Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  “This book was responsible for Harry Potter?” I asked, astonished.

  “Only if you believe the stories,” Heathern commented.

  “There are too many to be so easily discounted,” Barker insisted. “Abraham Lincoln couldn’t hold down a job before reading it. He was a store clerk, boat worker, farmer, even a soldier in the militia. The Wright Brothers fixed bicycles for heaven’s sake. Isaac Newton nearly bankrupted the family farm. Steven Spielberg couldn’t even get into film school. The Beatles were playing a dive in Hamburg.”

  “The Beatles read this book?”

  “No, but their manager, Brian Epstein, did.”

  Heathern threw up her hands in frustration, “This is all nonsense.”

  “And I had no interest in literature, ancient or modern,” Barker added softly.

  The silence in the room was palpable. People talk about cutting the atmosphere with a knife, but you would have needed a chainsaw in that room at that moment.

  “You read the book?” Heathern asked. The shock on her face was absolute and undeniably genuine. “You read the book?”

  Barker looked at her steadfastly.

  “You read the book?”

  “It doesn’t matter where you put the stress,” Barker told her, “the answer is still yes.”

  “What did it say?” I asked without thinking. I could tell that I did so less than a second before Heathern. Perhaps her disbelief was not quite as certain as she professed it to be.

  Barker smiled ruefully, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “What?” Heathern and I asked together.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember?” Heathern demanded, her voice rising throughout the short length of the sentence until she was almost screeching.

  “That’s not how it works,” Barker told her gently. “I was changed, reborn. I discovered a whole new purpose in life and pursued it with great success to the place where now you find me; one of the foremost authorities on literature in the world. I can quote Shakespeare, Bacon, Bronte, Dickens and Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Melville, Orwell, even King and Grisham verbatim, but I cannot recall a single word of what I read in that book. Not one.”

  “So, this book… what, allows you, drives you, to achieve your full potential? To be better than you could otherwise be?” I wondered, not even questioning any longer.

  “Something like that,” Barker agreed.

  “Then why hasn’t everyone read it?” I demanded. “Something like that ought to be mandatory for everyone.”

  “Because that’s only half the stupid story,” Heathern explained.

  “For every action, there is an equal, and opposite, reaction,” Barker said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that not everyone is inspired to great heights,” Heathern said.

  “It is said that Adolf Hitler was an unremarkable corporal when he read the book,” Barker added. “It is said that he loaned it to Mengele. Vlad Dracul was a hostage of the Ottomans when he encountered it. Joseph Stalin read it in Moscow. Pol Pot, Judas Iscariot, Lucrezia Borgia, all of them readers of the book. It has even been tracked to London in late 1887.”

  “Jack the Ripper?”

  Barker shrugged. “It can’t be proved, but...”

  “Humanity’s brightest, Mankind’s worst,” Heathern summarised.

  “And so many others who were driven mad by what it turned them into,” Barker added sombrely. “So many in asylums. So many suicides.”

  “Fortunate, then, that it’s only a story,” Heathern pointed out with brittle good cheer. “A stupid urban legend.”

  “It certainly is quite a story,” I agreed, feeling myself come out from under a cloud, a fog that had gripped me whilst I listened to Barker’s talespinning, “but what makes you think that Lisa Atwell saw this book?”

  “Because we have it here,” Barker said as thought that was common knowledge.

  Heathern just looked uneasy.

  “Here?” I was surprised, though I really should not have been.

  “We have the largest collection of controlled books outside of the Vatican’s Forbidden Library,” Barker revealed.

  “‘Controlled books’?” I was repeating phrases so much I was in danger of asking for a cracker.

  “Words have always had power over us,” Barker said. “There are still some ideas that it is unsafe to have running free in the world. And before you ask, yes we are qualified to make that determination.”

  That certainly wasn’t a debate that I wanted to get myself sucked into.

  “So, you think that Lisa Atwell read the book, or just the first page,” I amended as Heathern stirred to respond, “didn’t like what she saw and threw herself off the roof to prevent it?”

  “It’s a theory,” Barker confirmed.

  “It’s nonsense,” Heathern contradicted him. “Completely unfounded.”

  “We can check that, though, can’t we?” Barker challenged her.

  “We can? How?” I asked.

  “All access to the controlled books is, well, controlled,” Barker explained. “Nobody can gain access to the vault without prior approval and access to each volume is strictly monitored.”

  “So, if she read the book there would be a record?”

  “There would indeed,” he confirmed.

  “Then there’s a chance we can lay this whole thing about the book to rest right now?” I suggested. Laying the unfortunate girl to rest would be someone else’s problem later.

  “Of course,” Barker agreed. “We can go and have a look.”

  “Go?” I asked. “You mean it’s not on computer?”

  Heathern spared me a scornful look, “Remember where you are, Commissioner.”

  And I thought that police information technology was behind the times! We could store everything that we needed, but getting it back again was something else.

  “We don’t consign anything important here to computers,” Barker backed his colleague up. “If it’s important enough, we write it down. It’s more permanent. Books are our business, after all.”

  He stood up, eager to be away and look at the damning evidence, or exonerating evidence depending on your point of view. Heathern also rose from her chair, but with a great deal more reluctance.

  “It takes both of you?” I wondered, joining them in a standing position.

  “These are the controlled books,” Heathern pointed out sharply, “so yes, it takes two keyholders.”

  “Fair enough,” I allowed, considering some of the security restrictions the force had in place looking after its information.

  Barker led the way. I paused, gallantly inviting the lady academic to precede me, but she stared back at me stonily until I shrugged and followed him. She fell into step behind me. It was almost as though I were a condemned man being escorted to the hangman’s noose with a guard ahead and a guard behind.

  From the comfortably overheated rooms of the professors, we progressed along a warm corridor and then out and across the quadrangle in which Lisa Atwell had taken her terminal tumble. This was distinctly less than warm. I nodded to the uniformed PCSO who was guarding the scene from onlookers and anyone else who might want to contaminate it. Not that this was likely since the Scene of Crime Officers, or Crime Scene Investigators as they now insisted on having it, had taken everything they needed from the site before the body was removed.

  On the far side of the quadrangle, there was a heavy, locked door nestled in a barely noticeable alcove. Since it was close to the more frequently-used door leading to the student accommodation and tutorial rooms, there was enough activity to distract the casual visitor from even realising that it existed at all. Whether this was by design or fortunate accident, I couldn’t suggest.

  Barker produced a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. He flipped the ancient-looking light switch set in the even more ancient-looking wall and headed down the decidedly ancient-looking stone steps beyond.
I followed and heard Heathern pause to lock the door behind us with a disconcertingly solid thump.

  The stone surfaces of the steps were smooth and worn, but this was much more a sign of their age rather than the use that they had received in recent times. They were also narrow in the fashion of long ago, so I had to pay attention to prevent my big policeman’s feet from sliding out of place and slipping me down onto the descending professor ahead. That would have amused Heathern no end and I had no particular desire to amuse the woman.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a short corridor leading to another solidly-built door. Barker unlocked this one as well and went ahead. Beyond this door, was a surprisingly large, and even more surprisingly dry, hexagonal room. Each wall of the room held an alcove that was guarded by an iron gate. These gates did not look at all ancient and their locks appeared to be both modern and very strong. There were two locks on each.

  Heathern locked the door to the room behind us and then joined Barker by one of the internal gates. Each of pair chose a key and inserted it into the locks. They turned their keys together and the gate swung easily open on oiled hinges. Barker went inside and Heathern waited for me to follow.

  “This is the book,” Barker said with great gravitas.

  More gravitas, it turned out, than the book itself deserved. It had been placed on a plinth in the middle of the alcove, marking it out as the centrepiece, but it was disappointingly unremarkable in every other way. There was no leather binding, no embossed lettering, no aura of crackling magical energy. It looked for all the world like a large format art book that you might find on anybody’s coffee table. Anyone who owned a coffee table and liked art, that is. It was deeply disappointing.

  “The records?” I asked.

  “In here,” Barker said, turning to a small bureau with several locked drawers and a writing surface. Each drawer required two keys to unlock it.

  “Left key,” Barker said, sorting through his collection again.

  “I’ve got the right,” Heathern said, taking up station on that side of her colleague. It reminded me of that scene at the beginning of ‘Wargames’ in the nuclear missile silos.

  I looked again at the book. It was so curious that such an unimpressive thing could have created such a legend to build up around it. It wasn’t the kind of thing that you’d find Indiana Jones dodging giant boulders to get hold of. I wondered what it actually said on that famous first page. Was there something profound that fundamentally changed people, or was there a smiley face and a short phrase something to the effect of ‘Gotcha!’.

  “Three...” Barker said, “two...”

  “Do we really need the countdown?” Heathern complained.

  “Turn your key,” Barker replied, irritated.

  They both turned their keys, but the drawer did not respond to their action. Barker pulled at the handle hard enough to shift the bureau across the floor.

  “You’ve used the wrong key,” he accused Heathern.

  “Maybe you’ve used the wrong key,” she countered.

  I reached out to touch the cover of the book. There was no bolt of lightning, or even tingle of static. There was nothing to signify that this was anything other than an ordinary mass-produced hardback book.

  I ran my fingers along the edge of the front cover. I could flip the book open with almost no effort and read what was inside, but paused. Barker had told a good story. He had seemed to believe it completely, whilst Heathern’s dismissals had been edged with something, something somewhere between uncertainty and fear. Should I look? Was it really possible that this unremarkable book could turn me from an efficient and competent copper into the Sherlock Holmes of the day? On the other hand, could it turn me into the Moriarty of the day, trailing bodies and destruction in my wake?

  Was I being had? Was it all some elaborate hoax? Were the academics laughing silently at the trick they were playing on the dullard policeman? There was only one way to find out and that was to open the book.

  Was there really a risk? Could it be as great as Barker had said? Again, there was only one way to find out.

  My finger tensed under the edge of the book’s cover, but still didn’t flip it open. I was wracked with indecision, perhaps as Lisa Atwell had been before me.

  I mean, what would you do?

  The Whys And The Wherefores

  The Operation

  Nobody likes to go into hospital and nobody likes the idea of being cut open to find out what is going on inside. That was the simple inspiration behind this story, nothing more and nothing less. There is probably something of all the body horror movies that I’ve seen in my life and who can deny the impact of the chestburster scene from ALIEN?

  The Wall at the End of the World

  This story has been growing in my head for a long time, years in fact, so that when it was written, it came out in a single flowing stream so familiar was the story. That familiarity worried me. Was it my story or someone else’s? After all, what writer, composer or artist is not a product of their influences (except perhaps child prodigies who do not have time to pick up those influences)? It seems clear to me that there are three main sources of inspiration for this story. The first is THE WALL AROUND THE WORLD by Theodore Cogswell (and it is only after rediscovering this short story that the title of my story was expanded from the much more prosaic, and brief, The Wall). Though the wall in Cogswell’s story encircles the whole community and the story also tells of someone wishing to surmount the barrier, his protagonist, the manner in which the feat is achieved and what is found beyond is very, very different. Still, it seems obvious that I read this story as a child and it has stayed with me all this time, though much altered. A name check is required, however. The second obvious source, and one that might even have inspired Cogswell, who knows, is the wall that protects the native village on Skull island in KING KONG. The film posits the theory that all walls are built to keep something in, something out or two things apart. Though there are no dinosaurs or spider pits in this story, the influence is clearly there. And then there is GAME OF THRONES (not GRR Martin’s books, which I haven’t read, but rather the sometimes overly talky and often overly naked TV show) with its towering wall of ice. Everyone can reach the top of that one, but the image is still impressive and almost certainly inspired this story to fruition at last.

  The Egg Mk II

  This story was originally called simply The Egg and was written many years ago as an exercise in short story writing. The manuscript was put away in a drawer and, eventually, lost. The story, though, remained with me and I finally got around to rewriting it from memory. The events, characters and settings are all pretty much as I remember them, though the writing has obviously changed somewhat in the intervening years. Hence the current title, the Egg Mk II. Don’t worry, I can’t remember any other early stories that have been lost and can be resurrected. Now there’s a point; I haven’t done a resurrection story.

  Lottery Ticket, Lottery Ticket

  The world is going to hell in a handbasket and there seems to be little that anyone can do about it. People insist on blowing each other up, the global economy is going down the toilet, US Presidential candidates are using hate, fear and xenophobia to get elected whilst UK governments are in open warfare on the rights of the ordinary citizen. The world is warming, weather patterns are changing, Michael Bay is still being allowed to make films and the population is getting both older and larger. The dystopian future is coming true in the present.

  But does it have to be that way?

  I wanted to write a future story that would take the overpopulation crisis as its inspiration and posit a world that wasn’t on the brink of extinction. A story to suggest that Mankind will do what it has always done to survive – adapt.

  Of course, the classic text on the subject of overpopulation is Harry Harrison’s MAKE ROOM, MAKE ROOM! (which I haven’t actually read, but have seen the excellent film adaptation SOYLENT GREEN, which does get a reference) and that is why the tit
le is as it is. There are also hints of the Ewan McGregor/ Scarlett Johannson film THE ISLAND (one of the few Michael Bay movies worth your time and which also features a lottery promising a trip to a land of beauty) and the legendary ecological fable SILENT RUNNING. You can even throw in the lyrics to BIG YELLOW TAXI, in which they took all the trees, put them in a tree museum and then charged a dollar and half to see them.

  There are times when the future looks bleak, but then there have been lots of times when the future looked even bleaker and we are still here, possibly against all the odds. I like to think that, whatever the future holds, we have the capacity to deal with it.

  The Girl Who Talked to Fire

  This story was inspired when I was researching arson (it’s a work thing, honest). Fire isn’t alive, but it does a pretty fine imitation of being so. Ask any fireman. I know, my dad used to be one. Fire consumes, fire hypnotises, fire fascinates and if you look at it long enough you just might catch it looking right back at you. Then came the title – a little twist on the first in a trilogy of very popular mystery novels. With that in place, the rest of the subject matter all but fell into place in a single day. Women also dump men by text as well, you know.

  The Detective’s Genie

  Blame Disney. We got a hint of what an unfettered genie would be like when Jafar wishes for himself to become an all-powerful genie. Having seen that, I always thought it was a brave move setting the genie free at the end. What if he turned out to be less pleasant than advertised? Now you know.

  Which Witch is Which

  Just a bit of silliness really. Hardly ‘When shall we three meet again’. A quick comic musing on what it might be like to be a modern witch.