Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  I examined the feed of every one of the CCTV cameras, not quite frame-by-frame, but close to that, and found nothing. I searched every inch of the workroom floor and the benchtops for any sign of how this had been achieved, but there was not a single clue.

  Even whilst I was carrying out my examinations, I knew that I was not going to find anything useful. Whatever else this plastic-bricked marvel was, it was impossible. This square was truly miraculous.

  By this time, I had constructed just about every commercially-available kit that was available. I had also bought several discontinued models from within the community. Collectors were known to buy multiples of the bigger kits so that they could store them under the bed for the day that the companies discontinued them and the price instantly doubled. Even the used ones could command high prices if they came in original boxes with the original instructions. Some of these sets were big (Wembley Stadium at one thousand nine hundred and forty-nine pieces, the Star Wars super star destroyer at three thousand one hundred and fifty-two pieces, Tower Bridge at four thousand two hundred and eighty-seven pieces and the almost legendary Taj Mahal at just short of six thousand pieces) and they were all dwarfed by what I was looking at. Nobody could have constructed this in a single night. A whole team, bringing in pre-built sections and assembling them on site might have been able to manage it, but not without the use of a vehicle and certainly not without showing up on the CCTV cameras somewhere.

  The most obvious answer, and the one that was the most believable, was that I was losing my mind and building these things during blackouts. I was happy to swear by the therapeutic effects of building these kits, but could it be that there was something darker there? In a short time, I had gone from dismissively putting together the Houses of Parliament just to satisfy my daughter and progressed to having a collection of the largest, rarest and most expensive kits in existence, all of which I had built. I had established a small business within the community of AFOLs and had received some notable praise from the same community for the Argonath build. There could be few people who didn’t see that as being at least a little obsessive. Had that obsession become a mania that took me over and made me create these wonders in some sort of fugue state? Was that possible?

  Whilst it was the most sensible answer (well, only sensible answer if I tell the truth), it suffered from the slight drawback of being as impossible as a crew of pranksters evading the CCTV footage with these huge models. That I might have built them was one thing, but I could never have done so without extensive planning and design work. One of the reasons that I never rose above the level of jobbing professional architect was because, whilst I was completely dependable and accurate, I was never really inspired. I could not come up with those sculptures without a large number and variety of design drawings. No such drawings were in evidence and it was completely unbelievable that I could have prepared them without my knowing it, no matter what sort of state I was in.

  When Miracle Square disappeared to be replaced by the Trocadero in Paris only a few days later, complete with Pont de L’Alma and Seine-going bateaux-mouches, I could prove that I was not the culprit. I had been keeping a diary, each day noting that Miracle Square was still in the centre of the workroom. On the day that the Trocadero appeared, I checked that diary and the notation for the day before was Miracle Square. The new piece had appeared overnight and if there was no way that a whole crew could build such a thing in such a short time then I certainly couldn’t.

  Which left me only the crazy theories to work with. Were the Lego pixies doing this? Was the house built on a convergence of ley lines and the magic was building these things out of my subconscious mind? I even checked that one out, getting a map of the supposed locations of local ley lines and finding that none passed anywhere near my house. It was possible that aliens were messing with me, putting me through some sort of test, but that was just too absurd to contemplate. Alien testers aren’t going to use small plastic bricks as their equipment of choice. Anal probes, maybe, but not Lego. Was I perhaps telekinetic, like Sissy Spacek in that Stephen King film? Well, it wasn’t a Stephen King film really, it was a film from a Stephen King novel. Trust me, I’ve seen Maximum Overdrive and there is a difference. I considered this to be a very real possibility until the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind rising above the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming showed up in workroom. To that point, I had never seen CE3K (as the folks on the forums seemed to like to call it). I have seen it now and the irony of the fact that the main character builds a model of the Devil’s Tower in the middle of his living room (no mothership in sight, though) was not lost on me. Telekinesis wouldn’t explain the accuracy of the scene that I had never actually witnessed.

  It also wouldn’t explain the sly humour in that model. Humour is a very human concept, and pretty much unique to humans and to higher primates. Since I wasn’t living on the Planet of the Apes, I had to conclude that whatever super-, supra- or para- normal thing was happening in my home, it had a human component. This seemed to be further confirmed when the Devil’s Tower disappeared to be replaced by a kitchen table and some chairs, drawn up neatly beneath it.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked the room in general, since there was nobody there to ask specifically. “A table and chairs? Has all the imagination leaked out already?”

  There was no answer, of course, but I turned away for a few seconds to pick up the drawings of the lighting project that I was working on and when I turned back the chairs were all stacked up on top of the table.

  “Oh, that’s very good,” I complimented the unseen forces, amused rather than frightened because I had seen this film. “Very Poltergeist.”

  And that was one of the two theories that stuck with me. It was possible that the plastic bricks themselves were alive, though there was no hint anywhere on the internet of such a phenomenon having been recorded before (and the internet is a place where everything conceivable seems to have been recorded somewhere by someone). I could not bring myself to believe it was possible and I never found anything that could render my assessment of the theory invalid. What I really believed was going on was that I was being haunted.

  It’s a strange thing, but having decided that I was being haunted, I stopped being scared. Fear is rooted in the lack of understanding. We fear what we don’t understand. Once upon a time that meant pretty much everything and so humans barely out of the caveman stage had gods for everything. By Greek and Roman times, we had reached the stage of possessing gods for lightning and war and love and death. Of these, only the fear of death drives us to our higher beings, on the battlefield or off, and so we’re down to needing just the one god and, for a growing number of people, we don’t even need that one. Obviously, there are some things it still pays to be frightened of like disease, our apparently constant lust for war, merchant bankers, Republican presidential candidates and so on, but we at least understand them and can find ways, and have found ways, to limit them and their depredations on the rest of humankind.

  But a spirit that expresses itself through the use of Lego? That is beyond most of our human experience. It is uncanny. And yet it is still far less frightening than the idea of dementia stealing away our minds.

  “Joanna?” I once asked the workroom in general. It was morning and I had walked in to find the Atlantic City boardwalk circa 1922 laid out in the display area, which was how I now thought of the room’s central space. I had no idea what the model was until after I posted photographs to the business website and set off a whole discussion amongst customers and fans as to both the location and the era. Vintage photographs were quickly forthcoming to resolve the issue.

  There was no answer to my spoken question, of course. I hadn’t expected one, but the question had to be asked. Had to be asked and ignored, just as it had been. The ghost wasn’t Joanna. It couldn’t be. She would never have played these games with intricate Lego structures as a way of contacting me. She would have simply spelled out the things that she
wanted to say on the floor. Saying it with bricks, as it were. Besides which, she could not have created those sculptures. I hadn’t seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind when that model appeared, but Joanna would not even had heard of it. Like the locksmith, whose name I had forgotten, she didn’t take with the elves and the pixies. She went further and didn’t take with science fiction either. She liked her movies to be firmly rooted in the real world, which allowed for gory horror alongside insipid romantic comedy and dreary historical drama against gritty real life stories. Even a knock-down, slam bang action movie would do as long as nobody had superpowers or cars that could fly.

  Joanna also couldn’t have built those structures from a technical point of view. Unless being dead immediately conferred an understanding of stress and moment and redundancy, she did not have the technical skills to overcome the practical issues that building such intricate structures posed.

  But if not Joanna, then who? There was no answer to that. In this area, a house purporting to be home to a ghost was likely to bring twice the price on the market, so the estate agent would certainly have mentioned it at some point in the buying process, if only to increase his cut. I now researched the house’s history on the internet and at the local library and came up blank. A freedom of information request to the police brought no news of bloody murders on the site. There was ‘no information held’.

  The spirit of the Lego’s identity remained a mystery, but as long as the only way that it manifested itself was through gorgeously detailed renderings of Mount Rushmore, the Battle of Waterloo, Norman Bates’ house from Psycho, the Alhambra Palace, Stonehenge, Balmoral Castle, Starfleet engaging the Borg at Wolf 359 and, heartbreakingly, the World Trade Center, then it was a mystery I could live it. It was a mystery I did live with.

  Then Brenda happened.

  By this point, I was something of a minor celebrity amongst the AFOL international community. Whilst many people were producing Lego sculptures that were every bit as creative and stunning as the ones that I posted on my increasingly successful business site, they were not doing so on such a regular basis and not with such a variety of subject matter.

  Brenda was alarmingly American. I find most Americans alarming, but that’s because I am the quintessential buttoned-up Brit. The kind of Brit, for example, who would use the word ‘quintessential’.

  Brenda turned up on my doorstep unannounced; a tactic I am sure that she employed to catch her targets off-balance, as if the force of her considerable personality was not sufficient to do that.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” she greeted me effusively when I innocently answered the door after hearing the doorbell. It was about the time that the postman delivered the bundle of mail, most of it from the industrial unit where I was now the proud employer of five full-time and three part-time members of staff. It still seemed ridiculous to me that I could give people gainful employment based on lighting people’s Lego structures. “I’m Brenda Yeagher and you, sir, need no introduction.”

  “I don’t?” I asked, still in a state of some confusion as to what was actually happening.

  “Not to me,” she asserted. “I am a big fan of your work. I have three of your lighting kits installed in models at home.”

  “You’re a builder,” things were suddenly starting to become a little clearer.

  “Well, yes and no.”

  OK, so they were only getting a little clearer.

  “I mean that I am a builder, but I am not only a builder.”

  “‘Not only a builder’?” It was still mid-morning and I was down on my coffee intake. I think that I could be forgiven for not following the conversation under the circumstances.

  “I mean that I am a writer as well,” she helpfully clarified.

  “Oh,” I replied, mainly because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Then, my brain caught up with the world with a jolt. “Wait. Yeagher. Brenda Yea… You’re Brick Building Brenda from Global Brick Magazine!”

  “Guilty as charged,” the woman on my doorstep said, smiling widely at having been recognised. “It’s always nice to meet a fan.”

  “Oh, I’m not a fan,” I blurted out. “I was just excited that I realised who you were.”

  “Oh,” she said, crestfallen.

  “I mean I could be a fan,” I tried to make up for my faux pas, “if I had ever read anything that you had written.”

  I was digging this hole a great deal deeper and decided to stop.

  Nothing was going to keep Brenda down for more than a few seconds, however. She reactivated her smile and continued, “Well, I am a fan of yours.”

  “Mine? I have fans?” this was something that came as news to me.

  “Of course,” she confirmed. “Quite apart from the excellent lighting designs, the sculptures that you make are the stuff of legend.”

  “Legend?” I was doubtful. “Really?”

  “Perhaps ‘legend’ is pushing it a bit,” she considered, “but they are greatly admired by a large number of people and, increasingly, not just amongst the brick building community.

  “I’m afraid that I don’t understand,” I admitted.

  “And I would love to explain it all to you,” she suggested, “but perhaps we could do that indoors? Where it is a little less chilly?”

  “What? Oh, yes, of course. Sorry.” I stood aside and allowed her to enter the house. “I have lost the habit of having visitors since… well, since…”

  “Yes, so sad that you lost your wife,” she said sympathetically, whilst at the same time examining the hallway with a thoroughness that was almost forensic. “I myself lost two husbands, though in my case quite deliberately and through the divorce courts.”

  “How do you know about Jo… my wife?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “This is the twenty-first century, darling; there are no secrets anymore,” she said with a laugh. “There was a notice of your wife’s passing in the local papers. Your previous employers still haven’t taken down your ‘about us’ page on their website and your name is on too many public contracts for it to have mattered if they had. Birth, marriage and death details are all available now, even if the certificate copies themselves are harder to come by. Your company is registered with Companies House, so there is a public record of you there. Also, you might want to check the privacy settings on your Facebook account.”

  “Have you been cyberstalking me?” I was suddenly feeling less comfortable about having her in the house.

  “In a way. It’s what journalists do,” she leaned forward to confirm confidentially.

  “You write for a Lego fan magazine,” I pointed out, this seeming to be a broad usage of the term ‘journalist’. Though, to be fair, that term had to be fairly broadly used when referring to anyone in that profession that I had ever met. Scientifically speaking, that was a small sample.

  “That makes me not a journalist?” she challenged.

  “It makes you a writer,” I tried to hedge my response.

  “If you weren’t so cute, I might be offended by that.”

  “I meant no offence,” I apologised immediately. That’s what British people do. “I didn’t… wait, what, cute?”

  “People like artists,” Brenda ignored my babbling and moved further into the house. “They want to be artists. Everyone is creative to some degree and it appeals to that side of our nature to know about the great artists amongst us. Celebrity culture may now all be about the fame and not the substance, but it is the work that inspires us and the person who interests us afterwards. Right now, people are interested in you.”

  “I’m not an artist,” I pointed out.

  “False modesty is no modesty at all,” she chided me cheerfully. “Ah, this is the kitchen, obviously. I would very much like a cup of tea if that is not being too forward.”

  It was being too forward, but that would not have bothered Brenda.

  “I’m not being modest,” I complained, busying myself with the kettle, “falsely or otherwise. I
’m not an artist.”

  “You might have been able to claim that if you only built the kits,” she pointed out, taking a seat at the table without being invited, “like I do. Even if you had stuck to buildings, that would have been seen as normal, considering your previous occupation. You don’t do that, though. The Martian war machines engaging the British army, copied nothing. It was an interpretation and, if I may say so, it was stunning.”

  “Thank you,” I said, feeling distinctly ill-at-ease taking the credit for something that I had not done. I wasn’t a politician, after all.

  “The Parting of the Red Sea, Captain Nemo’s ship attacking the whalers, Chinese junks at sunset, tigers stalking antelope, the underground city from that Cthulhu book…”

  “‘At the Mountains of Madness’,” I quoted the title, not mentioning that I didn’t think that Cthulhu featured in that story.

  “These are all works of art,” she insisted, “and that makes you an artist. And, as I believe I mentioned, people are interested in artists.”

  “And you are here to sate that interest?” I placed a cup of tea in front of her, which she completed ignored. Asking for it had been another tactic, I presumed.

  “It’s one way to make a living,” she offered with a slight shrug.

  “Prying into the private lives of the rich and famous? I can imagine more honourable ways,” I said, rather ungallantly.

  “That’s not what I write,” she objected. “I have no interest in your funny little, what is that amusing British word, peccadillos. One thing that you have to say about the brick building community – it’s only the work that matters.”

  Which was true enough. Though the factions fought over which bricks could be legitimately used and whether smashing up huge models in slow motion for YouTube videos might actually be sacrilegious, it was all about the bricks. If you built, then it didn’t matter if you were male, female, young, old, any sort of legal sexual orientation and, of course, this church was built of bricks of many colours.