The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read, Part 2

by Andy Ritchie

  It was as if a door to a part of my mind I never even realised existed, had just been unlocked. Suddenly, I knew everything there was to know about the camper van. Everything.

  I knew the colour of the curtains and the upholstery. I knew how the cutlery drawer was organised, where the spare bedding was stored, even what kind of washing up liquid was in the cupboard under the sink.

  I knew where the switches for the lights were, how the heater operated, and the fact that the insect screen in the skylight needed cleaning because there was a big spider’s web in there.

  I knew that the van was a little difficult to start on very cold mornings, that there was a peculiar vibration between 40 and 45 mph, and that the transition from third gear to fourth was a little bit temperamental.

  It was all there, fully accessible in my mind, memories as clear as if I had made them myself.

  That was why I didn’t ask how we would know which van was the one we wanted. Instead, I asked a different question:

  ‘Once we know it’s here, what then?’

  ‘Then I suggest we use it as a base,’ Tukaal replied, ‘just as the Researcher seemed to do when he went to Stirling.’

  ‘What about getting it off this site. We didn’t book it into the site, we don’t have any keys, we’ve no way of proving that we knew the Researcher...’

  ‘I think I may be able to take care of all that. First of all, we need to see whether the camper van is here at all.’

  So, having paid and displayed (just in case the van wasn’t there and we needed to use the Mondeo again), we walked over to the entrance of the site.

  I recognised the gate. I recognised the long, straight road that went down to the reception, river to the right, tall hedge to the left. I even recognised the top of the Researcher’s camper van, parked as it was on the other side of the hedge, quite close to where we were stood.

  But we did not immediately go towards it. Instead, we spent about 10 minutes surreptitiously ‘scoping’ the camp-site before we eventually decided that the best course of action was to simply walk onto the site as if we belonged there, go to the van and somehow find a way to break into it. In preparation, we had already been back to the Mondeo to get Tukaal’s case and my duffel bag.

  The van itself was a Swift Sunbeam 500, white in colour with little bits of blue and yellow trim. It was R-registered, which I guess makes it pretty old, but it looked in exceptionally good nick.

  As we approached the van with intent, I asked Tukaal whether he was going to use some more of his nanites.

  ‘I doubt whether nanites will work. By the looks of the age of this vehicle, there won’t be any electronic locking, so I think we may have to resort to brute strength.’

  What he actually meant by brute strength I never saw because, as we approached, he asked me to check whether there were any electrical hook-up points in the immediate vicinity of the van and whether the van itself was connected to one.

  Fortunately, there was neither, but whilst I was checking the electricity situation, Tukaal somehow managed to open the driver’s side door and, after a few more seconds, started the camper van up.

  Almost immediately, though, he turned the engine off again and clambered into the back of the van to open the door on the passenger’s side which gave access to the van’s living area.

  The inside of the camper van was just as I remembered it...or just as the Researcher remembered it...or just as it was in the Researcher’s memories...or whatever.

  On entering the van, there was a unit which contained a sink, a gas hob, an oven, a fridge and a drawer of cutlery. Opposite this was a very compact shower room-cum-toilet with a couple of small cupboards with mirror doors behind which were toothpaste, deodorant and hair-gel. Next to the loo there was a wardrobe, sat above the heater, which held clothes and coats. At the back of the van were two sets of opposing seats which converted into a bed, and above this were a number of little cupboards which held crockery, books, files, stationery and all manner of stuff. Finally, above where the driver and passenger sat, there was another sleeping area where, judging by the presence of a sleeping bag and pillow, the Researcher presumably spent his last night’s sleep.

  The upholstery was a strange mix of pale orange, mauve and lilac in one of those crazy patterns that only seem to exist in caravans, and the curtains were also mauve, though these were a little faded.

  ‘Close the curtains, please, Jeth,’ Tukaal asked as he placed his metal case on the work-top and started to get out a number of pieces of equipment.

  ‘I take it we are not leaving straight away.’

  ‘No, there are some things we need to do first.’

  The way Tukaal said it, either intentionally or unintentionally, made it sound ominous.

  ‘And what would they be?’ I asked nervously as I closed the last of the curtains at the front of the van. Even with the curtains closed, the interior of the van was not dark as daylight was pouring through the skylight in the ceiling.

  ‘First of all, I need you to extract my neural net from inside my skull.’

  I laughed.

  He did not.

  I stopped laughing and stared at him with a look of what I hoped was incredulity.

  He simply stared expressionlessly back at me.

  ‘You’re shitting me, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I’m not ‘shitting’ you,’ Tukaal replied, his face chillingly serious. ‘As you know, the energy signature of the power source of my neural net is what Mendelssohn and his men were able to use to track us. Whilst it is active, we are extremely limited in where we can go because we can’t get within a few feet of anything electrical which is hooked up to the grid...’

  ‘Hence the need to check for any plugs outside.’

  Tukaal nodded.

  ‘It is possible to remove the neural net power cells from inside my head, just as I did with the power cells from my URG at Sainsburys car park.’

  I didn’t like the sound of it one bit, and I said so.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of this one bit. If I take out your brain, won’t that kill you?’

  Tukaal laughed in the same way as a teacher laughs at a child who has failed to grasp a simple mathematical principle (at least, that’s what my teachers did).

  ‘The neural net is not my brain, Jeth. It’s a recording device, a data archive and a remote control. It’s like your laptop computer. It is not what I use to think, it is merely a tool which enables me to do things more easily.’

  ‘And you want me to take it out of your head.’

  Tukaal smiled.

  ‘Precisely.’

  I gulped, and I kept gulping for the next ten minutes as Tukaal explained to me what it was I needed to do, how it should be done, and which of the array of tools from his metal case I was to use to do it.

  Then, all too soon, we were ready.

  I took a deep breath and asked him if he was ready.

  He calmly said that he was.

  I took another deep breath and picked up something that resembled a pen.

  My hand was shaking badly, so I took yet another deep breath in an effort to calm myself.

  It didn’t really work.

  ‘Won’t there be blood. Don’t we need some tissues or stuff like that?’

  I think I only mentioned this in an effort to postpone the inevitable.

  ‘The instrument will cauterise as it cuts,’ Tukaal replied patiently.

  I guess it was some small relief that, as I cut open the back of his head, I wasn’t going to see a river of blood pouring all over his back. It did nothing, however, to ease my trepidation.

  Eventually, after what must have been the umpteenth deep breath, I pressed the button at the top of the ‘pen’ and a reassuring blue light came on. Then, as instructed by Tukaal, I held it about two inches from the centre of the back of his neck, just below the hairline, and held down the second button (near the ‘nib’) with my index finger.

  At the point on the b
ack of Tukaal’s neck where the pen was pointing, a little green dot appeared, like the dot from a laser pen. Almost immediately, the skin around the green dot began to darken.

  ‘Start moving up in a straight line, Jeth, slow and steady.’

  I did as he asked, and felt myself gagging a little as I watched the skin split, forming a slit in the back of Tukaal’s head which, as I moved the green dot steadily upwards, widened.

  The edges of cut skin were slightly blackened, but thankfully, and as Tukaal predicted, there was no blood. What there was, however, was a rather unpleasant odour that made me feel nauseous, akin to the unpleasant smell of burnt meat. It became more pronounced once I started cutting through skin covered with Tukaal’s short black hair and every now and again, there was a wisp of smoke as a hair was incinerated by the invisible beam from the ‘pen’.

  After about a minute of steady(ish) cutting, there was a four inch gash in the back of Tukaal’s head, from his neck upwards.

  This was when he asked me to stop and get the comb.

  ‘What I need you to do,’ he said, ‘is to use the comb to move the hair out of the way so that you can cut the scalp from the top of the cut you have made in a straight line to a point just above my right ear. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I croaked from a mouth that was terribly dry.

  I picked up the comb and, as Tukaal had suggested, used it to keep the hair out of the way. After all, if I had just cut straight across, he would have ended up with a rather unsightly gap in his hair where the hot beam from the pen had cut them all away. As it was, he was just being left with an extremely unsightly scar as the skin split and...this was where it started to peel back, as the cut began to get close to the ear, the flap of skin that I had created began to peel back like a piece of wallpaper that wasn’t properly hung...

  ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ I remember saying as I saw the inside of the skin and what was, to all intents and purposes, the back of Tukaal’s skull. As the flap of skin peeled further away, so I saw strands of what looked like very thin strips of moist chewing gum stretching out between skin and skull, mostly white, but some of it a snotty yellow.

  I made a conscious effort not to look at it, concentrating instead on making sure that I didn’t cut the top of Tukaal’s ear off.

  ‘Once you’ve reached a point just behind the top of the ear, Jeth, you need to cut downwards round the back of the ear until you reach a point just below the ear-lobe.’

  With as much care as I could, I began to cut as he had suggested. Unfortunately, as I got about halfway down, I found that the loose flap of skin that was being formed was starting to get in the way. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it, so, irrespective of how unhygienic it may have been, I used the comb to keep it to one side so that I could continue to cut unhindered.

  Still there was the smell of singeing flesh and still there were the strands of stretching goo.

  I was not enjoying myself one little bit.

  After about another minute, though, I had thankfully finished this third cut and, having pressed the button on the top of the pen to turn it off, I found myself looking at the bizarre sight of the back of someone’s head with the right, bottom corner exposed and a flap of skin hanging down onto the collar of their shirt.

  ‘How are you feeling, Jeth?’

  I was feeling not at all well.

  Though I’d seen things similar to this countless times in countless films, nothing can ever quite prepare you for seeing something like this in the flesh. This was no special effect, this was the back of a man’s head, skin cut away, skull exposed...

  Only, when I thought about it, this was a special effect. Tukaal’s whole body was a special effect, a ‘shell’, created on a far-off world to imitate a human being down to the finest detail.

  This wasn’t real. This wasn’t skin I’d been cutting, this wasn’t bone I could see, those weren’t sinews or whatever that were stretched between the two.

  This was all artificial, all synthetic.

  And suddenly, I didn’t feel nauseous anymore because I realised that I wasn’t performing surgery; I was, instead, performing...maintenance, like a mechanic on a car, removing a front wing to do some work on the chassis.

  That’s what I was doing...and that thought made me feel a whole lot better.

  ‘What do I do now?’

  ‘You should be able to see the heads of three screws...’

  ‘Screws? Are you telling me that this super-duper ‘shell’ thing of yours is held together by screws?’

  I don’t know why I found that fact so bizarre, I just did.

  ‘When it comes to technological basics, Jeth, you will find that a lot of worlds have a lot of things in common...like the screw. Shall we continue?’

  I couldn’t be certain, but I have a feeling that Tukaal’s tone was one of ‘oh, grow up, you moron’ and, to a degree, I can sympathise with that. After all, it must have been more than a little annoying to sit there, with the back of your head cut open, listening to some human buffoon going on about the fact that someone has used some screws!

  ‘I’ve already selected the correct fitting on the multi-tool.’

  He handed me what looked like a Swiss Army knife on steroids, out of which was sticking what looked to me like the end of a basic Phillips screwdriver which I inserted into the first screw, just at the back of the ear. Disturbingly, as I pushed the screwdriver into the notch in the top of the screwhead, some of the yellow sinewy stuff oozed out around it. Not nice.

  ‘Clockwise or anti-clockwise?’ I asked

  ‘Oh, er, clockwise, I think.’

  So, I thought, not quite as common. But I didn’t say that. Instead, I gingerly started to try to turn the screw clockwise (which felt a bit counter-intuitive, I must admit) to loosen it. As equally disturbing as the sight of the yellow goo was the sight of Tukaal’s head also moving a little as I applied more and more pressure.

  ‘It’s not moving,’ I hissed.

  ‘Keep trying, Jeth,’ Tukaal said encouragingly.

  By now I’d placed my left hand on the top of Tukaal’s head to give me stability and something to push against. I was scared of stripping the screw-head as I had done countless times before at home when attempting DIY...

  Then it gave a little, and I let out a little cry of satisfaction.

  A little more pressure and a little more give until, eventually, the screw began to rotate more easily and I was able to let go of Tukaal’s head. When I finally got the screw out, I found it was about a quarter of an inch long, was flat ended and as light as a feather. I put it on the work-top beside the comb and the skin-cutting pen.

  The second screw, which was almost central to the back of Tukaal’s head, came out slightly more easily, but the third was as stubborn as the first. It was also more difficult to get to because it was right next to the flap of skin and Tukaal had to lean his head right forward so that I could get at it. I actually had to ease the flap of skin down a little and also use the fingers of my left hand to hold apart what I can only describe as ligaments so that I could get the screwdriver into the screw head.

  Worse than that, though, was the fact that when I did (after much cursing and grunting) eventually get it loose, I became acutely aware of the fact that there was a distinct possibility that, when the screw was fully unscrewed, I could drop it and end up losing it somewhere in his chest cavity...and, believe me, even though I had convinced myself that this was maintenance and not surgery, the idea of hunting around in Tukaal’s innards looking for a quarter-inch screw was not something that appealed to me at all. It was therefore with great care that I unscrewed the last screw and, when it was fully loosened, I used two fingers of my left hand to hold it whilst I slowly eased it clear and placed it with the other two on the worktop.

  ‘There,’ I said with a deep, satisfied sigh, ‘that’s the screws out.’

  ‘Good. Now you should be able to see the edges of the plate which the screws were holding in place.’
<
br />   I couldn’t, mainly because the surface of Tukaal’s skull, or the plate as he called it, was covered with the same combination of stretchy white sinews and icky yellow pus that was stuck to the back of the flap of skin, a fact I felt compelled to tell him.

  ‘You’re skull is covered in some really grim-looking goo.’

  ‘It’s just a sub-cutaneous (I had to look that up!) lubricant which let’s the skin move against the artificial cranium.’

  ‘It smells.’

  It really did smell, actually, and it had the same smell as stuff that has been under one of your toe-nails for a few days, the smell of sweat that’s gone off.

  But Tukaal was unsympathetic.

  ‘You’ll need to use your fingertips to find the distinct groove which represents the edge of the plate. Once you’ve found the edge, you’ll notice that, near the ear, there’s a slightly bigger part of the groove. That’s where you need to insert this part of the multi-tool to prise the plate free.’

  Whilst he had been speaking, Tukaal had been messing with the ‘Intergalactic Swiss Army Knife’ and, instead of a Philips screwdriver tool, it was now a large metal spike tool.

  He handed it to me and prepared himself once more.

  I looked at the stubby spike in my hand for a couple of seconds and then, with what seemed like my millionth deep breath, I ran the index finger of my left hand over the surface of his skull, feeling for the tell-tale groove.

  Fortunately, it did not take me long to find it, and nor did it take me long to find the special part of it that Tukaal had said was where I should insert the metal spike which was to be used as a lever.

  ‘Are you ready for this?’

  ‘I am,’ Tukaal replied, fortunately resisting the temptation to nod.

  ‘Okay, here goes.’

  The plate required so little pressure and popped out so quickly that, if it hadn’t been for the lattice-work of white sinews, it would have ended up on the camper van floor. Instead, it simply hung there, like an insect caught in a spider’s web.

  Gingerly, and not knowing what to expect, I took hold of the plate and eased it away from the last few remaining sinews, whereupon I placed it on the worktop so that I could look at what its removal had revealed.