by Heide Goody
“This is a mess,” she said. She sought out Barry, who had wisely decided to cower in a corner. “Tidy this up.”
“Of courthe, mithreth,” he said.
She turned back to her writing position. There was a teapot nearby, a cup, a saucer and a coaster. She reached out with her human hand – human, eh? she thought – and found the teapot to be cold.
“I thought I asked for tea,” she said.
“You did,” said Barry. “Ageth and ageth ago.”
“Oh.” There was an ancient brown stain in the bottom of the cup. “Did I enjoy it?”
“I made it jutht like you athked,” he said and smiled encouraging.
“More tea then,” she said and bent to her work. She looked at where she had just left off and continued writing.
Birmingham - 01:20am
“It’s just not acceptable,” said Security Bob for at least the fourth time.
“Yes, I understand,” said Morag kneeling before Prudence by the entrance to the Vault. She was about to give her girl her very first heart-to-heart telling off. She hesitated. Morag had not been a well-behaved girl herself. She had ended up in many scrapes and pickles. That business with the teddy bear and the seagull leapt immediately to mind. And the time she’d stolen the neighbour’s tortoise and tried to put it in the Moray Firth. True, she’d not triggered the security alarms in a restricted area within two hours of being born; that was a special achievement. Kneeling besides Prudence, she realised that the girl had continued to grow at an unnatural rate. What physiological age had Prudence reached now? Six? Seven? Hair sprouted in unruly curls around her face. She had freckles and a full set of baby teeth.
“Prudence, you can’t just come in here,” she said. “This place is dangerous.”
“Uncle Steve was with me,” said Prudence.
Steve the Destroyer, hearing his name, struck a macho pose.
“Yes, but Steve’s a moron, sweetie,” said Morag. “You need to stay safe. You need to stay with me.”
“It’s just not acceptable,” said Security Bob again and rearranged the belt around his broad middle.
“What more do you want from me, eh?” Morag said to him.
“There should be consequences,” he said sniffily.
“You want me to put the anti-Christ on the naughty step, do you?”
“I’m just saying…”
“Yeah, well go say it somewhere else.”
Bob made a number of disgruntled and affronted gestures but Morag ignored them, and the irritating jobsworth moved off. Rod and Nina passed him in the aisle. Professor Omar, wheeled along by Maurice, was not far behind.
“Found her then?” said Nina. “The ginger menace.”
“She’s grown,” said Rod. “Blummin’ heck, she’s the spit of you, isn’t she?”
He was possibly right but when she was young, did her hair look quite so wild, was her demeanour so feral? Probably. Morag felt a weird momentary embarrassment that her daughter had no shoes.
“You didn’t all need to come and help look,” she said to her colleagues.
“Anything to get out of that meeting,” said Rod with feeling.
“This is Mr Angry Shell,” said Prudence, holding up her find for all to see.
“She’s talking,” said Rod, astounded.
“That’s one of the angry whelks,” said Nina.
“I thought I had lost one somewhere,” said Omar.
Rod and Nina parted to let him be wheeled through: a frail and venerable elder being brought before the god child. Morag had never thought of Omar as old, but he wore his injury poorly. The pulsating mass beneath his shirt, shifted and clicked.
“They’re vampiric,” he explained. “They consume flesh and excrete certain arcane energies that I can use to keep this body going.”
Prudence offered the whelk up to him. Omar waved it away with a limp hand.
“I think forty-eight nibbling at my breast is sufficient.”
Morag made to take the whelk from Prudence. The shell snapped frenziedly at her fingers as they neared. “Oh, that’s a feisty one.” She took what looked like an old tobacco tin down from a shelf and opened it. “Let’s pop the nasty thing back in the box.”
“But mum…”
“Now!” said Morag, surprised when her little girl complied.
“Back in the box,” said Prudence.
As Morag closed the lid, the whelk bounced and threw itself around furiously, tapping out a tinny Morse code.
“And you’ve got those things eating you?” said Nina, impressed.
“As life-support systems go, it has its drawbacks, dear Nina,” said Omar. “It can’t sustain me for long.” He smiled wryly. “But maybe for just long enough. Croyi-Takk have overrun Edgbaston. A bezu’akh annihilator is trampling through south Birmingham. Daganau-Pysh is on the hunt. Anytime now, our own soldiers will receive orders to shoot all humans on sight. I wouldn’t be surprised if the nukes aren’t in the air at this very instant, flying to put us all out of our misery.” He looked from Nina to Rod to Morag. “And you three would like to do something to stop it even though you’ve been told it’s quite impossible.”
“If the Soulgate doesn’t close until the arrival of Yoth-Bilau…” said Morag.
“Oh, I do love that look of hope when all hope has gone,” he said. “Something in the eyes. I can never be sure if that’s because I’m a sentimentalist or a deeply cruel man.”
Maurice made a wordless noise to indicate his thoughts on the matter.
“Oh, shush, you. You can go prepare a flask of green tea. Some of us have journeys to make.”
Morag, who had been instinctively trying to untangle the worst knots from Prudence’s hair despite her daughter’s silent protests, frowned at Omar. He winked in reply.
“There are theories regarding the Soulgate,” he said slowly. “Rituals which could be enacted, even at this dire moment, to turn back the tide and save at least some fragment of this world.”
“I knew it,” said Nina. “There’s always something.”
“Theoretical rituals,” said Omar. “And they weren’t my theories. The expert in question was Mr Giles Grey.”
“Mr Grey?” said Nina. “As in Mr and Mrs Grey?”
“As in the late Mr Grey?” said Rod.
“Well, quite,” said Omar.
“Did Vivian know anything about his work?” said Morag. “Did they write anything down?”
Prudence had run out of tolerance for Morag’s hair tidying and twisted out of her grip. Prudence took the rattling tobacco tin from the shelf and went over to Steve the Destroyer who appeared to be trying to teach his land squid command words.
“Do not wander far, you hear me?” said Morag. “And no poking things from other dimensions.”
“Do you know anything about Bella in the Wych Elm?” asked Nina, which to Morag’s ears sounded like a nonsensical non-sequitur.
“Anyone with an ounce of local knowledge knows the legend,” said Omar.
“Bella – Isabella – grew up in hell. Hath-No. She knew Vivian. Then the bitch tangled with me in seventeen seventy-three and ended up being blasted forward to World War Two and into the trunk of a tree.” She caught Morag’s puzzled gaze. “It’s been a busy few months. She had a Gellik orb on a necklace.”
“A tunnelling device?” said Morag.
“Between Hath-No and here,” said Nina. “Except her body went missing.”
“A lot of things go missing during wartime,” said Omar.
“That’s what Mrs Fiddler said,” said Nina. She hadn’t noticed the tone in Omar’s voice.
“And some things don’t go missing but are stolen,” said Morag.
Omar nodded. “An officer from Special Branch was responsible for the original theft. That Gellik orb has passed between a number of paddlers in the lake of darkness over the decades, before ending up in the hands of a thoroughly disreputable occultist.”
“Where is it now?” said Rod.
�
�In my private stash, Rodney. At Birmingham University.”
“You have it!” said Nina. “We can summon Vivian back from hell! I’ll go and fetch it.”
“This being the part of the city currently being stomped on by a bazooka annihilator,” pointed out Rod. “We’d have to fight our way there.”
“Bezu’akh annihilator,” corrected Omar. “And, yes. Rod, you should go.”
“I can go,” insisted Nina.
“Rodney will go,” said Omar. “And Maurice with him. Maurice!” He called out to the kitchenette Maurice had gone to. “Have you made that flask of tea yet?”
“Why not me?” said Nina. “Don’t you trust me?”
“You have other tasks. Rod is to go to the university. He’ll need Maurice to help him circumvent the riddles and traps.”
“Riddles?” said Rod.
“Morag already has her hands full with the kaatbari.” Omar raised his eyebrows. Morag looked back down the aisle to Prudence who was playfully wrestling the land squid.
“And me?” demanded Nina.
“You’re going to fetch Mr Grey.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“He possibly wishes he was,” said Omar. “And it’s a fiction that Mrs Grey was keen to maintain. He was put under a curse, one that only the caster can lift.”
“Aye, I knew there was something amiss,” said Rod. “I saw on your office planner the other day. You meet him in Sutton Park every week or so.”
Nina’s face took on a shocked expression, like she’d swallowed a fly. “Sutton Park…? Um.” She raised a hand tentatively. “You know that thing where I say something and everyone looks at me like I’m a moron?”
“Not a moron exactly,” said Rod.
“Was Mr Grey turned into a donkey?” she asked.
Morag snorted with laughter.
“He was,” said Omar.
“What?” said Morag.
“Knew it,” said Nina and threw a finger snap of victory. “The picture in Mrs Grey’s house. The fact that she left everything in her will to the donkey sanctuary in Sutton Park.” She stared at nothing for a full second. “Dang. Mr Grey’s a donkey?”
“This is nonsense,” said Morag.
“You wanted your one last ditch chance to stop the end of the world,” said Omar. “This is it.”
“A magic donkey who may or may not know some ritual to undo all of this?” said Nina.
“Have you got anything better to occupy your last few hours, Nina?”
Nina clapped her hands, enthused. If this is what was on offer, she was going to seize it. “Let’s do it! I’ll go grab my driver. Rod gets the Gellik orb. I’ll get Mr Grey. We’ll be back by breakfast and the world will be saved.”
Maurice appeared, a tartan thermos in one hand, a small lunch pail in the other. “Now, who’s going on a journey?” he asked.
Prudence squealed with laughter as the land squid tried to bind her legs together with its own. It was hard to say who was winning.
* * *
Farewells were said in the Vault. Whatever tenderness passed between Omar and Maurice was said in hushed whispers and held hands. Maurice’s hands were tiny in Omar’s bronzed fingers.
Morag watched Rod do a mental pat down of his weapons and array of concealed gadgets. “You come back in one piece,” she told him.
“I’m not going back in time to save you again,” said Nina. “I can’t.”
“This’ll be a breeze,” said Rod. “I’ve been in worse scrapes.”
“Like that time in the Syrian Desert?” said Morag.
“Aye, did I ever properly tell you about that?”
“No,” she said.
“Well, you see, this was just before the battle of Al-Qa’im. I’d got separated from my men and lost the anti-tank mortar I was carrying. Night was falling and—”
“You will tell me,” said Morag, interrupting him firmly. “When you get back.”
He was silent for a long moment. “Aye,” he said, sincerely, in the voice of someone who could not promise he would ever return. Rod gave a nod to Maurice.
“Lay on, Macduff,” said the smaller man and they made to the lifts.
“Time to get Ricky and fetch us a donkey,” said Nina, and then frowned. “Omar, how will I know which donkey is Mr Grey. There are lots of donkeys there, aren’t there?”
“The donkeys have their names on their bridles and stable doors.”
“And Mr Grey is…?”
“Mr Grey,” said Omar.
“There is a donkey called Mr Grey?”
“Kinda works,” said Morag.
There was a rap at the door separating this section of the Vault from the lobby area and lifts. Morag assumed it would be Rod or Maurice having forgotten something or other, but it was Lois the receptionist. Security Bob on her heels swiped and tapped to open the sliding doors.
“There’s an August Handmaiden of Prein outside,” she said.
“There’s lots of things outside, Lois,” said Nina. “It’s the big ‘come out and play day’ for monsters.”
“Yes, bab, but there’s an actual August Handmaiden of Prein on the doorstep. She says she's come to collect the kaatbari.”
Morag felt a cold weight descending inside her chest. In a night of pain and unpleasant bodily sensations this was the worst.
“You can tell that teglau bitch to—”
“Have they come for me, mum?” said Prudence, pausing mid-wrestle with the land squid.
Security Bob was surprised. “What? The girl? Is she the…”? He waved his hand, unable to pronounce the word. “She’s one of them, then?” This was said with a certain tone of judgement, as though Prudence Murray should never have been allowed in the building.
“Who wants to take me away?” asked Prudence.
“No one,” said Morag firmly. “You play with Steve.”
“But…” said Security Bob.
“I will go talk to the Handmaiden,” said Morag firmly.
“You sure?” said Nina.
“You’ve got a magic donkey quest to go on.”
“But are you sure you’re the right person to speak with the August Handmaidens?” asked Omar, adding, “You do have form for antagonising them.”
Morag could have smiled. “You think I’d start a fight with the Handmaidens? In my state?”
“Yes, my dear. I believe you would.”
“Too bloody right,” she said. She hesitated, her eyes on Prudence.
“I can supervise the young and the reckless here,” said Omar.
“Really?” said Morag. “You’re hardly the paternal type.”
“I tended to let Maurice deal with such things,” he conceded. There was a weary honesty to his voice, some sense of his true self riding through the smooth façade. “However, I have always felt I had a certain avuncular charm.”
“Oh, I can see that,” she said. “Creepy uncle.”
“The best kind of creepy,” said Omar.
Morag waddled over to where her daughter played. She had to say her daughter’s name twice before Prudence sat up.
“What, mum?”
“Come here.”
“I am here.”
“She is here, fool!” crowed Steve.
“Keep your nose out of family business, fuzzy felt.” She tapped Prudence’s leg. “Come. Here.”
Prudence disentangled herself from the clutches of Steve and the land squid. Morag took her in her arms. “Muda. You get bigger every minute.”
“I know,” said Prudence.
The makeshift shorts which had reached toddler Prudence’s ankles were now knee-length baggy culottes. Morag untied the knot in Prudence’s T-shirt and it dropped to become a short dress.
“You hungry?” asked Morag. “You must be hungry.”
“I believe there still might be some pink wafers somewhere,” said Omar.
Morag looked towards the entrance, at all the eyes on her, and then back at Prudence. “Mummy’s got to go work.”<
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“Does someone want to take me away?”
“I won’t let them.”
Prudence glanced sideways at Security Bob. “He doesn’t like me.”
“He doesn’t like anyone.”
“But I don’t belong here, do I?”
Morag had no answer for that. “How can you be so clever?” she said softly, amazed. “How can you even speak?”
“I don’t know, mum. Some things I just know. They pop up inside me. Some things you told me.”
Morag felt a wrench inside her. “I would be an awful mum, you know.”
The hug Prudence gave her near broke Morag’s heart. Prudence put a mushy kiss on Morag’s cheek. “You’re the best.”
“Aw, now you’re just mocking me.” She pointed at Omar. “You do what Omar tells you. Unless it seems evil or devious. In which case…” She rocked her head. “Make a judgement call. Do not ask Steve’s advice.”
“My advice is golden!” insisted Steve.
Morag rolled her eyes and Prudence laughed.
“I’m only upstairs,” said Morag. “I…” She turned and called out. “Bob! You got a walkie-talkie?”
“I have,” he replied.
“Give it to me.”
“I cannot give out personal equipment—”
“Do not make me come over there and take it from you, man,” Morag growled.
The walkie-talkie was soon forthcoming. Morag presented it to Prudence. “You need me, you press this button here. This button, right, Bob? Press it and tell the person you need me. I will come to you.”
“This button,” said Prudence and pressed it. The walkie-talkie gave a squawk.
“Fine.”
Morag stood. As she made to go, she looked at Steve. “You look after her or you are in for a world of pain.”
“I fear no world of pain!” he retorted. “Steve the Destroyer was born in a world of pain! Pain is the sea in which he swims, morsel!”
“I’ll replace your stuffing with rocks and dress you in wee doll’s clothes if anything happens to her.”
She made her exit with a minimum of post-natal hobbling.
01:24am
Rod had his Glock pistol drawn all the way from the rear doors of the Library building, across the road to the multi-storey on Cambridge Street. He watched the night sky, prepared to put a bullet in anything that came within range. Maurice’s bright pastel jumper made him a target for any demonic creatures passing by. Once beneath the illusory but nonetheless comforting shelter of the car park structure, Rod stepped down from hyper-vigilance to regular vigilance.
