Oddjobs 5: The Long Bad Friday

by Heide Goody

  “Strong enough to knock out a bleeding god with a single punch.”

  “Aye, and that should mean…” Rod stopped and straightened. The hands never left his shoulders. He spoke slowly to savour his rising temper and to stave off the answer that he knew, just knew was coming. “Did you make me strong enough only in terms of punching gods? Like only so I could punch a god?”

  “You asked…”

  Rod whirled and almost shook the King in Crimson from him. “You right tricksy bugger! I knew you were going to do summat like this. Mess with the wording. You better have sent that orb to Morag like I asked. I was careful how I phrased that, but this!” He pushed angrily at the hands but they held his jacket. He tugged and pulled and then just slipped out of his jacket completely. He turned, pistol already drawn and aimed.

  Ninety percent of his anger dried up at the full sight of the King in Crimson. He was a hunched figure, but was still a full head taller than Rod. His limbs were emaciated, coarse and black, mummified even within the sleeves of a threadbare red coat. But his chest and face, where it was visible, were alive and wet. Open sores and gaping wounds fed his skin with a constant layer of weeping, glistening pus. The tumorous holes in his face shifted constantly like tiny murmuring mouths. His mouth and nose were invisible, covered by a stained rectangular mask. The line of the mask over his nose framed his sunken eyes, which were hateful and very human. The fabric glistened and moved with the King’s breath. With the mask and the King’s ragged, uniform-like coat, Rod couldn’t tell see where fabric ended and flesh began. He couldn’t tell if the black-red colour of the clothes was dye or drying blood.

  Staggered by the dreadful sight, Rod might have lost all of his anger to terror, but for the fact the King in Crimson still held onto Rod’s work jacket by the shoulders, holding it up in confusion. Like a cloakroom attendant who had lost their customer. Rod grasped onto that ten percent of his anger.

  “You knew what I wanted,” he said.

  “You dare challenge me?” Black pus flew in flecks from face wounds.

  “Until I get my three flamin’ wishes, you’ll do what I say, sunshine.”

  He knew he was pushing it. He was riding a wave of anger- and fear-fuelled adrenaline, and suspected it would all go very badly for him when it was over. What did it matter? It was going to go very badly for everyone when this day was done.

  “All I wanted was to get out of this bloody hole and away from here. Can you not do that?”

  “That I can do, patron,” said the King in Crimson.

  And, in an instant, they were gone.

  02:15am

  Morag straightened out the spine of her policy document and sipped her fresh cup of tea. The flow of people in and out of the meeting room had settled. With many pulled away by more urgent missions and other distractions, there were now only five of them in the room: Morag, Lois, the army major Sanders, and the two councilmen.

  “Okay, if we can all turn to page seven,” she said. “We can proceed with the plans for mass euthanasia.”

  “Killing people,” said Major Sanders.

  “Yep,” said Morag. She wiped a tear from her eye. It wasn’t a tear for the billions of people who were suffering or about to suffer. That would have made sense, even if it might have looked unprofessional at this juncture. Tears had sprung unbidden to her eyes because her mug, found from gods knew where, had a cheery cartoon cat and dog on it. As post-natal hormones washed about her body, she couldn’t look at the bloody mug without a catch in her throat.

  “Stupid, stupid mug,” she muttered, then cleared her throat. “Right, yes, murdering the local population?”

  “Killing,” said Major Sanders. “Not murdering.”

  “Right. Right.”

  “I have given the order for the Fifth Fusiliers to begin shooting civilians on sight.”

  “I want it put on record that I am not happy with this,” said Councillor Rahman. “I’m not signing off on this one. I want to know where these orders are coming from.”

  The major sighed. “Well, given that my commanding officer has run away to his holiday cottage in Wales and isn’t answering his phone. Given that the Prime Minister disappeared mid-broadcast and has possibly been eaten. Given that it appears the US Commander-in-Chief has ignored internationally agreed protocols and is trying to fight off the alien menace single-handedly. Given all of that, I’d say it’s pretty bloody clear that the chain of command has collapsed. I’ve given out the order to start shooting civilians to all troops in this city.”

  “My objection’s been noted?” said the councillor.

  Morag and Lois looked at each other. “Are you taking minutes?” Morag asked.

  “No,” said Lois. “Didn’t seem to be any point.”

  Morag looked at Councillor Rahman. “You can make a note of it yourself if it makes you any happier.” She turned to the major. “We’ve got a volunteer force administering suicide pills door to door throughout the city. And we’ve also got soldiers shooting people on sight. Won’t there be some form of … overlap?”

  “Undoubtedly,” said Major Sanders. “Unfortunately, there’s no co-ordination between the branches of government in charge. We should expect some suicide pill volunteers to be killed by army personnel, possibly before they have distributed their supplies.”

  “I suppose there’s little we can do about that now,” said Morag. She caught a glimpse of the cat and dog mug. Their big soulful eyes brought new tears to her eyes. “Damn it.”

  As she turned the mug around there was a tiny electrical pop, and something appeared in the air directly in front of her face. It dropped heavily to the table. The council CEO swore in surprise.

  It was a chunky piece of jewellery. Yellow metal worked around a rose-coloured glass ball.

  “The Gellik orb,” Morag said, as surprised as any by its sudden appearance.

  “What is it? Is it dangerous?” said Councillor Rahman.

  “It’s a way to get Vivian back,” said Morag. She would have pushed herself from her seat and sprinted for the lift, but her lower torso was still a big old bag of wrongness and she could only do a tender high-speed hobble. “Talk amongst yourselves,” she called back to the attendees as she left.

  She took the lift to the floor above.

  Security Bob was in the lobby area of the Vault.

  “Omar?” she said.

  “Inside. With that girl of yours,” he said as he unlocked the doors to let her through.

  Omar was exactly where she’d left him, in his wheelchair by one of the many workspaces he’d created for himself around the Vault. He was leaning gingerly over an open book.

  “Working out how to save the world?” she said.

  “Huh?” said the professor, shaken from a reverie. He sat back and treated her to a weak smile. “Nothing so practical or noble, my dear. I was looking over one of our little travel albums.” He put a hand on the scrapbook page. Photographs, ticket stubs and notes had been painstakingly taped onto its pages.

  The photograph on the open page was of Omar and Maurice on a grassy clifftop. Maurice was nearly swamped by a cream cable-knit sweater. Omar’s arms were expressively wide as he talked about something that both of them could see but the photographer could not.

  “Shetland. Fourteen years ago,” said Omar. “We stayed at a charming hotel with a very poor breakfast menu. We went to see the puffins. We visited an old Norse settlement. And one evening we summoned the Voor-D’yoi Lak from its cave and barely escaped with our lives.” He sighed nostalgically. “A fine time was had by all.”

  Only then did he see the Gellik orb in her hand. He clutched at it. “They’re back?”

  “I’ve not seen Rod or Maurice. This just appeared. Literally appeared.”

  A dark look passed momentarily over his face.

  “My daughter somewhere?” she asked, casting about.

  “Around and about with that amoral rag doll,” he said.

  “Prudence!” she called.
r />   “Yes, mother!” came a distant reply.

  “You being good?”

  “Yes, mother!”

  Omar turned the gem around in his hand. “If I had known this had previously opened a passage between earth and Hath-No, we might have been able to effect her rescue earlier.”

  “So you can do it?” Morag said, trying not to sound so pathetically eager.

  “Dimensional tunnelling devices are child’s play,” he said. “Ten a penny, frankly.”

  02:17am

  Prudence ran her hands across the cement surface of Crippen Ai. Her mum’s call had distracted her, pulled her out of the worlds beyond which the trapped and tortured creature had shown her.

  Now, she felt the surface again, seeking a reconnection.

  Steve the Destroyer interrupted her with a “Look! Look! I have found it!”

  His land-squid had climbed up a shelving unit and now Steve was shoving a carved wooden cube along the shelf. It was not a large thing but it was a significant challenge to him.

  “Just on a shelf with all this junk!” he grunted as he pushed. “Clearly its proper display case is not yet ready.” He turned to put his back against it. “Such things take time.”

  “I’m busy,” said Prudence, tilting her head towards Crippen Ai.

  “Pah! Who are you to say when you are busy, morsel? Steve’s business is the only important business. Come help me. Come stare in wonder.”

  Prudence ignored him and turned her attention back to…

  ……

  ……

  ……

  …With startling ease, Prudence slipped back into the mental realm of Crippen Ai. She felt a momentarily alarming jolt as she found herself transported into a space that was this space. Prudence, a spiritual observer only, stood in the consular mission Vault. In front of her, a girl with an explosion of ginger hair and a loose dress made from a T-shirt leaned against the entombed form of Crippen Ai.

  “That’s me,” she said. She had never seen herself before.

  Prudence moved forward to take a better look at herself. She looked at the concentrating face, the screwed-up eyes. She seemed to be putting in a lot of effort to do nothing at all. Prudence the observer saw Prudence the observed blush at the thought of being watched.

  “Come help me, indolent child!” commanded Steve. He had given up pushing the cube and was now attempting to twist its sliding surfaces.

  At the end of the shelves, the burned form of Crippen Ai twisted and shuddered in the shadows, a tormented figure at the edge of this vision.

  “Why are you showing me this?” said Prudence. Immediately she was looking along the aisle to where her mother and the professor were. Did she choose to look that way, or had Crippen Ai directed her? She couldn’t tell. Prudence drifted towards the professor. He had his hands on a pink jewel her mother had brought him and speaking softly in Venislarn. Prudence was confident if she concentrated a little, she would know what the words meant. The jewel began to glow as though a strong light was shining through it.

  This, Prudence knew, was what Crippen Ai wanted to show her. The pink light was one end of a thread which linked this place and another.

  “Show me,” she said and Crippen Ai hauled her away along the length of the thread. The transition was too fast to understand, the journey passing through something other than mere geography.

  They came to a halt so suddenly that Prudence fell to her knees and rolled across the gritty floor of this new place. It was a gloomy cavern, filled with a subtle stench of rot. Old rot, new rot and everything in between. It was like flicking through the pages of a book at speed and each page was an essay in decay. Sounds of horns and drums and shouts echoed in from the world beyond this cavern.

  There were shelves here too. The total experiences of her life so far indicated that everywhere was filled with shelves. And, yes, books also. Like some of the books in the Vault, nearly all of the books here were alive. They were restless, like roosting birds jostling for space.

  The floor of the cavern was taken up by a machine. It merged with the floor in a crust of grease and filth. Higher up, its articulated arms were pale grey and shining silver. The arms curved up and over like cresting waves to touch down on the pieces of paper arranged on the counter surface before it. Prudence noted the see-through tubes running up the arms from the machine’s base, carrying a ceaseless supply of dark red ink to the fingertips.

  Despite the noisy activity coming from elsewhere, the skrit skrit skrit sound of pens on paper seemed to fill the place. The machine itself moved silently and Prudence (who had never seen a spider) was very much put in mind of a spider weaving its web.

  She stepped closer and, as she did, noted the form of Crippen Ai watching from the darkness of the high ceiling. Prudence stepped onto the lower levels of the table (which was no table at all but an extension of the machine’s body) and climbed up to look at the paper. The pens, several of them working on each sheet at a time, produced a fast-emerging block of prose.

  * * *

  The kaatbari, Prudence Murray, peered closer. Although she could not read, filtered through the senses and mind of the Venislarn pariah Crippen Ai, the words made sense to her and she saw her own current actions being narrated to her as they occurred.

  Prudence drew back a little in shock but curiosity held her there. She looked at Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas, fascinated by the machine’s working and saw, amid the arms and pistons and inner gears, the face of ap Shallas. Ap Shallas’s eyes looked up to seek out the kaatbari.

  * * *

  The old woman in the centre of the machine sat back and the whole apparatus of her machine body moved with her. She stared directly at Prudence, although Prudence was not present in any true sense.

  The woman stared. She frowned. It was not a happy or friendly face. It was human and all the more unhappy and unfriendly for that fact. Dirt etched the many lines on the woman’s face and outlined her irritation and displeasure. “Boo,” she said.

  Prudence shrank back. The woman continued to stare.

  “Barry!” she called.

  There was a succession of dull clonks and clangs and a short thoggan creature ran into the room.

  “Yeth, mithtreth,” he said, clattering to a halt. He spoke Venislarn, but passed through the intermediary of Crippen Ai’s mind, Prudence understood it clearly.

  “Barry, can you see someone—” The Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas stopped. “What are you wearing, Barry?”

  The thoggan was wearing what might charitably be described as a suit of armour. But one would have to be very charitable indeed, as it appeared to only consist of a number of pots and bowls bound to his head, chest and limbs with rags and lengths of filthy sinew.

  He smiled. Prudence automatically tried to count his teeth.

  “Thith is my armour. I am drethed for war.”

  “You look ridiculous.”

  “Hath-No dethendth upon the earth at thith very moment, mithtreth, and when the time comth, I will fight at your thide, my anthethtral weapon thworn to you.”

  Ap Shallas scowled. “I have told you that I will not be fighting. I am close to finishing the book. Furthermore…” A twisting mechanical arm prodded the shoddy little axe he carried. “That is not an ancestral weapon. I saw you making it earlier.”

  “It could be,” said Barry, “if I gave it to my offthpring.”

  Ap Shallas ignore his idiocy and pointed at Prudence. “Tell me, can you see someone standing there?”

  The thoggan made a good show of looking in Prudence’s direction. “No, mithreth,” he said eventually.

  “Me neither,” she said.

  “Riiight.”

  The many arms came in to scribe once more. Prudence watched and read and thought.

  * * *

  The kaatbari watched as ap Shallas noted down the conversation she had just had with the thoggan, Barry. Prudence thought that ap Shallas was, if not exactly cruel, at least a rude and dismissive master to the thoggan. She
felt this even more so upon reading that Barry had been in servitude to ap Shallas for a length of time that was beyond all human comprehension.

  * * *

  “Oh, what do you know?” said the ap Shallas out loud, and glared at the spot where Prudence stood.

  Prudence blinked. “Can you see me?”

  “Not at all,” said the ap Shallas as she continued to write.

  * * *

  “…but I know that you are here. I am recording everything that is happening in this instant and I can read my own writing which tells me exactly what you’re saying and doing.”

  “So, you know that I’m saying because you’ve read it?”

  “Correct.”

  “As you’re writing it?”

  The ap Shallas nodded sharply.

  * * *

  “It makes perfect sense if you’re able to make certain leaps of logic,” said the ap Shallas.

  Barry gave ap Shallas a gentle pat on the side. “Who are you talking to, mithreth?”

  “The kaatbari. Prudence Murray. Morag’s daughter.”

  Barry nodded slowly. “There’th no one there.”

  “I know!”

  Barry gave this due thought. “Maybe you’d like a cup of tea, mithreth.”

  “What?”

  “Or a bit of a retht. You have been overdoing it of late.”

  “I have worked ceaselessly for an eternity,” she said.

  “That’th what I’m talking about.”

  She made a disgusted huff and attempted to return to her writing.

  * * *

  Prudence Murray observed her quietly for a while. She studied the movements of the pen arms, the glistening ink as it flowed across the page and then dried. The Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas worked to a task that, to Prudence’s mind would be one without end. To try to write down everything that ever happened was impossible.

  “You’d have to write down everything that happened,” said Prudence, “and then you’d have to write down what happened when you wrote the book. And then you’d have to write about writing that bit. And then you’d have to write—”