, was he went out every night to all the pubs in the area that he and his wife had visited and he had a half-pint in each one. The girl tells me this: he walked from his house – the whole round-trip would be around four miles – and he went to all the pubs on the left side of the road as he walked in and all the pubs on the right side as he walked back home. Needless to say, when he got home each night he was a little . . .” Jim looks questioningly at Fortesque.

  “Tipsey,” the stranger offers.

  “Right, tipsey. And he had done this seven nights a week, fifty two weeks a year for –” Jim shrugs. “– three, four years?”

  “God,” is all Jack Fedogan can think of to say, Jack too busy casting his mind back to his beloved Phyllis, gone on ahead on Valentine’s Day 1990 and Jack alone these past fifteen years. Alone apart from the Working Day. He takes a drink and glances around at the others.

  “And then he stopped,” Jim says, basking in the dramatic revelation.

  “He stopped?”

  Jim nods.

  Joe Morello’s laugh of relief at the end of “Unsquare Dance” signals the trio’s (Paul Desmond playing only handclap in the sessions for this particular tune) “Why Phyllis” written by Eugene Wright – whose wife, like Jack’s, was named Phyllis – and taken from Brubeck’s 1961 album Countdown Time In Outer Space.

  “Well, go on,” Edgar says.

  “I’d gotten to watching out for him each pub we went into – and, like I said, we went into a lot of pubs in those days – and I saw him a good few times. Then, one night, I was suddenly aware I hadn’t seen him inside a pub for a good few nights. You know how that kind of thing creeps up on you? You kind of take something for granted and then, one day, you realize that that something has stopped?”

  The consensus was that everyone knew how that kind of thing crept up on you, and Jim continued.

  “I’d seen him a couple of times walking out on the street or – and I thought this was strange right off – standing outside the pub.”

  “Standing outside?” Fortesque asks. “Doing what?”

  Jim shrugs. “Just standing there – couple of times I thought he looked kind of wistful.” Jim stops and looks around the faces. “We’re talking here maybe three, four weeks during which I guess I’d seen him a half-dozen times – we were always out and about at the same times so it wasn’t too unusual.

  “So, this one night – we’d only just gone out and we were up near West Park at the pub there – and I asked the guy behind the bar if the little guy – the Thompson twin – had been in recently. ‘He died,’ the guy behind the bar tells me. I was shocked but, most of all, I felt –”, Jim searches the faces around him, looking for the right word or phrase. “– I felt sad. No
idea why. It just seemed such a desperately sad life he’d had.

  “And then, just casual, I asked the guy behind the bar when it had happened – when the Thompson twin guy had died. And he says, matter-of-factly – because why would he be otherwise – ‘Last month.’ So I say to him that can’t be. I tell him I just saw the guy, three maybe four times just this past week – week and a half, out on the street. And the barkeeper looks at me like I just fell off of a tree. Says I must have seen someone who looks just like him. And then he goes off to pull somebody a beer.”

  You could cut the atmosphere with a knife.

  Edgar looks nervously at Jack Fedogan, Jack looks at the little Lorre fella, Lorre looks up at Fortesque who is watching Jim Leafman. Every few seconds, one or more of them gives a little shake of their head. Even the usually confident Dave Brubeck sounds a little phased as he drifts into “It’s A Raggy Waltz”.

  Then Jim says, “There’s more,” before draining his glass. “But we need refills and I need the restroom.”

  5 Enter Cliff Rhodes

  As Jack goes to the bar, moving faster than he has done all day, the tall black man shouts, “How about another Manhattan,” to which Jack nods enthusiastically. Then the black guy gets up and walks across to the table, pack of Camels and ashtray in hand, says, “Mind if I join you? I always liked story-telling.”

  “Sure,” says Edgar.

  Jim nods Hi as he stands up.

  Lorre says, “Don’t be long,” and there’s something in there – in those three words – that sounds unpleasant and menacing.

  “Pull up a chair,” says Fortesque to the black man, leaning over with his hand outstretched and adding, “Horatio Fortesque.”

  The new arrival nods, shakes hands, and says, “Cliff Rhodes.”

  Introductions are then made and Jack returns with fresh beers, forgetting to charge anyone for them. Scant seconds later, Jim gets back and introductory sips are made from the replenished glasses before Jack says, “So, go on.”

  “You hear any of this?” Edgar asks Cliff Rhodes as Cliff swirls the olive around the Manhattan.

  “I’m afraid so,” Rhodes confesses. “It’s not my habit to listen in on other folks’ conversations but, like I said, I’m a sucker for stories.”

  Edgar waves never mind and slaps Rhodes on his shoulder.

  “Well,” Jim says, “I tried not to give it any more thought but then, that weekend – I remember: it was a Saturday evening – I saw the guy again, and this time I was sure it was him. No question. He was standing outside the Oak just as I walked across the street, standing right there outside the pub, his coat collar up, hands in pockets, still looking as smart as ever, staring through the big window they have – or used to have – in that pub.

  “So, I took the bull by the horns and I called out to him. ‘Hey!’ I shouts to him, waving a hand in the air –” Jim demonstrates. “– like this. And he turns around, sees me and . . .” He shakes his head, checking each face individually. “And then he just kind of fizzles up into wispy smoke, smoke that’s kind of man-shaped and then isn’t, and that’s solid for a few seconds, then less solid and then just see-through smoke. And then there’s only the big window and the sidewalk, people passing by going this way and that, not one of them appearing to have seen him or seen him disappear.”

  “What then?” is what Cliff Rhodes decides to say to break Jim’s pause.

  “Well, then, I guess I just stood there looking at where the guy had been, looking at the other people, people either walking or standing – outside the Oak was a popular meeting place – and then I looked through the window into the pub. And that’s when I figured out what was going on.”

  Sips all round followed that. Then:

  “I figured that I was the only one seen him because I was the one expected to put things right.”

  Edgar harrumphs and takes a sip of beer, seeming agitated.

  “Put things right?” hisses Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat.

  “Well, way I figured it, there had to be a reason why I’d seen him and seen him disappear while the other people all around him hadn’t. And that reason was to put him out of his misery.

  “See, when I looked through that window, I saw what it was that was making the guy so morose: people drinking. And it came to me that ghosts probably can’t drink.” Jim shrugs. “Maybe he wasn’t fully aware he’d died, only that he couldn’t go into the pubs and have his customary half-pint in every one. The routine had sunk its claws into him and he’d become so fixated with what he did every night that he wasn’t about to let a little thing like death keep him from it. But death was keeping him from drinking.”

  Jim swirls the beer around in his glass and watches it make patters of froth around the rim. “And I got to thinking that ‘someone’, whoever or whatever keeps these things in check, had looked around for a likely candidate to put things straight again.” Jabbing a thumb into his own chest, Jim Leafman says, somewhat proudly, “And I figured that person was me.”

  “You knew what to do?” Jack says, leaning closer over the table.

  Jim shakes his head. “I didn’t know,” he says, “but I figured someone had to get it through to him that he was dead and that he should let go . . . go off to re-join his wife.”

  At that, Jack Fedogan grimaces, shuffling in his chair and fighting back a sudden urge to blubber. Without his letting anyone else notice, Edgar places a big ham-hock sized hand on Jack’s knee and gives it a squeeze.

  Cliff Rhodes, Jim and even Fortesque and the Lorre fella all see the gesture and don’t let on, though Jim sees that Greenblat has seen it, has seen the little guy’s soft smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, and he reconsiders his opinion of the man.

  “So, I went in and ordered a pint. Didn’t go to the upstairs room where my regular crowd were, and I didn’t stay more than just a few minutes. I just drank the pint and moved on.

  “From there, I did the Hyde Park, the Rose and Crown, the Skyrack, the Drum and Monkey, the Travellers’ Rest, the Lawnswood Arms, the New Inn and, finally, the Tap and Spile . . . plus maybe a couple of others that I‘ve forgotten about down the years.”

  Now Jack’s grimace isn’t about his missing Phyllis, it’s from thinking about all that beer – eight pints at least and probably well into double figures.

  Edgar looks at his friend with newfound respect.

  “As you can probably guess, I wasn’t too good at the end of it all . . . but we won’t go into that.” He takes a deep sip and rests his glass back on his coaster, pulling himself tall in the chair – maybe even almost as tall as Cliff Rhodes, sitting across from him, who wasn’t trying hard at all – and he continues with his story.

  “I didn’t see the guy again after that, and we were out and about just as frequently as before. The way I figure it,” Jim Leafman says, lifting his glass once more, “is that the guy needed to be freed. He’d gotten himself into some kind of loop, going out every night to drink in the various bars that he drank in with his wife, and then –” Jim waves a hand. “– He went and died. And, as we know, dead men don’t drink too good.”

  He is, of course, referring to Front-Page McGuffin and both Jack and Edgar nod knowingly.

  “So,” Jim goes on, his voice sounding tired and kind of resigned, “he just stood outside each of the pubs waiting for some kind of release.”

  Edgar snorted. “And that release was you going out and getting hammered?”

  Jim shrugged. “Well, I didn’t see him again.”

  “You ever stop to think that maybe you’d imagined you’d seen him?” Cliff Rhodes ventures.

  “Absolutely!” says Edgar, loudly.

  “And that maybe he wasn’t there at all,” Rhodes continues. “That he was just either a figment of your imagination or someone who looked a lot like him.”

  “It comes down to faith,” Jack offers, sitting back in his chair a mite. “Either you believe in what you saw and what you did, or you don’t. Simple as that.”


  “His was a journey of faith,” Horatio Fortesque says. “The Thompson twin, I mean,” he adds. And then, “As was yours,” and he pats Jim Leafman on the arm.

  “It’s a nice story,” says Lorre.

  “It was a nice story,” Jack agrees.

  “But then, all stories about journeys are good.” Edgar considers his glass for a few seconds and, sensing that there’s more to come, the others remain silent. Then:

  6 The man on the bus

  “Back when I was a youngster we lived in Forest Plains,” Edgar says, his voice slightly wistful and distant.

  Jack says, “Forest Plains? Where’s that?”

  “I checked the mapbook once and it turns out there are several,” Edgar says. “This one is in Iowa, about an hour west from Cedar Rapids.

  “My first job – clerk and then teller at the local branch of First National, long since closed – was in Branton, a small town around 30 miles due north from home. There was a twice-daily bus went from the Plains straight into Branton, stopping on Main Street, about three minutes walk from the bank and then at the railroad depot where it turned right around and went back to the Plains. Same thing happened on an evening.

  “In the morning, it left the Plains at seven forty-three and in the evening it left Branton at six eleven – funny how you remember the small details,” Edgar says, shaking his big head slowly. “It arrived in Branton at a little after or a little before eight thirty in the morning and I‘d usually be back home around seven at night.

  “My dad bought me a car – an old Mercury, 1960 model, canary yellow with tail-fins and a bench seat you could’ve sat a football team on . . . and still had room for the cheerleaders.” Edgar slaps his knee. “Jeez, they just don’t make cars like that any more.”

  “More’s the pity,” Cliff Rhodes says, the words coming out so quietly that Fortesque and Greenblat exchange frowns. But before they ask him to repeat it, Edgar is up and running again.

  “But that didn’t happen until I’d gotten through my probation period – one month – so’s the bank could decide whether they wanted to keep me on. They did and I got the car, but for that first month I used to ride the bus. In and out. Every day.