by Dan Carver
Unfortunately, the promotional duties don't take up nearly enough of his time, and so he follows me around. I'm 'charismatic', apparently. In return for my company, he has to work. And I find him jobs that involve wearing protective masks so I can't hear his damn mouth flapping.
He didn't want to tan the skin – oh, that was apparent from the off - but I didn’t give him much choice.
“With tree bark and urine,” I ordered, clearly enjoying myself. “Here! I’ve been saving some specially!” I passed him the container.
“Yeh, er... fanks,” he said, clearly wishing he was dead.
“Splish splash! I was taking a bath!” I sang. That gave him something to complain about:
“It your urine. You splishy splashy in it!”
“Seniority, mate,” I replied, tapping myself on the chest before breaking into a few verses of ‘Singing In The Rain’.
I take great pleasure in dismantling the Crueslie kittens. I stick their heads on poles outside the door. The bodies are too small to slip directly into the skin so we strip them for bearings, motors and other useful components. We even salvage the speech unit, should our puppet friend have to talk at some point. What he might say, we don’t know. The whys, whats and wherefores remain a mystery.
Working for the government’s great. We’ve got a vac-former; crosscut saw; all kinds of powertools. We’ve even got a welding torch. Dromedary micromanaged us to the point of madness. By contrast, Calamine’s been in once, and he just nodded and made enthusiastic noises. We haven’t seen Calamari at all – good news, really, as he scares me. He’d scare Satan himself.
We’re working long hours but it’s... it’s fun and I never thought I’d hear myself say that. Hell, I’m even getting decent wages. Poverty made a miser of me. Now I can buy Rachel the things she wants and deserves, like divorce papers.
So things are going great. It’s all... It’s all far too good to be true. And that sets my teeth on edge because, as I’ve said more times than I can remember, everything good is always taken away from me.
I’m sculpting clay bodyforms when I hear something outside the workshop. There’s a smashed window covered with cardboard, through which we hear voices – three of them initially. I recognise two at once: Calamari and Calamine. There’s something shiver-inducing about the mysterious third, something almost inhuman. The way it switches from robotic monotone to venomous, nasal gnashing in the flick of a diphthong. The peculiar stresses on certain words, like an actor emoting in his second or third language. Only this man is clearly English. And it’s this same voice that mentions my name. I start thinking in swearwords.
Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves goes the saying. Forewarned is forearmed goes another. I want to know what’s going on here and who the Hell we’ve got ourselves involved with. I press my ear against the chilly corrugated cardboard and, from the word in five I catch, I don’t like the conversation one bit. It’s not the topic – I can’t make that out – it’s the frigid, mechanical way they communicate.
You can tell from the tone there’s a difference of opinion. It’s clear that Calamine and the strangulated voice disagree on some pretty fundamental points. Calamari finds this funny. I hear a large vehicle crunch to a halt on the gravel outside. I strain my ears, but it’s at this point that Elton starts to talk at me in a loud self-pitying monologue.
I bawl some furious rebuke his way and the weird voice stops sharp. I hear the command for “quiet” and then the crunch of footsteps on the frosty ground. I hear the cocking of firearms and more sinister whispers and I can tell they’re heading for the door. I could cheerfully throttle Elton right now. But there’s nothing to do but sit tight and wait. We’re all on the same side after all. Aren’t we?
The door flies open, propelled by Calamari's heavy boot. He enters, mouth frothing, clutching one of our cat-heads in his tightly clenched mitt.
“This!” he cries, “Is not fucking inconspicuous! What were you told to be?!” He looks me straight in the eye. “That’s right! Fucking inconspicuous!” And he’s screaming right in my face by now.
“Don’t let our friend upset you,” says a smiling Calamine, although his tone is less than conciliatory. “He takes it very seriously. And we did ask you not to draw attention to yourself, didn’t we?”
It’s a plastic cat-head, I think to myself. People find weirder body parts in the gutter after police raids. But I say nothing as the rabid ape unleashes his next salvo. I sit impassive as he talks himself out. It’s an old trick of mine. I stay silent until he’s used up all his A material and starts weakening his point blustering crap. I then tell him his argument makes no sense and call him ‘Cockface’. This does not go down well.
Whilst he screams, projecting hot air and spittle my way, I tune out. I’m remembering a snatch of something I heard through the broken window, the freakish third voice: “...motivation through fear. That’s what we want to see. Start as we mean to go on, so to speak.”
There’s swearing, shouting and much gun brandishing. It’s all scenery-chewing, cartoon villain bullshit. Then Calamine walks over, blanks my enquiry as to ‘what this is all about’, and starts smashing things on my desk – although with hindsight, I must say just the inexpensive, easily replaceable items. And then he’s dragging me around the floor by my collar.
“If you beat a dog with a piece of rope,” he whispers cryptically, “it blames the rope. Now clutch your left hand.”
“What?” I say.
“Clutch your left hand,” he repeats. “No, your left hand. I have orders not to break your right. Now, when I slam the desk drawer, you’re going to scream like merry Hell.”
“Eh?”
“Just do it!” He kicks the desk. The legs buckle and the whole structure collapses to the floor, scattering papers and stationery. I wail unconvincingly and then with slightly more conviction when he grabs my hand and whacks it with a steel ruler, leaving a ferocious purple welt. “We need a mark,” he explains. “You,” he points at Elton, “cry like a girl.” Elton, staring wild-eyed, doesn’t need any prompting. He explodes into genuine tears. Calamari sees none of this. He’s too busy daubing the national flag on the wall with a tin of house paint. He salutes it.
Now you’ll think I’m being over dramatic but I swear this is true: the electricity spikes, the lights pop and the dark that was outside is inside. More tame trolls trickle in, like liquid night, and a monstrous thing twists toward us, blocking our escape. Wrapped nose to ankle in a flapping, leather greatcoat surges something... Well, at this point, I can’t tell what it is. Is it even human? I hear there are some weird things evolving up in Northumberland.
It’s a scene redolent of cheap horror, where the head vampire, flanked by his gurning familiars, reveals himself to the disbelieving hero and heroine. Well, substitute me for the hero and our cowering cockney Neanderthal for the heroine and you’re closer to the truth. I’m expecting the cape-like greatcoat to creak open and belch bats – such is the theatrical feel to proceedings. And then they ramp up the camp some more with the dimming of torches and the lighting of the room with a signal flare. I watch with a sensation of half fear, half fascination as the red glow reveals something very nasty indeed. And it’s smiling.
Now, when I say ‘smiling’, I mean a kind of pulling of the mouth into a tight, rigid circle with brown teeth jutting behind, giving the overall effect of a bashed radiator grill playing hide and seek in a swollen anus. Framing this foul orifice is a grotesque, grey golem, too tall by far and seemingly made out of right angles.
He strides up to me, his legs so long that each forward step is a swoop. He speaks, and that weird cat’s-mewl of a voice curdles my soul like fingernails down a blackboard. I stand silent as the vile entity introduces himself. As Malmot.
There’s a whipping-branch strength in his wiry frame as he cuffs me across the face with a leather glove.
“Ow,” I say, my cheek burning. “Now where’s the need for that?”
“Pig sk
in,” he says smugly. “It makes such a rewarding slap.” And he pivots on his paws, prowling the workshop, poking, prodding and pouring scorn on things he clearly doesn’t understand. I can’t say I’m listening too intently. No, my attention’s focussed on those gloves of his, and where he got them. Pig products are the preserve of the profligate and powerful. The sinister, even. Once more, it’s the little things that set my nerves a-jangling.
He issues some unrealistic demands: Bactrian is to walk and talk and to do so, ‘Convincingly’. Well, we can do talking, but it’ll look like a bulldog chewing a wasp. Walking? Well, the Japanese manage it but they have computers, twenty-four hour electricity and millions of dollars. And still their robots move like ducks taking a shit. So what chance does a third world nation stand? ‘Convincing’ just isn’t going to happen.
Malmot likes to think he understands the common man. Thing is, I’m not common and he sure as Hell isn’t. The jury’s still out on whether he’s undead. Our points of reference are poles apart. So how can he second-guess me correctly? Well, he can’t but that doesn’t stop him interrupting my every sentence with something mind-shreddingly irrelevant. Ten minutes of talking passes and not one iota of information is exchanged.
“The clues are in the words I’m using,” I seethe. “Try listening to them.”
This is the wrong thing to say, and I’m soon in acute agony. I’m concussed. It can happen when you’re smacked round the head with a rifle butt. Elton, who’s as weird as Malmot seems to be autistic, pipes up fearfully. There’s a brief discussion and they seem to strike some common ground about wheelchairs and old tape recorders.
Meanwhile, Calamari circles me like a shark in a black ocean. I hear a match strike. I hear him open his dumb mouth and, God rot him, if he doesn’t go into some hectoring rant. A True Believer, this one. I can’t stay focussed enough to listen. My thoughts seem to slide over each other before I can catch hold of them. There’s a dull throb at the back of my head and a searing heat at the front. Sometimes the sensations swap. There are moments of lucidity then the pain drives me back into a kind of echoey, underwater version of my own brain. Words go in, but they don’t commit themselves to memory. Only fragments of his deluded diatribe remain:
“You should feel honoured to crawl in the presence of such a great mind.”
“A very great mind. Though you won’t understand his methods…”
“… the carrot and the stick…”
“Forward progress…”
“Rowing in time to the beat of the drum.”
“And if that doesn’t work, well, you beat their heads instead. Because what have we got to work with here? Men and women who behave like apes because they’ve no notion of the greater good.”
“We’re trying to carve a society out of a dung heap. We’re trying to grow food, create jobs, link up the gaps in public services…”
“But the populace won’t embrace their own potential…”
“…for the good of the State.”
“Disenfranchised. Of course our predecessors didn’t help – lying through their teeth, crippling everything they touched, offering our country’s arsehole to the Americans and then wondering why we got spunked all over by Islamist terrorists.”
“…and then the swing to the Right. And the plagues and The Great Separation and the civil wars.”
“Thank God for strong leadership.”
“England was once a beacon to the world. Now we’re feral children playing in its ashes. But we can burn bright again if we stop the general population pissing in the wood pile.”
“Stop pissing in the woodpile, Jupiter.”
And that’s the last I know. I’m out for the count. My head fills with horrific visions of military parades. I see banners and police beatings and England as a form of bacteria, spreading to mainland Europe in the rat infested holds of creaking, wooden boats. Bacteria in jackboots.
I wake into dull daylight. Afraid. Worryingly, I also have an erection.
I’m not going in to work today. I’m working on an Advanced Theory of Violent Assault. I figure, after the third or fourth time, something in my head’ll rupture and I’ll die. Seeing as no-one’s sussed how to make a ghost do manual labour yet, I feel death might be my smartest option: an eternity of peace and quiet with just a few brief interruptions from clairvoyants. And I’d like to see them find a clairvoyant. Last I heard, they’d burnt them all. I doubt I’ll go to Hell. I can’t believe it exists. You tally up God’s antics over the last few thousand years and you have to conclude that He should be burning in it Himself. And with that in mind, the first thing I’m going to do is track Him down and call Him a Cunt.
I consider a brief stint as a vengeful spectre, compile a list of folk I’d like to traumatise and then waste a few moments pondering the mechanics of turning your head inside out and vomiting blood. Do the undead really do that? And, if so, how? Is it a skill you have to work on? And then I turn my thoughts back to the real world. I’m not the most motivated of workers today. Probably something to do with the rifle butt and the pistol whipping. So I’m disinclined to open the door when Mr Calamine comes a-calling.
I’m heating water on the cooker. I figure I’ll throw it on him, he’ll shoot me and then this whole sorry charade’ll be over. It all sounds hysterical but I’m rapidly reaching the end of my tether. I’m not intrinsically evil. Why does the world want me for its punch bag? It’s not just the water that’s boiling. It’s my whole life. Like a bubbling cauldron. And the more I look into it, the more unpleasant things bob up and stare back at me. Then the electricity cuts. So no scalding today then.
With the lights out and the sky so black with angry clouds it may as well be midnight, I fumble in the cupboard for kerosene, or lighter fluid, or just anything flammable that I can burn in my old hurricane lamp. You don’t want to be in the dark with a predator. I want to see the bastard coming. Paranoia’s an evolutionary advantage – as you find out in my line of work.
But my fears are unfounded. Calamine’s his usual personable self. I don’t understand his part in last night’s events – and I can’t say I trust him – but I feel comfortable enough to put down the kitchen knife. He takes the gesture graciously. He hands me a tomato plant.
“By way of an apology,” he starts.
“But? What? What the?! What the fuck was last night about?!” I shout.
“You weren’t in work today,” he continues. “I was hoping to talk to you… clear a few things up.”
I know what I’m hoping, I think to myself, but the chances of a block of concrete crashing through the ceiling and crushing you, you scar-faced Judas, are pretty remote. Again, I say nothing.
His lips are moving, and I know it’s a pretty juvenile thing to do, but I’m tuning out again. I hear the soft pitter patter of raindrops on the roof and, before Calamine can even draw breath, I’ve got my chemical-proof glove on and I’m holding a strip of litmus paper out of the window. I check the colour with a candle. It barely even reacts. And before Calamine can take another breath, I’m in and out of the rain with every saucepan, every bucket, every anything that can hold liquid I can find.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“What do you think I’m doing?” I say, because it seems pretty obvious to me. “I’m collecting rainwater!” And he shrugs and looks at me nonplussed. “Look!” I cry, and I’m soaking wet as I say it. “I’m not dissolving! This is drinkable!”
Now, I guess it’s different when you’re up in government with purified water on tap. But when you’re leopard-fodder like me, and your choices are weak beer or the desalinated dysentery-juice from the reservoirs, you get pretty excited about conventional rain. I guess it’s all relative. Calamine’s charmingly condescending when he tells me:
“You know I can get you fresh water whenever you want. You just have to ask.”
“And why would you do that for me?”
“Because you’re part of the team,” he says, smiling in the unfl
attering candlelight. But I’m thinking of those rifle butts again when he says: “Look, I think we’ve had a bit of a misunderstanding. Just give me a minute to…” and he checks his watch. “In fact, less than a minute…” He trails off, starts counting soundlessly. There’s a sudden noise that I can’t even begin to describe – honestly, I can’t – and then he rips off the watch and slings it into the pedal bin.
“No use to me now,” he says. “Do you own a computer?”
“No,” I say, bemused as ever.
“Good,” he says. “Suffice to say, everything electronic in this entire street is now screwed.”
“Why?”
“EMP.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“You won’t. Not if you don’t know what an EMP is. Let me explain: We’ve just flashed your house with an electromagnetic pulse. Or a microwave pulse – I can never remember which it is... though I hope it’s not the second because I believe they make men sterile. Anyway, my point is this: the pulse fries electronic equipment – annoying if you own a computer repair shop, but quite useful if you suspect a building is bugged. By a building, I mean your house. And now, well, let’s just say we’re free to talk a little more openly.” He pulls up a chair. “So you’ve met Montgomery Burns then.”
“I don’t get the reference,” I say.
“Right. Probably a bit before your time. I mean Malmot. Tall, thin gentlemen. Grey hair. Grey complexion. Slapped you with a pigskin glove. Screamed obscenities in your face.”
“Oh, him!” I say.
“Brings a chill to the room, doesn’t he? And tends to bring out the worst in our friend, Calamari,” Calamine chuckles. “Well, you’ll be pleased to know that Mr Malmot bears you no personal grievances. He’s just, how shall we say, a little uneasy around new people. In fact, let’s say all people. He thinks you win respect by battering them to a pulp. Takes his management strategies from Stalin, you see. Personally, I prefer the subtle approach...”