Troy, ravenous as always, had made himself a tongue sandwich. With his own tongue. Everyone immediately shushed his inevitable ‘Ow!’. It was getting close to nine, and we couldn’t take any chances now.
Brian glanced at his watch for the umpteenth time. ‘The parrot must have got there by now.’
I raised my second and fifth eyebrows. * ‘ If he managed to find his way to London without being swooped on by birds of prey, or blasted out of the sky by one of your inbred aristocracy, and if he remembers the message correctly, and doesn’t just bowl up and regale everyone with an account of how much he likes Gemma’s bottom.’
Brian blanched and blushed at one and the same time. He practically resembled a barber’s pole. ‘For once and for all – I never said that! The bird just made it up on its own.’
‘Of course it did,’ Gemma smiled. Was I imagining it, or was she looking at Brian with surprising gentleness? ‘Brian . . .’ she began.
‘Yes?’ The lad sprang to attention like a puppy to a Bonio.
‘Just in case this . . . doesn’t work out . . .’
‘Yes?’ the young infatuate panted.
‘I feel I ought to clear things up a little . . .’ She reached into her pocket. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to—’
But Jenkins spoiled all our fun by butting in with: ‘’Scuse me, sirs and miss: it’s nine o’clock coming up.’
Quanderhorn, who’d apparently been dozing against the back wall, snapped immediately to attention and crawled quickly over to the radio. His hand hovered over the knob. ‘Ready?’
We lowered a wooden pallet over the loosely plugged ceiling gap and stood on it. If the horde heard us, we might keep them out for a few seconds, but no more. Though from the noises below, I suspect they wouldn’t have been disturbed by a kookaburra playing the cymbals perched atop a battleship’s foghorn at Krakatoa.
The Professor twisted the knob, and we all winced at the sound of the Greenwich Time Signal pips. Below, there was no obvious reaction. We held our breath.
‘ This is the BBC Light Programme. And now, a very special edition of Housewives’ Choice, hosted by a Most Important Person . . . ’
The familiar signature tune started up. There was a slight hiatus in some of the pandemonium underneath. We heard one or two footsteps shuffling towards the ceiling gap, and braced ourselves.
The strains of ‘In Party Mood’ faded away to the gruff, familiar voice every Martian child has learned to despise. The cursed Churchill himself.
‘ Good morning, housewives everywhere. ’
There was a groan and the rustle of script pages, and an off-microphone mumble of ‘ Do I have to say that? ’ After a garbled reply from the producer, Churchill continued. ‘ Oh, very well. ’
He began reading somewhat reluctantly. ‘ I have a special request from a Professor Darius Quanderhorn ’ (he could barely bring himself to utter the name without actually spitting) ‘ to play a certain record . . . ’
There came a scratching on the ceiling beneath us. It started to grow more urgent, and there were unearthly murmurings instead of the erstwhile frenzy.
‘ Please turn up your volume knob to maximum and hear . . . ’
He exhaled painfully and, off-microphone again, whined, ‘ I know he’s just doing this to humiliate me. ’ He exhaled once more, and forced himself onward.
‘ Ethel Smith – brackets – First Lady of the Hammond organ – close brackets – play that lovely melody . . . ’
Covering the microphone with his hand, he moaned, ‘ Oh, for heaven’s sake! ’ and finally announced: ‘ Monkey on a String. ’
Yes! Against all odds, the parrot had made it!
There was a violent thump on the ceiling, and we were rocked on the pallet, just as the perky melody blared forth from the nation’s radio sets.
It took effect almost immediately.
The thumping noises ceased, and were replaced by a cacophony of pained moaning and whining, and desperate cries of ‘No! No! Make It Stop!’ and ‘Not The Music! Please!’
Quanderhorn’s eyes burned with delight. ‘It’s working!’ He twisted up the volume.
On the radio, behind the music, we could hear a chair being pushed away from a desk, and Churchill declaiming: ‘ No – I have absolutely no intention of saying anything concerning Gemma’s bottom! Whoever she is, and however callipygianous it may be! ’ and the door slamming as he left the studio.
The opposing modal frequencies had done their job. The hung-over grumblings of the mob shaking free of their enchantment wafted up between the joists. It was going to be quite a disturbing shock for whomever came to and found themselves attached to Mrs. Wiggonby. And, indeed, there came the sudden desperate screech I associated with just such an event.
We were so caught up in the celebration we all quite forgot Gemma had been about to tell Brian something terribly important. We were not to discover the full horrifying consequences of the omission until it was far, far too late.
* The various combinations of Martian raised eyebrows (there are 720 different permutations) are detailed in appendix 4: Martian Ocular Signalling System.
Chapter Five
From the journal of Brian Nylon, 4th January, 1952 – Iteration 66
The Professor thanked us all, but mostly himself. We crawled back to our rooms, all except for Quanderhorn, who rarely seemed to need sleep, and Jenkins, of course, who had a good deal of extremely unpleasant cleaning up to deal with. *
I tried to rest – I hadn’t had a wink in twenty-four hours – but my mind just wouldn’t stop buzzing. After four days I was still no clearer who I was or what the devil was really going on here.
I wandered back downstairs and snagged a notebook from the stationery cupboard. I thought somehow if I kept a journal I might be able to make sense of things just a little. Also, should my memory ever be wiped again – apparently a distressingly likely eventuality – the entries would yield valuable clues to my amnesiac future self. Sitting back down at my desk, I unscrewed the top of my fountain pen and began to write.
‘The journal of Brian Nylon . . .’ I stopped, staring at the script.
The note I’d found in my flight suit previously was my own handwriting . Clearly, it had been a warning to myself, and I’d be a fool not to take it seriously.
Of course, that note was ashes now. Feverishly I rifled though the shards of my splintered memory – what had it said?
Something about dangly boobs, I remembered that for some reason. Something else about a fellow named ‘Dave’? Or was it ‘Don’? And a reference to a fortune-teller. No, wait: it had actually said ‘Ellar!’ It seemed obvious now: the word was ‘Cellar’.
‘Don’? Done? Donkey? Don Quixote? Don Quixote’s down in the cellar? You never know in this place. There’s always some kind of bizarre danger lurking behind every . . .
‘Danger!’ The name wasn’t ‘Don’, it was ‘Dan’! I was warning myself about something dangerous in the cellar. The same thing that Mr. Churchill had portended. And just who might that other someone be?
There was a rap on the door. Instinctively, I went to stuff the journal between some clothes in my drawers, then I realised I didn’t have any clothes in my drawers, or anywhere else for that matter.
‘Just a minute!’ I called. ‘Just . . . winding my watch up.’ What a dismal excuse! ‘With no trousers on,’ I added. Which made it worse.
I ran backwards and forwards stupidly for a few moments, then jammed the tome under my mattress, struck an assumed casual pose on the bed and called ‘Come in!’
The Martian poked his enormous head around my door. ‘Brian? I thought I heard you moving about in here.’ He stepped in, notebook in hand.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I confessed. ‘You neither?’
‘Oh, Martians only sleep one year in seven. That’s why a full Martian breakfast has eighty-two eggs. And then you get constipation for the following six years. Listen, old boot: can you tell me what “tennis whites�
� are?’
‘Of course. It’s sort of white plimsolls, flannels and a white shirt and pullover.’
‘So, cricket whites, then?’
‘Yes. No!’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Well, if you turn up for cricket in tennis whites, everyone would laugh at you.’
‘I seeeee . . .’ He clearly didn’t. ‘Only I’m giving lessons this afternoon to a group of sixth-form girls from St. Winifred’s.’ He turned to go, then poked in again. ‘Also, I need to know what “tennis” is.’
‘Actually, Guuuurk.’ I was aware I had to be very circumspect about my plans. He seemed like a pleasant enough fellow, but I still couldn’t bring myself to completely trust a Martian. ‘I was wondering if you could remind me which way it is down to the cellar . . .’
Guuuurk shut the door quickly. ‘You don’t want to go down to the cellar, old fruit,’ he hissed. ‘Remember what happened to poor old Virginia. Morning – face of an angel. Afternoon – huge pile of oozing broccoli.’
So Virginia had ventured down to the dreaded cellar. How had she got down there? ‘It’s that special lift, isn’t it?’
Guuuurk looked suddenly serious. ‘There are some things that, around here, you just don’t ask,’ he said under his breath. ‘Now then,’ he continued brightly, ‘I managed to hire a “racquet” from Jenkins, but I need to know a little more detail . . .’ He picked up his notebook and naughty pen again, sat down on my chair and crossed his legs like a shorthand typist. ‘Go.’
It was a very long night. When you try to explain tennis to someone who doesn’t understand it, very soon it begins to make no sense whatsoever. Particularly the scoring. And everything else. When we’d finished, I felt I knew considerably less about it than when I’d started.
Guuuurk eventually left, practising his forehand smash with what I couldn’t bring myself to tell him was actually a frying pan, and I finally felt very tired indeed. But just as I lowered myself onto the mattress, closed my eyes and began to drift into blissful oblivion, that annoying woman blurted out over the tannoy:
‘ It’s 7.30 precisely. All personnel proceed to the briefing room immediately .’
* In the Professor’s own notebooks, there are many sketches of an ‘Alpha-Matic Sleep-Speeder’ headset, which supposedly compacts eight hours of sleep into two and a half minutes. Some accounts claim the Professor had stocked up on considerable reserves of sleep while attending a Beat Generation interpretation of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, featuring bongo-playing Valkyries in black leotards.
Chapter Six
From the journal of Brian Nylon, 4th January, 1952 – [cont’d]
I couldn’t take much more of this. I dragged myself upright and staggered over to the washstand for a quick basin bath with rusty water and carbolic. As I’d burnt the remainder of my clothes, I attempted to rinse what I had under the tap and put them on again.
Pulling sopping Y-fronts up my cold legs, I envisaged any number of horrors that might be awaiting me. But there were no existential threats, no comets hurtling towards the Earth, no imminent invasions. In fact, the scene, when I arrived, was calm.
I sat on the radiator and steamed lightly.
Guuuurk was lounging in his whites – heaven knows where he’d managed to muster them from – shirt collar up and pullover looped over his shoulders, trying to jam his frying pan into a racquet press.
Troy hadn’t arrived yet, but Jenkins lurked in the corner, eyeing us all insubordinately over his steaming tin mug of compo tea.
Dr. Janussen, as ever, looked radiant and fresh, like she’d just stepped from a fragrant garden where she’d bathed in crystal waters with nymphs and been wafted dry by the sweet breath of a scented zephyr. I noticed the Future Phone key was around her neck again. I didn’t want to think about how she’d retrieved it.
The Professor breezed in cheerfully. He rubbed out the word ‘CRISIS’ on the blackboard, and chalked up the word: ‘BREASTS’.
Guuuurk immediately dropped his frying pan, whipped out his notebook, and leant forward with fierce concentration.
‘Right, let’s get the necessaries out of the way.’ Quanderhorn glanced around the room. ‘Did I remember to congratulate myself after yesterday’s triumph?’
‘Yes, Professor.’ I nodded just a tad too enthusiastically. ‘But congratulations, anyway.’ The others looked at me with disdain, but my mission to the cellar meant I had to maintain a ‘teacher’s pet’ façade to avoid suspicion. Although, come to think of it, I was exactly the sort of person who would have been the teacher’s pet.
‘Excellent crawling, Nylon! Time, then, for the business of the day . . . I present my latest revolutionary cross between science and underwear.’ The Professor picked up a little bell from his desk, tinkled it and stared at the door.
Nothing happened.
Quanderhorn sighed, and said again in a slightly louder voice: ‘I present my latest revolutionary cross between science and underwear.’ He tinkled the bell more loudly and stared at the door.
We all stared at the door.
Nothing happened.
Eventually, from outside, Troy called: ‘Was that the bell?’
‘Yes! Yes!’ the Professor yelled back, testily. ‘When you hear the bell, wheel the thing in, remember?’
‘OK. So, when the bell goes, then.’
‘Right.’ The Professor tinkled the bell again.
We all stared at the door.
Nothing happened.
‘Didn’t you hear that, Troy?’
‘No – sorry. Someone keeps ringing the doorbell, just when I’m ready.’
‘We don’t have a doorbell.’
‘Yes. That’s what’s so annoying about it.’
‘Let’s forget the bell, shall we? Just wheel it in.’
‘All right.’
Troy trundled in a large cage, draped with a dust sheet. Whatever was inside was clearly very big, very angry, and very not human. It roared and snapped and hurled itself repeatedly against the cage with considerable enthusiasm.
The Professor gathered himself again. ‘I present . . .’ He whipped away the dust sheet with a flourish. ‘. . . et cetera et cetera!’
Secured inside the cage was a most curious animal – certainly not a Child of Nature. It was quite squid-like, though an angry pink with a lacy sort of skin, like a pig’s caul. It had no eyes I could make out, but two large gooey, gummy mouths on each of its twin bulbous heads.
‘Sweet Lord Baden-Powell!’ I cried. ‘What is that?’
The Professor beamed proudly: ‘The Living Bra: 50% Acrilan, 20% cotton and 70% anaconda.’
The hellish chimera reared both its demonic heads and began spitting in fury.
I shook my head firmly. ‘I’m sorry, Professor – I really can’t allow Dr. Janussen to put that on.’
The Professor frowned. ‘Of course not. That would be far too dangerous. No. This is a job for our very brave Product Tester.’
Everyone seemed to be looking at me again for a very long time.
I sighed. I was beginning to learn what that meant.
‘Take your shirt off, Nylon!’
I immediately flushed red. ‘I don’t want to take my shirt off,’ I stammered, trying not to catch Dr. Janussen’s eye. ‘I don’t like taking my shirt off.’
‘Really?’ Troy seemed genuinely surprised. ‘I like taking my shirt off.’
‘Do you even have a shirt, Troy?’
‘Yeah! Course I do. This pink one with the two nipples . . . Oh, wait . . .’ He stared at his chest as he slowly processed the implications.
The cage rocked as the beast roared and flung itself against the bars violently.
Guuuurk took four or five steps back. ‘That thing looks more vicious than an eyeball-sucking Martian tiger-maggot. * Are you absolutely sure it’s safe for anyone to put on, Professor?’
‘No idea. Come on, Nylon, off with it.’ He nodded at Jenkins, who staggered over dragging a large trunk.
&
nbsp; I disrobed as discreetly as I could, inconspicuously shielding my nipples with my thumbs in front of a lady. My shirt made a wet splat as it slid heavily off the back of the chair.
Quanderhorn rooted in the trunk and pulled out what looked like a pair of opera gloves made of chain mail, studded with metal spikes. ‘Dammit, Jenkins,’ he cussed, ‘I told you to bring the really armoured gloves!’ He also produced a pair of giant tongs, about two and a half feet long. ‘And I wanted the extremely long tongs.’
‘Sorry, sir: they’re at the blacksmith’s being repaired after when you put that thing in the cage, yesterday.’
‘Oh, well. Let’s hope it’s worn itself out trying to bite through the solid titanium bars in a frenzy of bloodlust. Right!’ He braced himself, tongs extended fully in his armoured hands. ‘Arms in the air, Nylon! Stand back, everyone else!’ he added, unnecessarily.
I raised my arms and closed my eyes.
‘Open the cage!’
There was a tremendous, unhuman roar, and a series of banshee screeches, over the Professor’s struggling grunts as he tried to wrangle the beast into position.
I took a deep breath and prepared to die.
* THE EYEBALL-SUCKING TIGER-MAGGOT
More Nonsense Tales for Martian Minnows
by Tynggg the Unrhymable
A marvellous thing is the bold Tiger Maggot:
It’s mostly all tail but it seldom will wag it
in joy, when its Master gets home
Instead it will pounce from some shadowy corner,
Reducing its Mistress at once to Chief Mourner,
That optical orb-gastronome.
Chapter Seven
The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (dishonourably discharged), Friday the 4th of January, 1952
Jeyes Fluid bulk delivery tomorrow. Order more rubber gloves.
You should see the look on Mr. Nylon’s face as they puts that thing on him. It’s hard to tell what’s whiter: his pigeon chest or his face. As soon as it slaps against him, the creature stops growling and slithers round his ribcage, gentle as a baby octopus hugging its dear old mum.
The Quanderhorn Xperimentations Page 13