‘And there we are,’ the Prof says. ‘Comfy?’
Mr. Nylon finally opens his eyes and looks down. ‘No,’ he says.
Mr. Guuuurk, the Martian chap, chimes in: ‘Actually I think it’s rather becoming. I’m getting quite aroused.’
I’m hoping he isn’t, ’cause the Jeyes Fluid ain’t coming till tomorrow.
The Prof leans in and peers at the creature. ‘The question is: if you actually had breasts, would it be giving you support?’
Young Master Troy pipes up with what we was all thinking: ‘He does sort of have breasts.’
‘I do not!’
Dr. Janussen says: ‘They’re bigger than mine, Brian.’ Which sends him all of a dither again.
‘No they’re not! Not that I’ve looked . . . Or wanted to look . . . or seen how big . . . or not . . . Not that there’s anything wrong with them whatever size they are . . . Oh Lord . . . somebody help me, please.’ The Prof obliges:
‘How does it feel?’
‘Well, it feels very . . . uuuuuuuuh . . .’ he says, or noises to that effect. His eyes go round and round like the fruit in the one-armed bandit at the King’s Torso, and he starts sweating more than a pig doing jankers. ‘Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh . . .’ he goes. Hard to tell whether it’s terrifying him or titillating him. ‘It’s strangely . . . nuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhh . . .’
‘I think we can call that a success,’ says the Prof. ‘Women everywhere will not only have firm support, but also something to fetch the newspaper in the mornings.’ That’s the Prof for you: always thinking of other people’s convenience. Everyone starts putting their things away, then Mr. Nylon chirrups:
‘Can I take it off now?’
Well, that thing growls like it knows every word he’s saying.
The Prof frowns: ‘Ah. Well. That might not be advisable right at the moment.’
‘Thing is, Mr. Nylon,’ I says, ‘we haven’t fed it today. Or actually ever.’
Well, he pulls such a face, like a Jerry I once garrotted with my bootlace. ‘Unghhhuhhhh,’ he groans. ‘It’s contracting! Get it off!’
The beast don’t like that kind of talk, that’s for sure. It growls so loud you can feel the floor rumbling underfoot.
‘ Don’t startle the bra! ’ the Prof yells. ‘It could be dangerous.’ He’s not wrong. Now you may think Mr. Nylon is a gutless wonder with no spine to speak of, but you’d be wrong. I know something about him what would change your mind, but I cannot share it in these pages.
‘Get it off me! Get it off me!’ he screams in his high-pitched voice.
‘If you insist.’ The Prof turns to yours truly. ‘Bring me the rifle.’
Somehow, Mr. Nylon’s face finds an even paler shade of white. ‘ What? ’ he squeaks.
‘I’m afraid the only way is to shoot it off,’ says the Prof. ‘Don’t worry: everyone in the Army told me I’m a crack shot.’
Well, I couldn’t let that stand. ‘Beg pardon, Professor: they told you you was a crap shot.’
He waves his hand at me. ‘Don’t bother me with pettifogging details! The rifle!’
Ours not to reason why. I reaches into the trunk and hands him the trusty Lee-Enfield No. 5 Mk 1 ‘Jungle Carbine’, loaded and safety catch off, as per standing orders.
He raises the weapon. ‘Everybody stand back.’ To be honest, everyone was still standing back from last time, but Mr. Guuuurk managed somehow to stand back a little bit more.
The Prof takes careful aim at the bra from two feet away, squeezes the trigger, and scores a direct hit on the Telemergency Print-O-Gram, a good ten feet to the left, blowing it to smithereens.
‘Actually,’ Mr. Nylon says, surprisingly calm, like, ‘it’s starting to feel quite comfy now.’ You can tell he’s lying, because he’s squirming something rotten, and a gasp of pain hisses out of him as the creature tightens its grip.
The Prof yells: ‘Stand still, dammit!’ and shoots again, this time missing ten feet to the right, and blasting Alaska out of the globe on his desk.
‘Please stop shooting, Professor,’ poor Mr. Nylon pleads, sounding quite breathless now. ‘It’s making him very tense.’ He can hardly get those last words out.
There’s a crack – everyone hears it, and he croaks quite matter-of-fact: ‘I think that was one of my ribs.’
And blow me sideways, there’s another crack, and he nods and rasps just: ‘Yup!’
The Prof starts rooting through the trunk. ‘I’m afraid we may have to use the flesh-eating virus pistol to get it to release its grip.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d lobbed it into the Obliteration Chamber after that last horrific fiasco.
But poor old Nylon doesn’t know that, does he? ‘No, no. I wouldn’t dream of putting you to all that trouble, Professor,’ he babbles. ‘I’ll just keep wearing it for a bit.’
The bra loosens off a bit when it hears that, and starts a sort of purring noise.
Mr. Nylon quickly slips his shirt back on. Not much point. It’s so wet, you can see the bra right through it.
‘OK! That’s it! Demonstration over.’ The Prof starts dumping all the equipment back in the trunk, no thought to putting it in any kind of order, of course. ‘Nylon!’ he yells. ‘A word.’ And nods towards his office.
Well, of course, there’s plenty of mess to be cleared up, as per, so I grabs my trusty broom and starts sweeping up behind them as they walk towards the Prof’s office and go in. By amazing coincidence, I just happens to catch the beginning of the conversation before the Prof looks up, spots me accidentally watching him, pulls down the venetians on his office door and slams it shut.
So I can’t make out another bloomin’ word after: ‘It pains me to say, Nylon, that we have a traitor in our midst . . .’
Chapter Eight
From the journal of Brian Nylon, 4th January, 1952 –[cont’d]
I wandered into the Professor’s office. I’d glanced in before, but had never (at least in my memory!) actually been inside. I tried to scan the room on the q.t. It was crammed with half-completed prototypes, stacks of dog-eared notepads and skeletons of creatures not to be found in any encyclopaedia. Quanderhorn followed close behind me.
‘It pains me to say, Nylon, that we have a traitor in our midst.’
He shut the venetian blinds and closed the door as I tried to stop my ears turning red by sheer willpower. I doubt I was successful. My eyes fell on a pair of goggles on the desk that seemed oddly familiar. Quanderhorn quickly swept them into a drawer.
He was too agitated to notice. ‘A snake in the grass!’ he went on. ‘A double-crossing Judas, passing as one of us and reporting to that pompous egotist Churchill. Or as I call him . . .’ He affected the most disdainfully childish expression and voice: “ Cheeuuuurch ill”.’ I would have been rather taken aback by the vehemence of his loathing, had I not been scared so utterly witless.
‘A traitor?’ I tried to ignore the increasingly urgent signals now transmitting from my bladder like the order to arrest Crippen, and focused instead on the pain in my ribs. ‘Surely not, Professor?’
His face struggled to adopt a kindly expression, which was thoroughly unfamiliar to it. ‘I know to someone as basically decent as yourself, Nylon, such a thing is too disgusting to contemplate. Which is why, before your memory . . . went away, I engaged you to root out this lying, despicable, backstabbing turncoat.’
Which circle of Hell had I wandered into here? Which ward of Bedlam was this? I had been recruited by Quanderhorn to hunt down Churchill’s agent, who was also me ? I forced my features into a facsimile of a smile. ‘And I said I’d do it?’
‘Yes. You vowed to find out who this foul, two-faced, weaselling ingrate was, so they could be eliminated.’
‘And by “eliminated”,’ I offered hopefully, ‘I meant given a jolly good ticking-off and sent home without—’
‘No.’
‘No, of course not. I meant dock their holiday pay and—’
‘You meant – they would have to be . . .’ H
e fixed me with a stare that left no ambiguity. ‘ Taken care of .’
‘I meant that ?’ The fake smile was dying on my face.
‘Yes, like you did with Virginia, when you transmuted her into the giant broccoli monster.’
‘What?’ I felt the ground had opened beneath me and I was falling into an abyss from which there would never be any return. ‘That was me ?’
‘Oh, of course – you’ve forgotten: when you discovered she’d been down to the cellar, what choice did you have but to blast her with the Vegetablising Ray?’
The more I found out about my past, the less I wanted to recover any more of my memory. The man I’d been – I didn’t want to be him again. Duplicitous, violent, ruthless. None of it felt right. None of it at all.
‘B-but then,’ I stammered, ‘surely we’ve already dealt with Churchill’s agent?’
The Professor shook his head sadly. ‘I fear another, more dangerous imposter is still at large. We suspect their codename is: Agent Perpetrator.’
I almost corrected him, but only allowed the first syllable to escape before I caught myself. ‘Pen—’
‘What?’
‘I was just looking for a pen. Ah! Here it is. Here in my pen pocket. Where it always is. I’ll just make a note of that on my hand: Perpetrator .’
If the Professor found this odd, he didn’t let on. ‘Nylon – I’m relying on you to smoke out this vile, amoral, self-serving vermin, and give them the brutal treatment you usually mete out.’ He looked me up and down, as if appraising me for the first time. ‘Who could have realised that pathetic, wet, incompetent exterior concealed the stony heart of a sadistic, merciless bastard? Certainly not I.’
A small buzzer sounded in the corner of the office, and Quanderhorn strode over to monitor some experiment he was conducting with a rat, a drainpipe and some vicious-looking electrodes. He didn’t dismiss me, he just seemed to forget I was still there. And who could blame him, contemptible creature that I was? I slunk towards the door, but as I opened it, I saw the Professor glance at me out of the corner of his eye in a curious way.
Were there more, even darker secrets buried in my past?
There was a flash of light, a puff of smoke and a plaintive rodent squeal.
I shuddered and left.
Chapter Nine
From the journal of Brian Nylon, 5th January, 1952 – Iteration 66
I stumbled up to my room, quite thankful not to bump into any of the others, except Jenkins, whose gaze I avoided.
I sank onto the miserable bed and tried to muster my painful thoughts. What was the truth? Could I believe the Professor? Why would he lie to me?
The only way I could ever get to the bottom of this whole thing was to go down to that terrifying cellar and find its secret.
It was a long and difficult day. There were a lot of preparations that had to be made. I needed some boot polish for facial camouflage, a dark balaclava, some shoes that made no noise, lock-picking equipment, a jemmy and some kind of climbing rope.
On the pretext of securing some fresh clothes, I managed to persuade Jenkins to let me have the key to the stores (it cost me my watch!). The shelves were surprisingly empty, with only the occasional item on view. *
For genuine, daily use, I did manage to rustle up a couple of pairs of itchy wool trousers, some string underwear (which I loathe, but needs must), and some grey shirts made of an odd synthetic material which sparked if you rubbed the sleeves together. There was no boot polish, but I managed to find some gravy browning. No balaclava either, but I did discover a rather large sock I might cut a hole in for my face. Not ideal, but beggars can’t and all that. As for the noiseless shoes, though, no sign.
I was hoping perhaps for gym pumps, but Guuuurk had presumably taken the last pair for his tennis apparel. After an hour of increasingly desperate rummaging, I came across a pack of balloons amongst the Christmas decorations. If I stretched one of the long thin ones over each of my brogues, it should, in theory, muffle them sufficiently. Make do and mend, as Mumsie used to say.
Surprisingly, the storeroom did yield a crowbar and a rather professional-looking lock-picking kit. What on earth they were doing there, Lord alone knows. I stuffed the whole lot in a military duffel bag and hoisted it over my shoulder.
Fully stocked, I now had to chew over the problem of getting it all past the eagle-eyed Jenkins. Mercifully, as I headed back to the main building, I saw him scuttling off towards the village on his bicycle, presumably to get my watch to the pawnbroker’s before it closed.
Safely back in my room, I laid the equipment out on my desk. I could hardly make my cellar incursion in broad daylight, so I closed my eyes for just a few minutes, and didn’t wake up until night had fallen. Obviously, I had no idea of the actual time, but an angry moon was flooding the room with white light.
I made my preparations.
It was quite difficult to get the right consistency of water to gravy browning, and mixing it up made me feel incredibly hungry. I smeared it over my face and checked the mirror.
So far, so good.
The balaclava would conceal most of the drips and streaky bits. I pulled on the argyle sock. It was a snug fit, and the coloured rectangles made me look a little bit like a violent Harlequin, but on the whole, professional, though it did have a tendency to ping off my head if I turned too quickly.
I had the devil of a time stretching the red and green party balloons over my shoes. Several of them went out of the window, and one almost took my eye out. They didn’t quite do the job as well as I’d hoped, because I now squeaked quite gratingly with every step, setting my own teeth on edge. Still, better than the sound of my clodhoppers, so long as the dangling coloured overhangs at each toe didn’t trip me up.
I tucked the rest of the equipment in the bag, and crept to my door.
I opened it just a chink.
There was no light under Dr. Janussen’s door. I slipped out. I crouched and listened at her keyhole. I could just about make out the gentle rhythm of an extremely delicate, feminine snore rattling the door.
Satisfied, I straightened and turned, and almost jumped out of my balloons to find Guuuurk standing right next to me.
‘Hello, old sport!’ he chirped. His various eyes roamed over my outfit. I was suddenly acutely aware I was smeared in gravy browning, wearing a sock on my head, balloons over my shoes, and carrying a bag that made a clanking noise every time I moved. ‘On your way to a little “assignation”?’
‘Certainly not!’
‘No, neither am I.’ He winked. ‘The very idea of tennis lessons at midnight is a scurrilous lie.’
‘You’re probably wondering why I’m dressed like this . . .’
‘Like what?’ He seemed genuinely baffled.
‘Nothing. In my typical earth night-walking outfit.’
‘Really? How interesting. Not sure about the balloons, though. And you do smell . . .’ he wrinkled his Martian nose, ‘. . . rather meaty.’
‘That’s to repel the mosquitoes.’
Guuuurk chewed this over and finally said: ‘I thought the whole point of mosquitoes was that they liked meat.’
‘These are vegetarian mosquitoes.’
‘Vegetarian mosquitoes!’ He shook his head sadly. ‘This planet is such a shambles. Evolution clearly took a detour around you lot.’ Then he slipped off down the stairs ahead of me, mouthing ‘Cheery bye’ as he disappeared.
I ran a quick check at Troy’s door. He was obviously within . . . was that the sound of him rubbing his legs together?
Jenkins was undoubtedly boozing away my watch money in the King’s Torso, so there was only the Professor to worry about.
Only the Professor!
I crept down to the reception area.
Deserted.
I tiptoed squeakily towards the bank of lifts. I found my shoulders loosened themselves when I spotted one of the lifts was on the forty-third floor of the High-Rise Farm. Hopefully, Quanderhorn would be up there, squeez
ing cows into the wee small hours.
Nonetheless, my hand was shaking as I reached out to summon the Professor’s private lift.
* There are several instances in Jenkins’ daybook where he refers to the warehouse as ‘The Shop’.
Chapter Ten
From the journal of Brian Nylon, 5th January, 1952 [cont’d]
I half-expected all kinds of alarms to go off as I pressed ‘Call’, but the doors slid open smoothly, and I stepped inside the car. They clanged shut behind me again very quickly. I tried not to feel trapped. Who knows what Jenkins had meant by ‘security devices’?
I forced myself to keep calm and studied the array of buttons. They were marked with the usual impenetrable symbols, which presumably only the Professor would understand. A fish; a portcullis; a moon; a ghost . . . And what was that one? Siamese twins? None of them evoked ‘Cellar’ to me, or anything like it, so I simply pressed the bottom button, but nothing happened. Clearly, they were not yet activated.
I started as the metallic voice of that damned woman issued from the speaker. ‘ Please state your identity and destination. ’
I gulped back the growing feeling of dread that rose like so much bile in my throat, and pulled off what I honestly think was a pretty brilliant facsimile of the Professor’s growling, angry voice. ‘It’s me, Quanderhorn. Dammit!’
There was a short pause, and a strange whirring noise while the mechanisms, whatever they were, assessed my verisimilitude. I aged about seven years.
Finally, old metal-voice kicked in: ‘ Welcome, Professor. Where can I take you today? ’
Triumphant, I quickly replied: ‘The cellar, of course. Dammit.’ I really think I got the impatience level just right.
‘ Certainly ,’ she said. I was on my way!
But then she went on: ‘ Simply answer the security questions, to verify that you are not a shape-shifting troglodyte from beneath the Earth’s crust. Who is the current Prime Minister of Great Britain? ’
The Quanderhorn Xperimentations Page 14