by Rufus Offor
At the bottom of the stairs was a twelve-inch thick, iron studded solid oak door with a small backlit panel just to the right of it. Shoop took off his right shoe and sock, pressed his heal against the panel. A metallic voice came out of nowhere saying,
“Processing!”
Shoop replaced the footwear, lit a cigarette, took a hefty swig of gin and waited. It annoyed him as to how long the process of getting to his sanctuary was. The bigwigs could’ve made it a lot easier and quicker but didn’t. They had long recognised that it was the small touches that ground men down.
Eventually the metallic voice came back, “Print not accepted, please try again, if the print should fail this time you will be asked to try one more time and then you will be decapitated. Thank you for your patience”
Shoop went through the whole sham all over again. The damn thing did it every time. It never opened with the first try, and if you didn’t put your sock and shoe back on it would tell you that processing the request couldn’t be taken further until all foot coverings were replaced. The folks up stairs loved to get on Shoop’s nerves.
“Print identified,” Said the door and made some clicking wheezy noises before clunking open, “Welcome back Mr Wankel.” At the sound of his name being so mockingly mispronounced he ground his teeth hard and told himself that one day soon he would be back on top and his tormentors would suffer long and hard. There was no basis in fact for this internal statement as he had no idea how he was going to bring the bastards down, but it made him feel better to fantasise about the damage he would love to one day inflict on his overlords.
The door creaked open and he stepped through it onto an iron walkway and surveyed his domain.
He was looking into a vast cavern that stretched back almost a mile. It was a hundred feet wide and just as high with twenty foot long stalactites making the roof of the cave look like the inside of a colossal iron maiden. The cave housed a series of buildings stretching the length and breadth of it in all manner of styles from all manner of ages. The tiny town looked deeply confused about its identity and age. There were Tudor buildings next to Victorian next to nasty post war stippling covered horror shows. Art deco mixed with gothic mixed with medieval. It was quite a strain on the eyes.
The town bustled with activity, which upset Shoop to the brink of violence. This used to be a quiet place. It had been his secret for a very long time. The secret of the underground village had been handed to him with the greatest of confidence in his ability to keep it very quiet and very secret. He had let it all get out of hand. Part of him would rather destroy the place than let it get any worse.
Shoop had a great deal of affection for the place but hated almost everyone in it. They were all just another reminder as to how commercial the organisation he’d helped to build had become. He took another swig of gin and decided to hit a few people on the way to his rooms. Hitting random folk always made him feel better. He made his way down the swooping iron staircase into the pandemonium of the main street wearing a grimace that grimaced more sharply than his average run-of-the-mill every day grimace.
The streets were teaming with all manner of sharp suits, mail carts and office juniors rushing photocopies and files from one place to another. Two hundred yards into the cave and a man in an Armani suit made the mistake of wandering to within a meter of Shoop. Shoop made him vomit all over himself after thrusting his index and middle fingers into the man’s throat. He felt a lot better about everything after that, so his grimace returned to its every-day potency rather than def-con one.
Shoop’s most potent grimace could give people nosebleeds at fifty yards.
He wondered up the main street scaring people for a while then headed down a small side street at the end of which was a door set into the cave wall. It was small, circular and after awkwardly pressing his armpit onto the luminous square panel to the side of it a couple of times, taking a hefty swig of gin and lighting a cigarette, the door spoke to him in a metallic voice, mispronouncing his name mockingly, and promptly opened.
This was his last hiding place. It was the only place that the sphere of influence couldn’t touch him. Well, the only place that they knew of.
The Sphere of Influence had been born of two men. They’d not always been called the Sphere of Influence; in fact they had started out going by the names of Dave and Mike and were both quite likeable people. Dave and Mike had been best friends since meeting at their local college where they both studied, and excelled at, computing and electrical engineering, back in the days when a computer took up several large rooms and had problems calculating its own mass. They frequently went on trips together and during one particular hiking expedition to the highlands of Scotland they witnessed something strange. They were camped in a glen having a nightcap when a bright light streaked across the sky and landed not half a mile away from where they were with a very loud crash. Upon investigation they appeared to be the only witnesses to the crash landing of a flying saucer. Luckily they were at the beginning of their holiday and took the remaining two weeks moving the object to a nearby remote cottage and began to realise that the technology they’d discovered could, potentially, earn them an awful lot of money.
They both quit their jobs and spent two years in the wilds of the highlands figuring out the wealth of technology, growing long beards, becoming smelly, hunting wild animals, gathering wilds shrubs for food and growing there hair.
When, eventually, they descended from their untamed glen they trimmed their beards, cut their hair, mugged a couple of business men for their sharp suits and went about leaking the technology into society at a rate that wouldn’t cause suspicion. They made stupendous amounts of money.
The leaking of their findings took thirty years making them two of the world’s richest and most powerful people and over the course of those thirty years they came to realise that their talent for keeping themselves out of the limelight was a very valuable commodity indeed. In fact, secrecy became more important to them than the technology and the money.
They also discovered that the knowledge they had been in possession of was a drug. They loved being ahead of the game more than anything else. More than Aston Martin’s, more than the finest accommodations and most sought after wines and whiskies, more than the bevy of scantily clad young maidens that would pop up every time they took out their cheque books. They, like most men, were the victims of the “I know something you don’t know” mind-set. The problem was, though, that their knowledge was finite and was sure to end one day. They needed more secrets and more technology.
They scoured the world for anything that would keep them on top: Newer crash sites, freak occurrences, anything that would give them the edge but to no avail. Their beloved drug, secret knowledge, was dying out and there was nothing that they could do about it.
Then, one day while on a trip to a small town in the south east of England called Bury St Edmunds, Mike met an angry looking man in a pub who intrigued him. He didn’t intrigue him straight off, at first Mike was downright terrified of the man but he warmed to him after a few choice pints of homemade English bitter. They got talking and it turned out that the man was a veritable magnet for the strange and unusual and had been since he was a small boy. He could walk down the most populated street in the busiest city and would be witness to the oddest things without even trying. He had once been walking along Oxford Street in London and a Sloth had dropped out of the sky and landed on a man who was walking not three feet in front of him. The man was killed instantly but freakishly the Sloth had survived without a scratch. The angry man had kept it as a pet and called it Gary. After much investigation it was concluded that the origins of the sloth and why it had decided to fall from the sky were beyond comprehension. Or more accurately they were heard saying, “We’ll be buggered if we know!”
Mike’s chat with the man, after moving on from bitter and loosening themselves up with a frightening amount of hard gin, revealed that the angry man had, in the toilets of the very pu
blic house they were in, not an hour earlier, come across and exterminated a werewolf, dropped it out of the toilet window, dragged it to his car and stuffed it in the boot. It was sitting there at that very moment waiting to be prodded and dissected to reveal the mystery of its existence. He also had a demon pig in the back seat, a little green man stuffed into a suitcase and a fairy in the glove box, all of which had been encountered that morning.
Of course Mike thought that his new companion was a raving lunatic but was fast proved wrong when the man showed him the evidence and said that he knew who Mike was and what he’d found in the highlands thirty years ago. The man said that he’d always hunted down the strange and destroyed it but didn’t have any money to keep him going as his part time bar job just didn’t pay for trips to Transylvania. He needed a job that paid lots of money and had a healthy expense account. Mike was more than happy to oblige. The man’s name was Shoop Winkle and it appeared that he had a remarkable sense for finding the kinds of things that would give Dave and Mike the secrets that they so desperately craved.
They set out for Edinburgh that very hour, after swinging round to pick up Shoop’s friend George, and headed for the hidden underground town that Shoop still inhabited. In the beginning the town was empty and they had little or no idea how it had come to be there; but it was the kind of secret that made them all feel very superior indeed.
Dave and Mike’s organisation had been reborn from the passionate hatred for all things odd that came from Shoop Winkle. The extra finances that the two men supplied increased Shoop’s productivity a thousand fold. He made it his life’s work to hunt down and destroy anything that was even vaguely out of the ordinary; but before destruction it went to the underground town for analysis, and to see if any profit could be made from it. They grew to new heights, or plunged new depths depending on your perspective, and all seemed well, until a certain individual caught wind of what was going on and decided that he wanted in.
Dave and Mike mysteriously disappeared shortly after the individual had managed to get Dave to sign a document handing the organisation over after spiking his drink. It was the late eighties and it was all about money and power. The businessman decided to take a heftier interest in the project and began the process of making the organisation his. The organisation was renamed the Sphere of Influence and it was a very secret, very powerful, very sneaky organisation indeed.
There was little or nothing that Shoop could do against such financial force but more importantly there was little or nothing that he wanted to do against such financial force. He just wanted to get paid for destroying oddities and the Sphere was more than happy to oblige, as long as he didn’t look into the disappearance of Dave and Mike. Shoop didn’t really care that his original benefactors were gone, he was on a mission to rid the world of weirdness and that was all that mattered to him. He became blinded by the mission and could see little else; which turned out to be an almighty mistake, as the businessman used Shoop’s lack of foresight to pull power away from underneath him like a magician whips away a cluttered tablecloth.
The Sphere became the solid backbone of anything that moved the human race forward in any way and the businessman, now only known as The Boss, was the head of the most powerful underground organisation in the world and Shoop was his underdog. Shoop didn’t like this and The Boss knew it. Moving the company forward meant cutting loose the old. The Boss was just biding his time until the right man came along to take over Shoop’s job, or until he could figure out a way of getting rid of Shoop without getting himself killed. The Boss was, to be perfectly frank, terrified of Shoop. Shoop knew all of this and wasn’t going anywhere without an earth shattering fight.
So the stalemate continued, but it was only a matter of time until one of them would gain the ground they needed to finish the other off. To Shoop’s frustration, it looked like the Boss was winning.
Shoop stooped through the circular door and into his retreat. It was bland, dank, grey and old. It made Shoop vaguely miserable, which is why he liked it so much.
The grey walls of the main entrance hall were littered with oil representations of the royalty of the British Isles. Kings, Queens and princes stared down from their muddy gold frames and seemed to stare their will for conservatism into Shoop’s very bones. He loved that feeling. This was his shrine to all that he believed in: History, monarchy and the leadership of the upper class. It was the very essence of everything normal and non-odd. It had been that way since the dawn of civilisation. New and strange ideas threatened the very fabric of his world and the more keenly he did his job, the more oddities he found that needed to be destroyed in order to sustain the status quo. This was all very ironic because the more keenly he did his job the more the status quo weakened from his findings.
This was a paradox he was all too painfully aware of.
The main focus of the hallway was at its very end. Both the walls leading down to it were littered with portraits, but the end wall only housed one. It was massive. It was a shrine to the one leader Shoop felt embodied the very essence of his beliefs. Queen Elizabeth the first glared down at him from her unnatural height, through her unnaturally pale face. In Shoop’s mind, the virgin queen was a goddess. He had very rude dreams about her.
As was his custom, before heading into the library, he whispered to her, “You want me don’t you! I know you do!” through his softest grimace and then turned right down a corridor that lead to the library.
The library wasn’t as stark as the rest of the cave-house mainly because of the man who was sitting slumped, face down on the ornate antique writing desk at the far end of the room. He had insisted, from the very outset, that this room would be his and Shoop’s hellish love of drabness would not interfere here.
The room was three stories high with bookshelves. It had a large mahogany table in the centre that, if it had been the only thing in there, would have looked pathetically small in comparison to the immensity of the room. It wasn’t the only thing in there though; in fact there was so much paraphernalia dotted about the place that the table looked positively colossal. The room was stuffed to the brim with all manner of academic artefacts. Their were dusty antique leather chairs, ink-wells and quills, decanters half full of brandy, globes, charts, eye glasses of varying thickness, compass’ and rather peculiarly and inexplicably, a stuffed Yorkshire terrier in a glass case attacking a stuffed bat. All was covered with a thin layer of dust except for a few places where thick, leather bound books had been recently moved and studied.
Shoop crept up to the sleeping man at the desk, licked his own index finger and stuffed it into the man’s ear. The man sat bolt upright and squeaked, “Mother!” while brandishing a deeply concerned expression. He flapped his arms around in a panic for a while and then looked around for a moment with bleary, encrusted eyes. One of the first things he saw through the waking blur was an unfinished glass of brandy on the desk. His saviour perceived, he proceeded to drain the glass post haste, pointed at Shoop while wincing and hissed through clenched teeth,
“Wanker!”
“Morning George.” Replied Shoop, grinning through a grimace, which is very hard to do, but Shoop had had a lot of practice.
George had once been the proud owner of a head-top bushel of flame red hair, but now it was a kind of burnt grey. It had been dulled through years of brandy, libraries and smoking pipes. For some reason, probably because he hadn’t been outside and seen normal people very much, he had decided that a bowl cut was the hair style for him which made his long, pail, be-speckled face look even longer and more gaunt. The hair sat atop his head like a wild highland bush. It had a mind of its own and George wasn’t about to try and convince it that it should be a bit more organised and polite. His full bushy moustache was in complete contradiction to the rest of his face. It was madly redder than his dull redhead top-mop was now, or had ever been and infinitely better groomed. He wore glasses that sank so far into his eye sockets that they looked as though they’d been surgic
ally implanted and could only be removed by tying the rim to a door handle and slamming it very smartly.
Even having been asleep face down on a desk his clothes were in pristine order. His grey blue polka-dot bowtie was geometrically perfect. Shoop harboured suspicions that the tie grew out of George’s neck. He also believed that the dark greenie grey cardigan that he religiously wore was in fact his real skin, but he didn’t prey on that idea too much as it would mean that George was walking around half naked most of the time; the idea of which made Shoop feel physically ill.
“I’ve got something for you to take a look at.” said Shoop.
“Hang on, let me get a brandy and fill my pipe.”
“Mine’s a gin and tonic.” Replied Shoop
George wobbled off, still half asleep, to fetch the morning booze based sustenance as Shoop slumped into his favourite battered leather armchair.
“How was your night?” Husked George through phlegm filled, nastily rattling coughing fits.
“Followed some people, blew up a vampire, found some stuff.”
“Wow, a whole night summed up in less than three seconds. Anything else or are you just going to resort to a ‘grunt only’ form of communication now?”
“Piss off!” suggested Shoop.
George shuffled over and presented Shoop with his liquid breakfast while scooping some of his own down his neck. He packed his pipe and lit it.
“So,” said George pausing to puff on his vanilla shag that permeated a sickly sweet plume, “you found some stuff then eh?”
