Future Tense

by Frank Almond

  “What did you say?”

  “I said ‘very.’”

  “You don’t sound very sorry.”

  I climbed up on the handrail, jumped off, and caught the chair. The chair and I—plus about eight feet of rope—landed on the floor of the platform with a resounding thumpety-thump. I quickly untangled the board and sat on it, making sure my legs were securely through the loop.

  “All right, I’m on—you can pull it up now,” I said, without a trace of smugness in my voice. I just wanted to come in from the cold. I wasn’t looking to score any points.

  Nothing happened.

  “Haul away!” I yelled up, hopefully.

  Still nothing moved.

  “I’m waiting,” I called.

  Slowly, the dope on a rope started feeding it down, until I had spirals of it around my feet. I folded my arms.

  “That is very funny,” I shouted up. “Now, can we stop assing about—I demand that you imprison me!”

  “Tell me how sorry you are again,” said the smug, moronic control freak on the other end of the line—I know what rope I’d have liked to see him dangling on!

  “I,” I said. “Am very.” I paused. “Sorry!”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?” said my tormentor.

  The rope started to go up until all the rope that had been paid out was gone and the line tensed. At last I started to ascend.

  The chair felt very springy going up, bouncing up and down and slowly turning round and round, but I just kept opening and shutting my eyes, holding on tight and gripping that board with my buttocks. Soon the staging I had spent so many happy times on looked no bigger than a matchbox, and I entered the mist.

  “Most cons have to walk up here,” crackled my metallic voiced friend. “You must have friends in high places to get a ride up in the chair.”

  Now, I must admit I thought the whole episode on the platform was a bit bizarre. And I do admit I was not amused and, therefore, may not have been in full command of my mental faculties, and maybe that’s why I never caught on. There was just something about that idiot up there that didn’t ring true. It wasn’t so much the voice—that was obviously disguised and strained through a megaphone—no, it was the sheer petty, juvenile, bloody-mindedness of him.

  “Duckworth—you bastard!”

  I heard a metallic quack.

  Chapter 12

  “You should have heard yourself,” laughed the Duck, from somewhere in the mist. “It was bloody priceless!”

  I had got to the point where my ascent was halted and could now see above me that I had been riding on a chair suspended from nothing more than a bendy wooden boom, with a simple eyelet and pulley on the end. It was nothing more than a giant fishing rod.

  “Where the hell are you?” I shouted.

  “Over here.”

  I looked round and could just make out the grey stones of a battlement. And then I saw a hook thing coming towards me. I followed the pole it was on and saw the unmistakable red specs on the big nose of the Duck’s intent face. He was standing on what looked like a large stone windowsill, directing operations. I noticed there was a bullhorn hanging around his neck on a piece of string. There was also a bald-headed guy with him, holding the pole, which they were operating like a gaffe. They snagged the hook on the line and tugged. I began to rock violently and edge towards the sill. When I was near enough the Duck reached out and pulled me in.

  Before I had a chance to hit him, he was embracing and kissing me.

  “Get off!” I said, pushing him back. I snapped the loudhailer off him and threw it on the floor. “I’d like to shove that thing right down your throat—I could have frozen to death!”

  The Duck’s little helper picked up the bullhorn and handed it back to him. I blew into my freezing hands and stamped my feet on the sill. It felt hollow.

  “What is this stuff?” I said.

  “A fibrous-plastic compound,” said the Duck. He put his arm around his helper, a plump, florid-faced little man, dressed like the Duck in a black boiler suit, with huge cargo pockets sewn all over it. “And this is a hydrocarbon one—meet, Reggie.”

  “Thanks, Reggie,” I said, offering him a handshake.

  Reggie wiped his hands on the seat of his pants and shook my hand, nodding and grinning all over his moony face. “It’s an honour, Mr Duckworth, sir.”

  “Actually, the name’s Sloane,” I said. “But you can call me Steve.”

  “Reg is my right hand man,” said the Duck, slapping him fondly on the head. “Aren’t you, Reggie? You can say anything in front of Reggie. So, what kept you?”

  “What kept me?” I shivered. “You kept me—!”

  “It was just a little wind up,” smirked the Duck.

  Reggie ran over to a huge wooden capstan to show me what they had used to reel me in.

  “Wind up,” he said.

  “Yes, very droll, Reg,” I said, through chattering teeth.

  The Duck helped me down off the sill. I knocked on the wall and got the same hollow sound. “Is this whole place made of plastic?” I said.

  “Yeah, everything you see is phoney,” said the Duck.

  “You’re in your element here then,” I said.

  “Very funny. Every time we dig a bloody tunnel we fall straight down the sewer. And that’s not fake nor funny. It was built as a theme park around the turn of the twenty-second century. The post-Disney period. It’s a right little box of tricks.”

  I looked around the tacky winch room, with its joke-shop cobwebs, toy rats and rubber bats, touching and poking things. “I couldn’t even get banged up in a real dungeon. I have to end up in a bouncy castle,” I said.

  I picked up a stuffed rat and gave it a squeeze—it squeaked.

  “Er, I wouldn’t do that if I were you, mate,” said the Duck.

  “Why not? Its only a—” The rat suddenly sank its fangs into my thumb. “Aaagh!” I shook my hand and it flew across the room and shot through a crack in the wall.

  “Aunt bloody Nora! It bit me!”

  “I told you this place was full of surprises,” said the Duck. “That reminds me—we’d better be getting back to the dorm before they start moving the walls around. Come on, Reg—chop, chop—track us back!”

  Reggie ran out the door. The Duck grabbed me by my trench coat and dragged me out after him.

  “Moving walls around?” I said.

  “It’s like a maze in here—they keep changing it all around, so we never know where we are,” he said. “But don’t worry, Reggie has the best nose in the business—he’ll sniff out the way home. Come on—it’s nearly curfew.”

  “Wait!” I said.

  “What?”

  “I want to ask you a question,” I said.

  “There’ll be time for all that later—”

  “Now!” I pulled him back. “Um? Um?”

  “Well go on then! We haven’t got all day!”

  “Shh! I can’t think—no, wait—I know—there’s a painting in the long gallery at Duckworth Hall—a woman leaning against a marble column—what nationality did you tell me she was?”

  “Hey? How do you expect me to remember a bleeding thing like that? Australian?”

  “No.”

  “Dutch?”

  “No.”

  “She was French then!”

  “No. German. Close enough. All right, you’re the real Duckworth—anyone impersonating you would have got it right first time,” I said.

  “Now can we get on? Reggie’s waving at us.”

  “Lead on, Horatio.”

  We hurried on along the straw-strewn passageway after our tracker, who darted around a corner as soon as he saw we were following him again.

  We pounded along and turned right into a plastic brick wall, which knocked us both back flat on our backsides.

  “Oh, no!” cried the Duck, leaping to his feet. “They’ve started playing silly beggars!” He hammered on the wall. “Reggie! Reggie? Can you hear me, mate
?”

  There was a faint reply.

  “He’s miles away,” said the Duck, looking around desperately for inspiration. “Damn it. We’re lost.”

  “What’s the worst case scenario?” I said. “We sleep here the night and miss supper?”

  “We are supper if we sleep here, mate,” said the Duck, chin in hand.

  “What?” I exclaimed. “Tell me you are jesting!”

  “Do I look like I’m bloody jesting?” snapped the Duck, his eyes flaring like two jellyfish behind his big specs. “Now, shut up and let me think a minute.”

  I rubbed the back of my creeping neck and looked round anxiously.

  “Don’t tell me what it is,” I said. “I don’t want to know what it is—just get us out of here.”

  “All right—I’m thinking. Got it!”

  “What?”

  “Get all the straw you can find and pile it against this wall—well, go on then!” he said.

  “What’re you going to do?” I said, scampering away a few feet to gather up handfuls of straw off the floor.

  The Duck removed his megaphone and started smashing the electrical part open.

  “Arson,” he quacked.

  I carried on bringing the straw and making a big heap, while he sat cross-legged on the floor and tinkered about with wires he had ripped out of the bullhorn.

  “That’s enough,” he said. “Find me some little dry bits—for kindling,” he said, getting up on his knees and shuffling into position with his broken megaphone.

  I made him a tiny pile of tinder and he shorted two bare wires together, trying to get the sparks to drop onto it.

  “So, er, what’s the big hurry?” I said.

  “Thought you didn’t want to know,” he said, continuing to try and catch light to the straw.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t—what is it?”

  “Bugs,” replied the Duck. He thought he might have a spark and started gently blowing the tinder.

  “Bugs?” I said, looking around on the floor.

  He started shorting his wires again. “Not real bugs,” he said.

  “Good. I hate creepy-crawlies.”

  “They’re electronic clones—the bugs recycle—er, human protoplasm into a kind of cellulose and use it to repair the Castle—it’s a very efficient ecosystem actually.”

  “That’s all right then.” I thought for a moment. “Wait a minute! Are you saying these things eat you alive and turn you into walls!”

  “Don’t worry,” said the Duck. “When you’ve been stung a couple of hundred times, you’ll be paralysed and won’t feel a thing.”

  “So it just hurts the first one hundred and ninety-nine times?” I said. “And then you get to lie there and watch yourself being turned into wallpaper?”

  “Cup your hands round that kindling,” he said. “There’s a draught.”

  I draught-proofed the tinder with my hands. “Come on, Duck—light the bloody fire!”

  “Stop breathing on it then!” he quacked.

  He sparked the wires and managed to get the tiniest red sequin of fire going. He was at it in a shot, gently blowing and coaxing the orange glow into life. Once it flamed the whole lot went up in a whoosh.

  “Straw!” he quacked. “More straw!”

  I scuttled off to forage. But then, remembering the flesh-recycling bugs, I dashed back with just a couple of quick handfuls.

  “More than that!” cried the Duck. “Hurry up!”

  I ran off around the corner, because I’d used up all the closest stuff. As I was bending down snatching it all up, I could hear the Duck calling to me.

  “Come on—it’s going out! Quick!”

  I hared back round the corner with a huge armful, threw it on the blaze we had going and rushed off to fetch more, without being asked. This time I had to go even farther afield to find the stuff—almost all the way back to the winch room. It was then that I heard them. It sounded like a high-pitched chattering noise at first. But then it grew louder and louder till it became a mechanical din—like rows and rows of those old Burroughs adding machines all working at once! And then I saw them. Thousands of them! Scuttling out of every crack and orifice for as far as the eye could see. My flesh crawled with them. My limbs stiffened and seized up. Some inborn animal instinct wouldn’t dare let me turn my back on the shellac army.

  “Duckworth!” I screamed, my eyes bulging out of their sockets as I tried to take them all in.

  “What?”

  “B-B-Bugs!”

  I heard the sound of running feet.

  “Flippin’ heck!” quacked the Duck.

  I tore my eyes away from the heaving mass of twitching antennae, quivering claws, and segmented legs and looked round at him.

  “Can’t we turn them off or something?” I said.

  The Duck was standing some twenty feet away, holding a handful of burning straw.

  “Yeah—you take all the spiders and centipedes and I’ll do the beetles and cockroaches—how the hell can we turn all that lot off? Anyway, we’d need screwdrivers.”

  “Screwdrivers? I’ll need toilet paper in a minute!”

  “Smell that?”

  A curious pungent odour filled the air.

  “What is it?”

  “That’s the formic acid they’re giving off,” said the Duck. “It’s digestive juices. Better move back.”

  I kept my eyes on the black tide, pouring along the passage towards me, and walked backwards.

  “Throw it down!” cried the Duck.

  I dropped my bundle. The Duck threw his straw torch on it and it burst into flames, barring the way of the bug invasion. The column halted and started edging back.

  “They don’t like that!” he quacked.

  “Now what?” I said, seeing that wasn’t going to stop them for long. Some were already demonstrating their rage and climbing up the wall to bypass the traffic jam.

  “Leg it!”

  I didn’t need telling twice. I was around that corner before the Duck and running headlong towards the burning plastic wall, which had caught and was belching out sooty billows of thick toxic smoke. I just did a running jump at it, hoping to smash through, but I rebounded off it and only succeeded in catching my shoe alight into the bargain. A dollop of molten plastic had attached itself to the sole. I danced around, stamping it out.

  Meanwhile, the Duck picked up the remains of his bullhorn and started bashing at the melting wall with it.

  By this time our eyes were smarting and we were both choking on the poisonous fumes. And the clattering noise was all around us.

  I noticed the first few spiders and cockroaches scampering nimbly round the bend, high on the wall.

  “They’re here!” I cried.

  “Don’t worry, Son,” shouted the Duck. “We’ll suffocate to death before they get to us.”

  “You’re a comfort in a crisis,” I yelled back.

  I had an idea. Taking off both my shoes and using them as gloves, I scraped them on the melting plastic and started smearing it across the floor a couple of yards away from us, to make another barrier. The Duck, now on his knees to try and avoid taking in lungfuls of the airborne toxins, carried on bashing the hole bigger, kicking me over any burning bits of plastic he managed to dislodge. We worked feverishly like this for what seemed like five minutes at least, but it was probably more like thirty seconds.

  “Give me your coat!” yelled the Duck.

  I lay down on the floor, wriggled out of it and threw it to him. A huge spider came within inches of my face. I crushed it with my shoe. It crackled and buzzed and a small wisp of smoke came out of it. I looked round to see what the Duck was doing, because I could hear him beating something. It was the fire—he was beating it out with my coat and then trying to grab the sides of the hole with it to put the melting plastic out.

  “Okay!” he said. “You first.”

  I galloped over on my hands and knees and, using the coat as a fire-blanket, climbed through the hole. I felt something
firm.

  “There’s a floor,” I said. “Feels soliddddddddd!”

  I had given it a thump to make sure it was safe and promptly toppled off the edge—to find myself falling headfirst down what seemed like a bottomless shaft. I kept my hands out in front of me as I fell, but there was nothing to grab onto to break my fall. I was, of course, screaming at the top of my voice the whole time I was falling, anticipating that final crunch and certain death. And then I hit the water, the thick, slightly warm, putrid-smelling, scummy water. I think I must have just got a whiff of it before I plunged into it. It smelt like a sewage treatment works I used to cycle past when I was a kid—kind of gassy and sour. And it tasted even worse!

  I tried to clamp my eyes and mouth shut, but it was too late. I’d already taken in nosefuls of the stuff. And when I choked and attempted to spit it out, I only let in more. I opened my eyes and saw a dim sepia-tinted light. I swam towards it. This all took a matter of seconds. As I ascended, I heard an almighty plunge nearby and saw a vague shadowy figure out of the corner of my eye, floundering—the Duck. I broke surface and dog-paddled around, bumping my nose on the sides of the shaft, until I found an outlet. Then I heard a splash and lots of gasps.

  “Deep!” spluttered the Duck. “Can’t—”

  “Swim? Yeah, I know,” I said. I breaststroked over to him and grabbed him by the collar of his slimy boiler suit. “Typhoid, diphtheria, dysentery, trench-foot—I shudder to think what we’re going to catch in this muck.”

  “Don’t worry,” panted the Duck. “Way out—that way.”

  He pointed to the outlet I had already discovered. I swam us towards it. It led to a channel with a big grille blocking the end.

  “What next?” I said.

  “Ladder,” said the Duck.

  “Where?”

  “Up—up there,” he gulped. He spat something out and it plopped into the water and swam away.

  I craned my neck round and saw a rusty, slime-festooned ladder bolted to the wall.

  * * *

  A few minutes later we had managed to climb up it and were hauling ourselves into an enormous drainage pipe. I could stand up in it and stretch my arms out—just like the guy in that famous Leonardo da Vinci drawing. The Duck, on the other hand, was still on his knees, spluttering and coughing—a bit like the flea in that crap drawing by Blake.