by Brian Hughes
“Rum do about old Henry, eh?”
Old Henry! That was Bill’s limited way with words was that. Henry Higginbotham had never been old and given the circumstances it seemed unlikely he was ever going to be. But to Bill, who was somewhat past his prime himself, everyone in Greyminster was antiquated.
“Not as rum as w’at I’ve just seen.” Jack rubbed his eyes with his thumbs, sleepily. “Y’ know Bill, I don’t think you’d believe me if I told y’ w’at sort of mornin’ I’d ’ad.”
Tappitty tip tap went the pencil, leaving tiny black marks on the mock-marble surface. “Go on then, Jack. Try me.”
“Would y’ believe there’s a spaceman chasin’ several shape-shifting mutants round the town?”
There was a long pause whilst both policemen took stock of the sentence.
“Well, frankly Jack, no I wouldn’t.” The pencil snapped and shot off like a bullet towards the ceiling.
“I didn’t think y’ would somehow.” Jack thought about the lack of activity being undertaken by his colleagues. In particular the overlooking of a shuttlecraft embedded in Brasswick’s back yard. “’Oo’s on duty round Sword Street this morning?”
“Ah! Now that’d be Parkins.” There was a soft grind whilst the pencil was sharpened by a crank-wound machine attached to the counter’s edge.
“Parkins? Wasn’t ’ee on duty last night...?” Jack waited politely whilst Sergeant Foster dislodged a sliver of graphite from the blade using the broken end of the pencil. He was engrossed in the procedure, examining the lead with the sort of precision normally associated with old men who carve matchsticks.
At length Bill Foster raised his face, visibly tracing a path backward through the conversation.
“Yeah, ’ee was. But we’re understaffed today. So ’ee’s on double shift. Or rather triple shift. ’Cos we were understaffed yesterday an’ all.” Bill thought for a moment. “Don’t know where he finds the stamina that lad. Thick as a plank but he’s got the staying power of a steamroller.”
He blew into the plastic container at the sharpener’s base and received an eyeful of pencil dust for his trouble. Both sergeants winced.
“’Ere, where’s your girlfriend goin’?” said Bill with a bloodshot eye.
Mrs. Doyle hobbled silently through the station door, her furry boots shuffling with a barely audible ‘Swush, swush’ across the leaf-strewn exit. Seconds later Jack Partridge grabbed her arm.
“Now come on Mary. You’re not goin’ ’ome until we can be sure that it’s safe.”
Her walking stick made contact with the back of his head.
“Patternoster Row!” she bawled angrily.
“What?”
She violently tugged in the opposite direction whilst Jack rubbed his painful scalp. Moments later the stick made another direct blow, this time crushing his fingers.
“I said, ‘Patternoster Row!’”
It has been said that the universe hangs together by a series of threads. Threads so fragile that if one breaks it’ll bring the whole of history crashing down. So when you consider that irony behaves like a pair of enormous scissors, randomly slicing across the space/time continuum, it’s a wonder that the world has survived at all.
Sometimes fate lends a hand.
In 1978 a slightly younger, but just as acrid, Mrs. Doyle had still been married. An ill-conceived marriage admittedly. But married nonetheless.
Her husband was Albert Doyle, Greyminster’s foremost roofer and odd job man.
Albert felt uncomfortable dressed in any sort of suit not preceded by the word ‘boiler.’ Consequently he was always to be found with his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a screwdriver in one hand and a pipe, its bowl stuffed with ‘Best Baby’s Shag,’ in the other. Those were the days when manufacturers could get away with that sort of name.
As always autumn that year had produced several mischievous squalls, which in turn led to several roofs requiring Albert’s attention. One morning Albert found himself attending to several loose tiles on the library roof. His head was engorged in a cloud of tobacco smoke and his hammer was rattling away ten to the dozen.
A familiar voice shouted up from below. “Albert! Y’ bloody great bugger! Your lunch is ready!”
Albert ignored it. As he had done for the past twenty years.
“Albert Doyle! Are you up there? I said your lunch is done! ’Urry up or it’s goin’ in the bin!”
Albert ignored it again. Only this time he drowned the words in a medley of whistled wartime tunes. On the forth shout, however, the remarks became personal. They concerned his haemorrhoids, something he wasn’t willing to share with the rest of Greyminster. Angrily throwing his hammer down he shouted into the busy street, “Mary! Stop showin’ us up for God’s sake, WUMON!”
The hammer rolled along the slates with a rumble, plummeted off the gutter and into the startled shoppers beneath. It hit the pavement with such a thud that it shattered three of the flagstones and left a pattern of cracks. It was closely followed by Albert Doyle himself, his standing on the tool being the reason behind its unexpected fall in the first place.
Time passed. Lots of time. Plummeting off a roof tends to make a man evaluate his life and its worth.
It took Albert several months to recover but his marriage to Mary ended that day. Following the incident the two of them never spoke to each other again, which as far as Albert was concerned was a vast improvement.
On October the tenth, 1980, Albert Doyle caught the last train back to Lancaster, leaving Mary and Cissy once and for all.
Ironically he also left an upended tile on the library roof.
A tile that was rapidly being approached by Albert’s now grown-up daughter in pursuit of a dangerous, giant space amoeba. Irony had snapped the dangling threads of the universe and fate had tied them back together in a large, clumsy knot.
The sort of knot that begs somebody to trip over it.
So that’s what Cissy did.
As the toe of her boot came into contact with the iniquitous slate, Cissy’s whole concept of time seemed to stretch. She knew that her footing had slipped and that she’d lost balance. And she knew there was nothing she could do about it.
Nonetheless her arms flew upwards instinctively. The crooked rooftops of Greyminster span up from below her. Huddled, frightened characters from a childhood nightmare.
And Death! Resembling a rag doll with orange peel teeth, she tumbled over the gutter and head first towards timeless oblivion.
Chapter Seven: A Collection of Simultaneous Events
At that same moment several other dramas were being enacted across Greyminster. Events that might, or might not, be important to this book, but which ought to be recorded for the sake of posterity. Unfortunately it’s impossible to bring all of these threads together at once without creating an incomprehensible mess for the reader. So let’s embark instead on a clockwise trip around the Victorian town, picking up on each incident as we might come across it.
First stop: Greyminster Park. Apart from the occasional dog walker - astonished witnesses to dogs cocking their legs against solid air - and a murder, or whatever the collective noun might be, of chattering old women tapping a football about, the sparsely wooded gardens stood still, drowsing in the colourless morning.
Well…almost still!
In the bushes surrounding the crazy golf course two figures rustled furtively. Moments later, undetected, the taller of the two appeared on the football pitch, sprinting across the patches of misty mud in a cloud of breath. He glanced back across one shoulder, signalling to the shorter individual to follow with the bend of a hirsute digit.
Several more seconds of silence. Then the bushes moved again.
With the stealth of a one-eyed wildcat the first character reached the invisible leg of the spacecraft. Using a three-pronged hook attached to a cable he lassoed some unseen contraption above his head. Shortly afterwards he started to climb the indiscernible stanchion.
It was
n’t long before his companion arrived below him in a cloud of steam.
Above her a shuttlecraft, not unlike the Columbus, blinked into view, attached to the side of some far larger construction.
Now the girl began to ascend behind her associate, watching wide-eyed as he unscrewed the handle securing the circular hatch.
“What about Amanda Duck?” she suddenly hollered, a Yorkshire pudding of condensation filling the void before her lips.
“Don’t worry about her.” The catch squealed. “Time has a habit of ironing out misdemeanours!”
It opened with a release of air that sounded similar to a spitting cat. Offering his comrade his hand he helped her through the opening, then screwed the hatch back into position.
“Have you ever had that feeling of Deja-Vu?” The cover sealed itself shut once more and moments later the shuttle shimmered into nothingness.
There followed a heavy clunk. A dent appeared on the football field roughly the size of a manhole cover but dish-shaped as though somebody had dropped a bowling ball onto the damp grass.
A tribe of beings dressed in black, wearing sunglasses and carrying technologically-advanced machine guns, appeared above it and started to fall. One after another, landing on the ground and adopting the stances of elite legionnaires.
As the last one scrambled to its feet there was a chug from above, followed by an explosion as though something cumbersome had backfired. Trailing a braid of smoke mingled with orange flame, the invisible shuttlecraft shot up into the sky. The scribble of fumes tapered to a point to the right-hand side of the pale sun, piercing the cloudbank as though it was a needle and thread stitching the torn sky back together.
These events might at first appear confusing. However, if the reader would just bear with me, all will be revealed as we untangle our snarled thread.
Next stop. At about twenty minutes past three had the whole of Greyminster resembled some vast dial. In an area of the town known as Lower Wattling. Thirty-four Ashbourne Road, apartment two, to be exact. Home of Allison Moore, Cissy’s only friend.
Allison was a plump and extremely short girl. The cruel amongst us would say ‘Frumpy.’ Cruel but probably accurate. She had a tendency to walk by swinging her arms from side to side, propelling herself forwards. In the day to day bustle of Greyminster Allison would often turn up unexpectedly. People out shopping or just minding their own business would be suddenly confronted by a familiar gash of a grin surrounded by a podgy face full of freckles.
That was the difference between her and Cissy. Allison was always grinning. Nobody was sure what it was that amused her so much. Some had even put it down to a muscular disorder. Whatever the case, it made her a much more sociable person.
Which was handy because Allison’s hobby was acquiring new friends. She was extremely proud of the fact that she had her own harem going. Admittedly it comprised mainly of sad, lonely men who sang with the harmony of castrated cats at the evangelical church. But Cissy was convinced that, had she wanted to, Allison could have had her choice of Greyminster’s finest and that the only reason she was still a virgin was for ethical reasons rather than being too ugly to score.
The other difference was that Allison had her own apartment. Her parents had been killed in a climbing accident when she was only fourteen following which she’d spent time in the Greyminster orphanage. A grisly two years where the dark underbelly of society had destroyed her middle-class sensibilities. Cissy tried not to hold it against her. Allison had just had one of life’s lucky breaks.
A large pair of slippers, the toes worn though to the webbing, padded softly across the lounge. They stopped in front of the lifeless television. Packaged in a weighty red dressing gown with a gold braided cord Allison blearily thumbed her collection of second post letters.
She looked rotten first thing in the morning. Something akin to a blemished lump of suet that had gone sweaty and wrinkled. Most women emerge first thing looking small-eyed and raw without their glamorous masks. However most women didn’t have blood red creases down each cheek that resembled the Martian canals and all their freckles ganging up into one huge stain.
As she sorted the missives into some order of importance Allison Moore felt the distinct impression that something ominous had just entered the room behind her.
She turned her head, her heart beating hurriedly against her ribcage, her long ginger hair sweeping back from her bulbous forehead.
The lounge looked exactly the same as always, right down to the poster of James Dean on the wall with the embroidered crucifix pinned to one corner in what she thought was a fitting tribute.
Only something didn’t feel right. As if the room had more furniture than before. She shook her head, licked her lips and yawned, a gaping chasm of pearly white teeth and succulent tongue.
Allison had been up until late last night working on letters to her pen friends. Pen friends who had been so misinformed about her appearance that if she’d arranged to meet them would have walked past her wondering where she was. She devoted a great deal of creative energy to such people. Last night, for instance, she’d stayed up scribbling in her Giant Blotter until almost half past ten, an inconceivably late hour of the night for Allison as her friends would no doubt tell you.
She parked her huge pear-shaped bottom in the sagging armchair before meticulously opening the first envelope without damaging the stamp. In the process her slipper-clad feet went up onto the coffee table. She was in a rebellious mood today. It was her apartment, so what the Hell?
As she tugged out the carefully penned reply from her never-met-but-often-dreamt-about pen-friend Jurgen Voldamich, the chest of drawers behind her rippled ever so slightly and appeared to grow.
Dear Allison.
How are you? I am, as ever, well. How are your family? My family are fine. How are your friends? My friends are very well, thank you.
Jurgen’s letters read like a German translation book.
The sock drawers buckled, the colours oozing into the intricate pattern of the rug.
Allison, however, was absorbed in machinations of Jurgen’s appearance. She pictured him as being somewhere in his late-twenties/early-thirties, blonde haired and blue eyed, with the sort of wonderful square chin that had bolts of bone at the corners.
Ironically Jurgen was short and fat, just like Allison, his genetic lineage having been totally by-passed by the ethnic cleansing of the Second World War.
What had once been the sock drawers reared up into the threatening shape of a transparent polar bear, distorting the ceiling behind it. If it had been solid it might have cast a warning shadow across the pages held tightly between Allison’s Falstaffian fingers. But instead there was only a rainbow shimmering so faintly that it passed undetected.
The Altarian Beast unfolded whatever it was that passed for its mouth.
A runged tunnel of swollen pink flesh, darkening to blood red the further it receded, deepening to black as it turned into throat. Dribbling and gurgling, frothing and gargling, it hung there, scions poised to strike swiftly.
It continued to sway against the clutter of furniture as though some intriguing puzzle had taken control of its tiny mind.
Two small holes appeared near the creature’s head, twitching with the uncontrollability of a rabbit on heat, as though the scent of bad socks had reached its nostrils. The holes dilated, then quivered, attempting to draw in more of the pungent aroma, a proboscis extending itself to allow them to do so.
Allison turned the page, checking the circled number on the top corner. She wanted to make sure she was reading the sheets in the correct sequence. Jurgen’s writing was somewhat disjointed at the best of times.
Slowly the animal retracted into itself becoming a shapeless blob no greater in stature than a stocking filled with jelly. It had been alerted by something distant. Something primitive rumbling subconsciously deep within Greyminster itself. It was a strangely pungent taste that reached back into its senses beyond its childhood. Older than tim
e and experience itself.
And the Altarian Beast knew that, whatever the sensation was, it had no other choice than to act upon its powerful call. Breakfast would have to wait.
It curled up into a foetal globule, dropped to the floor and slunk softly away, leaving nothing but a trail of slime across the carpet. A trail that sparkled up the doorjamb, glistened down the narrow hall, coruscated along the peeling skirting-board, and glowed in a sticky, broken line through the letter box.
In her armchair Allison tutted, shook her head with condescension and laughed out loud. It was amazing really what she could find so amusing about Jurgen’s corrupted English.
For the third appointment the reader must accompany me across the cramped rooftops. Twisted plumes of sooted smoke form a thinly populated forest of pollution. See how they twist above the narrow streets like deadly columbine. In the distance, if the reader looks closely, frown the formal bookends of the town hall and council offices. Further still, the shattered dome of the library with a figure tumbling from it, momentarily frozen in time. The auburn tops of the dying trees regimenting Greyminster’s streets are going out in a final blaze of glory for the year. And below, the doleful meandering of the grimy canal, blackened and choking as it sluggishly probes the factory yards.
Here, at last, we find a dark and dingy quarter that has stood amongst its own shadows since the town’s struggling infancy.
A short cobbled street, overhung with tall buildings, reminiscent of a wharf except that both sides face each other. The buildings are so close together here that the sunlight has difficulty getting through. It joins the roads of Old Bridge Lane and Blackberry Row together at the hip.
Patternoster Row was one of those streets that was more of a back alley with pretensions than anything else. Presumably due to its lack of notoriety nobody had bothered removing the extraneous ‘T’ from the hand-painted plaque.
Originally there had been eight buildings. Now, however, there were only seven. Number three had burnt down in a fire long ago and was just a collection of rubble through which the industrious weeds grew.