treacle oblivion.
The talons released Roy into the nearest cavernous mouth and he tumbled, panic stricken, into a glutinous, soul-devouring, black ocean. Huge shapes butted him this way and that until he was sucked down into a deep sump where dark energy gathered up quantum detritus. This was the toilet at the end of the Universe.
Something massive was bouncing on his chest.
And there were words.
“Keep going Mavis or we’ll lose him.”
There was an exasperated voice. “Stupid little idiots - why do they do it?”
A flashing blue light briefly penetrated Roy’s eyelids before the pumpkin creatures returned to chase him, followed by the rock faces, Kat and his gang, dinosaurs and, eventually, marshmallow-faced mushrooms.
“He’s back Sid. Let’s get him into the wagon.”
Then the throbbing started. Roy could feel his whole body rise and fall with each nauseous spasm. He was crashing through doors, being tossed from trolley to table, from table to bed, from bed down a bottomless pit filled with huge, writhing worms.
Then came real pain.
He screamed.
“We have to get that stuff out of his stomach before we can deal with the fractures,” a calm voice decided.
There was the jab of a hypo in his thigh and the writhing of the worms turned into a sedate waltz as his stomach was turned inside out.
“Next of kin?” Another voice called out.
“Being informed.”
“They needn’t rush. He’ll be in the operating theatre for some time.”
A mask was placed over Roy’s face and at last his nightmare came to an end.
The next voice he heard sounded distant. By its edge of authority it wasn’t a nurse.
“Come on, give the doctors a clue, love. What drugs were you doing?”
“Dunno,” he murmured. “Friend gave it to me.”
“What? Again? Just who is this friend of yours? If we can’t do him for supplying drugs, he should be prosecuted for being a twerp in charge of a chemistry set.”
Roy managed to focus on the young woman taking notes. So far she had only managed to jot down ‘unresponsive’.
“What happened?” he groaned.
“Long or short version?”
“Can’t remember.”
“Short version then?”
“Tell me?”
“You thought you were Batman and tried to fly off the balcony of your flat. Pity you didn’t remember that it was three floors up.”
The Handbag Gang
The tapestry flowers embellished with sequins was Lorraine’s favourite, closely followed by the embossed olive velvet and linen embroidered with thistles and cornflowers.
It was an odd hobby for a 15-year-old, collecting handbags and other accessories, especially as few of them were ever used. It was just as strange that her two closest friends, Sam and Toby, shared the same passion. Every season they would display their collection at a local bazaar to buy, sell and exchange handbags, brightly coloured silk scarves, and gloves. Leather and plastic were banned. Every item had to be fabric; linen, velvet or canvas, lovingly hand embellished with appliqué, needlepoint, embroidery or beads, and very colourful.
Sam had the skill to mend, make and create new items, an ability inherited from her mother who was a florist expert at designing wreathes and bespoke greetings cards for every occasion. Toby was 16 and had a steady boyfriend, but that did not interfere with her dedication to fashion accessories. In fact, Luke was happy to help out, searching for antique handbags, scarves and gloves in charity shops and boutique sales.
And it was Luke who made that extraordinary discovery. None of the friends had seen a handbag quite like it before, its iridescent satin catching the light like butterfly wings.
It also had zipped compartments. When Luke had searched each one in the charity shop they were empty. The mere fact that someone had donated something this expensive was remarkable in itself. Expecting them to leave valuables inside it as well was a little too much to hope for, but Lorraine needed to make sure that the odd diamond had not been caught in a seam. She rummaged about the handbag’s interior and pulled out a black velvet cube.
“But I went through it thoroughly,” protested Luke, “and nobody but us has touched it since. It’s not one of you having a joke, is it?” He knew that the Handbag Gang was too dedicated to waste time on playing tricks like that, but it seemed to be the only explanation.
Lorraine placed it on the trestle table with their recent acquisitions. “What is it? Looks like a jewellery box, but doesn’t seem to open. It’s too large for a key ring and doesn’t have a link to attach it to anything else.”
“Perhaps it’s a demon taxi driver’s fluffy dice,” suggested Toby.
The four of them stood gazing at the mysterious black cube.
Then it moved - very slightly, but just enough to make them jump.
“My God! It must have batteries,” exclaimed Luke.
“It’s an electronic toy of some sort,” Toby agreed. “Perhaps it operates by Wi-Fi.”
“To do what?”
The words were hardly out of Luke’s mouth when its sides opened.
Like a piece of origami, huge, iridescent petals unfurled.
“Oh that is too weird!”
The four friends backed away as the cube rapidly increased in size and exuded a grey duvet of mist.
The room grew dark.
Lorraine, Toby, Sam and Luke would have dashed out if they could find the door.
Then the ghostly mist dissipated and the room returned to normal. The cube resumed its original shape, as innocent as a fur fabric dice dangling in the windscreen of a taxi, albeit driven by a demon.
The Handbag Gang refused to discuss what had happened. None of them indulged in illegal substances or was prone to hallucinations, so embarrassment inhibited them from talking about it.
Months passed. It did not occur to them that the odd experience had been responsible for the sudden burst of energy that had encouraged them to transform their innocent interest in fashion accessories into a serious business. They called their new brand Butterfly Designs.
Within a couple of years the young adults were supplying accessories on eBay to brighten up drab society. They soon had the funds to expand into clothing and their designs were mass produced for the high street outlets they established. Their commitment to colour and decoration became an obsession. They did not understand why, when people were more affluent than they had ever been before, they dressed in such dull, uniform colours. The chemicals that enabled modern textiles to be dyed in brilliant, exotic shades had never been used to their full advantage in the West. Designers, especially those of the major stores, seemed committed to the dull end of the spectrum as though anything else would scare off the customers. Even the fruit and vegetables on supermarket aisles had better colour coordination than the clothing department.
Lorraine, Toby, Sam and Luke were determined that fashion should embrace bright hues to reflect the glorious world they lived in.
After five years of trading, the entrepreneurs were controlling a huge clothing empire with outlets across Europe. At first fashion magazines had ranted at their unsubtle blending of colours. Butterfly Designs ignored the outcry. Their skirts, jackets, trousers, shirts, frocks and blouses were spangled with beads, sequins, embroidery and appliqué. And then - horror of horrors - they designed a catalogue of bright, brash clothes aimed at the senior market. People in their eighties deserted M&S and wore vivid, clashing colours to demonstrate their lack of respect for convention and drably dressed members of younger generations.
Soon, bright colours were everywhere.
Schools changed the compulsory grey, navy blue and dark green uniforms for rainbow colours which pupils could mix and match. Military designers suggested silver braid and buttons on lavender for a range of dress uniforms, but were promptly reprimanded before they started adding sequins to combat gear.
No l
onger just a fashion statement, brightly coloured clothes, from Bermuda shorts to burkhas, became the norm across the globe. Rich and poor alike now felt free to express their individuality in the way they dressed whether neat or sloppy. People became happier, more confident, and satisfied with life. Cases of depression dropped and mindless crime became rarer.
Lorraine, with her new partner Larry, Sam, resolutely single, Toby, now married to Luke, decided to take stock of what they had achieved in ten years. Each of them was so wealthy they could have spent the rest of their lives in indolent luxury if they had chosen to. None of them would have admitted it, but they had joined the self-satisfied elite that at one time they had taken such delight in ridiculing with their outrageous designs. The Handbag Gang no longer wore the clothes they had created. Everything was haut couture, tasteful and very, very expensive. Perhaps it was time to retire and let the huge clothing empire they had established float on the stock exchange.
Those early, precious items they had collected before launching Butterfly Designs had been lovingly packed away. Now it was time to remove everything from the crates stored at Lorraine’s mansion and decide whether it should be retained to litter the interiors of their immaculate, palatial homes.
The beaded and embroidered handbags were first to be pulled out. Then Luke came across the iridescent, satin bag that he had discovered so long ago.
There was something inside it, so he shook it out.
A black velvet cube fell onto the polished pine floor and bounced against the crystal encrusted geode Lorraine had collected in South America.
“What’s that?” Toby asked.
Luke shrugged. “Don’t know. Can’t be worth anything.”
“Chuck it away then.”
“Okay.” Luke opened the door of the stove in the centre of the open plan room and tossed the cube into it.
The change was imperceptible at first. Then slowly colour began to leach away from everything; their fine clothes, furnishings, and even the garden furniture outside.
For a moment the companions hardly noticed.
Their world was losing its rainbow hues to reflect the dull state of mind they had dwindled into.
As colour seeped away from the world, with it went the friendly smiles of strangers. The world’s pessimistic outlook returned, so did the petty squabbles, intolerance and murderous wars.
That night the small cube sat in the dying embers of the fire. It shook the ash from its velvet skin like a small dog, and then shot up the flue and out into the dark sky embroidered with nebulae, gas giants and diamond stars.
Threep!
It was not much taller than Jenny and sprouted hair like a startled floor mop.
Most disconcertingly, it went, “Threep!”
The sound was far from birdlike and demanded a response.
“Hello,” said Jenny.
“Threep!”
The creature fiddled with an array of buttons on its baggy, blue overalls. “Hello,” it eventually said.
“Who are you?” asked Jenny. She knew it was wrong to talk to strangers, but this creature was so strange it was hard to resist.
“My-code-is-Omega-20-in-your-language.”
“What does that mean?”
“I-am-the-last.”
“The last of what?”
“It-is-complicated.”
Adults always seemed to use that excuse when they didn’t want to explain something.
“My name is Jenny. I’m eight. How old are you?”
“My-allocation-has-no-time-frame.”
Well, Omega 20 certainly sounded like an adult.
“What are you doing here?”
“Observing.”
Jenny looked about them. There was nothing much to observe beyond the hedgerows and farm outhouses. It was always entertaining to watch Matron, the sow, wallowing, but she was now inside suckling a litter.
“Observing what?”
At last something Omega 20 didn’t have an answer for.
With a whirring sound punctuated by several “Threeps!” the strange creature disappeared.
How odd, thought Jenny. Those students employed during the summer must have been playing a joke. Either that, or filming a science-fiction movie. Her family always used to play jokes until, without warning, they became very serious. A few weeks ago, Jenny had arrived home from her cousin’s and thought she had been brought back to the wrong house. Nobody was the same. Paul, older brother, no longer heaped sugar into his tea; Buster, the dog, instead of rushing to greet everyone at any pretext, was slinking away as though they were liable to kick him. The worst thing was the change in her mother. She no longer smiled, just looked vacuous as though newly arrived from a different planet.
Jenny was still given breakfast, lunch and dinner, made to get up in the mornings and sent to school, but there was no more home-made ice cream, plum jam or evening trips to the supermarket. All the joy had drained from her family. It was hardly surprising the eight-year-old was starting to see strange creatures that went “Threep!”
To make matters worse, Bob and Sid had left without warning at the same time, leaving her father and brother to manage the farm by themselves.
Money had always been tight, so the family was dependent on her mother’s salary for shelf stocking at the very supermarket that took forever to pay for their calabrese and trimmed parsnips. However much Jenny’s parents moaned about that, they always used to laugh it off as the price for being blessed with such a wonderful view over the Downs. That was usually followed by ribald comments about Matron being less greedy than company directors who must have had similar waistlines. Now they weren’t bothered one way or another.
Then the morning after meeting “Threep!”, a new farmhand arrived.
Hopefully she would lighten the atmosphere once everyone didn’t need to work so hard. The young woman certainly had the physique to carry sacks of parsnips and turn the screw on the apple press come cider season.
“What’s your name?” Jenny demanded before she allowed her inside the farmhouse.
The new farmhand smiled. “Ollie.”
“That’s an odd name?”
“You are Jenny, aren’t you?”
Jenny was puzzled. She had never met Ollie before and was sure her parents weren’t communicative enough at that moment to have told her.
“Have you had breakfast? Everyone else has, but I can scramble some eggs before I go to school if you like?”
“There’s really no need.”
“All right. I don’t know where the others are, so I’d better show you to Sid’s old room. You wouldn’t like Bob’s. He was a mucky old bugger.”
The young woman smiled.
That was unusual. Most adults showed disapproval when the eight-year-old swore, but Ollie seemed to assume that it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Thanks.”
After the new farmhand had unpacked and freshened up, there was still no one else to meet her.
Before Jenny dashed for the school bus she thrust a sheet of paper into her hand. “This was on the kitchen table. Looks like dad left you a list of things to get on with.”
“Thank you Jenny. You have been very helpful.”
Ollie watched the schoolgirl dash up the lane just as her bus came over the brow of the hill.
She waited until it was out of sight, tossed away the list of things to do and opened her jacket to take out a small tracking device. The high pitched signal it emitted woke Buster. He came charging across the farmyard, wondering how he had missed the arrival of the newcomer. There was something very wrong here. He growled and kept a safe distance as she strode away from the farm.
Ollie used the detector’s beam to sweep a small clearing. Human forms started to take shape - two adults and a young man. They remained nebulous, obviously not aware of anything.
She scanned the area again. This time two bodies appeared on the ground. They immediately became solid and appeared to be dead. Ollie rem
oved another device from her jacket and used it to pulse a shaft of energy at them.
Sid coughed and came to with a jolt. “What the hell!” Then he saw Bob lying beside him, apparently lifeless. “Oh my God!”
Ollie pulsed energy at the motionless body until it moved.
Sid pulled Bob up into a sitting position. “Wake up you old fool! I thought you were dead! I nearly shit myself!” Then he became aware of Ollie standing there. “Who the hell are you?”
“What is the last thing you remember?”
Sid had to think. “Mucking out the old Matron and her litter.” He looked at Bob. “Gord knows what he was doing. Probably having a quiet smoke behind the tool shed.”
Hearing Sid’s rasping tones, Buster bounded into the clearing and bounced on the two dazed farm hands. Then the long-haired spaniel saw the shadowy forms of the family and whimpered in terror.
“What happened to them?” demanded Sid.
“You must tell me what happened,” Ollie insisted. “Otherwise I can do nothing to help them.”
But something else occurred to him. “Jenny’s not with them? She okay?”
“She is safe. Tell me what happened?”
“It’s all a bit of a fog.” Sid managed to get to his feet. “I’d just filled the old Matron’s swill and was coming back to feed the hens... There was something in the yard...”
“Please concentrate.”
“Only it wasn’t really there.”
“What colour was it?”
“What?”
“Bright yellow, dark blue, pink, hadrinaceous..?”
“Hadri... what?” Sid remembered. “A sort of red smog glowing like a furnace. There were things inside it.”
Infrared; that’s what Ollie needed to hear. It meant that there may still be time.
Sid indicated the three frozen figures. “They alright?”
“That depends...”
“Who the bleeding hell are you?”
Ollie didn’t answer. She turned and walked back to the farm.
Bob struggled to his feet and Sid helped him follow her, neither sure whether it was such a good idea.
By the time they reached the yard the mysterious woman was sweeping the area with her small scanner. Finding nothing, she went into the farmhouse kitchen. When Sid and Bob reached her and looked inside, the stones of its ancient chimney breast were glowing red. They didn’t recognise this as the place where they used to sit and eat their meals.
The Welsh dresser displaying decorative plates had been replaced by a peculiar honeycomb structure filled with busy, buzzing lights. The large oak table was now a dome of octagonal cells from which tiny entities came spinning out, weaving nebulous webs.
“Bloody hell! What’s going on?”
“Keep back!” Ollie warned Sid.
She was standing in the midst of the furious swarm, apparently impervious to their attacks.
Bob was still only half aware of what was going on and assumed he was hallucinating. “What’s up Sid?”
Sid’s commonsense told him to get out of there, but curiosity had him rooted to the spot.
Just as he thought Ollie would be consumed by the dense webs and buzzing swarm, the room was filled with a flash of brilliant light.
The strange hive and furious entities disappeared.
So did the woman.
Where she had stood was an alien in blue, baggy overalls and hair like an exploding floor mop.
“Who the thundering hell are you?” Sid demanded.
“Omega-20.”
The alien pushed a button on her baggy overalls, and was gone.
When Jenny came home her parents, brother, Sid and Bob were sitting around the kitchen table looking bewildered.
Buster was underneath it, whimpering with confused delight.
The eight-year-old had come to expect no friendly greeting on arrival and tossed her satchel onto a chair. She went to the sink to pour a glass of water. Without warning her mother leapt up and gave her a hug that knocked the breath out of her.
“Still with us then, kid?” called Paul as though wondering why she hadn’t run off long ago.
“It’s alright Jen,” reassured her father, “we’re all back to normal.”
“Though where the hell we’ve been none of us knows,” added Sid.
Jenny was aware someone was missing. “Where’s Ollie?”
“Ollie? Was that the woman’s name? She turned into this peculiar creature and said her name was really Omega 20.”
So Jenny hadn’t imagined the alien after all.
“Don’t worry about it Jen,” Sid told her, though knew he would have nightmares for the rest of his life. “Everything’s alright now.”
After the Matron had been fed and bedded down for the evening and the others were watching TV, Jenny secretly slipped out and went to the spot where she had met Omega 20 or “Threep!” as she remembered it.
There was still a strange electrical charge in the air.
“Where are you?” she called.
Omega 20 shimmered into view against the setting sun.
“What happened?” There was urgency in the eight-year-old’s tone that refused to be fobbed off with some adult platitude.
“Parasites. They-infest-other-lifeforms-and-use-their-energy-to-reproduce. They-create-replicas-of-their-victims-to-avoid-detection.”
“Ugh! How disgusting.”
“Your-family-was-cleansed-before-they-could-be-drained.”
“Didn’t the parasites want Sid and Bob then?”
“They-must-have-sampled-them-and-not-liked-the-taste.”
Jenny could understand that. Bob smoked like a chimney and Sid lived off burgers and beer.
“Where are you going now then? Home to a different planet?”
“This-is-my-planet. I-was-installed-here-after-the-dinosaurs-died-out.”
Jenny couldn’t believe her ears. “You mean the dinosaurs were wiped out by these parasites?”
Omega 20 had told her enough. “I-must-go-now.” And with a brief “Threep!” disappeared.
Door in the Wall
There was a door in the wall.
It had always been secured with a padlock, but this evening the shackle had not been pushed home.
Ben lifted the padlock from the hasp and opened the door. He had no idea what was on the other side, he only knew that he needed somewhere to sleep for the night. Several interlopers had moved into the underpass and they were beginning to attract too much attention. With only one or two of the regulars dossing down there, the locals didn’t feel threatened and passed by without comment. Now, to make matters worse, a local gang had started to loiter at the end of the underpass, obviously with trouble in mind. None of the regulars - or interlopers - were in a fit enough state to fend off an attack and the police, when they did turn up, would only find a few bloodied victims and bedding strewn the length of the tunnel.
That scared Ben more than the unknown on the other side of the secret door. He peered in and could just make out what seemed to be a storeroom beneath the University campus car park. It was dry, secret, and would suit him for those few risky hours before dawn.
He could find no light switch, so took out the old windup torch given to him by a well-wisher and went inside. There was another door in the far wall, but Ben was too tired to explore. He tossed his bedding into a corner, replaced the open padlock in the hasp of the outer door and pulled it to. It was unlikely anyone else would notice. Not even students visited the rear of the university grounds bordering the railway sidings where there was nothing but ragwort and piles of ballast for the tracks. Ben was the only one of his group who still had enough curiosity to investigate such unlikely places. He was a survivor. In fact, given his young years, he had survived enough adversity for several lifetimes.
That had taken its toll. Ben was always exhausted. He fell asleep as soon as his head hit the rolled blanket he used as a pillow. When outside he usually managed to wake before the owner of the
shop whose porch he was dossing down in arrived to open up. Most business owners took exception to down and outs using the front of their shops as dormitories, the more fastidious scrubbing the tiles with disinfectant as a precaution against fleas, scabies and Ebola.
Ben felt secure enclosed in the pitch darkness of his new hideaway. He carried on sleeping until morning when a noise on the other side of the internal door roused him. It sounded, and felt, as though something was drilling deep into the ground. Surely the University wouldn’t allow an oil company to drill beneath its campus? The students would have rioted if they found out. Ben pulled the half bottle of flat Lucozade from his knapsack and took several swigs to wake himself up. He quickly rolled up his bedding and delved about in the bottom of his knapsack for the discoloured eraser, which often proved useful when finding a new bolthole from the unfriendly night. He sliced a sliver from it with his penknife and packed it into the padlock keyhole. It didn’t work every time, but anyone careless enough to not secure the shackle wouldn’t notice that the tumblers had not engaged.
After a quick glance about outside to make sure the coast was clear, Ben pulled the door to after him and replaced the padlock in the hasp.
First things first. He needed to find out how his acquaintances had fared the night before in the underpass.
As soon as he arrived it was obvious that it had not been well. A uniformed PC was watching several smug faced youths. He caught Ben’s eye and indicated he should take a different route. After making a mental note of the thugs responsible for the mayhem of the previous night, Ben followed the PC’s advice and doubled back to find some biscuits for breakfast at the food bank - Bourbons if they had them.
The next night, safely behind the door in the wall, Ben felt guilty at not sharing its location with the others attacked in the underpass the previous night. But that was a law of the street; survival first, friends in adversity, second.
Again Ben was woken by drilling. It was much louder this time. A quick glance outside told him that the sun was about to rise and in the light of his windup torch he could see steam seeping under the inner door. Unlike others who were ethanol dependent, he didn’t imagine things. Ben’s dreams might have been turbulent, but they weren’t about subterranean hells. He had to know what was going on down there. A slight push at the inner door opened it slightly.
Light and steam flooded the storeroom, giving Ben an instant sauna. It was impossible to see what was happening below. Against his better judgement, he had to find out. There was a metal walkway, which fortunately had a railing to prevent its users plunging into the shaft where the drilling was taking place. Ben carefully eased his way along it, hoping to catch a glimpse of what was going on beneath the steam. He had been an apprentice engineer before having to hit the road and understood geothermal energy. This steam was being generated by water being pumped from deep in the ground. The University above wasn’t only researching solar and wind power. Since the fracking controversy, which involved sinking boreholes under people’s property, it was hardly surprising they were keeping quiet about this project. Perhaps the new uni had chosen its isolated location to test their experimental drilling rig, albeit at an ungodly hour in the morning, and not just to give refuge to down and outs. What next? Admit they had been drilling without authorisation, or create a company to declare the success of a cheap new way to sink bores at a ‘future’ date?
For the first time in years Ben felt engaged with something. This was far more important than the thugs terrorising his companions or wondering where the next meal would come from. He had to see more and felt his way through the steam.
Further along the walkway there was another door. He pushed it open and a brilliant shard of light from the rising sun cut through the steam. Ben quickly dodged outside before someone below noticed, jamming his foot in the door to ensure it didn’t slam shut on him.
Shading his eyes from the rising sun, he found he was standing by the disused bridge over a derelict railway station.
Propping the door open with a brick, Ben went to investigate this forgotten, derelict corner of railway history where trains were being moved from their sidings to collect the first passengers of the day. Even the drivers shunting the engines from their night-time berths under the rusting footbridge probably didn’t give this deserted platform and overgrown tracks beyond it a second glance. They were all that remained of a branch line after the Beeching cuts. Ben decided against crossing the bridge over the trains below. Its supports were rusty and the screws half hanging out of them.
The sun was getting higher so he returned to the storeroom. He rolled up his bedding, replaced the sabotaged padlock, and left to find breakfast.
No one slept in the underpass any more. Even the hardiest of its night-time residents had taken police advice and accepted beds at a hostel. The local thugs had lost an easy target to terrorise, but were not yet willing to risk injury by fighting