by Iain Scarrow
THE FERN HOUSE
(Part 1)
1
Night descended before the wheels of the DC10 touched the runway.
The plane rolled to a stop. The old man bided his time.
Let them rush.
He had time to wait.
And after the others had clattered down the gangway he stood up, pulled open the overhead compartment, and took down his little black bag.
The steward smiled and nodded at him.
“Good night, Dr. Gatling.”
Gatling donned his snap-band hat and nodded back without comment or making eye contact.
It wasn’t important.
Tall and lean and dressed in his customary black suit he then entered the airport terminal and passed by the recently disembarked and left them to their milling and lowing like so much cattle around the trough-like carousel, for Gatling possessed nothing more than the portmanteau that he carried, and strode through customs where no one dared to stop him.
They never did.
If you asked them why, they wouldn’t know.
For there was something about this elderly gentleman that made officials not want to be caught looking at him. Something elegant and prescient, though not effete. Something from a lost age of ocean liners and air travel. By Zeppelin, perhaps. From a time when only the privileged few could afford to travel by such means.
When the terminal doors slid wide at his approach he stepped confidently into the warm air of an August evening and strode up to his Daimler already waiting under the Terminal’s amber lights where Parker, Dr. Gatling’s chauffeur, stood at the ready in his regulation uniform of grey jacket and trousers, starched white cuffs and shiny peaked cap, and yanked open the back door for his employer.
“Good evening, Dr. Gatling,” he said, clipping his heels of his steel toe capped together.
“Evening, Parker,” Gatling said, removing his hat as he slipped inside the backseat where he made himself comfortable on the roebuck upholstery.
Parker then slammed the door for Dr. Gatling with a resounding flourish, before stepping to the front of the Daimler and jumping in whereupon he rammed his foot down and zoomed them off into the night in a squeal of burning rubber and hairpin bends.
Gatling pressed the blue button set in the arm rest of the back seat and the glass partition between passenger and driver slid wide.
“Parker?” he said.
“Yes, Dr. Gatling?”
“Please wait until we are out of sight this time, won’t you,” he said with a wearisome sigh.
“Yes, Dr. Gatling.”
“We don’t want any trouble such as we did at the Ruhr Valley now, do we?” Gatling said with a sigh.
“Yes, Dr. Gatling,” Parker said. “I understand, sir. That was a bit of a tussle wasn’t it?”
“Quite,” Gatling said. “Unfortunately I am lead to believe that the whole horrible affair is being written about as we speak, and I fear that the whole episode is going to end up as bad as that of The Green Children of Woolpit, or God forbid, that of Casper Hauser. My mind still aches when I think of all of the trouble I had to go through to sort those two incidents out. And I have no intention of going through the same thing again. I’m not getting any older you know, Parker, and time is pressing.”
Gatling held his hand up and examined the back of it under the stroboscopic flashes of the passing streetlights.
“Sorry about that, sir,” Parker said over his shoulder. “I wasn’t thinking. But when those coal miners came at us with pickaxes and shovels, I panicked.”
Gatling closed his eyes and rubbed at his forehead as if some great pain were trying to escape him.
“Parker,” the good doctor said, dropping his hand onto the portmanteau in his lap, “nothing short of a nuclear bomb, with the power of a collapsing magnetar, of the kind that one can easily find in the Crab nebula, could possibly damage the hull of this machine. Now please remember that the next time that there’s a spot of bother, now, won’t you. We have to be discrete, you know. So think before you go ramming your foot down the next time. A Daimler shooting straight up into the stratosphere at the speed of light tends to confuse the locals. All sorts of things can result from it. Look at what happened at San Cristóbal for instance. Not to mention Fatima. So please be careful, Parker. I can’t whizz around and fix every peculiarity on this planet if I keep creating yet more peculiarities in turn. Otherwise everything will end up in an endless geometric fractal without end.”
“Sorry, sir,” Parker said.
“Forgiven,” the old man sighed. “Now Parker, what have you found out for me whilst I’ve been away in the Ruhr?”
Parker bit his lip.
“I think I’ve found two,” he said, “maybe three candidates.”
“Pray tell,” Gatling said, leaning back.
“One of them has premises in the city. In Pitt Street. A rather run down area, if you ask me. It’s hard to see why anyone would open a business there. There’s never anyone around there at the best of times.”
“What kind of a business?” Gatling asked, looking distractedly out the window.
“Estate agent,” Parker said.
“Interesting I’m sure.”
“It’s always closed though,” Parker went on, “the premises I mean. And the owner also goes by many different names.”
Gatling’s eyes fluttered wide for a second.
“It sounds as if someone doesn’t want to be found,” he said. “We should keep an eye on him. Or rather you should. Now what about the others you mentioned?”
Parker cleared his throat.
“There’s a younger fellow,” he said, “a tramp. There’s something odd about him.”
“In what way “odd”?” Gatling asked.
“He doesn’t say much for a start,” Parker said, “And he hangs around soup kitchens, one in particular – Grass Market Mission of the Lost.”
“Really,” Gatling said, rolling his eyes.
“And he’s attracting attention.”
“In what way “attracting attention”?”
“It’s hard to tell,” Parker said. “He’s a bit of a loner— “
“Aren’t they all?”
“—appears and disappears.”
“Not unusual for a vagrant, I should imagine, Parker.”
“But he does have a kind of charisma about him. Though it’s hard to see why. This young chap might dress in rags, but there’s nothing raggy about him. He looks fairly together. If you know what I mean.”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” Gatling said, looking at the backs of his hands and frowning.
It took a little while before Gatling realized that Parker had stopped talking.
“Parker?” he prompted.
“I’m just trying to think,” Parker said. “It’s not easy to put into words.”
“Force yourself, then,” Gatling said with mild annoyance dropping his hands into his lap.
The last of the streetlights disappeared behind them as the car pulled around the side of Dewberry hill.
“Well, if you ask me,” Parker went on, “it’s as if this young chap knows something. Yet he doesn’t know what that something is himself. It’s as if he doesn’t quite understand what it is that he does know, or how to express it. So he keeps it to himself. That’s about all I can tell you about him.
“You couldn’t be any more obtuse, could you, Parker?”
“Except whatever it is that he does know, but he doesn’t really know, seems to shine out of him like an invisible light.”
Gatling’s eyes snapped wide for a second time.
“Go
on, Parker,” he said, focusing his attention on the back of his chauffer’s head.
“He just seems to have an effect on those who get close enough to him,” Parker said. “Not that anyone ever gets that close to him, because then this young tramp is off and disappeared again. Sometimes for weeks at a time.”
“And this is the charisma part, is it?” Gatling said, sounding disappointed.
“Exactly, sir!” Parker cried out.
Gatling shook his head.
“I was being facetious, Parker,” he said.
The red and green cat’s eyes on either side of the road shot into the air with the sound of bullets out of a blunderbuss as the Daimler’s passed by, and the hazard lines in the middle of the road glowed white, broke up, changed color, and flew into the night like a frenzied swarm of flaming-red fireflies.
“Well,” Dr. Gatling said, “maybe this young chap does have something to do with it, but then again maybe he doesn’t. What about the other one you mentioned?”
“I’m not sure if he is another one,” Parker said, swerving the car around a blind bend in the road. He switched the headlights to full beam and twin fans of violet preceded the vehicle’s trajectory as it sped along the country road. “I’m not sure he’s really part of anything at all. Perhaps he’s just been sucked into the sidelines, if you get my drift, like flotsam sucked into the wake of a passing ship; a kind of accidental thing.”
“In a good or bad way,” Gatling asked lighting his clay pipe with the red flame of a Bengal match. He flicked the match out with a snap of his wrist and dropped it into the ashtray as a pleasing scent of candied strawberries and crushed junipers filled the air.
“I’m not sure to tell the truth, sir,” Parker said.
“Parker?” Gatling’s voice carried an implicit warning.
“It’s that soup kitchen, sir,” Parker blurted.
“What soup kitchen?”
“The one that that young tramp I was telling you about goes to, when he turns up that is. There’s something about that place. Not a good feeling.”
“Tell me, Parker, does this young tramp have a dog, a small dog by any chance?” Gatling asked.
“I’ve never seen him with a dog, sir, why?”
“Oh, it’s probably nothing, just a thought,” Gatling said, reaching out and touching the brim of the snap-band hat sitting next to him on the back seat, a hat that he had acquired whilst sipping glühwein with a certain popular writer in a kneipe on the German Hungarian border. “I just wonder why things just turn up out of the blue sometimes, be it by ordinary or extraordinary means, and with a meaning that isn’t quite obvious to one at the time it happens, even to me.”
“Not obvious even to you, sir?” Parker asked incredulously.
“Even to me, Parker,” Gatling said, sounding deflated. “I’m not God, you know.”
After a moment of silence between the men Parker said, “Sorry about that last time, sir.”
Gatling thought for a moment as he sucked in the cinnamon and laudanum of his pipe smoke.
“I had a devil of time going back to the Ruhr, you know, especially without the protection of this vehicle. Well I couldn’t go back there with it again, could I? Not after what you did with it the last time we were there,” he said. “And now rumor has it that some upstart by the name of Angelucci Orfeo has taken an interest in that last escapade of ours at the mine, though it’s probably just a scare story.”
“Afraid I don’t know the man, Sir,” Parker said.
“Orfeo was nice chap whilst he was alive,” Gatling said. “Still, I wouldn’t bet on his mortal demise stopping him going after a good story. He was a rather tenacious character, you know. And I’ll tell you another thing, Parker. I wasn’t too keen on the buckets glühwein that I had to consume in order to regain the trust of the locals whom I needed to help me in acquiring the new specimens, either. Not that they actually realized it was me a second time around.”
“I’ve never tried it myself, sir,” Parker said, “glühwein that is. It reminds me of Christmas, all that cinnamon and orange.”
“Sickly stuff if you ask me,” Gatling agreed leaning forward and tapping out the ashes from his pipe into the ashtray.
He sat back again and dropped the pipe into his pocket.
“But more importantly, Parker, we do not want any more fairy tales and spooky half-baked rumors threatening to unweave the strands of the destinies that I am here to put right by attracting unwanted attention to ourselves in the process, which would, of course, prove to be disastrous. What with the tendency of simple minded folk to trample all over the place and mess things up. Scientists, I ask you! A more idiotic shower you couldn’t hope to meet. They haven’t the foggiest idea about anything, you know. For instance, they actually believe that the world is round!”
“No,” Parker said breathlessly. “You’re kidding me.”
“I kid you not,” Gatling said. “They actually think that the earth is as smooth and as round as a snooker ball. I’ve even heard them saying so with my own ears. No wonder the planet’s in such a mess. They even teach this codswallop in schools. And they get away with it.
“No, what we need to do, Parker, is to locate the right people, not the wrong people. There have been too many of the wrong people have been involved this time. And things are difficult enough for me at Brock House as it is, not to mention that other place, which shall remain nameless. And with the right people my mission here will have been accomplished. No guarantees of course, but one can hope. This scatter gun approach of ours has, so far, not proved to be efficient. And it’s time consuming, time that I simply do not have.”
He looked at the back of his hand again.
“So I have decided,” he went on, “that instead of us going around like an out of control tornado as a means of trying to find them that it should be they who are made to homing in on us instead.”
“How so, Sir?”
Gatling grinned to himself. “By providing metal more attractive for them to be attracted to, as Sir Francis Bacon said.”
“I think you’ll find that it was William Shakespeare who said that, Sir.”
“Don’t contradict me, Parker. I am always right, as you very well know, even when I am wrong. Please remember it is I who is in charge here.”
“I will, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Forgiven.”
Gatling took a deep breath and let it out slowly before trusting that his voice would be steady enough to go on.
“Therefore,” he said, “I need you to deliver a few things for me, to get the ball rolling as it were; a little mass to bend the fabric of reality and thus set everything of significance rolling in towards us for a change, instead of us constantly running up one blind alley after another trying to find them, and getting nowhere in the process I might add. Maybe this way we can finally get about setting the record straight.”
He held up his hands again, and frowned.
Parker looked at Gatling in the rear-view mirror.
“Anything wrong, sir?” he asked.
“Liver spots,” the doctor said.
“Liver spots, sir?”
“Yes, Parker, liver spots. Old people get them. Little brown marks on the backs of one’s hands and arms that have this annoying habit of appearing with the aging body. I was eighty yesterday— “
“Congratulations, sir.”
“—and I am chronologically seventy-five years of age today. Hence, my liver spots are disappearing, Parker, one by one. At this rate I shall end up at the preconception stage before my duties can be discharged, which will mean they won’t be discharged. And I shall be deemed a failure, which means I shan’t be able to retire at the age I wish to retire at. Do you understand my urgency now, Parker?”
“Yes, sir, I think so, sir. Actually, I’m not sure at all.”
Gatling appeared not to notice Parker talking.
“Why in God’s name the powers that be set up these vortices in the first place is beyond
me,” he said. “They’re nothing but trouble. The vortices I mean. Too many dangerous idiots find them and then go about trying to use them for their own selfish ends. I would shut down Sedona National Park if I had my way, but no, they don’t listen to me, do they? So I am stuck with Brock House to sort out instead.
“We need that swine, Parker, whoever he is, and we need to bring him to justice. He’s got away with it for far too long. And the longer he’s gotten away with it the worse things have become. It makes me mad.”
Realizing he was raising his voice he stopped talking, pulled in a deep relaxing breath through his nose and slowly released it through his mouth.
It didn’t work.
“Damn these criminals, Parker. What purpose do they serve?”
Opening his portmanteau he reached inside, took out a cube of solid Perspex and held it up.
“What’s that, sir?” Parker asked looking at Gatling in the rear-view mirror.
The doctor narrowed his eyes as he peered at the object trapped inside the cube.
“A Calliphora vomitoria. Mummified, of course,” he said, looking past the cube in his hand to the back of Parker’s head. “I had a devil of a time getting it out of that vault in the basement of Cairo Museum.”
“What is it?”
“A blow-fly, Parker.”
“From Cairo?”
“Exactly.”
“Embalmed?”
“What?”
“Isn’t that what they did with mummies over there in Egypt?”
Gatling dropped his arm down.
“The ancient Egyptians may have been able to fool us into thinking that Tutankhamen was a young handsome pharaoh, Parker, when in fact he was a she, and a rather misshapen dwarf at that. But the means to embalm a bluebottle, I think, would have been beyond even them. I said mummified, not embalmed, which means dried out, desiccated. Yet—”
“Yet?”
“Yet this little beauty,” Gatling said, holding up the cube again, “still contains the essence of gangrene, which is, of course, what these particular bluebottles were and still are good at ingesting. They don’t touch anything alive. You did know that, Parker, didn’t you?”
“No, I didn’t, sir,”
“I thought not,” Gatling smirked. “Anyway, as I was saying. This particular specimen it seems, settled on a gangrenous spot of a particular priest of Nefertiti’s. Not that he, Nefertiti, had anything to do with this particular problem that we are dealing with now.”