The Listening Post
Iain Brown
Killing Vector, Oslo
Copyright Iain Brown 2011
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved.
Cover: Adapted from a photo by Gábor Kovács and licensed under the Creative Commons license. https://www.flickr.com/photos/21923568@N00/2636507463
About the Author:
Born on Merseyside in 1979, Iain Brown grew up in the East Midlands of England. Vastly over-educated in theoretical physics, he embarked on a research career focusing on the most interesting and least fashionable areas of cosmology. Guitarist, songwriter, sound engineer, author, digital artist, obsessed with mediaeval history and absurdly egotistical, he set up Killing Vector as a creative outlet in 2011. The marque will feature a range of fiction and music from short stories to serial novels, albums and compendia, all released on a loose, flexible schedule through a range of online outlets.
Contents
• Cover
• Copyrights
• About the Author
• Dedication
• The Listening Post
• Notes
• Also by this Author
The grenade tore through the attic scattering boxes and flaming insulation. A hole erupted open in the roof and tiles rained on the street below. Astonished onlookers saw a gout of fire lick out, searingly bright against the black thundery sky. People dropped to the floor and covered their heads. Someone screamed. Someone shouted for the fire brigade. Twenty minutes later the firemen lead out a man, perhaps thirty, blackened and burned, empty-eyed. He cradled a shoulder — broken or badly bruised — and muttered to himself. No-one heard what he said.
* * *
Alec first heard it a week before. It was a Sunday — a quiet day. Church bells woke him at half-ten and the sound of rustling leaves leaked through his open window. There was the occasional bang and thump of someone on the street. Moving something heavy, repairing a motorcycle or laying a patio in their garden.
He drifted half-awake for a few minutes before he realised. It had rained heavily the night before after a week of oppressive humidity and the window was shut. The rustling and the thumping continued. Upstairs — in the attic. Alec had no weapons. No baseball bat, no guns. This was Middle England, not the Bronx. He had kitchen knives; they’d have to do. Painfully slowly, he opened the bedroom door. For all his care the hinges creaked and he froze, heart hammering. The thumping and rustling continued unabated.
Returning to the landing clutching a carving knife he realised he was still naked. Naked and armed only with a dulled knife, bought cheap and immediately blunted on an inconvenient bone. But there was nothing for it; the thumping was getting louder. The hatch to the loft was shut, and the ladder attached to the upper side. He needed to unhook it and let the ladder down and there was no way of doing it quietly. His heart pounded louder and he felt his arms tremble with the adrenalin.
Fast would have to do it.
He yanked the hook from the wall and grabbed at the hatch. It swung down with a violent crash, jarring the ceiling. Flakes of paint rained down on him and the hinges creaked. Then the ladder fell, an enormous barbaric clatter. Alec ducked. The lower section rattled heavily from its cradle and slammed into place barely an inch from his upturned face.
The rustling and thumping had stopped and everything was silent. Almost too silent. The metal was cold and rough against his bare feet as Alec climbed cautiously to the loft. Slivers of old wood dug into his hand as he groped across the support beam for the light switch. He poked his head carefully through the hatch, brought up the knife and snapped the light on.
An awful shrieking pounded mercilessly on his ears. He winced and dropped the racquet and barely heard it hit the floor. The attic was full of bats. Whirling, flapping, filling his mouth and eyes with dust from their wings and from the air that swirled and eddied with their frenzied flight. Cold toes brushed his face and something wet dripped on him. He felt it trickling down his chest and began to shriek himself. The bats were screaming. He’d thought humans couldn’t hear them but he was wrong. God, how he was wrong. Wings beat against him or caressed his back and tails flicked over his face, cold and smooth and somehow reptilian, alien, and his ears crackled with the sound of their cries and he fell from the ladder and hit the floor and passed out.
* * *
The bats were gone. He was sure of it. He’d gathered enough courage to climb the ladder again — carefully; his left arm was badly bruised from his fall — and boost himself into the loft. This time he was clothed; there was no way he wanted bats brushing against his bare skin again. And he had thick gloves on, and a powerful torch. But the loft seemed deserted. He shone the torch into the dark corners but was greeted with no glittering eyes and none of the alien screaming. But there was so much junk! His, and that of the previous owner, broken, scattered randomly across the deteriorating floorboarding or lying dangerously carelessly on yellow tufted insulation. They could be hiding anywhere.
He walked hunched over to the far end. There were no bats here, either, although there was plenty of evidence of them — droppings, insulation gnawed and chewed and rumpled. The corner lay curled up and the matting was skewed out of place. Grimacing he plucked at the insulation… and it moved. It was loose!
“What the…?” Alec pulled it more purposefully, and it moved easily. It peeled back. He flinched and gripped the torch tighter in his other hand, expecting a flood of bats, but none came. But what he saw was unbelievable. No wonder he’d heard thumping!
Hidden beneath the loft insulation was a bewildering array of electronics. Alec could identify an amplifier, and he imagined that the smooth black box covered in lights was a small computer. There was no monitor but the ten shallow buttons on its top looked like a primitive keyboard, like a stenographer’s typewriter. There was a tiny set of headphones. Small enough for a fairy or a leprechaun. Or a bat.
This was insane.
A thick grey cable lead from the amplifier towards the wall. Alec shuffled closer, his back complaining. The wire went behind a wooden upright. It looked loose so he tugged gently. It swung back. The upright was concealing a large horn and a small dish. Alec had seen the films. He knew what this looked like.
If the idea hadn’t been quite so crazy he would have thought he was looking at a bat’s sonar listening post.
* * *
The idea seemed less crazy now. It was three days later. Three days of being woken once every three hours by the rustling and thumping of the bats at their work. What they were listening for Alec had no idea, but he did know that were listening. Anytime he went near to the ladder, the noises stopped, suddenly. And if he went upstairs, the bats were gone. The listening post remained, and he was reluctant to touch it — squeamish, if truth be told; who knew where the paws that operated that keyboard had been before — but the bats were gone. Five minutes after he shut the loft hatch, the scratching and scraping and thumps began again.
One time he tried closing the hatch and remaining in the loft, but to no avail. Bats could use their inbuilt sonar to detect him even if their modern listening post was unavailable. When he snapped the torch on he thought he caught a brief glimpse of a rat-like body in the far corner, heard the faintest rustling of downy wings, but nothing more.
What they wanted, he had no idea. But he knew he wanted rid of them. They weren’t doing any real damage… but the house was beginning to smell of bat droppings and Alec was tired of conversations with his neighbours about the amazing number of bats that seemed to be around these days.
Even the exterminator had refused to do anything.
“My hands are tied,” he said. “If it were mice, then yeah, perhaps I could
help. But bats, bats I can’t do nothing with.”
“But they’re everywhere!” Alec said. “Can’t you smell them?”
“But I don’t see none,” the exterminator said. “There’s no sign of them except the occasional droppings. No sign of a real infestation. I’ve come up here twice now when you’ve called and both times, nothing. I don’t deny you’ve got some bats,” he added as Alec grew visibly angry, “but I can’t see no trace of an infestation. Just a few bats, and I can’t do nothing about that. Put down some poison and hope, that’s my advice.”
The bats were listening out for the exterminator just as they were listening out for Alec. He could only think of one thing to do: visit Hunchy.
* * *
“Bats, eh? Hmm.”
No-one knew where Hunchy came from. All anyone knew was that he spent most of his days skulking in his sheds up the Lane, performing God knows what experiments and inventing all manner of strange devices. He would arrive in late April and leave in early September — to where, no-one knew — and return for short random visits throughout Autumn and Winter. Metallic odours filled the woods near his sheds. When Alec arrived it mixed with the smell of burned wood, and the corner of the one of the sheds was blackened and broken by fire.
“Yes,” Alec said. “With a listening post.” He cringed but the old man didn’t look at him with the contempt he deserved. Instead, Hunchy leaned forward and gave him a look he doubtless believed piercing. Shaggy greyed eyebrows dusted the cluttered desk with dandruff.
Hunchy coughed a sound halfway between a “harumph” and an “ahem”, and less pretty than either. Alec wrinkled his nose. Even the man’s breath was heavy with the taint of metal.
“One would like to hear again what happened when you first went up to the attic,” Hunchy commanded. His voice was deep but scratchy and broken. There were no empty bottles of Goldschläger in the sheds but Alec wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Hunchy was secretly distilling his own version up here: moonshine dusted with iron filings. Certainly that’s how his voice sounded. How it smelled.
But he’d come to the old man for help because he seemed the only option. The exterminator claimed his hands were tied; the old Bill would laugh and then charge him with wasting police time; the fire brigade would phone the ambulance, and the ambulance would take him for psychiatric tests. Whereas Hunchy — he was thought to study everything. From inventing mugs that stirred your tea for you, to ghost-hunting in Galfer’s Green (which he claimed without evidence to be on the site of an ancient henge), to constructing miniature particle accelerators to fire positron beams at an ancient lead plate, for all his flaws, he was rumoured to be the last Renaissance man. If anyone could help him with his technologically advanced batlike spy-post, it had to be Hunchy.
So Alec told the story again, only refraining to comment that he had been naked.
“Hurrum,” Hunchy said, idly slapping Alec’s jiggling foot until it stopped still. Hunchy nodded rapidly.
“Birds don’t scream,” he growled. His accent was hard to place; 30s public school soaked in decades of gin and failure might end up similar. “Neither do rats. Bats, bats are halfway between rats and birds. So it stands to reason, boy, it stands to reason that bats don’t scream.” He sat back and grunted a sound of satisfaction.
Alec waited until it was obvious there would be nothing more. “So…? So I’m wrong? The bats didn’t scream?”
“Quite right. Couldn’t have done. Birds don’t scream, and neither do rats, so neither do bats.”
“Well, forgive me for saying it, Mr, err, Mr…” For a moment stretched painfully thin Alec thought he would end up calling the old man ‘Mr Hunchy’.
Hunchy snorted through his nose; at what, Alec didn’t know. Maybe he was used to people not knowing his name. “It’s not bats that are your problem, boy,” he grunted, not appearing to care what Alec had wanted to say. “Excuse me a moment.” He dredged through the detritus on his desk and emerged with a warped record, which he set playing on a scratched, antique gramophone. A mangled version of Grieg’s March of the Dwarfs struggled from the tarnished horn. “It’s not bats,” the old man repeated. “I know what you’ve got. Can’t tell you. No, no, you’ll think I’m positively barmy. But why, last month a poor chap from down the road came to me with a similar problem. Had them in his garden. Thought they were leprechauns, but no. No. Nasty little blighters; you’re lucky they didn’t bite.”
Alec stared blandly. “I’m lucky they didn’t bite,” he repeated. He thought of the diseases bats carried. “Yes, I can get on board with that.”
“No, I can’t tell you what you’ve got, but I can help you. Come with me.”
Abruptly the old man stood and shambled slowly into the darks at the back of his sheds. Alec followed warily. Hunchy stopped by a rusting drum with TEXACO stamped on the side in fading, flaking red paint. As Alec arrived he handed him a hand grenade.
“This’ll clear the blighters!” he cried with surprising joviality.
“Wha-?”
Hunchy pulled another grenade for himself. “Let’s go. You can drive.”
* * *
And so Alec found himself again at the foot of the ladder, the acrid odour of metal filling his nostrils. Whether from the old man who grunted and snuffled by his side or from the grenades the two of them held he no longer knew. It didn’t seem important.
“This is a bad idea,” he said, but without feeling. On the short drive back into the village Hunchy had told Alec stories of things he’d seen. Kelpies, ghosting across the barren landscapes of the Orkneys; menageries of poltergeists in a lonely church at night, setting the bells endlessly ringing and soaking the pew-cushions in holy water; glamours and pale, bulbous wills o’ the wisp; wild hunts that cantered through the stormy sky and targeted the lost with lightnings, and stately, ancient powers who kept themselves aloof from man. There was something hypnotic about the old man’s scratched, studiously cultured voice. Despite yourself you found yourself believing him — and following him.
“Believe me, boy,” Hunchy replied; “believe me, this is the only way.”
A loud thump made the hatch immediately above them quake. “Now!” Hunchy cried.
Alec was up the ladder as fast as he could manage, hunched over and barging the hatch with his shoulders. It flew into the loft. There was a loud screeching, suddenly cut short.
“Throw it, you bally fool!” Hunchy cried.
Alec pulled the pin on his grenade and lobbed it blindly towards the listening post. In the five seconds before it exploded and he fell crashing from the ladder to land awkwardly, twisted on the landing, he had time to see the loft more clearly.
Beside the hatchway opening was a twisted tangle of broken electronics. The amplifier. Wires trailed back towards where it had been installed, but everything else was gone. And just as the grenade blew, the sudden harsh glare burned the image onto his eyes of… something. Manlike and short, screaming. And angry.
Then his arm bent painfully beneath him and his head socked into the banister and he slumped to the floor.
Smoking ashes dropped onto his face. Smoking ashes, flares of bat-fur like fireflies, and something else, stringy, tangled, like cobweb clumped around a dying horsefly. Muzzily he grabbed at it and stared in wonder. It was a saddle, the size of two postage stamps, the cobwebs a fine netting that covered it and lead to stringy reins. There were no stirrups. A white flare of pain rose in his ear, and a high, angry chittering. He rolled his head. He flinched and closed his eyes as a tiny foot slammed into his cheekbone. Pain slashed hot across his face as the bone cracked. Still the creature screamed invective in his ear. It looked quite naked. Manlike and hairless, with black eyes huge on the round face, an alien homunculus. Alec was dimly aware of Hunchy lurking nearby. He couldn’t tell what the old man was doing, nor whether he was injured. He just seemed to be staring.
There was a sharp digging on the other side of his head and two more miniature, hairless hominids cla
mbered down his face. One paused and urinated in his nostril. Alec spluttered and shook his head madly and a dizzy wash of unconsciousness threatened roaringly in his ears and his sight pounded out of focus. He was barely aware of the small creatures skittering along the corridor, or of Hunchy lumbering noisily after them.
He was still lying unbelieving on the landing when the fireman came for him twenty minutes later.
Notes
Many years ago, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I became addicted to Stephen King. This came after I'd been addicted (in turn) to Tolkien and to Diana Wynne Jones. All three have stayed with me through my life and are probably obvious influences on my own writing. I blow hot and cold on King's novels; some of them (such as It) rate amongst my favourite books, but others (such as Carrie) leave me absolutely unmoved. King's novellas and short stories are a different matter; one needs only look at the films Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, both adapted from the Different Seasons collection, to see how King shines in the shorter formats — both novellas are also better than their on-screen counterparts, which is no mean feat. It's no exaggeration to say that without his short stories, I probably would never have considered writing short fiction myself, and would instead have carried on failing to write epic Tolkienesque fantasy until I gave up in self-disgust.
Anyway, in Nightmares and Dreamscapes King included a story called “The Moving Finger”. In hindsight, this story had an inordinate impact on my own short fiction. I now have a range of stories where someone discovers something strange in their house that happens ultimately for no reason — this started with “Eyesore”, which was quickly joined by “Penates Come before a Fall” and “The Fridge”, all of which will be published soon enough. So if you don't like my habit of inserting something arbitrarily absurd into a domestic situation feel free to email me with abuse, but also feel free to blame Stephen King.
I wrote the bulk of “The Listening Post” one afternoon a week or so after writing “The Train will Never Stop” and then paused for a while. I didn't know if I really wanted to write another extremely silly story and, besides, I had no idea where to take it or what the ending would be. Then while I was walking to work I figured out the rest of the story — which, after all, is not exactly profound — and finished it off.