by Brian Hughes
Cissy gingerly crossed the hallway, flattened her temple against the door and listened with the trained ear of a mercenary who had done this sort of thing countless times before.
Mentally she filtered the overpowering sounds. Somewhere beneath the cackles of enraptured old people a distinctive snore pruned the air. It sounded similar to a log being sawn in half.
Good! Mother had gone back to sleep.
Satisfied she straightened herself up and noiselessly entered the kitchen. Having padded across the floor, the balls of her feet sticking slightly to the lino, she fumbled for the hook on the door that led into the garden. The rattle of a heavy object shortly followed as Cissy’s fingers tightened around the rusted keys to the ‘Staff Entrance’ of Brasswick’s.
A thin crack of moonlight momentarily illuminated a rectangle of floor. Seconds later it vanished and Cissy, feeling the thrill of the cold steps on her naked soles, vanished along with it into the night.
“W’at’s all this about then, Parkins?” Sergeant Partridge blew into his hands, forgetful of the fact that he was wearing gloves, and nodded in the direction of the inferno behind him. Sergeant Partridge was a stocky man who wore his police overcoat every time he set foot out of the station, regardless of the weather. He resembled a cube of dark-blue wool with a face.
“It’s a fire, Sarge,” Constable Parkins replied.
“Yes...” Jack rubbed his eyeballs with his thumbs and pulled his jaw down with his thick leather fingers. “I can see that.”
“Yes Sarge.”
“W’at’s it doing there?”
A few anxious moments ensued during which Parkins’ lips moved uncontrollably. On more than one occasion Jack thought he saw the word ‘Burning?’ appear but it never quite managed to escape Parkins’ mouth. At length:
“Where’s that bloody fire engine?” Jack pulled up his cuff and checked the hairs on the back of his wrist before turning to the flames. “P’raps Eric wanted to finish ’is darts match first, eh son?”
“Not sure, Sarge.”
Every town, every village and they’re always under my command.
“You ’ave contacted ’em, ’aven’t y’?”
“Yeah...I mean ‘Yes’ Sarge.”
“Right!” Jack looked his eager junior up and down, nodded awkwardly and set off at a stride towards the war-engulfed building. “Keep an eye on this lot.”
He waved a noncommittal gesture in the general direction he was heading.
“Don’t want nobody gettin’ ’urt. If you’re quite sure y’ can ’andle that without pullin’ a muscle.”
The ether crackled overhead, glowing embers drifting past on the haunches of a zephyr. It was all very suggestive of bonfire night. From beyond the dark hedges a portentous glow created a semicircle across the lush evening sky. It was accompanied by the smell of sausages frying.
Cissy felt the sharp stones biting into her pliant soles. The wafer light corner of a smouldering pin-up calendar drifted erratically overhead, exploding against a tree trunk. Debris fluttered to the ground.
Forcing a hole in the privet just wide enough to accommodate her head she caught her first glimpse of what had become of Sword Street.
And her face dropped with the disappointed elasticity of a water-filled balloon.
There was none of the bustle she’d expected. The commotion of soldiers spilling out of army wagons. Or the group of tin-helmeted servicemen being ordered around by brigadiers with waxed moustaches. There wasn’t even the tall, mysteriously unshaven figure wearing a trilby and an old Macintosh.
Just two of the local Bobbies and a smouldering heap of refuse.
The shorter but more square-built of the policemen was apparently window-shopping. He kicked a stone along the gutter for the want of something more interesting to do. Then he checked up and down for the first signs of the fire brigade as it thundered to its appointment. Evidently there was no prospect of that taking place in the immediate future, so he attempted instead to kindle a cigarette off the flames.
His associate wasn’t paying much attention either. He was busy shouting orders at an old woman who was having difficulty hearing them. Occasionally Parkins pointed aggressively to the alley from which she had just emerged accompanied by her Pekinese dog.
Cissy sighed, withdrawing her face through the tangled branches.
Moments later there was the sound of toes struggling for purchase against Brasswick’s wall, pursuing a familiar route that Cissy had worked out over many late mornings.
A leg that was more of a piano string than a curvaceous appendage, surfaced over the bricks. It was presently followed by a bundle of bones wrapped up in muslin. Cissy’s night-dress blew up in the breeze, revealing a pair of old-fashioned knickers elasticated around the thighs. Not exactly the most flattering lingerie, but Cissy had nobody to flatter in any event.
Directly, a spindling silhouette rose against the distended moon. It hovered briefly on the wall’s narrow apex, arms outstretched, before plummeting into the cobbled yard below. Muffled sounds drifted upwards with the sort of noise that a fish might have made as it was slapped against a filleting board.
Shaking the concussion from her head Cissy plunged one delicate hand down the front of her night-dress. Having fumbled for a few seconds around her flat chest the hand re-emerged pulling with it the enormous keys. With a satisfied grin Cissy held them aloft.
And was confronted by an unanticipated sight.
The Columbus had created more damage than Sergeant Partridge realised. The blanket of smoke covering the front of Brasswick’s acted as a curtain drawn across the devastation beyond.
The craft had hit the ground at forty-five degrees. Its stabilisers had ripped through the building’s infrastructure, the nose cone burrowing itself into the stone floor throwing debris up all around. A twelve-feet-wide groove deepened towards the centre of the yard, mounded on either side by a dike of hard-core flotsam. It concluded in the twisted mass of the shuttle itself, capped by a square of white and red cloth. A miserable oblong fluttering from a broken pole which concluded in a hook.
Not that Cissy had noticed.
Sprawled across the rubble, his torso half-hanging from the jettisoned hatch, was the unconscious Marshal Hogan.
Cissy brought her gaunt hands up to her mouth in a tiny gasp of astonishment.
“A spaceman...” Her voice was filled with promise beyond her wildest dreams. “A spaceman all of my very own...”
She set off at an excited gallop, her feet slipping on the unsettled ground. Scrabbling to lay claim to the battered figure first.
Here is darkness. Tiny flickers of brilliance flash on and off inside Hogan’s somersaulting mind. Down he tumbles, corkscrewing through unconsciousness.
He alights with a thump that sends an agonising pain shooting the full length of his spine.
Marshal Hogan waited for a moment, convinced that he could smell a full breakfast cooking. Then he opened his eyes onto the world.
A bedraggled creature, equipped with the most threateningly large teeth he’d ever encountered and what appeared to be some sort of metallic arachnid in its mouth, loomed towards him. Marshal jerked backwards, clouting his head against an iron girder. A girder that somebody, despite her apparently fragile frame, had managed to prop him up against.
There was an unhealthy ‘Thunk’ through his skull.
“Hello spaceman...” Cissy spoke in a compassionate, friendly voice. “I’m Cissy.”
She thought about that before smiling with the affability of a giraffe.
“Cecilia Doyle,” she added, offering the commander a grubby hand.
Hogan blinked, wondering whether he ought to draw his laser-rifle or not.
Cissy withdrew the hand, spat on her palm, left an out-of-focus smudge down the front of her night-dress and offered it back again. Marshal gazed on the trembling digits without comprehending. Cissy’s grin dropped disappointedly to nothing more than a skirt of teeth.
She lean
ed closer, her warm breath smothering his senses obtrusively.
“Do you understand ‘English’?”
Hogan attempted to dislodge the coil of locks matted to his brow in a dark red kiss curl.
“Yeah...” A painful twinge thrust upwards from his groin, reeking savagely through the tired muscles of his back. “In fact I’m capable of translating over four thousand languages.”
“Goodness...” Cissy leant closer, rubbing his scuffed cheek with a corner of her nightie. A corner that she had generously licked. “You must have studied at college a long time.”
A thought struck Marshal that he’d never even been to College. However, somehow, he appeared to be communicating with the gangly invertebrate. So he shook the thought from his head and waited to see what happened next.
Cissy sat upright, gazing at him lovingly.
“What’s your name?”
“Hogan...Marshal Hogan.” Another paroxysm careered into the lining of his stomach. “Cissy? Would you mind shifting your weight? I don’t know about your species but my bollocks are situated just below the buckle of me belt.”
“Marshal?” Cissy brought her hands together with a delighted slap. “You’re a marshal?”
Reluctantly the marshal attempted to move her himself.
“An intergalactic bounty hunter...” Cissy was building herself up into a romantic frenzy the likes of which she had never experienced before. Wisely Marshal considered it might be best not to shatter her illusions just for the moment. Especially taking into account where her knee was currently situated.
“You were chasing an evil bandit across space...” Cissy’s imagination had slipped the clutch and entered fifth gear. “Pursuing highwaymen around the galaxies...and you crashed into Earth? Oh my goodness! You’re a hero!”
It might have been the atmosphere of the heady night.
It might have been the smell of burnt sausages that turned her brain.
Whatever it was, Cissy wasn’t behaving with her normal self-restraint. That ordinarily shy and retiring girl who grew embarrassed when a bluebottle stared at her in a funny sort of way. Suddenly overwhelmed by passion she flung her skinny arms about the commander’s neck, landing an unwholesomely sloppy kiss on his slender lips.
It was a similar experience to being tongued by a giant cuttlefish.
Hogan struggled, tried to breathe and snapped his head backwards. Heard the ‘Thunk!’ Felt the pain as his head collided with the girder again. And sank back into the omnipotent rarefaction of insensibility.
The next to last thing that the commander witnessed was the hideous pixie donning an expression of surprise mingled with guilt. The last thing that Hogan recalled was a blue flashing strobe as it bounced around the remaining walls, the gentle drum of rain from the fire engine’s hose peppering his forehead.
The garden door of the Doyle household creaked slowly open, a crack of moonlight spilling onto the floor. It was followed by the sound of something cumbersome being dragged across the step. Something body sized. Something considerably too heavy for the person attempting to drag it.
A black shape filled the crack, struggled hopelessly for a moment, then toppled into the darkness with a winded ‘Oof!’ Seconds later the dragging continued, the apparition moving deeper into the kitchen. There was the clatter of several pans against somebody’s head.
Cissy had this vague idea that she could hide Commander Hogan in her bedroom. Sequestered from the army. It wasn’t a concept she was going to let go of easily, that. For years she’d been convinced there was a military base carved into Blackmoore’s Crag. She’d never actually uncovered the entrance to this surreptitious head quarters but that just made it all the more sinister.
Exactly how she intended to drag the commander up the stairs was anybody’s guess. Not that it mattered because the proceedings were interrupted unexpectedly at that point.
With a click the kitchen light turned on, flooding the chamber with alarming brilliance. There was a crash as Cissy dropped the commander headfirst into the cat’s supper basin.
The formidable figure of Mrs Doyle hunched into her Zimmer frame scowled across the room, anger etched across her granite features.
“Mother...” The words jumbled into a knot inside Cissy’s head. “I...I…this...”
“Cecilia Doyle!” The Zimmer frame shook, took a threatening step forward and squeaked against the floor. Mrs Doyle’s shadow climbed the cluttered walls, contorting around the cupboards like Nosforatu’s. “Oh no y’ bloody don’t my girl!”
Mary Doyle was, in all honesty, a rather dwarfed and frail old woman. However, her presence had an overbearing pomposity that inflated her appearance manifold.
“No, Mother. You don’t understand...” Cissy dodged as the rubber-ended leg of the walking frame came down on Hogan’s fingers. Mrs Doyle twisted the scaffold into the lifeless knuckles as if stubbing out a cigarette. “Mother...don’t!”
“There’ll be no bloody drunkards in this ’ouse! Not while I’m alive!”
“Mother! He’s not drunk! He’s been in an accident.”
Mrs Doyle wasn’t listening. It was a selective deafness that worked in close association with her pride.
“What ’ave I told you about bringin’ men back to my ’ouse, Cecilia?”
“He’s not a man...” Cissy stopped and thought about that statement. Mrs Doyle trundled over it like a train without brakes.
“Having it off in my own kitchen!” Mary prided herself on being competent with current juvenile slang. “You’re a disgusting tart, Cecilia Doyle!”
Cissy fumed.
“IT’S CISSY!”
The sudden vehemence with which those words were delivered brought the Zimmer to a halt. Mrs Doyle stiffened, her eyes almost as large as Cissy’s own.
But nineteen years of being emotionally blackmailed had brought Cissy to the end of her threadbare tether.
“MY NAME’S CISSY! ALL MY FRIENDS CALL ME CISSY!”
Mrs Doyle clutched her rib cage where she suspected her heart to be. Letting go of the walking aid the elderly ogress staggered backwards, conveniently locating the Welsh dresser.
“Now look w’at y’ve done...” Her breathing became shallow. “I’m ’avin’ one of me turns, Cecilia.”
“I hate you Mother!” Cissy advanced, her flimsy fists clenched and her backbone hunched into a menacing cobra.
“Oh...me ’eart!”
“You’ve already frightened all of my other boyfriends off!” She stopped and thought about that. “Well, Henry Higginbotham anyhow.”
“Bone idle bastard,” muttered Mrs Doyle at the recollection of the overweight student. She recalled herself, rolled her eyes and added out loud, “Oh. I’m goin’ this time...”
“Good! Bugger off and don’t bother coming back!”
Mrs Doyle slumped. The sort of impotent slump that a St. Bernard deprived of its skeleton might engender.
Her beady eyes frosted over, her hand dropping apathetically by her disjointed hip.
Cissy waited and stared. Reluctantly the anger started to drift from her eyes. Having regressed to the same mental state as a child she ventured a diminutive, “Mother?”
No response! Uncertain what to do next Cissy cautiously took hold of her mother by one flaccid wrist.
“Mother?”
And a feeling of panic began to take control of her common sense. So much so in fact that she failed to take into account that a corpse wouldn’t have had enough strength to hold itself up against the kitchen dresser.
One piggy eyeball opened weakly. Mrs Doyle managed to speak in a croaky voice.
“’Ee can’t stay ’ere, Cecilia.”
The old woman absorbed the expression of concern seeping through Cissy’s down turned features. Then she reached the conclusion that the anger had abated for now. Immediately straightening up, the hoary geriatric pushed past to the gantry of her Zimmer.
“Outside!” she stated firmly. Cissy made to object but her mother had
now seized dominion once more. “’Ee’s not staying ’ere. ’Ee’ll drive a wedge between us, Cissy. ’Is sort always do. We’ll put ’im in the coal bunker with all the other rubbish.”
One last phrase of defiance struggled hopelessly along Cissy’s arid throat. But as the legs of the Zimmer began to thump into Commander Hogan’s ribs Cissy sprinted across the floor and grabbed him securely by the shoulders. Unable to argue further she compliantly hauled him one more time through the garden door. Mrs Doyle followed closely, accompanied by the occasional thunk of rubber on bone.
Number forty-nine, Sword Street. An ordinary terraced house in every respect apart from the fact it was several doors up from Brasswick’s Butchers. The building itself had been turned into two apartments, overlooking the gates of the municipal park. It was the home of Cissy’s ex-boyfriend, the adipose Henry Higginbotham.
Cissy’s mother was right. Henry was a bone-idle, good-for-nothing slob. Wearing his stained string-vest Henry had spent roughly five minutes watching the blaze down the street before his attention had wandered back to the television.
Now he slouched in his armchair with a chipped mug of coffee, curtains drawn and remote between his podgy fingers, prepared for a marathon of channel hopping.
Because Henry had satellite TV. And like people the world over, so fond of expostulating the merits of satellite over terrestrial television, he would punch his way through fifty something channels never coming to rest on a single one. Well, perhaps the odd one. Those forty-five minute adverts for some apparatus that cleaned the fluff out of your belly button kept him enwrapped for about twenty minutes. And sometimes he’d squint at a scrambled German sex scene.
Behind his chair a shape shifted uneasily. It was barely discernible, just a shimmer against the flowered wallpaper that appeared to be slightly at odds with the rest of the wall.
It moved around the back of his dumpy head, a glutinous globule of adhesive water. It slithered down the skirting board with a barely audible slurp.