by Peter Ackers
"…A GLITCH IN THE SALES PITCH…"
- I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Teeth-bloke, and he was talking to someone. I discerned two sets of feet on the steps. Then, a knock.
“Hey, you okay in there?” It was Nymph-girl. She sounded genuinely concerned, like a mother.
“He’s pissing on it or something," Teeth-bloke said. “He went against us, and now he’s trying to stop us.”
Stop them. A thought occurred to me. Teeth-bloke was concerned I’d be pissing on their gloop, whatever explosive material it was. Axe-wielder had made such a remark, too. I wondered: did this stuff degrade if pissed on? And who the hell first discovered this?
There was a beaker atop the bathroom cabinet, which was a wooden box stuck on the wall above the sink. I grabbed it, spun to the toilet, and filled with beaker with the stinking, sloppy mess I’d pissed and shat into the bowl. I tipped it into the gloop and stepped back, half-expecting some kind of chemical reaction.
“Out the way,” another voice said, as another set of feet hit the stairs, these at a run. Surfer-dude, I figured. Seemed they were all coming. I was suddenly a popular guy.
“I don’t know if he’s alright in there," Nymph-girl told him. It was a whisper, but I heard it anyway. “He might have fallen, be unconscious.”
“He’s okay," Surfer-dude replied. “Step aside there, let me have a go.”
Shuffling as three people exchanged positions on the tiny landing. I tossed aside the beaker and grabbed the pool cue, began to stir the concoction in the bath. Slowly. I narrowed my eyes because I was fully aware that I was messing with volatile stuff here. Funny, eh, how we assume that narrowing our eyes will somehow be beneficial if something explodes in our face?
A soft rapping on the door. “Pal, you came to us for help, didn’t you?" Surfer-dude hollered through the door. “You came here to drown your sorrows and chat to the barman, the world’s truest agony uncles. You wanted me to give advice, help. I did. We’re the Shepherds. We will lead you. We will help you. Feel under the windowsill.”
I don’t know why I obeyed, but I did. I rushed for it, like a man on a timer. Under the lip of the windowsill, blue-tacked to it, was a small key. Immediately I figured it fit the window above the bath. Fuck knows why it had been hidden under the windowsill.
“That opens the window. Leads onto a steep roof, very slippy. Over it leads to the back yard and a balancing act. A slide down leads into the front garden thirty feet below.”
I clutched the key. Stared at the window. What was he saying?
I remembered the plants in the front yard, and their sharp-tipped stakes. And understood. Just who the fuck were these people!!!
“I tell you this, cock, because I like you and want you to have a head start, a chance. See, we showed you our world because you were straightaway open and honest with us, four strangers. We thought you’d join. Especially with all the shit with your bird. But since you didn’t, you now have to promise not to tell anyone about us or our plan. I assume you realized our plan? It's a new big step for us and we don't want our magnum opus ruined.”
“I don’t know any plan,” I blubbered. “So I can’t tell anyone anything. I wouldn’t anyway. I promise. I promise.”
Hearing myself promise like that, I understood that I was terrified. I read people and situations well, and I guess my emotions often fire up accordingly. That meant if I was terrified now, I had good fucking reason to be.
“That’s not the way we want you to promise. I’ll put this as kindly and nice as possible.” A pause; brain ticking over. “We want you to rest joyously in that big old comfy bed in the sky.”
Could such prose sell death to a life-loving, as if you were selling him a house? If so, that man wasn’t me. I literally felt a tingle in my hips as my sphincter muscle faltered a beat. The books aren’t wrong: you feel yourself relax and nearly shit. Good job I'd just been.
“In about ten seconds, a guy with an axe is going to chop open this door. Then he plans to crush your skull with it –“
Oops, a glitch in the sales pitch: kind of like a bit of dry rot showing in the sparkling photo of the aforementioned house’s living room. I don’t want to buy this product now, thank you!
“- but if you can get away from this village, escape out into the fields, we will not chase you. Our mission is too much work now for us to pause to chase you down. I bet we could get your details from things in your little hideaway here. But we won’t. Promise. Get away, you get away. Village boundary. Even if my axe-carrying friend here is a hair’s breadth behind you, axe ready to fall - if you cross that boundary, you live. You win.”
I heard mumbling, all of them. A shuffle on the small landing, and I bloody knew why! Axe-wielder, coming to the front, the others giving him room to let his axe dance.
The door shivered as the first blow landed, hard and metallic-sounding. I grunted in fear, almost dropping the key I clutched.
“What you doing?" Surfer-dude said. A mutter of some kind from Axe-wielder. “Sod the lock - hit the hinges,” Surfer-dude responded. Another thud. At about the point where I guessed the upper hinge held the door in its frame, a blade of wood poked out, no doubt pushed by the blade of the axe. This guy wasn’t Jack Nicholson coming through the door panel in The Shining. A few blows in the right places and the whole door was going to simply fall like a domino. And I’d be next.
I pushed open that window and hauled myself through it. It had begun to rain. I felt the drops on the back of my neck as I wriggled through that window like a worm coming out of the earth. The window did indeed lead onto the sloped roof of another part of the building. I put my hands on the slippy tiles and walked them, as if my legs were held by a friend and we were playing that old game known as Wheelbarrow, and I was said barrow with arms instead of a wheel. I dragged my knees over the window ledge with a painful bump, then bent my legs so they plopped out. I landed hard and immediately began to slide, but my fingers found a grip and my body slid like a jackknifing truck.
When I'd stopped sliding, I told myself not to look back. Ahead of me, the top of the roof was some six feet away. I began to haul myself up. As I did so, I became aware of two things. One was a remembrance of why Surfer-dude and cohorts had put spiked splints on the plants growing in the front yard - below me! The other was a rending crash from inside the bathroom as the door was eventually overcome.
I climbed past the window, higher, quick. Something touched my leg and I looked back. Axe-wielder was there at the window, feeding his fat arm out, working the chubby spider he called a hand into trying to grab my foot as I climbed past. I paused in my climb to shuffle ten inches to the left, out of reach, then continued upwards.
Despite the rain, the climb was easy. Adrenaline, I guess. I hauled myself over the ridge, moved into a sitting position atop the roof, shifted forwards to the end of the roof, and stared down.
I was right over the garden at the side of the house. Where Axe-wielder's bike was. Either side of it was a similar-sized, walled-off area, making all three look like some giant cored brick. To the left was a concreted area for storing beer barrels and crates; to the right, an area for the storage of junk, it seemed. The drop into either of these areas would be shorter because I could do so from the lowest part of the roof, but only the centre square, where the bike was, where I'd stood and chatted with a madman, had a gate. But I wasn't planning to drop down into the garden. I recalled that Surfer-dude had said something about a balancing act. The drop into the garden was some twenty feet, but directly below me was a buttress rising six feet from the ground. It had a flat top the size of a standard chessboard. The buttress was the centre one of five against the wall, and I realised that the gap between them was small enough that I could hop across and jump and catch the wall and clamber up and walk to the end and drop down into an alley created by the long back wall of this property and a high wooden fence. Beyond the fence, back gardens and houses.
But I was looking at the alley. To the l
eft, the alley led out into the village centre, which would be the direction to take if I was going back to the cottage for my things. But that way also took me past the front of the house, and I wasn't going to risk that.
So I would head to the right. The alley terminated at a chain-link fence that denoted the sharp edge of town, because beyond there was nothing but countryside, although it was so dark out there I couldn't see more than about fifty metres. The land just slipped away into darkness, and for all I knew the world could end at a vast cliff just beyond where the green of grass became first the grey-blue of night and then the black of nothing. The twinkling lights in the distance could have been low-hanging stars in space.
Suddenly I felt very alone and very lost.
"You fell and died yet?" came Axe-wielder's voice over the roof on a finger of wind. I got moving.
I turned and lay and fed my body into the chasm, until I was dangling with my hands hooked over the gutter, nought but my eight fingers holding me up. I looked down between my body and the wall and there was the flat top of the buttress shifting slowly below my feet. I was reminded of an old video game in which you had to fire a stationary gun at flying ducks, which reminded me of my situation now because I felt that it was the buttress moving, not my body swaying in the wind. If I missed landing cat-like on that fifteen-inch-wide flat-topped wall, I hoped to miss wide. Better to hope on a good landing after a longer-than-expected-drop than to catch the top of the wall with a foot or arm and hit the ground with something other than my feet - or, worse, to tear off a limb (suddenly I couldn't shake the image of catching the sharp edge of the buttress with my chin, smashing my teeth, severing my tongue with those smashed teeth, breaking my neck).
I landed fine, bullseye, but then I began to stagger backwards, and one foot tried to stand on air and was lost, and down I went.
Only I didn't. Desperate, a man clutching at straws, a hand flew out and snatched at the wall, and caught on an old nail sticking out of a brick. I had only just breached the point of no return with regards to my balance, so any amount of purchase would have saved me. And there I was, saved, leaning back at just a few degrees, body locked tight and straight, pad of my right forefinger hooked over the nail, the head of that nail dug into the joint.
I pressed down harder and slowly tugged, and the tipping point was gone and I stood there on the buttress, breathing into the wall.
It was only a six-foot drop, but the drop wasn't the problem. If I'd fallen, I would have been trapped in a box. As it was, I wasn't. So I quickly turned to face the next buttress and hopped three feet onto it. This time, no problem. Next buttress, then a leap at the wall. The wall was higher, so I aimed to land my chest on top of it and got it perfect, meaning it didn't hurt as much as I expected. I scrambled up and onto that wall as quickly as I could.
At the end of the wall, I dropped hard onto my ass, legs over the edge, and pushed off. I landed in the dark alley with a jolt that sent sharp pain up the back of my legs, but this nuisance was nothing to slow me and I turned right, ran along the dark roofless corridor, concentrating on nothing but the holes in the chain-link fence, and the lovely inviting fields of nothingness and sanctuary beyond.