The Janus Cycle

by Tej Turner

  It’s hard to look the other way

  The Janus Cycle can best be described as gritty, sexy, surreal, urban fantasy.

  Janus is a nightclub. But it’s not merely a location, it’s virtually a character in its own right. On the surface it appears to be a subcultural hub where the strange and disillusioned, who feel alienated and oppressed by society, can escape to be free from convention. Underneath that façade is a surreal space in time where the very foundations of reality can be twisted and distorted. But the special, unique, vibe of Janus is hijacked by a bandwagon of people who choose to conform to alternative lifestyles simply because it has become fashionable to be ‘different’ and this causes many of its original occupants to feel lost and disenchanted.

  The story unfolds through the eyes of eight narrators, each with their own perspective and their own personal journey. A story in which the nightclub itself goes on a journey. But throughout, one strange girl briefly appears and reappears, warning the narrators that their individual journeys are going to collide in a cataclysmic event. Is she just another one of the nightclub’s denizens, a cynical mischief-maker out to create havoc or a time-traveller trying to prevent an impending disaster?

  The

  Janus Cycle

  Tej Turner

  Elsewhen Press

  The Janus Cycle

  First published in Great Britain by Elsewhen Press, 2015

  An imprint of Alnpete Limited

  Copyright © Tej Turner, 2015. All rights reserved

  The right of Tej Turner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, telepathic, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. A version of Chapter 3 Bruises previously appeared in the Impossible Spaces anthology edited by Hannah Kate and published by Hic Dragones in 2013.

  Elsewhen Press, PO Box 757, Dartford, Kent DA2 7TQ

  www.elsewhen.co.uk

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-908168-46-7 Print edition

  ISBN 978-1-908168-56-6 eBook edition

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  Elsewhen Press & Planet-Clock Design are trademarks of Alnpete Limited

  Converted to eBook format by Elsewhen Press

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, clubs, schools, spiritual organisations and rock bands are either a product of the author’s fertile imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual popular beat combos, cults, academies, entertainment establishments, sites or people (living, dead, or time travelling) is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  1 Friday

  2 The Christmas Puppy

  3 Bruises

  4 Red Rivers

  5 Shadow Sisters

  6 Going Back

  7 The Dog Man

  8 Blisters

  This book is dedicated to mothers.

  Barbara Turner, who left this world too soon. Sue Watterson, who in her love and care took on the (sometimes troublesome) responsibility of raising me.

  Joyce Turner, Margaret Jackson, and Marjorie Jackson – my grandmothers. And also Dorf Jackson, who was like a grandmother to me.

  And finally; Kate Beck, Jeanine Fox-Rioche, and Tracy Dixon. Mothers of my friends who have all been caring at certain points of my life.

  Much thanks to you all.

  1

  Friday

  I hate Sunday mornings. That moment when you open your eyes to cruel sunlight beaming through the window and igniting a whole orchestra of pain. Squirming, groaning, covering your face, closing your eyes – it takes a while for you to accept that nothing will stop it playing out. The weekend is over and your body is punishing you.

  Like most Sundays, I told myself I was never going to do it again.

  And, as usual, I wasn’t fooling anyone.

  Curled up on the couch, once again, because last night I didn’t think stumbling into the bedroom was worth the risk of exciting my girlfriend’s wrath. Throughout the last few months I have learnt through trial and error that it is much easier to just creep into the living room, sleep on the couch, and greet her in the morning when she is usually more agreeable.

  It was now time to face the music. I stretched my aching limbs and crawled to my feet.

  I knew she was in the bedroom because I could hear faint noises from the television. So I lightly pushed the door open and stumbled into the room.

  Vanessa was lying under the duvet, tucking into a packet of crisps, and she managed to tear her eyes away from the TV for a brief moment to spare me a look of contempt.

  “Nice waste of a weekend?” asked the girl who probably spent the whole time vegetating on the couch, watching soap operas and reality TV shows.

  I shrugged, knowing that any reply, whether honest, sarcastic, defensive, or apologetic would simply incur more salty comments.

  At this point you are probably noticing that something doesn’t quite ring about our relationship. Well, let me tell you a few things about Vanessa and me...

  For our relationship to be considered dead would imply that it was once thriving. The truth is we used to be fuck-buddies but at some point we both needed a new flat, and it just so happens that sharing is cheaper. The sex died down very quickly, and after I moved in she soon began to put on weight, almost as if to spite me. A face, which at one point could have been considered pretty, is now frequently soured by the expression one pulls having just sucked the juice out from a lemon. Neither of us is prepared to acknowledge the fact that we have reached a cul-de-sac because we are both too lazy to change gear into reverse and turn it around. I work Monday to Friday so I can spend the weekends in various degrees of intoxication, whereas she is so lazy she hasn’t seen her parents who live five doors away for six months – now, where would either of us manage to find time for a breakup in that?

  “Nothing to say?” she asked, as she turned back to some riveting TV show about home improvement. “I haven’t seen you since Friday.”

  And that was when I remembered what happened on Friday.

  My weekends are usually a blur of drink and drugs. I kill too many brain cells on the journey to remember it all, but this weekend something very unusual happened. Memories of Friday night replayed in my mind. The face of someone I met flashed before my eyes.

  Was it a dream? Did it really happen?

  Didn’t she give me something to remember her by? I reached into my pockets. One packet of fags; three matches; my phone; a thimble, (where the hell did that come from?); one Rubik’s cube: not quite solved.

  No wallet – that was where I put it.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Lost something?”

  I ignored her and held back a curse. Where in my distorted haze of a weekend had I lost my wallet?

  “Kev’s house,” I realised. “I left my wallet at Kev’s!”

  I refrained from referring to him by his usual term of endearment – K-Hole-Kev – for obvious reasons. Vanessa is like a spider and this flat is her web. I am a fly she has caught hold of – a vile, disgusting one – but one she, for some reason I don’t think even
she knows, wants to keep in her grasp. She has learned over the last few months that drugs have a way of untangling me from her strings.

  “Oh no,” she shook her head. “You are not going there today!”

  “Why not?” I asked. “I need my fucking wallet!”

  “Fine!” she screamed, and then pointed one of her long red fingernails at me. “But no drugs!”

  “I don’t want to take drugs. I want my fucking wallet!”

  “Promise me you won’t take drugs,” she commanded.

  I rolled my eyes. It was a Sunday, why would I want to take drugs?

  “I promise I won’t take any drugs.”

  I popped a couple of aspirin and a few minutes later I was walking up the driveway of the marvel which is K-Hole-Kev’s house.

  This isn’t the sort of place that you bother to knock before you enter, the door doesn’t even have a working latch. I swung it open and entered the familiar scene of his rundown kitchen.

  This place hasn’t seen much cooking, but the counters were scattered with their usual assortment of empty cans, wrappers, ashtrays and pizza boxes. There were a few bottles of beer left over from the weekend on the side, I couldn’t recall Vanessa forcing me to make any promises about not drinking and she is one of those people who claim that alcohol is not a drug, so I – rather smugly – cracked the lid off with my lighter.

  But just as I brought it to my lips and took my first swig, K-Hole-Kev emerged from the hallway with a baseball bat in his hands.

  If he was trying to surprise a burglar, he’s lucky I’m not one because his sneaking advance was about as subtle as nails on a blackboard, he was holding the bat in his scrawny arms with the grace a young child brandishes a toy and, with scruffy hair and tired eyes, he had his usual just-got-out-of-bed look – which is ironic because he doesn’t sleep much.

  “You’re not taking my TV!” he screamed.

  “Kev, your TV is broken,” I reminded him.

  He had thrown a table at it a few weeks ago because he thought that the kid on the cereal advert was trying to eat him. He is probably better off without it.

  “I might have a TV!”

  “Kev, I was there when you broke it! It’s me, Pikel.”

  He leaned in closer and narrowed his eyes for a few moments, eventually recognising me and dropping the bat on the floor.

  “Pikel! Man, you came back!” he exclaimed, as if it had been longer than six hours since I last saw him. He put an arm around my shoulder and guided me into the living room.

  We sat down on the couch and on the coffee table in front of us was a pile of white powder that I guessed to be ketamine. He orders it online by pretending he’s a vet and I am surprised they haven’t sussed him out yet because if they checked his transactions history then it would appear that he is only interested in sedating horses.

  He began to arrange it into lines with his National Insurance Card.

  “Want some K?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No. Sorry mate, I can’t. I promised Vanessa.”

  “Aww man. Come on. Just a little one.”

  “Kev, I’m not doing any drugs!” I said firmly. “I just came here for my wallet.”

  “Your wallet?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, I gave it to you last night to stop me spending money.”

  It seemed like a wise idea at the time.

  “Oh shit man,” Kev exclaimed, smacking his hand on his forehead.

  “Where did you put my wallet, Kev?”

  He rolled up a five pound note, and offered it to me.

  “I lost it in a K-hole. You need to help me find it.”

  I sighed.

  “Okay, but just a little one.”

  I dropped the note on the table, and my head rolled back as I felt waves of turbulence distorting my mind. A few moments later I heard the snuffle of Kev’s nostril, as he checked in his ticket to join me in K-land.

  I opened my eyes and watched the ceiling above me slipping away, my muscles relaxed, leaving my body still and lifeless, my mind playing helter-skelter. The world turned inside out. My head rested against the cushion.

  The line Kev had given me had obviously been far from small, but it didn’t matter anymore.

  Her face appeared in my mind, and I remembered what brought me here.

  I remembered the first time I met her.

  Friday night. I finished work, my phone rang, and a voice on the other side gave me directions to where this weekend’s rave was being held. After a swift change of clothes I was out of the house and ready.

  Free parties are nomadic because if they linger for too long they become stagnant and the authorities send coppers in to snoop around. The location is changed weekly, and this time it was some abandoned warehouse on the other side of town. I soon found myself lost in the derelict quarters of the city, trying to make sense of the somewhat vague directions I had been given. I had been wandering for a while by this point but still not heard any loud music, and I had just swallowed a Rizla filled with MDMA so I was hoping to find it before my mind was blown.

  This is a district the council would rather pretend didn’t exist and most respectable people avoid. A few years ago some numbskulls decided to build new houses on the other side of town, thinking that it would increase the population – what they didn’t realise at the time was that no one actually wants to live here so the same people just moved from one side of town to the other. Streets were abandoned, and neighbourhoods soon became wrecks, filled with street kids, hippies, ravers, drug addicts, all kinds of vagrants and freaks.

  And I was just about to meet someone here who would change my life forever.

  Years of neglect also mean that blown-out street lamps no longer get changed, but in the darkness ahead I saw movement and squinted my eyes.

  A girl on the other side of the street seemed to glimmer as she ran down the pavement. She was wearing torn up jeans and a black poncho that trailed behind her as she ran. Maybe it was just the drugs beginning to kick in but I found myself strangely mesmerised by her.

  “Pikel!” she called.

  I stopped in surprise. I had never seen this girl in my life, but somehow she knew my name and was running towards me like I was a long-lost friend.

  “Do I know you?” I asked, crossing over the road. I couldn’t see how I could have known her; she didn’t seem like the sort I usually associated with. She had excessive amounts of purple eye shadow smudged around her eyes, and her hair was a messy brown tangle. She was pretty, but I wasn’t sure I liked the effect that the three silver rings dangling from her eyebrow had on her face.

  “There’s no time!” she gasped. “He’s coming for me!”

  “What?” I replied. “Who’s coming?”

  I looked over her shoulder and saw a dark figure running towards us. She was being pursued.

  I cursed under my breath, realising that he must be a mugger or something. I fucking hate muggers.

  I scanned the ground. It was littered with crap. Stones. Rubble. Fag butts. Beer cans. By the wall was a rusty pipe.

  I picked it up.

  What the fuck are you doing Pikel? I thought to myself as I faced her pursuer with the pipe in my hand. I couldn’t even remember the last time I came to the aid of a stranger. But there was something about this girl: I found myself bound to helping her.

  The dark figure carried on charging towards us. He was wearing a large black cloak, and a hood obscured most of his face. The pipe in my hands seemed to be no deterrent – he carried on running.

  Now, what to do next? I had a big, fucking ugly pipe in my hand, and he was still coming for me. He was coming in fast and I had no time to think. Instinct took over: I swung the pipe, aiming for his side, hoping to floor the fucker without killing him, but just as it was about to meet the black cape of his cloak, he disappeared and my weapon spiralled through thin air.

  He was gone.

  I gasped, and turned my head to look up and down the street. Vanis
hed.

  My first thoughts were that I must have been tripping, and I abruptly became aware and self-conscious of the fact that there was a girl behind me who had just seen me swing a pipe around at nothing.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “What?” I blurted, turning to face her. “You saw it too?

  She nodded, and I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or even more disturbed.

  “What the fuck was that?” I asked, as I tried to think of a reasonable explanation. Maybe that man was one of those hologram things I’ve seen in the movies, and this was some kind of trick. Or maybe I am actually tripping and she is either just humouring me, or we are having some kind of shared hallucination – I have heard of them.

  But when I realised that no matter how hard I tried, none of these “reasonable explanations” I was creating quite added up, I began to feel angry.

  “You won’t remember me yet,” she said. “But I know you, Pikel. We will meet again soon.”

  Nothing she said was making any sense and I felt like screaming at her. I usually would have but this girl was having a strange effect on me.

  I realised that I still had a tight grip on that rusty pipe and dropped it on the pavement.

  “So who told you my name?” I asked, deciding I would try and get to the bottom of that little mystery first. Maybe we had a mutual acquaintance and someone had told her about me, or I had met her before and just couldn’t remember her.

  But I found it hard to believe I would forget someone like her.

  “You told me...” she mumbled.

  It was a good thing this girl was pretty, because she was damn weird and I would usually be annoyed by now.