by Heide Goody
Oddjobs 5: The Long Bad Friday
Heide Goody
Iain Grant
Copyright © 2021 by Heide Goody
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Part I
Hell
Birmingham - 12:15am
12:20am
12:26am
12:30am
12:34am
12:45am
12:51am
12:54am
01:00am
01:04am
01:11am
Hell
Birmingham - 01:20am
01:24am
01:35am
01:45am
01:50am
02:00am
02:04am
02:09am
02:15am
02:17am
02:30am
02:35am
02:42am
02:45am
02:54am
02:59am
03:36am
03:10am
Carcosa
03:17am
03:31am
03:33am
Carcosa
Birmingham - 03:45am
03:49am
03:54am
04:01am
Carcosa
Part II
04:16am
04:18am
04:20am
04:29am
04:32am
Carcosa
Birmingham - 04:45am
04:51am
04:56am
Carcosa
Birmingham - 05:09am
05:15am
Carcosa
Birmingham - 05:34am
05:35am
05:39am
Carcosa
Birmingham - 05:40am
05:44am
05:47am
05:52am
05:58am
06:00am
06:01am
06:03am
06:08am
06:11am
06:14am
06:20am
06:25am
06:54am
07:04am
07:24am
07:33am
07:49am
07:53am
07:58am
08:03am
08:08am
08:12am
08:19am
08:39am
08:51am
09:00am
09:30am
09:48am
09:51am
09:55am
09:57am
10:04am
10:11am
10:24am
10:26am
10:29am
10:32am
10:34am
10:38am
Friday
Author Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Also by Heide Goody and Iain Grant
Part I
Hell
Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas – the living black and white – bent over the latest pages of the Bloody Big Book and wrote.
* * *
“Life is strange, isn’t it?” said Morag Murray.
“Compared to what?” asked Vivian Grey.
From the edge of the canal towpath a family of five ducks watched the two women. Ahead of them was the Cube building and the Court of Yo-Morgantus, temporal ruler of Birmingham. In the Cube, in twelve minutes time, Morag would meet the man with whom she would conceive the kaatbari and bring about the end of the world.
Morag sighed. “Do you ever wonder what it all means?”
Vivian Grey despised such vague and whimsical questions.
“No,” she said. This bluntness caused Morag to stop walking and turn to her new colleague. “Meaning is created in the minds of intelligent beings,” continued Vivian. “The ‘it’ you are referring to is the universe including those self-same minds. It is logically impossible, like trying to fit a gallon into a pint glass.”
* * *
Ap Shallas paused in her writings. She was disquieted, but could not quite pinpoint the reason.
Ap Shallas occupied much of the floor space of the scriptorium of Hath-No. In an earlier existence, when ap Shallas had fewer limbs, there had been desks and seats and even other scribes. They were gone now. As the task of writing the Bloody Big Book had grown, so had ap Shallas. Articulated mechanical arms had been gifted to her and grafted onto her by Sha-Datsei, regent of Hath-No. Blood-ink flowed through those limbs to pen nib fingertips and produced the incalculable number of words that went into the production of the largest book in existence. As ap Shallas grew, she became more machine than living thing – ah, there was that feeling of momentary unease again! – as she grew, seats and desks became unnecessary. All ap Shallas needed was ap Shallas. And a constant supply of paper.
The scriptorium sat in the bowels of the fortress of Hath-No. The fortress was an imperfect sphere of fortifications, tunnels and chambers floating in the non-geography of Leng space. In truth, it was no fortress at all, but the body and shell of the titanic god Hath-No whose eyes saw all and who permitted ap Shallas a view of all existence.
The task ap Shallas had set herself was the completion of the infinite Book of Sand, the Bloody Big Book, a volume which would describe all that had been, all that was and all that would ever be, in precise and complete detail. The woman whose life she was currently detailing in the book, Mrs Vivian Grey, would have said such a thing was a logical impossibility— There! Again! The sense of disquiet! Kreylah ap Shallas, a being who had glimpsed all things, felt she was overlooking something vital and obvious.
Ap Shallas straightened and stretched. Several dozen writing arms clicked and unfurled. In the rafters of the scriptorium, sheets of paper dried. On the walls were the thousands of books that made up the library of Hath-No. Before ap Shallas’s arrival, the books had been composed of vellum made from human skin. But since there was no death in hell, those dried skins were still very much alive and rustled and whispered to each other through the aeons.
Unable to focus, ap Shallas raised her voice above the whisper of the books.
“Tea! Barry! Bring me tea!”
There was the slap of damp flipper feet on stone and Barry the Thoggan ran into the scriptorium. He paused at the entrance to bang a gong to announce his own arrival before scurrying to ap Shallas’s side. At some point in the immeasurable time they had been together, Barry had either found or made himself a gong. It went donk! when struck with his little hammer. He used it to announce the arrival of visitors but since ap Shallas had very few, he mostly used it to announce himself. It was a frivolous item, but it appeared to make him inordinately happy.
He scurried to her side and smiled up at her, gong clutched pensively in amphibian hands. Barry smiled a lot. With a mouth like his, it was possible he didn’t have a choice.
“Bring me tea,” said ap Shallas.
“I’m thorry, mithtreth but I can’t,” said Barry, lisping through a mouth overfilled with pearly-white molars.
“We have not run out of tea leaves,” said ap Shallas.
“No, mithtreth but—”
“That last consignment from the bodu-papa was of dubious quality and certainly not very tea-like, but there was enough to service an army.”
“Yeth, mithtreth, but we can’t have—”
“And milk? You’re not afraid of the shokosz beast still? They only tried to eat you once.”
“No, although getting their glandular thecretionth rem
ainth a daunting tathk. It’th thimply that I cannot—”
“Do I need you show you once again the five steps to making a perfect cup of tea?”
“No, mithtreth. I mathtered it long ago.”
A claw hand reached out blindly and found the teapot on a bookshelf. “Here is the teapot. Here is … the coaster. Must always have a coaster. Tea without a coaster—”
“Ith the thin end of the edge, yeth,” nodded Barry. “But we cannot have tea now. There ith no time.”
“No time?” Ap Shallas scoffed. “This is hell. There is no time here at all. Apart, possibly, from tea time.”
“No time,” said Barry and pointed upwards.
Ap Shallas began to look upwards before realising he was referring to a sound, not a sight. The fortress around them reverberated with the voices of a hundred cracked horns. Ap Shallas was momentarily nonplussed.
“The Soulgate?” she said in disbelief.
Barry nodded. “It clotheth around the world of humanth. It ith the end of dayth.”
“The end of the world?” Ap Shallas found herself to be irritated rather than shocked. “But my work is not yet completed. I am so close, but I am not done. A few thousand pages left, maybe less.”
“Her Majethty Thya-Datsei hath decreed that her fortheth are to be in the vanguard.”
“But why?”
Barry shrugged. “Becauthe Hath-No told her and hith thecret godth told him and thye told me and now I’m telling you. All the Venithlarn, conthuming the world together.” He smiled merrily like it was going to be a swell party.
Ap Shallas could not get over the injustice of this news. “Tell Sha-Datsei I shan’t be coming. My work here is far too important. I have to catalogue everything. Does she comprehend how big ‘everything’ is?”
“Her Majethty will inthitht. You carry her thord. You are her truthted advithor.”
Ap Shallas drew the Menscuzo wordblade. As ap Shallas had expanded and augmented herself over the uncountable ages, the wordblade had ceased to be something she carried at her side and become simply another component of her increasingly mechanised body.
“If she wants my sword, she can have it back,” she said.
“Pointy end firtht?” asked Barry fretfully.
A grunt rose from deep within ap Shallas’s decrepit chest. “Just tell her that she will have to contend with the end of the world without me. I have a book to finish.”
“Yeth, mithtreth,” he said, bowed deeply, and fled.
“And bring me tea!”
“Yeth, mithreth!” came the fading reply.
Kreylah ap Shallas bent to her work once more. She frowned. There was something about the two women in this narrative that seemed achingly familiar, but she could not recall what. Pen-fingers descended onto the waiting page
* * *
Vivian Grey gave Morag Murray a look, one that conveyed no empathy or interest in Morag’s search for universal meaning.
“Is this to do with you dying?” Vivian asked.
“Yes,” said Morag.
“And why do you think you are going to die today?”
“I’ve been told. I have enemies.”
“We all do,” laughed Vivian. “Do you want the truth? A lot of things in this world hurt us and cause us pain. A small number of things do not. The only meaning to life involves avoiding the former and finding the latter. Death is the end of all of them, the good things and the bad ones. There is no more meaning than that.”
She did not speak again until they had walked a further twenty yards down the towpath at which point she asked, “Do you know we have the Wittgenstein Volume in the Vault?”
“The Bloody Big Book?” said Morag. “Yes.”
“You should read it sometime. Then you will understand.”
“I’m going to die today,” said Morag.
“True,” Vivian conceded. “Then don’t read it. You have probably got better things to do with your final hours.”
The women walked on.
Birmingham - 12:15am
It was a quarter past midnight.
Morag Murray had just given birth to a baby girl. She was currently trying to hobble down stairs from the room in which she’d recently been imprisoned to the waiting police vehicles outside. Rod Campbell carried the bundled-up baby in his arms and walked ahead. Nina Seth was beside Morag, holding her elbow. Nina probably thought she was being helpful, but the way she was holding Morag’s arm simply meant Morag had one less free hand to use as she navigated the stairs.
Some distance above there was a holler and yell from Steve the Destroyer as he battled with the warbling squid creature that had appeared in her makeshift delivery room not half an hour ago.
“Down! Down! You will bend to my will, puny creature!” Steve commanded, seemingly without much success.
Morag had felt nothing but relief since the baby emerged. Relief that the searing agony consuming her entire being had stopped, and also relief that she was no longer the most vulnerable being in a five-mile radius, given her situation. The relief was tempered with the unsettling realisation that her body was a different shape to the one she was used to. The most worrying part was an ominous sense that her vagina was something like a door that had been left unintentionally open. It was flapping around, loose, bloody and weird, and she wasn’t happy about it. And she was tired. Not the sort of tired which spoke of a busy day, or a long run, this was something else. Her body demanded rest and the chance to repair itself.
At the sound of heavy boots on the stairs, Rod held back and readied his pistol. Two police officers appeared at the turn of the stairs. They wore body armour and carried big guns (Morag didn’t give a damn about weapon details, even when she hadn’t just pushed a baby out through her uterus). Chief Inspector Ricky Lee, unarmed and unarmoured, was right behind them.
“They’re with us,” barked Ricky to forestall any trigger-happy stairwell firefights. “Building’s clear to the ground floor, Rod. Safe to go down.”
“Could everyone—” said Morag and then had to pause for breath. “Could everyone stop waving guns around near my baby?”
The coppers lowered their weapons instantly. Morag looked to Rod.
“Aye, sorry,” he said.
“And let’s just take this a little slower, eh?” she said. “You know those Italian pizza chefs who take a piece of dough and spin it out so it’s ridiculously thin and bigger than you’d ever think possible?”
“Yes…?” said Rod, his face telling her he was way ahead of her with this metaphor.
She pointed between her legs. “That. I haven’t even looked. I’m afraid to, but it’s … delicate.”
“We’re kind of on the clock here,” said Rod. “End of the world and that.”
Morag glared at him. Sweat trickled down her brow. “Have you just given birth to a baby, Rod?”
“No.”
“No, you have not. So shut your hole and let’s take it slow.”
“Yeah,” said Nina. “Have some consideration, Rod.”
Morag threw her a glance too. “Have you just given birth to a baby, Nina?”
“Hey, just offering some sisterly solidarity.”
Morag sneered. “You… You and your pert wee fanny. I bet yours doesn’t look like pizza dough after some celebrity chef’s been—”
“—So-rry.”
“We could get a stretcher?” suggested Ricky Lee.
“Did I say I needed a bloody stretcher?” Morag snarled, knowing she was sounding unreasonable and not caring one damned bit.
She grunted with exhaustion as she continued slowly down the stairs. “This is not how I wanted to spend my last day on earth. Limping about with my genitals strung out like bunting, in an evil mansion wearing nothing but a doctor’s coat to hide my indignity.” She laughed at that. “Damned dictionary definition of indignity, this.”
Somehow they made it down to the ground floor and out into the night. Blue police vehicle lights strobed the scene. Morag could now p
roperly see the building where she’d been captive for the last twelve hours. The Maccabees – Kathy Kaur’s deluded band of anti-Venislarn terrorists – had made their base in the carcass of a stately home, refurbishing the inside and maintaining the ruined exterior as camouflage. Morag did not know where Kathy and the remnants of her group had gone, but judging by the glowing red rent in the sky, they were either gearing up for some sort of ‘Plan B’ or generally regretting their poor life choices.
The rip in the night sky was a wound, glowing red and raw. It made Morag involuntarily think of her own unfortunate undercarriage. She’d just given birth to the kaatbari, the Venislarn anti-Christ. The things pouring out of that hellhole and bubbling across the stratosphere were numerous, multi-limbed and thankfully too distant to be easily viewed.
