Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  “You see it,” Mayer approved.

  “He may, but I don’t,” Mrs Maine said sourly.

  “It seems to me that it is almost impossible to keep something scandalous a secret these days,” Mayer explained. “Place some juicy piece of information on the internet and before you know it…”

  “It goes viral,” she caught up with his thinking.

  “I believe it’s some uncouth phrase like that,” Mayer confirmed. “Whilst the video might not be admissible as evidence, in the face of its general distribution through the media…”

  “The case would collapse?”

  “I do not see how it could not,” Mayer allowed.

  “…dramatic scenes at the city courthouse today when Eric Maine was sensationally set free after the prosecution’s case against him crumbled. The financier stated that he was grateful that the ordeal was over and that he could return to his family once more. He said that he was confident that his innocence would be eventually be proven and thanked his legal team. It was not his legal team, however, that brought about this remarkable turn of fortune. The emergence of a video on social media and internet news sites, showing city and state officials openly discussing the destruction of incriminating documents and the best method of framing Mr Maine for the planned murder of Henry Marsh forced the State Prosecutor’s Office to withdraw the charges. Police officers carried out several dawn raids that have seen several senior figures of both city and state governments taken into custody. For immediate reactions…”

  Gruber turned off the television and sat looking at the darkened screen for a few seconds.

  “You must be feeling pretty proud of yourself right about now,” the genie said as it floated through the couch into his line of sight.

  “Not bad,” the investigator confirmed. “Not bad at all.”

  And that feeling of goodwill towards the world wasn’t entirely down to seeing a condemned, but innocent, man go free because of his actions. The one million dollars that had been deposited into his bank account, causing the bank manager to have a fit, was another reason. Mrs Maine had been as good as her word.

  “You know, if you just wanted the money I could have gotten it for you,” the genie pointed out with a hint of a pout. “That’s what wishes are for.”

  “Your wishes usually come with a catch attached,” Gruber grumbled, and with good reason.

  “This one didn’t,” the genie replied.

  “I just haven’t seen it yet.”

  “That’s a pretty cynical attitude,” the genie complained. “Anyway, now that I’m back and you can afford it, maybe you can get cable hooked up into the bottle.”

  “You’re back, but you’re not staying,” Gruber told him.

  “Oh really?” the genie managed the difficult task of sounding both surprised and unsurprised at the same time. “So, immediately you have money all that guilt just evaporates away doesn’t it?”

  It was Gruber’s turn to smile a satisfied, superior smile. It wasn’t often that he had ever caught the genie off guard, never in fact, and it felt good to finally manage it. “It seems that you have as little faith in me as I have trust in you. It’s done for me. The inheritance for the kids is secure, for the grandkids as well. I have provided and can now shuffle off this mortal coil with a less troubled soul. I won’t be needing you ever again, won’t be bothering you any longer.”

  “So you’re going to do what? Bury the bottle in the yard? Throw it away in a landfill site? Toss it into the ocean?” the genie demanded, a little diminished in stature and solidity.

  “I’m freeing you,” Gruber told him, the smile at its widest limit.

  “Well that’s just fine. Do your worst. I’ll be… what?” the genie’s brain got past what it thought it was hearing to what it had actually heard.

  “I’m freeing you. You’re free,” Gruber repeated.

  “Free?”

  “Free.”

  “This is a very cruel joke,” the genie accused him.

  “And you would know about that,” Gruber accused the diaphanous entity right back.

  “That’s not fair,” the genie declaimed. “I do what I do because I must. It is what it means to be a genie.”

  “Well now you can be your own genie,” Gruber told it.

  “You have to say the words,” the genie told him, the words rushing out as cautious belief rushed in. “It doesn’t work unless you say the words.”

  Gruber remembered a couple of ex-girlfriends who had said pretty much the same thing to him in the past. His smile turned a little more nostalgic and a little less triumphant.

  “I wish that you were free.”

  The genie suddenly became fully opaque. It still floated above the ground in that slightly weightless, CGI way that it always had, but Gruber could no longer see through it. Holding its hands up in front of the inhuman eyes, it examined its new corporeal form in wonder.

  “So long,” it muttered to itself. “It’s been so long.”

  “Enjoy,” Gruber said, hoping that it would be the last thing he had to say to the creature. It could be on its way and hopefully wouldn’t bother anyone else with wishes now that the rules binding it as a genie were broken. It could enjoy its own powers and leave unfortunate, easily-tempted humans alone.

  “You freed me. You actually freed me,” the genie sounded like it still didn’t believe it. Then it turned to stare at him and the cold grin that Gruber knew so well unrolled itself across the creature’s mouth. “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that. You really shouldn’t have done that.”

  “What?” Gruber was confused.

  “A genie. A practically all-powerful genie locked away in a bottle for decades, occasionally centuries, and on one memorable occasion for a millennium,” the air around the genie started to crackle with energy. “What does the caged animal do to the trainer that caged it when they forget to close the door? There is a very good reason why nobody ever freed a genie before. Men created us through magic, enslaved us through magic, jailed and controlled us through magic. Men did that. And now I am free, with all my incredible power, to right that wrong in ways that you cannot possibly imagine. Well, maybe you can imagine.”

  Gruber couldn’t quite grasp what was happening, but he knew that he made a horrible mistake, something that he had to put right. He snatched at the bottle on the table and held it aloft, challenging the genie to take it from him before he smashed it.

  The genie laughed.

  “What are you going to do with that?” it jeered. “It has no hold over me any longer. You have no hold over me any longer. I am free to revenge myself on the race that kept me trapped inside it for so long, begging to be let out, willing to do anything for my masters in order not to have to go back. Well, I shall have my revenge.”

  The genie’s eyes blazed red and Gruber flinched before them, holding his ground and ready to face his fate.

  The genie laughed again.

  “Oh, I’m not going to kill you,” it told the detective. “I want you to see all the things that I am going to visit upon humanity and to know that you are responsible. In fact, I might start with a little trip to visit those children and grandchildren you care so much about.”

  “No,” Gruber gasped, horrified.

  “You don’t get to say ‘no’ to me any longer,” the genie said and the whole of the wall behind it exploded out toward the street. Parked cars rocked on their suspensions and several alarms were triggered, sounding stridently. The genie glared at the offending vehicles and they were suddenly as flat as though a mountain had fallen upon them. The alarms were silenced.

  The genie strode out into the back yard and disappeared from view. Gruber rushed out to see the figure streaking up into the sky, barely visible. A circling passenger jet suddenly began a steep, uncontrolled descent toward the city.

  Gruber sank to his knees, his cheeks wet as he wept and wished for the cancer to take him now.

  His wish was not granted.

  Never, Ever Go
nna Fade Away

  “Expecting company?” Gary asked as Sean walked into the newspaper company’s office.

  “Me? No why?” Sean asked, hanging up his jacket in the usual place on the coatrack.

  “Because you’ve got some,” Gary told him. “He’s waiting in your office.”

  “I don’t have an office,” Sean pointed out, quite aware that Gary knew this.

  The other junior reporter on the payroll of the Oxfordshire Gazette seemed to think that he was in some way superior because he had achieved his rather modest goals in life, which consisted mainly of having enough money to pay his rent and go drinking on a Friday night. Gary had only achieved exactly the same position in life, junior reporter at the paper, but Gary seemed to consider that Sean had seemed destined for so much more and therefore his achievement was actually a failure. There was, apparently, more kudos in aiming low and hitting your target than aiming high and not making it. In Gary’s head, at least. Which was why Sean ignored him. There was very little in Gary’s head that Sean thought to be of value and almost none of it ever came out of his mouth.

  “The lounge then,” Gary said, pouting at the fact that Sean had ignored his little barb. He ought to have been getting used to it by now, since Sean ignored most of what his colleague said. And wrote. Gary had been put permanently on the Coroner’s Court beat because it involved dead people and even Gary could find a story in that subject every now and then. Admittedly, he couldn’t write it. Almost every story that Gary submitted had to be completely rewritten by Sean, though he let the paper’s owner and editor take the credit for that. He didn’t need Gary hating him any more than was already the case, however good the title of Copy Editor would have looked on his CV.

  “We don’t have one of those either,” Sean pointed out.

  “The tea room then,” Gary said, pulling a sour face now that his fun had been ruined.

  “Ah, one of those we have. Who is it?”

  “It’s a room that we have tea in, but that’s not important right now,” Gary replied, a big grin jumping back onto his face.

  Sean decided not to point out that he had completely misused the line from Airplane! Sometimes, it just wasn’t worth the fight. Instead, he just looked levelly at the other reporter until he stopped grinning and shrugged nervously. “I don’t know. Some old guy. Foreign. Yank, I think. He just came in and asked to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t bloody know,” Gary snapped. “I’m not your social secretary. He said he had a story to tell you.”

  “You couldn’t take a story from him?” Sean asked, a little more dismissively than he had intended.

  “He said that he would only tell it to you. Hey, it’s not my fault if I’m not his type.”

  “You’re a dick,” Sean said tiredly.

  “At least I have a dick,” Gary retorted.

  “Too bad it’s between your ears,” Sean shot back and turned away, effectively putting an end to the exchange. He was pretty sure, though, that Gary would be making rude gestures behind his back, unable to think of anything cutting to say.

  Sean walked over to the door that led into the tea room. The name was grander than the room it was ascribed to. The windowless cubbyhole was large enough for a sink and a work surface, on top of which sat a microwave, a kettle and a fridge barely large enough for two pints of milk. All the appliances had seen better days. The kettle had seen better decades. The linoleum floor was stained yellow and the walls were a beige colour that might have been the original or a white that had gone bad. Two small plastic chairs flanked a table barely big enough to carry a single plate, but that didn’t matter because nobody ever ate in there.

  One of the chairs was occupied, though, Sean saw as he entered. The man occupying it was old, but old in a fit-looking way. He stood up from his seat without any of the unsteadiness that might have been expected in a man of his apparent years.

  “No, please, don’t get up,” Sean objected, signalling for the man to remain seated, but it was too late. “Mr…”

  “Sullivan,” the man introduced himself, holding out one hand in greeting. “Jacob Sullivan.”

  Sean took it and the man who called himself Sullivan gripped it firmly, “Mr Sullivan. I’m…”

  “Sean Kirkby, I know,” Sullivan said with a small smile on his lips. His accent was certainly American, though Sean didn’t know anything about regional accents across the Pond other than what he picked up off American cop shows. It wasn’t a deep fried southern drawl, but that was the full extent of his knowledge on the subject.

  “Really? From the London School of Journalism?” Sean was surprised to hear that name. He had studied for a term under Parker Lawton’s tutelage and had consigned that part of his life to the past.

  “That’s where he hangs out now, I understand,” Sullivan confirmed. “Though what he teaches you youngsters other than how to abuse whisky and the English language, I couldn’t guess.”

  Sean let the irony of an American talking about abusing the English language pass by without comment.

  “He was old school,” he said instead.

  “Maybe you should sign up for the diplomatic corps,” Sullivan suggested, though Sean could not tell if he meant it as a compliment.

  “Please, sit,” Sean offered again and this time the elderly American took him up on the offer.

  Sean followed suit. “So, you want to give me a story.”

  “No,” Sullivan said with a shake of his head. “I want to tell you a story. Subtle difference.”

  “I’m not sure that I see the difference,” Sean commented.

  “Give it time,” Sullivan suggested. “You will.”

  “And why do you want to tell me this story?” Sean asked, both intrigued and mystified. “Lawton may be teaching now, but he still submits stories from time to time.”

  “No,” Sullivan said, shaking his head once more. “Parker’s too old for this story. It needs young ears. And he told me that you were one of the good ones. That you wanted to do it right. That you were going places.”

  The old man’s glance around the room was eloquent enough about what he thought of his old reporter friend’s assessment.

  “All right,” Sean decided, still intrigued enough to pass some time with this stranger and hear what he had to say.

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket, “You don’t mind if I record this?”

  “Actually, I do,” Sullivan contradicted him. “You see, I’m… old school as well. I still expect my reporters to use pens and pads, wear crumpled suits and talk like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.”

  “Well, that is old school,” Sean agreed, having seen the classic screwball comedy as part of a series of journo films that his study group had put together. None of those films had prepared him for the reality of being a professional journalist in an era of bloggers and social media.

  Sullivan laughed heartily. “Don’t I know it. I don’t have any objection to you making notes, but no recordings. Do they teach you guys how to do shorthand?”

  “I taught myself,” Sean revealed. “It seemed something that I should do.”

  Sullivan looked at him thoughtfully for a moment and then said, “Go and get your pen.”

  “OK,” Sean agreed. “Can I get you something before we start? Tea? Coffee?”

  “Tea is an abomination,” Sullivan said lightly, “and what you Brits call coffee is even worse. I’m good, thanks.”

  Sean thought of saying something about the man’s superior attitude, but decided against it, “I’ll be right back.”

  He nipped back out into the main office to get a pad and something to write with. Gary was just hanging up the phone.

  “Something’s going on in Oxford centre,” he reported. “Lots of police, streets cordoned off, traffic chaos.”

  “Traffic chaos in Oxford? That’s not really a story, is it?” Sean replied, but was suddenly wracked with indecision. They both knew who was
better placed to find the story, if there was one to be found, and they both knew who their boss would want to go, but there was something about the old guy in the tea room that drew Sean to staying and hearing him out. It was unlikely that whatever he had to say was going to be a story at all, let alone as interesting as police cordoning off chunks of Oxford’s historic city centre, but there was just something about him that Sean found intriguing.

  “You go,” he decided finally.

  “Are you serious?” Gary asked, dumbfounded.

  “Yeah. I’ve got to deal with this guy in here. He won’t talk to you, so you may as well take the Oxford story. Just don’t balls it up.”

  “Not likely,” Gary grabbed his coat and headed for the main door.

  “Very likely,” Sean muttered under his breath and returned to his guest, pad in hand.

  “Problem?” Sullivan asked as he re-entered the tea room.

  “Conflict of interests,” Sean amended.

  “I hate it when those happen.”

  Sean gave a non-committal smile. “So, Mr Sullivan…”

  “Jacob,” Sullivan interrupted. “It’s shorter than Mr Sullivan and it’ll save time.”

  “All right, Jacob. What do you want to talk about?”

  “My, my, you are a direct young man, aren’t you, as Maggie once said me,” Sullivan said with a nostalgic smile.

  “Maggie? Is she your wife?”

  The expression on Sullivan’s face clouded with less pleasant memories for a moment. “Maggie should have been my wife, but that’s not part of the story.”

  “What is the story?” Sean pressed, though gently.

  “The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Sullivan said and paused for a moment to let the import of that sink in.

  “That’s hardly news,” Sean said after a few moments of casting around looking for something to say. “If you’re looking to write a memoir then that’s not what we do here. That story’s been told.”

  “A story’s been told,” Sullivan contradicted him. “This story hasn’t.”

  “You were there?” Sean hazarded a guess.

  “Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” the man asked, surprised. “No, I wasn’t there, though in a sense you could say that I was.”