by Brian Hughes
Not that either of his junior colleagues were paying attention.
“Right, lads, now!”
Robins, still busying himself with the irksome nose prickle, failed to respond.
The sudden flurry of tiny flat creatures beneath the net made Spike jerk backwards, startled. His footing slipped on the greasy capping stones. Moments later the terrified punk landed on top of the melee.
“Constable Robins!” bellowed Jack, emerging from behind the Corn Doll Cafe dustbin. “Drop your bloody end now, f’r crying out loud! The buggers are all escapin’!”
The itch took flight at Jack’s booming voice. Robins, slightly later than planned, finally complied with the order.
As the playing cards bit and scratched at the ropes, a distant rumble rose from somewhere just behind Jack’s shoulder.
He turned to stare at the ancient poster plastered to the telegraph pole. It was an advert for Wilberforce’s Fairground. The sort of colourful nonsense that the Beatles wrote songs about. To all intents and purposes, it looked exactly the same as it had done since it was super-glued into position back in the eighties. There were more tears across it now of course. And usually the elephants weren’t actually moving, but on the whole...elephants? Movement?!
Jack ducked as a pachyderm about the same size and shape as a modest sheep hurtled out of the illustration with a ripping noise. Tripping over its own trunk it tumbled into the hubbub.
Cards scattered everywhere, their limbs flailing wildly.
Robins forgot himself and screamed.
Spike, somewhat more streetwise than his associate, inched up his sleeves and battered the elephant into one corner.
With three doughnuts of dung on the top of his head, Jack picked up his helmet, tugged the badge from the front and flung it into the gutter, resolved that it was time he retired.
“’Ow is ’ee doin’ it, Clewes?” The shadow from St Oliver’s spire chilled the marrow in their bones as the two detectives and the one bedraggled clairvoyant wound their way between the headstones.
All around them peculiar creatures vandalised graves, tore up flowers and played basketball amongst the dead. They were using skulls for the balls and urns for the baskets. Some were soft toys, others mythical beasts.
None of them belonged in the normal world.
Gathered round the steps that lead down to the crypt, five black puddings in tribal loincloths were shaking spears and chanting threateningly.
“There must be more technology in this lot than there is in a George Lucas film.” Nesbit thought about that for a moment before adding in a quieter voice, “Or alternatively Prunella ’Odges’ bedside cabinet.”
“Always assuming they are puppets, Sir.” Malcolm shook the American cartoon character from his knee. It was difficult to believe that a puppeteer could have constructed something so obviously two-dimensional. Not even Jim Henson was clever enough to bend spatial dimensions.
“’Course they’re puppets!” Nesbit snapped back. “’Ighly technical puppets, p’raps. But nowt more than sophisticated marionettes.”
He stopped in his tracks, spreading his arms out wide so that Malcolm and Mrs Prune were forced to bring themselves to a halt behind him.
Then he pointed towards the crooked spire where Ethyl was roosting on the Father Time weather vane. She was issuing orders to the rabble below, a traffic cone held to her beak and her unmistakable high pitched whine echoing round St Oliver’s churchyard.
“If I’m not much mistaken,” continued Nesbit, actually very much mistaken but battening down one eyelid with determination regardless. “That chicken is some sort of central processing unit.”
“Need an’ ’and bringing the little so and so down to earth, Inspector?” Mrs Prune stepped up to the crease. She was tossing a gormless stuffed tortoise between her hands expectantly.
With a grin pleating the lower half of his face, Nesbit raised the branch that he’d been carrying. He adopted the stance of a baseball batter and nodded acquiescently.
The pensioner took several paces backwards, narrowly missing a clockwork snail. Then she started a lengthy but impressive run up, span a googlie and launched the tortoise towards Nesbit’s knees.
Thwock!
In a receding squeal, accompanied by trailing smoke rings, it arced towards the church tower. It grew smaller and smaller as it sailed into the morning perspective, until at last it was nothing more than a distant speck.
A speck so superbly aimed that it collided with another speck, which then exploded in a shower of feathers.
Several seconds later the squawk reached their ears.
The two specks tumbled, a third, conical shape following them down. In all probability it was the makeshift megaphone.
The three of them watched the descent.
Moments later they winced as the holly bush by St Oliver’s gate exploded beneath the impact.
“Look, Sir.” Malcolm pointed excitedly. Emerging from its hideout due to Ethyl’s unannounced arrival was the Quizzling. It was rubbing its head and staggering slightly. “It’s Miss Duvall’s missin’ orang-utan, isn’t it?”
“After it, Malcolm!” Nesbit sprang into action as the Quizzling regrouped its senses and leapt energetically over the wall. “If I’m right in w’at I’m thinkin’ that’s the puppet master in disguise.”
“But I’m not actually responsible for any of this.” Felix Wetherby shuffled into his armchair and abandoned his face to the fate of his palms. In the pallid light he seemed much older. “Not directly anyhow. I suppose I could be blamed in a roundabout manner.”
Pip took a step forward but Miss Duvall, who’d been towering in the fashion of supreme adjudicator over the old gentleman since her arrival, blocked her path. From the corner of one eye she cast Pip a meaningful stare as though to say, “Give him some space and he’ll tell us in his own time.”
Her instincts appeared to be correct. A few seconds later Felix removed his pince nez and rubbed both eyes with the crook of one thumb.
“It all started a long time ago. Difficult to remember exactly when now. I wasn’t much more than a youth.” He paused to collect himself before proceeding. “This might be hard to believe, I know, but it was the winter of 1647. Oliver Cromwell had just set up Parliament, beheaded the king and started the reformation. And that winter it snowed very heavily.”
He threw Miss Duvall a goading stare as though expecting her to take issue.
“Carry on, Mr Wetherby. I’ll believe just about anything at this point.”
Miss Duvall snuffled, although not in a haughty manner. More of reassuring snuffle with just the hint of a blocked sinus about it.
“Well I bloody won’t!” All eyes suddenly turned upon Flinders who was filling the doorway in his cumbersome wheelchair. It had taken some time to cross the town in that damned contraption of his. Triumph Bonnevilles tend to plough through attacking hordes of impossible creatures, whereas wheelchairs are more of a hindrance on the whole. “1647? Oliver Cromwell? I think you’ll find that Charles the First was still on the throne at that point.”
“That’s what the history books reckon,” Felix continued with barely a pause. “But I’ve seen those books re-written countless times, young man, for whatever political machinations. What’s more, and I bet you didn’t know this...”
He leaned forward confrontationally.
“We had toasters.”
Screwing up his eyes his features seemed to gather together into a single point of concentration.
“Course, we didn’t have electricity so’s they could work. We ended up using them as envelope holders.” He raised his eyes again, less defiantly this time. “But, the point is, sometimes archaeologists and historians get things wrong.”
He studied his threadbare slippers, thoughtfully shaking his head.
“Nope...the only absolute about ’istory is that there’s no way of stopping it from repeating itself.”
The Quizzling rounded the corner of Caldwell Crescent.
There was clearly a distressed expression etched across its unsightly face. There was also a manic old biddy in close pursuit, holding her dressing gown closed as her chubby knees reached the bob of her chin with all the exertion.
Exactly where Mrs Prune had found the rolling pin that she was now flourishing, reminiscent of some caricature from a saucy seaside postcard, was anybody’s guess.
She had a lot of pockets, did Mrs Prune. And a lot of night-dress for such convenient pockets to be secluded amongst.
Puffing and wheezing with the intensity of twin engines pulling into Bewdley Station, Nesbit and Clewes reeled along in her slip stream. They were expending more energy on their asthmatic remonstrances than on the actual jogging.
A flame of orange! And the panicking goblin leapt the gate at number forty-one.
A fraction of a second later Mrs Prune slammed to a halt. Taking stock of the situation, she studied her prey’s further progress through the violently snapping harebells.
Then she grabbed the gate latch, wrenched it up and barged into the overgrown garden.
“We didn’t mind the reformation.” Felix was rubbing his spectacle lenses with an ancient lint. He seemed content to wander the distant crannies of Memory Lane unhindered. “It gave us a chance to paint the house if I recall.”
“Us?” enquired Miss Duvall, settling herself down for the duration on the arm of the sofa.
“My wife, Madeline, and I.” A curtain of reminiscence drew itself across Felix’s eyes. “She was a beautiful lass, that she was. Long crimson hair down to the back of her knees and the largest pair of...”
“Mr Wetherby,” Miss Duvall interrupted as a peel of screams from the building next door brought back the urgency of their plight. “Could you just explain how all of this...”
She swung her arm around, searching for the best word to describe the chaos.
“This...mess...” she concluded hopelessly. “Would you care to explain how it actually happened?”
“You don’t want to hear about Madeline’s suckling pigs then?”
As there was no response, Felix shrugged his shoulders compliantly.
“I suppose such matters aren’t terribly relevant really, are they? I keep forgetting that we’re living in a more advanced age. More convenient! Faster! Crammed with hectic and stressful experiences.” He sighed, the slight heave of his chest magnifying the extent to which the moths had been nibbling his cardie. “Nobody wants to smell the roses any more.”
What Flinders had wanted to say at that point was, “Anybody wanting to smell the roses right now, Mr Wetherby, will end up with their faces covered in the shit you appear to have started.”
Unfortunately all that came out was a grunt. At that very same moment the Quizzling scrabbled up the back of his chair. Using his head as a launch pad it landed spread-eagled across the dining table.
A collection of television guides and mould-encrusted coffee cups scattered across the lounge.
Mrs Prune bumbled to a standstill behind it, her momentum being absorbed by the large spoked wheels. She sent Flinders flying into a stack of yellowing newspapers.
“Somebody stop ’im!” she yelled, as the Quizzling mounted Felix’s shoulder and stuck one foot inside his ear. “What the..? Bugger me fat Aunt Nellie with a cucumber!”
Nesbit and Clewe’s tumbled into the room, just in time to see Miss Duvall and Pip grab the gremlin’s ankle and tug violently.
Felix rocked back and forth, the Quizzling’s stubborn refusal to leave his head making for a surreal, if not slapstick, scene.
“That’s im, Clewe’s. ’Ee must be the Puppet Master!” Nesbit wheezed, his trembling arm pointing at the tableaux before him. “Arrest ’im and find out where ’is control box is!”
“You’ve got it wrong!” yelled Felix, losing the battle but continuing to fight as valiantly as he could. “I was telling Miss Duvall...the whole thing started the day that a hunch-backed gentleman in a top hat turned up in Greyminster.”
“An ’unch-backed gentleman?” Mrs Prune’s mouth dropped open in anticipation. “Did ’ee say what ’is name was?”
“Thomas Hobson!” shouted Felix at the same moment that Pip lost her grip on the Quizzling’s toe.
With an unpleasant squelch, followed by a brief spurt of blood, the ginger instep vanished completely. Felix’s head toppled forward onto his knees, unconscious.
Mrs Prune snorted anxiously to herself.
“Thomas ’Obson! I should ’ave known.” She turned to the increasingly flustered Nesbit, her words almost knocking him over with their impetus. “I ’ate t’ mention this, but if Old Man ’Obson’s involved we ’aven’t half got a problem on our ’ands now, Inspector.”
Chapter Nineteen: Of Histories and Hobson
Scattered across the northern fells and coastal plains of Lancashire are numerous ancient carvings. Stone obelisks, almost phallic in nature, sporting rounded glans with diagonal echelons striping their shafts. The majority of these stones have enigmatic divots ground into their summits, the meanings of which are shrouded by history’s veil.
To the less discerning, more lavatorial, archaeologists their meanings are patently obvious.
Even Saxon stonemasons had a very ‘British’ sense of humour.
Nowadays, just a handful of the locals understand the significance behind these Anglo-Saxon boundary markers.
Not that it matters. The British government, regardless of our heritage being the only industry we have left, continue to sell off such monuments in order to shore up political shortfalls. The stripping of Britain’s historical assets doesn’t bother such people who are only bent on securing their futures in offshore bonds. (Editor’s note: Enough of that!)
Added to this malaise, the idea exists nowadays that education is geekish. “Beer”, “football” and “shagging” are the current buzzwords, mainly because the idiots who follow such pastimes are incapable of pronouncing anything longer. Unfortunately this attitude only forces the boundary-markers ever closer to extinction.
Ignorant land-owners paint them white, bolt gate hinges onto them, hang floral baskets from their sides or break them up for aesthetically merit-less rockeries, never once realising what they’ve destroyed.
Back in 1647, long before such things would become of importance to obese Americans with a penchant for McDonalds -- indeed back in the times when America was still populated primarily by copper-coloured tribesmen with no interest in the tourist industry -- it was much the same story.
One cold but sparkling November’s morning Felix Wetherby was whitewashing his own ancient monument in front of Caldwell Croft. It was the sort of day where the sun winked from the plate of the river as though broken by prisms, enhancing the colours of the Cromwellian landscape and sending the viewer into a partial coma.
Behind Felix spread the somnambulistic bay, its wide horizon seemingly absent due to the peculiar play of light this morning. The fishermen who earned their living from ploughing the harbour rowed their tiny boats across this country as though suspended in the mid-air.
Greyminster was a much smaller concern in those times. These were pre-industrialisation days and the rows of pot-red cottages and belching chimneys were as yet confined to the imagination. Right now it was just a harbour town, fisherman’s cottages, upturned shrimpers and pyres of burning kelp being the freshly planted seedlings to the lumbering triffid that lurked in the future.
Along the Carlisle road winding parallel to the riverbank, hobbled an old man. His boots were coated with dust and his features were pinched beneath his top hat. Top hats were a cause of interest back then, being a concept yet to be invented, and several children, intrigued by the visitor’s anachronistic clothing, ran laughing at his heels.
At length he reached the industrious painter and slung his knapsack onto the ground with an arthritic grunt.
“Morning,” he wheezed, the whiskers on his chin vibrating and the sound of dried mucus snapping down his gullet.
“Go
od morning, Sir,” smiled Felix back.
Madeline emerged at the sound of the kiddies, wiping her flour-dowsed hands on the tea towel.
“What can I do you for?”
“Have you ever considered the possibility of living for ever?” Thomas Hobson unfastened his canvas holdall and took out a clockwork spider from its trinket-filled depths. “There’s a free bonus toaster with every purchase this week.”
Flinders stopped reading aloud from the ancient diary and raised his eyes. There’d been a reverence in his voice throughout his oration, his fingers still trembling with the excitement of handling such a document.
“So where exactly did Thomas Hobson come from?” he asked, too preoccupied to be bothered about dangling prepositions.
Across the living room Felix Wetherby was being brought back into the realm of the living with a little help from a tumbler of brandy under Miss Duvall’s command. He didn’t get the chance to answer.
Mrs Prune stepped forward and caught the question’s thread instead.
“’Ee came from the future. Or rather the ‘now’,” she explained mysteriously, adopting her best ‘clairvoyant’ voice to add inflection to the words. “Thomas ’Obson was the inventor of the world’s first time machine in 2037. Or rather ’ee will be, if y’ see what I mean? I’ve met ’im before an’ the man’s a bloody nuisance! Mr Wetherby?”
She turned dramatically to the traumatised pensioner. He was looking fatigued in his threadbare armchair. Hobson’s eternal-life-giving arachnid was clearly visible around his wrist, where it had been all along if anybody had bothered to actually check.
“What exactly did ’Obson want in return for this contraption?”
“That’s the odd thing.” The glass tumbler in Felix’s fingers suddenly shuddered, its rim hovering just before his cracked lips. “All he wanted was a couple of dining chairs. Nothing expensive. Not even money.”
“Ah,” returned Mrs Prune, screwing up one eye and nodding to herself knowledgeably. “Antiquities, eh? ’Ee must ’ave taken ’em back to the future an’ sold ’em for a fortune. Cunning old sod. At least ’ee isn’t destroying the universe no more. Quite an ’armless enterprise by comparison although I’m not sure ’ow the inspector ’ere ’ud write that one up.”