by Brian Hughes
And Jannice Applebotham collapsed in a heap.
Portion the Ninth: What goes around…
June the Nineteenth, 11.05 a.m. 114 Applegate. The living room door creaked slowly open beneath Benjamin Hobson’s sneaker.
Still wearing his RAF trench coat, despite the spitting heat outside, he navigated the labyrinth of burger cartons.
Two carrier bags brimming with groceries cut into his fingers.
“Ah, morning Jess.”
Jess looked up from his armchair, scratched his hirsute chest through his bean-stained vest and muttered something unintelligible. (Unintelligible, but no doubt facetious.)
“I wondered when you were getting up. You were dead to the world when I saw you earlier.”
The bags went down with a thump, a French loaf snapping impotently.
“Deader than an aardvark with dead maggots in its half-eaten, extremely dead skull!”
Benjamin’s hobby was reiterating points with needlessly wordy similes.
“That must have been one hell of a deep sleep you were having?”
Jess made no response.
Instead he dug into the shopping and pulled out a sumptuous looking pork pie.
“Just seen Jar-nette and Thomas at Singh’s Groceries,” his brother continued, opening the curtains. “She said that Jannice had been brought home from the Uni feeling nauseous. Must be all the pressure of her exams, eh?”
There was a grunt. It sounded similar to a backfiring pig.
The pork pie was devoured.
Jess stood up, dragged his dressing gown closed and stumbled sweatily off to bed.
It was a winter’s afternoon in Devil’s Copse.
Cravats of snow hung from the trees as Jess Hobson watched the ducks tumbling across their pond.
At length he hoisted his stomach as Jannice Applebotham sauntered through the thicket.
“Hello Jess…”
There was anger behind her words today. An untrustworthy edge that ran up his spine, cutting his goosebumps to the quick.
“What do you know about dreams?”
“Listen Jannice, I’m sorry about what ’appened…”
To be honest, Jess wasn’t sorry at all.
“I didn’t know what I was doin’. Y’ know what it’s like when you’re fast asleep?”
“Oh yes, I certainly do, Jess…”
There was a sudden tightening sensation about his wrists.
Jess looked round.
A pair of handcuffs had mysteriously appeared, cutting into his flesh with just that bit too much enthusiasm.
As he watched a long, barbed flail seemed to grow from Jannice’s fingers.
“But just in case you needed reminding,” Jannice added, grinning maniacally. “I thought that I’d better fill you in!”
Intermezzo the Seventh
“Now, that was a charming story.” Lucy lit her cigarette and sat back in her chair, watching the squirrels bounding around the treetops through the long cafe windows. “I think I’m inspired now to write something romantic...something blue, although not in the ‘Movie’ sense of course.”
“Life is like an ocean,” said the stranger, ignoring her sarcasm. “Full of emotions, often grey, sometimes violent but always best after a storm.”
“Or in your case it’s more like a pig trough...” Lucy added. “Full of rotten old swill...”
She glanced at her watch, the blue smoke from her cigarette coiling round her wrist.
“Just time for one more,” she said, pulling her cuff back down. “Then I’ll have to get going. The shops’ll be shutting soon and I’ve got to get Bill’s tea ready.”
“What walls we build for ourselves according to society’s blueprints,” said the stranger, philosophically. “We’re not content with the imprisonment of childhood. We have to construct our own jails as soon as we leave school.”
“Perhaps as well...” Lucy replied. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have sat here all afternoon listening to your terminal tales...so, what’s this?”
She selected a long, tapering needle from the collection. It was similar in many respects to the one she’d chosen earlier, except this one had a number of wires and broken computer chips dangling from one end.
“Now that,” said the stranger taking it from her and holding it up to the light so that it sparkled and shone. “Is the remains of a transmogrification device.”
“It’s not just part of a knackered old record player then?” Lucy asked.
“Far from it,” replied the travelled, unconcerned by her increasingly cynical attitude. “This once belonged to a highly advanced machine, far beyond the technical capabilities of mere humans. And for that we should be grateful.”
The Barley Principle
Hors d’oeuvres
There are mornings and then there are mornings. And this particular morning was one of the latter.
Somewhere off the eastern shoulder of Andromeda, in a far-away corner of the Milky Way, a large chunk of rock, roughly five miles across and three miles wide, encircled a cloudless planet.
It was doubtful that the rock had a name, even to the locals who often used it as an intergalactic marker buoy.
It was just one of those features that shone in the night sky when viewed from the planet, too small to be a moon, too large to be ignored by passing tourists.
It was, of course, only morning on one side of the asteroid.
Days, as a rule, didn’t last very long here due to the speed of its rotation. They varied between three hours and one hour forty-five minutes depending on solar storms, passing meteorites and how many of the inhabitants had gathered together on one side for a siesta at any given time.
This morning the tranquillity was being disturbed.
Air brakes hissed.
Not very loudly because the atmosphere was only thin.
But loud enough to lift a few old sandwich wrappers from the ground.
Geysers of steam filled the horizon, resembling complicated works of topiary.
Stanchions creaked and clouds of dust sluggishly swelled from the pockmarked surface.
Numerous dodons, the small frog-like creatures with their eyes on stalks that inhabited this isolated domain, scattered in all directions, surprised by the shuttlecraft’s landing.
Then came the squeal of an air lock, the clank of a mortise key and, finally, two human figures dressed in diving suits that would have better belonged in a Jules Verne novel cautiously inched their way down the rusted ladder.
As he reached the lowest rung the taller of the figures stumbled, ending up helmet-first in a mound of dodon gwak.
“Bloody marvellous! I’ve only just had this suit cleaned!”
“Are you sure you left it here?”
Cissy reached the ground, tested it gingerly with one toecap, and then took a giant leap away from the craft.
Moments later she was kicking at the corner of the abandoned picnic hamper where, several hours before, the two of them had been eating pickled dodon egg butties.
“I’m not sure to be honest,” Commander Hogan replied, struggling to his boots and flicking a boulder of straw-filled dung from his shoulder. It span listlessly into the starscape. “I could have left it on Earth for all I know.”
“You didn’t leave it at mother’s, did you?” There was an amount of panic in Cissy’s voice now, muffled as it was through her visor. “That was the last time you actually used it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Fido was now a seventeen-stone spotted dragon burning holes in the sideboard. Just the sort of irresponsible thing you’d do without thinking!”
“No, of course not!”
Hogan lifted the gingham tablecloth with his right boot and checked beneath it on the off chance that the DNA Reconstructer might have been blown there by a solar draught.
“I’m certain we had it when we accidentally collided with that Gnart Beast’s backside off RiMal Four.”
“Yeah...”
Cissy grimaced as the recent memory reared
up in her mind.
It was a particularly unpleasant memory full of moist bits and dripping noises.
“I told you not to go reading Moby Dick on a full stomach. No wonder you fell asleep at the steering column.”
“We were on auto-pilot!”
“I don’t care! The bloody book was so boring the computer fell asleep!” The statement was delivered with an acerbic bite. “That novel’s a menace, you know? Especially when you read it out loud. It took us hours to navigate our way out of that Gnart Beast’s intestines! And look at the mess you left in Sector Eighty-five B when you finally emerged from its ar...”
“Nope...it isn’t here!” Hogan fortuitously interrupted. “Come on, let’s look for it on Palbo Moon. And if all else fails we can pick up some goobledons for Allyson Moore while we’re there.”
The leaden clump of boot soles on the ladder again.
The squeal of the hatch being locked.
Moments later the Icarus was rising on a mattress of steam, the inquisitive dodons, who’d stuck their heads above the rim of the crater to watch their departure, suddenly receiving tonsures from the jets of hot water.
“Seriously Marshal, you don’t suppose it could have fallen into the wrong hands, do you?” came Cissy’s voice from the cockpit as the engines geared up for launch.
“You never did have much faith in human nature, did you, Cissy?” Hogan replied with just that little too much inflection to sound convincing. “I doubt that anyone from Earth would have the brains to work out what it was for anyhow, let alone how to put it to use.”
The engine spluttered, backfired once and blew the tablecloth across three of the dodons’ heads.
“I wouldn’t worry about it if I was you,” he continued, tugging at the choke and trying again. “It’ll be perfectly safe, I assure you.”
The Starter Course
“Betcha’ve never seen one as big as that before, eh Mrs Tulip?"
Albert Brasswick, if not Greyminster’s finest then certainly the town’s most notorious butcher, was finding it difficult to remain standing upright beneath the weight of the drumstick. It was approximately the same size and shape as a belisha beacon, only fatter and smouldering slightly around one end.
Albert’s huge cratered head was turning purple and his spine was arched well beyond its usual hump.
“That is a big one, Mr Brasswick,” replied the pensioner in a feeble voice, sliding her spectacles down her nose and peering so myopically at the enormous chicken leg that her cheeks began to sizzle. “What sort of bird did that come off?”
“A bloody big ’un!”
With a grunt Brasswick unloaded the snack onto his counter.
The cabinet groaned and sagged slightly in the middle.
“It’d keep Tiddles in titbits f’r a while, that’s for certain,” he added, optimistically.
Mrs Tulip squinted at the ruddy-cheeked butcher whose head appeared to be expanding and contracting through the wall of heat.
“Now there’s a thought.” She opened her purse much to Brasswick’s greedy approval. “I’ll take two, I think.”
“Right you are, Luv! Danny?”
Brasswick craned his neck around and hollered into the cellar, never once letting his gaze drop from the coppers in Mrs Tulip’s withered grip.
“Fetch us another o’ those ‘special’ legs, lad, and this time try not to get it wedged in the doorframe.”
“Where on earth are you getting them from?” asked Mrs Tulip discreetly.
She might have been ancient and she might have looked like the sort of person who wouldn’t have frightened an extremely timid mouse.
But her curiosity had been piqued.
“That’s exactly what I’d like to know!”
All eyes suddenly turned to the gentleman filling Brasswick’s shop doorway.
He was a dowdy looking official, wearing a long brown raincoat and a bowler hat. Beneath one arm he carried a clipboard, the accompanying pen being stuffed behind his ear for emergencies.
“Seth Grimshaw, ’Ealth and Safety,” he introduced himself, his almost-perfectly-square Hitler moustache glinting in the afternoon sunlight.
Closing the door he stepped into the butcher’s shop determinedly.
“No need t’ shake ’ands, Brasswick. We’ve met before.”
The interloper stopped before the counter and rocked backwards and forwards on the heels of his immaculately polished boots with an air of authority.
“There’s been a lot o’ rumours going round Greyminster about your wares. Rumours that, up until now, I wouldn’t ’ave believed.”
Removing the pencil from behind his ear he gave the drumstick a prod.
The skin popped with a sweaty sigh and a trickle of juice made its escape towards the counter.
“’Owever, the evidence is now incontrovertible.”
There was the faintest of squeaks as Grimshaw scribbled something down on his clipboard.
Concluding the note with an exaggerated fullstop he jammed the pencil back behind his ear and leant towards the dumbstruck butcher.
“So, Brasswick me old mate, could y’ kindly inform me as to the name and address of your supplier?”
If Mr Grimshaw had been local then he wouldn’t have even bothered to ask such a question.
There was only one supplier of farm produce around Greyminster. And that was Giles Barley of Nine Acres Farm.
As for the abnormal size of his off-cuts recently, well...Giles had been experimenting with genetic engineering methods for as long as anyone could remember. It had come as no surprise to the residents of the milltown that he’d finally produced something spectacular.
In the past Giles’ experiments had mainly consisted of injecting his chickens with water to make them fatter without the need to buy grain.
Or sticking bicycle pumps up the rectums of his sheep because grass wasn’t cheap and, besides, there was something entertaining about watching their expressions.
This morning he was busy.
In his specially enlarged chicken coop Farmer Barley rubbed two huge boulders of guano between his soiled fingers.
Then he sniffed their grimy tips, grimaced to himself and wondered which of the local drug dealers would give him thirty quid a ton for such good shit.
That was when he heard the sound of a 1940’s Humber pulling up in the slurry outside.
Grabbing his blunderbuss Giles inched his head out through the corrugated door.
He was just in time to see Mr Grimshaw stepping out of the jalopy onto the cobbled yard, his goloshas sparkling.
The car door slammed with a thunk and Grimshaw took stock his situation.
“Geddorf moi land, Grimshaw!” The gun was raised to Giles’ narrowing eyes. For a moment it swung there like some sort of deadly signpost, Swiss penknives of sunlight bursting from its muzzle.
“You don’t frighten me, Barley!” Grimshaw replied without concern, hoisting his briefcase from the back seat and holding his official Health and Safety card at arm’s length. Not that Barley would have known the difference between it and a library ticket, but official is as official does.
“If I don’t report in by four o’clock this afternoon the ’ole of the police force will be descending on this place. So stand aside and let me get on.”
Giles reluctantly lowered his gun. He might have been illiterate and he might have been several steps the wrong side of stupid, but he was well aware that his ‘Late Night Gentlemen’s Club’ was highly illegal. The last thing he wanted right now was a group of pot-bellied policeman snooping around. Even if some of the higher echelons of the legal establishment were actually members.
With a grunt he stepped into the yard. Then he attempted to disguise the rusted strip of corrugated iron that was the door to his coop by standing in front of it with his legs wide apart. “Waddya want any’ow, Grimshaw?”
“Well, for starters,” Grimshaw went on, his white teeth flashing and his rectangular moustache wagging maliciously
. “You can stand back from that shed you inbred dolt and let me ’ave a look inside.”
The First Course
It was dark in the lofty coop. Shapes and shadows filled the faraway corners.
There was something very unnerving about the way that they moved. Every so often one of the makeshift windows that rimmed the ceiling would darken as some feathered colossus stalked past it in silhouette.
“This is all very irregular, y’ know, Barley?” said Grimshaw with a snuffle.
He stepped over a huge mound of what appeared to be very regular droppings.
Well, regular that is apart from their rugby ball size and dimensions of course.
“And this is what you’re usin’ to turn these poor little chickens into over-bloated freaks, is it?”
Giles made to grab the DNA Reconstructer but Grimshaw already had it up to the end of his nose.
He turned it inquisitively in the dim light, examining the LCD, the needle at one end and the tiny flickering keys covered in alien gothic script.
“Put thart down, Grimshaw. Tha’s no right snoopin’ round ’ere. You townsfolk don’t understand us country ways!”
“I understand blatant disregard f’r the laws concerning genetic modification, Barley!” Grimshaw snapped, peering into the darkness.
An enormous bantam, roughly fifteen high and perched on tiny legs that could barely take the strain, blinked pathetically back at him.
There was something hideously stupid and bright orange about it.
Grimshaw was reminded of Des O’Conner.
“Bloody ’Ell, that is a fat ’un!”
“Oi said gimme thart back an’ Oi meant it!”
With a sudden lunge Giles Barley grabbed the diamond-shaped machine.
A twist! A yank! And the farmer wrestled it from the health inspector’s grip.
“This is private property Oi tells ya, an’ tha’s not welcome ’ere!”
“Let’s not do anythin’ rash, Barley!”
Grimshaw stumbled backwards, caught off guard, as the idiotic labourer wielded the device above his head.