by Brian Hughes
Exactly what had driven Amanda Duck to this state of affairs? Precisely what did the sinister secrets of Patternoster Row amount to? Have no doubt, dear reader, all these questions shall be answered in due course.
Chapter One: What the Night Dragged in
Cissy Doyle burrowed her chin between her arms and gazed longingly through the open window. Out into the gloom at the end of the garden. Studying the night with moonstruck eyes that no matter how hard she tried to hold them in still resembled two hard-boiled eggs.
Above the rooftops the last vestiges of the day transformed into a cold intense ribbon of stars. The skirt of sunlight behind the silhouetted chimney-stacks diffused radiantly off her brace.
She had intended to write a poem before bed. Something about enigmatic women in rickety boats. But as usual the words had stuck inside her head. So now the well-chewed pencil tapped against her bottle-opener teeth without her knowing it.
Cecilia dreamed, conjuring up adventures amongst the stars.
Inventing a time that was free from her formidable mother and her down-to-earth job at Albert Brasswick’s.
These were her fantasies where the mocking face of Debbie Woodthorpe couldn’t find form. Where Cissy was the ravishing Princess Cecilia. Or the courageous Cissy Doyle, Giant Frog Slayer on the planet of Xnarg. A planet full of dark, handsome men with designer stubble, who had never set eyes on an attractive woman before.
Take a good look at Cecilia Doyle, if you would. Nineteen years old and unbearably emaciated, with skin the same colour as a boiled trout. Hers was the sort of lifeless hair that clung to her face as though it was seaweed. Hers were the sort of ears that poked out through this insubstantial thatch in much the same manner that inquisitive actors might thrust their faces through a set of curtains.
And those eyeballs.
The sort of eyes that gave the impression of somebody having stuck a straw up her bottom and given it a good hard blow.
A breeze that was more of a pant than anything stronger worked its way through Cissy’s night-dress. A night-dress made from the heaviest muslin; too plain to be exquisite, too coarse to be considered sensual. Cissy wriggled her ungainly toes as the night moved like a hand across the quilt, caressing each elongated digit in turn.
She watched the pockmarked face of the yellow harvest moon. A circular cut out hung against the framework of stars, unwholesomely large and extremely inviting.
And she wondered what stories the old rock might have to tell tonight.
Somewhere off the eastern shoulder of Orion an asteroid-cratered shuttlecraft screamed within a plume of colourful smoke. Ah, but that’s not strictly true is it? The craft would have screamed had the inky void of the galaxy been dense enough to allow sound to travel through it. Regardless of this transgression however the shuttle appeared to be the sort of out-of-control craft that deserved to scream. And the tiny mouths of the terror-stricken barnacles along its bows would have screamed along with it, given the opportunity.
The Columbus had witnessed better days. Right now the aft-thrusters burned violently in a swirling miasma of lilacs and pinks. It ought to be said that any ordinary fire couldn’t possibly have burned in the vacuous seal of space, as no doubt the reader of this highly factual tome is aware. However, this particular conflagration was being fuelled by the oxygen escaping from a hole in the hull.
A puncture, where a man-made satellite was well and truly wedged. It bore the words:
The Voice of God on Channel 45
The Columbus span uncontrollably through the merciless void. A thumbprint of molten metal spiralling down through the night, reminiscent of the carriage of some great cosmic roller coaster.
“Buggerin’ fat hairy gonads! That’s just bloody marvellous isn’t it?”
Commander Hogan punched frantically at the buttons before him, his rugged features burnished with the scrolling letters of the monitor.
“What the Buggerin’ ’Ell hit us ANN? Not another ruddy space anemone?”
Commander Marshal Hogan, too youthful to be middle-aged, too seasoned and space-weary to be a stripling. He hated the banality of this meagre existence. But most of all he loathed the war, the pointless battles and those experimental bloody war artists with their thick purple brushes. The terrible confrontation between the Great Empires was ripping apart the Crab Nebula as though it was no more substantial than a tissue. At least now it was all God knows how many million light-years behind him.
Another control panel exploded. The artificial gravity generator made a noise similar to a punched gonk and conked out. An ashtray drifted upwards in slow motion. A mushroom of ash resembling the wraith of a giant amoeba tumbled across his head, smothering his yellow furry-dice.
On the screen the holographic features of an attractive girl alternated between full-render and wireframe. ANN: An acronym of Amalgamated Neural Networks.
“Let me guess...it was another buggerin’ limpet mine, was it?”
“I’m not sure.” The ephemeral voice would have oozed sexuality had it not been forced through a speaker that was torn in half. Her dark eyes investigated some unseen object within the monitor’s rim.
“Marshal?” Ah...now, it didn’t bode well when the data processor started referring to him by his Christian name. “The Columbus is in serious trouble I’m afraid.”
Almost as though somebody wanted to substantiate the point, the entire craft buckled. Hogan’s olive-green uniform changed colour. The studs along his collar pulsed in the warning strobe of blue light as it deluged the quarters. Small beads of sweat glistened across his aquamarine forehead as he frantically pulled backwards on the steering column.
“This is pure hypothesis, of course.” ANN shrugged her invisible shoulders. “But the planet below us might be capable of sustaining life.”
She blinked condescendingly. Hogan screwed his features into a sphincter of disgust.
“Always assuming that we don’t crumple up on impact first.”
Time out for another brief interruption, so that we can explore the tiny craft before it crashes into Earth.
The front of the Columbus consists solely of the technology-crammed cockpit, currently undergoing a miniature pyrotechnics display with Commander Hogan as the Guy Fawkes.
Next up comes the central band. It differs slightly from the rest of the craft by being grubbier. Thoroughly less salubrious. This band comprises the toilet. A modest round airlock designed to jettison offending articles into the refuse heap of space and ‘Tough Shit’ to any asteroid that happens to be passing. Quite literally.
And last the cargo hold. A cramped chamber that’s attempting to tear itself apart at the seams. Occupied by dark wooden crates which have been designed as efficient penitentiaries.
Their thick bars are screwed tightly into position by Altarian thumbtacks. Deep down inside these repositories, strange and difficult to understand shapes lurk. Menacing forms with hardly any definition. In fact the only indication that there are creatures here at all is the slightest distortion of whatever happens to be behind them.
The beasts whoop rabidly. It's the sort of sound that excited baboons might make.
The lettering on the top of the crates reads:
DANGER, DO NOT OPEN. AT ANY COST!
“Whatever possessed me to take this foetid, uncharted backwater?” It was a rhetorical question. Hogan frowned, his broad brow creased into gullies of anguish.
A crackle from the poster behind his head startled him. Orange spikes of flame licked at the corner of Miss Ursa Major ’41, a well-endowed Cheetah woman from the planet of Gronos. The more than customary number of mammaries went some way towards explaining her great popularity. Hogan ignored the combustion and returned to his research.
“Why is the screen black?”
“Because it’s uncharted?” ANN puckered her texture-mapped lips into a papilla of complacency.
A tiny addendum scribbled itself across the map screen beside what seemed to be some sort of hastily scraw
led dot.
“Earth? Earth...Earth?” Hogan ground his teeth together and shook his head. His fringe flopped across his eyes. “Where the bloody Hell’s Earth?”
“Three minutes, fifty-two-point-nine seconds to impact.” ANN’s indifferent gaze met with Hogan’s and the exquisitely rendered face attempted a noncommittal smile.
“With Earth,” she added. “That blue rocky thing that’s causing you so much confusion, Commander.”
Hogan studied the chart again, somewhat vacantly. A spot surrounded by a scribble wasn’t exactly the most helpful of information. Especially at this intensely critical moment. Then his eyeball scorched as burning embers burst from the screen.
“Whoa...problems!” ANN’s face suddenly looked worried. “There’s an internal fire spreading rapidly towards my personality banks.”
The head flickered in and out of vision, metamorphosing through various facial casts before continuing.
“Excuse me a moment, Commander. I’m attempting to reroute my data banks through the Columbus’ CPU. Search initiated for secondary personality back-up files.”
Hogan swabbed his watering eye with his woollen cuff. What a Bummer! Tomorrow morning he wouldn’t bother getting out of bed. That is, he wouldn’t bother turning his trench coat the right way round and sitting up straight in his chair.
“ANN, try t’ get the forward thrusters back on line. We might be able to skim across the atmosphere.”
No response.
That wasn’t right. Hogan felt his stomach sink.
The familiar sultry head had gone. Instead, occupying the screen and resembling a huge pink pear with a gash for a mouth, there was the sweaty face of a man. It was wearing a gormless, frog-eyed mien.
Hogan blinked.
“Personality Back-up File One?”
He couldn’t be certain but something in the manner that its sideburns were plastered to its temples suggested that the head was drunk.
Cissy’s toes dug into the quilt, creating veins across the patchwork. Every muscle of her scrawny body had tensed in excitement. Up above the few straggling clouds a remarkable web of smoke had appeared.
It started as a fragile thread in the eastern firmament, high against the eternal well of the night. Then it broadened, broken and drifting, turning into charcoal where it scribbled across the moon.
And now something had entered the atmosphere of Earth. Something ablaze. It might have been a meteorite, glowing red as it hurtled through the ionosphere’s outer rim. Then blue. Then white.
No, that was no meteorite. It definitely had the shape of a Xnarghian battle cruiser about it.
A cruiser so blisteringly hot its infrastructure had gone beyond mere colour. Now it was just a shimmering stab of light with a fringe of fire dancing at its rear.
Cissy’s heart pounded within her rib cage.
“Cissy!” The familiar thump of her invalid mother’s walking stick rang through the dark house. Mother had awoken and wanted to be tended to. “Cissy! Come here! Now!”
But Cecilia didn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear anything apart from the blood rushing through her ears. She held her breath, her knuckles urged against her large buckled teeth, as the incinerated comet tore apart the sky in a blaze of triumphant glory.
Sword street. A sad collection of terraced shops, thirty years the home of Cecilia’s boss. Albert Brasswick had been drawing down his shutters with a wooden pole when Mrs Wainthrop had turned up unexpectedly.
Brasswick’s Butchers always stayed open as late as was humanly possible. Despite his portly appearance Albert Brasswick was in essence a thrifty man. Some would say ‘Greedy’. But there you go. What could you expect of a butcher?
Generally what the customers observed of Albert Brasswick was a swollen, pockmarked head attached to a huge bloodstained pinafore.
What Cissy perceived, confined most of her days to the cellar with its stench of rotten meat, was a hostile, unforgiving man. A miserable, overweight boar who only let her go home at six o’clock because it wasn’t worth paying the extra couple of quid to keep her on.
And at that moment what Mrs Wainthrop witnessed was a bulbous alcoholic’s nose, undeniably similar to the tripe in his shop window. It bore down upon her somewhat forcibly, with the heavy-handed flirtation that Brasswick had perfected for all of his customers. A sexually overt flirtation, regardless of how ancient and craggy the customer actually was.
Mrs Wainthrop herself was wrapped up beneath a coat so thick it gave her the appearance of a woollen pepper pot. Emanating from one ear warbled a whine so high pitched it was confusing the first of the bats out tonight.
“Best Cumberland sausage in Greyminster, Mrs Wainthrop.”
Albert occupied most of the doorway to his great, bloodied empire, the vertical blind half-closed where he’d hurriedly left off. His nose had never failed him yet where the smell of money was concerned. “Betcha ’aven’t seen owt like that f’r a while.”
Wagging an eyebrow suggestively he held up a sausage that would have made a centre-fold blush. Mrs Wainthrop shrieked with smutty delight.
‘A little slap and tickle,’ thought Albert, ‘goes a long way in the butchering business.’
“Oh yes...” Mrs Wainthrop rubbed her marinated eyes with a handkerchief. Albert took it as a good sign.
“It is a big one,” she continued.
“Enough t’ make y’r eyes water, eh?”
Albert’s ponderous physique rocked precariously on the heels of his shiny black shoes.
“Oh, y’ cheeky man.” Mrs Wainthrop playfully knuckled him on the shoulder. Albert winced, maintaining his great friendly smile. “If my Tom was still alive I don’t know w’at ’ee’d say.”
“Nothin’,” Albert ventured. “He’d probably just go green wi’ jealousy, eh Mrs Wainthrop? Ha ha...”
Mrs Wainthrop stepped backwards. Her harsh little eyes narrowed beneath an avalanche of angry forehead. Albert’s laugh faltered as he realised he might have gone a bit too far this time. Some of these old biddies took jokes about their dead husbands personally.
“’Ee’d probably come round ’ere an’ bayonet y’ through the neck f’r that.” She spat the words, her head forced down between her shoulders. “Y’ dirty bastard!”
The laugh faltered further. Albert desperately tried to recover the situation. He couldn’t afford to lose valuable custom, even if it probably hadn’t got long left for the world.
“Hahaha...yes.” He swallowed, his neck bulging outwards like a toad about to bark. “Erm, half a pound o’ rump steak’d go nicely wi’ that, I ’spect.”
And he fished out a parcel from his blood-smeared pocket. A package of offal that he’d been planning to throw in the bin when the shutters were down.
“’Ave this on the ’ouse, Mrs Wainthrop...”
This time the Columbus really did scream. The radiant craft swept down in an arc towards the rooftops of Greyminster, setting the whole sky ablaze with the menace of a mighty fireball.
Hogan pulled back as the heat suffused the steering column. His fingertips smouldered against the leather-encased wheel, his hair erect in smoking spires. The gathering momentum squashed his features with such force he resembled a bloodhound.
The Columbus collided with the roof of Greyminster town hall, almost ripping the small copper dome from its moorings in an explosion of bricks and frightened pigeons.
Hogan braced his blistered sneakers against the floor, pushing himself flat against the chair as if somehow this course of action might put off the impact for just that little longer. The gormless head on the monitor blinked. Then it swallowed a bolus of needlessly programmed fear and continued to stare insipidly at the fire.
Through the windscreen, although the ride was becoming too bumpy to see clearly, Brasswick’s Butchers approached. And with it the mound of putrid meat otherwise known as Albert Brasswick. Mrs Wainthrop, completely ignorant of forthcoming events, was attempting to wrestle the stubborn package from the butcher’s st
eadfast hand.
Albert watched, his immense skull perfectly motionless, as the Columbus hit the cobbles and bounced in a huge globe of flame towards him. It was all very nostalgic of Barnes-Wallace’s bouncing bomb, Brasswick re-enacting the part of the dam.
Hogan relinquished his hold on the stick, covered his head with his arms and emitted an odd muffled whimper.
“Oh shit…shit…shit...Shit!”
The battered shuttlecraft impacted with the Victorian building. A collision that resulted in a blast of turbulent flames.
The explosion mushroomed up into the crisp night air. A gigantic cloud of orange and black. It grew with the ferocity of a summer storm, covering the narrow streets in a shower of fragmented metal.
And deep in the remnants there rose an ominous, dreadful sound. A sound of whooping baboons running wild.
Chapter Two: The Commander’s Rescue
Cissy tiptoed soundlessly down the stairs. The bristles tickled her bare toes as she followed an intricate pattern from memory. Every step had its own familiar spot to position a foot without disturbing the creak. Below her, beyond the vibrating lounge door, some game show host was entertaining an audience of old women. An audience not unlike her mother but active enough to have travelled to the studio.
The lounge itself was dark. Well, almost dark. Cissy’s mother hadn’t bothered to put the lamp on yet but the colourful light of the television was engulfing the room in a carousel. Colours attempted to squeeze themselves out through the tightly closed portal.
As always the television was much too loud. Normal human eardrums would have burst long before now. Mrs Doyle had a hearing aid somewhere but pride insisted it was hidden. As a consequence the whole street had to suffer her choice of viewing as it spilled across the windowsill.