Ventriloquists

by David Mathew

  He and Yasser shook. The grip was clammy and adhesive.

  ‘I’m Yasser… This is Shyleen.’

  The boy reached out for Shyleen’s hand too, which she took and shook.

  ‘This bully is my loving Teddy Bear,’ said Elvis, referring to the tattooed fellow. ‘Don’t mind his grumpiness. You’d think he was the one eaten to death by insects!’

  ‘What?’ said Shyleen.

  ‘A little less conversation, a little more action, please,’ said the parrot.

  ‘Eaten alive?’ Shyleen asked.

  ‘Oh yes. I’m as dead as a fried peanut butter sandwich.’ The boy giggled. ‘I was supposed to chaperone a man called Connors… Do you know him? I keep thinking I’ll see him here…’

  Yasser shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know him.’

  ‘I think I do,’ Shyleen interrupted. For a few seconds, she looked around and about, searching for a horizon to peer out at but too short to see past the motley crew of pilgrims on the mount… Taking in the crisp mid-afternoon seaside air, tangy with brine and washed-up kelp, Shyleen formed her thoughts from a jigsaw of disconnected memories, and her nostrils spasmed. ‘I heard his name on the wind last night, while you were asleep.’

  The air now a marked contrast to how it had been then: chilly, obsidian, and fizzy with drizzle and midges. And a voice – a woman’s voice, one that Shyleen had wanted to know, to remember – had trailed from wallet-shaped cloud to wallet-shaped cloud, trailing like a comet’s streak, something visible, a string lacing buoys together.

  A roll call in the heavens.

  ‘Connors was one of the names,’ said Shyleen. ‘She was telling us about the people we’d meet.’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘I don’t know… Someone spoke to us last night, Yass. Like we heard before.’ Shyleen addressed Elvis – and Teddy Bear’s decorated chest. ‘Have you any idea what I’m talking about?’

  A pause.

  Then a parakeet said, ‘I think I do.’

  And Yasser said, ‘I think I do too. It’s all coming back to me.’

  3.

  When a man and a woman climbed up on the rock, an air of expectation rippled through the crowd and felt like a change in atmospheric pressure, the approach of a summer storm.

  The man spoke first.

  ‘My name is Vig,’ he said in a loud voice, ‘and just like you, I believe, I live in the Home Counties in England… A quick show of hands, if you’d be so kind. Who here knows what I’m talking about when I say the Home Counties?’

  Murmurs; nothing committal. Too early in the performance for audience participation.

  ‘Think hard,’ Vig advised. ‘Tell me where you were born, where you live. Shout em out!’

  ‘We were born here!’ a man shouted from somewhere near the front. He sounded angry.

  Undeterred, Vig made the invitation once more. ‘Who’s heard of Leighton Buzzard? Dunstable? Hemel Hempstead, Harpenden, Flitwick…’

  ‘Yo!’ another voice called.

  ‘Flitwick?’ Vig asked.

  ‘Harpenden! I work in a travel agent’s… in Harpenden.’

  ‘Good! Anyone else?’

  The first man who had spoken now spoke again. ‘What’s this nonsense about?’ he demanded.

  Vig showed the palms of his hands and made a plea for the dissenter’s patience.

  A woman called out that she was born in Linslade, adding that the town was joined to Leighton Buzzard. Although Vig was not entirely sure where Linslade was located (even with the woman’s geographical clue), he was energised by the cooperation.

  ‘Who else?’ Vig shouted.

  Group psychology – the mystical social adhesive of the mob – was what it took for the spell under which they’d all suffered to decay. As more place names were bellowed out, confidence grew among the ranks. The fact that some of the towns mentioned were not even close to the Home Counties was not important. The important thing was the remembering. The crowd was picking holes in its amnesia.

  ‘We are not really here!’ shouted Phyllie, her voice riding a wave of murmurs – agreement and dissent in equal measures.

  Running with the baton now, Vig added, ‘We’re all prisoners – in a man’s home! We’re in the dungeon he’s built, under lock and key! Under sedation! But we can escape! If we all fight together… there’s a lot more of us than there is of him!’

  The murmurs had become cheers, in parts of the congregation at least.

  Turning to his left, Vig watched a young Asian man work his way through the crowd. Politely but insistently, he moved forwards, his expression (to Vig) unreadable – neither hagiographic nor hostile. When he was close enough to call out, he said:

  ‘Can I get up there with you? Few words?’

  Vig and Phyllie exchanged looks and the twitchiest of shrugs.

  ‘Be our guest,’ Phyllie answered.

  4.

  ‘My name’s Yasser,’ he called out, ‘and I’m from Bury Park in Luton, Bedfordshire… Some of you might know it. It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t… The important thing is, I’m a visitor here, like all of you are. And the man here is right… Did you say Vig?’

  Vig nodded.

  ‘Vig is right. We’re here against our wishes,’ Yasser preached. ‘Me and Shyleen, my cousin, I mean – but I bet it’s all of us. All of us, yeah?’

  Cries of yeah!

  ‘And if you’re in any doubt,’ Yasser went on, ‘I’ve been learning some of your names. You see, wherever we are really – and I believe Vig if he says it’s a madman’s dungeon – in fact, I can almost remember him… and older man… Benny!... Do any of you remember a man named Benny?’

  The cries of yeah! sounded more surprised this time. Benny’s name echoed and hovered.

  ‘There’s a woman I know who must be with us – with our physical bodies, I mean. And she talks to me and Shyleen; tells us what’s going on in the real world.’ Yasser smiled. ‘At first I thought she was a kind of goddess… she’d love that!’ He laughed. ‘But then I realised – or Shyleen did, to be exact – that she was talking to us in our sleep. In our coma! She wants to help us!’

  More murmurs; more cries… Vig’s reciprocated glance at Phyllie was an exchange of mostly optimism. It seemed as though the Asian lad’s words were working wonders. The hollers of disapproval, now, were no more than a quarter-of-the-throng strong, or so he guessed.

  He was winning.

  Yasser had not quite finished.

  ‘I came here as the result of some violence in a house in Edlesborough – one of the way Benny gets us here. At the same time, roughly, some other people were attacked in the house, in one way or another.’ Yasser paused. ‘Is there a Connors in the crowd? A Chris Connors?’

  ‘I’m Chris Connors!’ a young man shouted from midway into the crowd.

  ‘Do you remember the house?’ Yasser asked. ‘You were there to steal from it… but you were set up. You and the bloke with you. Benny wanted some new blood for his project.’

  It was not Connors who spoke next.

  ‘How do you know all this?’ a man called out – a man who was standing near Connors.

  Yasser replied, ‘The goddess told me… Who are you, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘My name’s Massimo. I’m the one who employed Connors and Dorman to rob the place… It was Benny who set us all up!’

  Yasser raised his arms in a gesture that said: There you are then! We’re all in agreement!

  And with every second that passed, there were more people joining the crowd – more people to agree with Yasser’s sentiments, message and rage. Among their numbers, newly arrived, were Don and Charlie – even Dorman. Not everyone knew one another individually… but the crowd absorbed these new arrivals with the hive mind of species recognition. All were welcome… and all wou
ld be there in due course, drawn towards the sermon by instincts impossible to ignore. The dead and the living, together on one final battlefield, their anger fed by the memories and thwarted ambitions of those in Benny’s dungeon. Memories creating a false and gruesome nostalgia sometimes, and at other times the purest of factual recollections, which also had to be addressed in blood. Revenge and violence was in the air, like a coalescing storm.

  Vig raised his voice and addressed the swelling numbers. ‘So we’re all in agreement!’ he shouted. ‘It’s time to tear this place to shreds from the inside!’

  The Can-Do Spirit

  1.

  At Maggie’s behest Eva had brought Benny down into the vivaria.

  ‘I thought you should see this,’ Maggie told him. ‘In the absence of our noted film maker… who is where, by the way?’

  Benny walked closer. ‘He had a class to teach… How long has this been going on?’

  ‘I only just got here,’ Maggie told him.

  Holding a digital camera on the unfolding events, Eva answered. ‘About fifteen minutes.’

  Although the prisoners (or scientific subjects, as Benny preferred to think of them) remained asleep, a discernible shift in posture had overtaken as many of them as Benny could see in and from this chamber. The bodies of some had stiffened, where before they had been relaxed in their comas; others had sat up on their cots. One or two had even opened their eyes.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Benny asked hopefully. ‘Is it Vig and Phyllie?’

  ‘It was,’ Eva answered. ‘Right now it’s Yasser… he talking to them all.’ Her voice sounded somewhat awed.

  So did Benny’s. ‘It’s working… All of them?’ he wished to clarify. ‘They’re all listening?’

  ‘As far as we can tell,’ said Maggie. ‘They’re talking about you.’

  ‘Fame at last… You sure that thing’s got batteried, Ev?’ And he looked straight into the camera.

  ‘It’s fully charged,’ he was assured.

  ‘Good.’ Benny made certain his shirt collar was straight, muttering something about wanting to wear a tie; then he turned to face Eva’s camera and he gave the date.

  ‘It’s three-forty-five,’ he continued, ‘and there’ve been some interesting developments. Or so it would appear… For the last fifteen minutes, there’s been signs of spontaneous psychic activity. The catalysts I used – Vig and Phyllie – have agitated the state of ennui that was the case for the last…’ Benny fidgeted. Because he had not prepared for this, he did not have the facts at his tongue-tip. ‘…the last little while,’ he busked. ‘Vig and Phyllie were the only subjects who went in with the knowledge – or the certain knowledge – of what they’d find. So scientifically, I’d argue, they have to be the ones responsible for this intra-rationalism.’

  This was when the former soldier, for whom Eva had the hots, began to move. Still naked and somnambulant, he swung his legs free of the bed and tried to stand up.

  2.

  One by one, the prisoners moved on their cots; suction pads were torn from dried patches of skin on their bodies, and dangled from monitoring devices. With the machines’ readings thereby knocked off-kilter, the air was alive with the sound of angry and admonitory beeps. Hydraulic pumps writhed; saline drips spasmed like skeletons dancing, such was the movement in the chambers, the commotion of the prisoners as they tried once again to learn to toddle and stroll.

  3.

  ‘Do you think you should get out of the way,’ Maggie asked, ‘for when they wake up finally?’

  Benny asked, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they’ll be angry, of course.’

  ‘Good. I deserve their anger – and science deserves their anger… I was right all along, girl,’ he boasted. ‘Now where’s that Branston to record it all?’

  4.

  The answer to Benny’s question was: outside.

  At just after four p.m., camera in hand, Tim Branston arrived at Benny’s front door.

  Accompanying him was a man named Lydon, a journalist for the Beds on Sunday, and police officers Peter Vash and Maureen Tennan. Other officers were also en route.

  Branston was wondering if it would be him or the officers who knocked on the door… when the door opened wide. Wearing blank expressions, Maggie and Eva backed out into the afternoon air. The red light on the camera in Eva’s hand was still on.

  Inside the house, someone screamed the first of many screams.

  THE END