“Who were those people who just came in?” asked Leila.
“I’m sorry, madam. I can’t be giving out personal information about undergraduates.”
“Undergraduates?” I said, flabbergasted, “You mean to say this is still a functioning college? People are still studying here?”
“Of course they are, sir. People have been studying at St Dunstan’s for more than two centuries. And they’ve been studying at the university since the early thirteenth century. Wars, plagues, famines and catastrophes have come and gone. We try not to let these little things interfere with the life of the university.”
The porter, having said his piece, decided there was no more to be said and was already walking away into the darkness of the college quadrangle.
“Hey, wait a minute!” I yelled, “Where can we go?”
“Go?” he called back, “There are plenty of places you can go.”
“But we’ve come here to…” – what had we come to Cambridge for? We had never had any clear idea of what we would do when we arrived. We’d only come to Cambridge on the Colonel’s recommendation. And why had I ever paid any attention to what the Colonel said, anyway? For the same reason that the people in the village had always done what he told them to do, in times of crisis and emergency. Because, quite simply, he had a natural air of authority.
“The Colonel told us to come here,” I called out. I don’t know why I said that. I had no reason to suppose that Mr Pipply, the porter of St. Dunstan’s College, would have the remotest idea who the Colonel was. In fact, my words had a dramatic effect. Mr Pipply stopped dead in his tracks. He stopped. Then he turned. Then he looked at me and he looked at Leila and he said, “The Colonel?”
“You know him?” I replied.
“Now then, lad, which colonel would that be, exactly?”
“The…” – I had no idea what his name was. All I knew was that he was an antique dealer and that everyone in the village called him Colonel. Had he told me his name? I thought hard. In the Church Hall he had said his name was… what, Richard? Ronald? Reginald? Yes, that was it. Reginald. But what was his surname?
Geoff was standing beside me by this time. I whispered to him, asked if he knew the Colonel’s full name. He shrugged – “Everyone just called him The Colonel.”
“Reginald,” I told the porter, “Colonel Reginald.”
The porter looked unimpressed.
A voice called out from the darkness behind us – “Colonel McPherson. That’s who they mean, Pipply, Colonel Reginald McPherson.”
Pipply was back at the gates now and, miracle of miracles, he had the bunch of keys in his hand and was busy unlocking the padlock.
“Begging your pardon, Professor,” he said, “I didn’t see you there. I’d have had the gates open in a jiffy if I had.”
“That’s quite all right, Pipply. Be a good man, would you, and put the kettle on. We could all do with a good, hot cuppa tea, I think.”
“Certainly, Professor Smith, I’ve got some biscuits in the lodge too, sir. Chocolate digestive.”
“Dark chocolate digestives?” asked Smith, imperiously, as he strode up to the gates and entered with all the magnificence of Pompey returning to Rome.
“Oh, certainly dark chocolate, sir,” Pipply assured him with cringing obsequiousness, “I wouldn’t think of offering you anything less, sir.”
“Lead on, then, Pipply. Lead on!”
As we sat in the porter’s lodge, two things struck me at once: 1) The room was illuminated by an electric light; 2) the kettle was plugged into an electric socket.
The place had power! The porter’s lodge was like a mysteriously preserved fragment of the world that had gone before. Soon we were drinking tea and we were eating chocolate biscuits and we were slowly beginning to relax. Smith, who it transpired really was a professor of the history of art, started to make arrangements with the porter to find guest rooms for us to stay in.
We’d been there about twenty minutes when there was the sound of a fairly large vehicle pulling up outside the gate. Pipply ran out with his keys jangling and, a few moments later, he was back again. There was no mistaking the tall, dignified-looking person standing beside him.
“Ah, I wondered if you’d make it,” said the Colonel, “Still, I had every confidence that Smith would persuade you.”
“Smith! What has Smith got to do with…”
“Oh, Smith has been pivotal to the entire operation, my dear chap. Without Smith, I really doubt if you’d be alive, let alone in Cambridge.”
Smith said nothing but he raised an eyebrow meaningfully.
“I don’t think I understand,” I said.
“No,” said the Colonel, “I don’t suppose you do. It’s going to take quite a bit of explanation, I fear. Still, plenty of time for that, don’t you think?”
That night we slept in comfortable beds with crisp white sheets and duvets. Our rooms were in the guest wing at the far end of the quadrangle. Each room had electric lighting and an en suite bathroom with hot and cold running water. There was a telephone on a table next to my bed. I’d been told that if I needed anything I should use the phone to call the porter’s lodge. A small bedside radio sat next to the telephone. I lay back on the bed and turned the radio on. It was playing music. Something with synthesizers that I couldn’t quite place. As the song ended a familiar voice came on the air… “That was Blancmange with ‘Blind Vision’ and this is Peter Quinn with the All 80s Radio Show. You are listening to Radio True Britain. And now for another golden classic, The Human League with ‘Dreams Of Leaving’…”
Just when I’d thought I’d begun to get used to the strangeness of this shattered world, things had started to get a whole lot stranger. I had no idea quite how strange until the next day when the Colonel told me about The Exodus Project. If I’d had any sense, I would have left while I still had the chance.
A Message from the Author
Thank you for reading my book. I hope you enjoyed it. This is the first book in The Exodus Plague series and I am already busy writing another one!
Writing these books takes a great deal of time and effort. I love writing them and it is one of the best things in my life to hear from readers who enjoy reading them. But the biggest problem I face is trying to let potential readers know that I even exist. There are millions of books for sale on Amazon and elsewhere and it is really hard for my books to compete against titles produced by big publishing companies with huge marketing budgets.
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Reviews are incredibly important to me. They let potential readers know if they might enjoy reading one of my novels. I would therefore be really grateful if you could take a few moments to leave a short review on Amazon. You can do that by clicking one of the two links on the next page or (on other Amazon sites) by clicking the ‘Write a Customer Review’ button on the book page.
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Huw Collingbourne
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Now Read On…
The story continues in ‘Imprisoned’ – the second volume of The Exodus Plague trilogy. Here’s the first chapter…
Imprisoned
Arrival
Cambridge: April
Perkins The Pardoner
“He’s still there. By the gates.”
“Are you sure it’s the same chap?”
“There can’t be two of them, surely.” Sir Eric Martingdale poured another sherry. He’d had a tiring morning discussing
college discipline with the Dean and, as a consequence, he now had a slight headache. He did not, as a rule, take sherry before lunch but he knew that his friend Dr. Ampleside was fond of sherry so he’d sent down for a bottle of amontillado from the Fellows’ Cellars.
“You should get old Pipply to send him away.”
Pipply was the college porter. He represented the third generation of Pipply porters at St. Dunstan’s college.
“Pipply’s no good,” said Sir Eric, “I think he’s afraid of the chap.”
“Possibly you could get one of the bulldogs…”
Sir Eric laughed. “Ha! You are indulging in nostalgia, my dear chap. The days of University bulldogs are long gone. There’s been no University Constabulary since the Great Snow.”
“Ah, that had not occurred to me. What do you propose to do about the blasted fellow then?”
“Not much one can do. I suppose I could give old Pipply a call and tell him to round up a few undergrads to sort him out?”
“Give the man a good kicking, you mean? Good idea. He has no business lurking at the gates. A good thrashing would do him the world of good.”
“I suppose it’s worth a try, at any rate.”
*
When the phone in the porter’s lodge began ringing, Augustus Pipply had the distinct impression that it did not bode well. “This doesn’t bode well,” he said to the junior porter, Samuel Parker. Pipply picked up the phone and answered in his most porterly voice, “Good morning, Master. Oh, yes, sir. I had noticed him. He’s been there all morning. What’s that? Get rid of him? How am I to…? With the help of some undergraduates, sir? Ah, well, now… I suppose… yes, yes, of course, Sir Eric. As you say, sir, nothing is impossible. When you put your mind to it.”
Pipply slammed down the phone and scowled at Sam Parker who, at that moment, was leaning back in a chair with his feet resting on the porter’s reception desk – a slovenly habit that Augustus Pipply particularly disliked. He swiped Sam’s feet off his desk brusquely and said, “Sam, my lad, we got some business to attend to, me and you. The Master wants us to get rid of Perkins the Pardoner.”
“’Ow we gonna do that, Mr Pipply?” said Sam.
“That’s a good question, Sam. And one to which I ain’t got an answer. He’s mad as a hatter is that Pardoner. But he’s just a skinny old fella’, when all’s said and done. I’m sure a young man of your strength and vigour won’t have no problems seeing him off.”
“Oh, I’m not gonna risk crossing the Pardoner, Mr Pipply. Not for all the tea in China, I won’t.”
“And why is that, Sam?”
“Don’t you know, Mr Pipply? The Pardoner curses people. He’s been touched by God, they say. And so his curses are good ones that always work.”
*
Sam Parker was in his early thirties. He’d always kept fit. He cycled every day, played football on weekends, never drank more than three or four pints of beer when he was down the pub. It was thanks to his fitness that he had survived the Great Plague, so he reckoned, though some doctors from the University had their own ideas on that matter. Sam Parker was not, however, much inclined to acts of physical violence. On the contrary, he suffered from a marked aversion to it. Which is why he was not at all enthusiastic about getting into an argument with Perkins the Pardoner. Because Perkins the Pardoner believed that the spreading of the Word Of God was his sacred duty. And if anything came between him and his duty, God didn’t in the least object to a bit of good, old fashioned, proselytising violence. Only a few days ago, Perkins the Pardoner had knocked the Master of Christ’s to the ground when the latter had informed Perkins that he was not entitled to be strolling barefoot over the grass of the college quad. The week before, Perkins had given the Praelector of Gonville & Caius a black eye following an altercation over an obscure element of doctrine.
No, all things being equal, Sam Parker did not at all relish the prospect of telling Perkins The Pardoner to go away from the college gates. Which is why Sam Parker strolled over to the college bar which, at ten o’clock in the morning, resounded to the sounds of snooker balls ricocheting off the walls.
“Morning, lads,” said Sam Parker, “The Master’s got a bit of business as needs doin’ and I was thinking to myself you’d be just the lads for the job. Yow!”
The concluding “Yow!” was in response to a ricocheting snooker ball that made sudden and forceful contact with the tibia of Sam Parker’s right leg. He knew it was the tibia and not, for example, the fibula because Terrence Farquhar (a student of medicine) informed him of the fact – “Got a nasty whack to the tibia just then, Sam,” he said, “Want me to take a look at it?”
“No, no, that won’t be necessary,” replied Sam, who would no more trust his leg to a St Dunstan’s medical student than he would trust his pet cat to a hungry Timber Wolf, “Why are you lot chucking billiard balls around the bar anyhow?”
“Snooker balls,” corrected Angus Whitley-Stanton (a third year physics student), “And the reason we are doing it is to put to the test a theory of mine that Newton’s third law of motion contains an error.”
“Yes, well, be that as it may. I have important work for you, lads.”
“Lads! Lads!” boomed a female voice (belonging, as it happens, to Fiona Chitterton-Ruddle, a second-year student of English), “I trust you intend that word in the mediaeval sense!”
Sam was starting to feel confused. When the undergrads got jabbering at him, it wasn’t long before he started to feel as though his head was spinning. He decided the best thing to do would be to come straight to the point – “Perkins The Pardoner is at the gates again and the Master wants him got rid of.”
“Oh, OK,” said Angus, “I think we can do that. Can’t we lads?”
“Oh, rath-errrr!” Fiona cried with enthusiasm.
When Sam had left the bar, Angus asked Fiona, “By the way, old girl, what is the mediaeval sense of the word ‘lad’?”
“No idea, old man. The etymology is what is known in the business, as ‘uncertain’. Come on, let’s go and give this Pardoner fellow a jolly good thrashing.”
Acceptance
Stony Cove: January
Sebastian
Sebastian had been planning to kill himself. He had considered throwing himself from the cliffs into the sea and he had considered jumping in front of a train but both of those methods seemed quite messy and might easily go wrong. In the end he’d settled on a couple of razor blades, a few bottles of cider and a hot bath. He’d heard somewhere that you could bleed out quite peacefully in a hot bath; a few bottles of cider would ease the process. But after the first bottle of cider, the razor blades started to seem less and less of an attraction. After the second bottle of cider, he couldn’t even remember what he’d been planning to do. After the third bottle of cider, all he could think about was drinking a fourth bottle of cider. After that, he couldn’t recall what exactly happened. All he could remember was waking up feeling very cold, very sick and with a head that felt as though it had been battered against a stone wall with a cricket bat.
In fact, it was another two days before he felt well enough to get up off the sofa and go and get a shower. He needed a shower to wash away the smell of stale sweat and vomit. He looked at himself with shame. He had never been so drunk that he’d vomited before. Why had he done it? He dried himself off and looked at his face in the bathroom mirror. His eyes were bloodshot and couldn’t focus properly. Even after taking a shower, he looked a mess. He shaved and put on a clean tee-shirt and a fresh pair of jeans. It was only then that he remembered that he had planned to kill himself.
“Why would I do that?”
And then it all came flooding back. Freddie. He’d had the biggest ever argument with Freddie.
But wait, there’s more…
More Books…
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Books by Huw Collingbourne
The Exodus
Plague
Book 1: The Snow
Book 2: Imprisoned
Book 3: Escape
The 1980s Murder Mysteries
Book 1: Killers In Mascara
Book 2: The Glam Assassin
Book 3: Death Wears Sequins
Thank you for reading.
Best wishes
Huw Collingbourne
The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow Page 22
