by Rufus Offor
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘as one is lead to believe, the situation is rather perilous and in real danger of causing both of our person’s to be freed of our mortal coil, correct?’
‘I do wish you’d use less words!’
‘I’ll accept that to be an answer in the affirmative!’
‘If you must!’ grunted George.
‘Right, so, to continue,’ she continued, ‘the more time that is spent by us in this rather ornate and charming little home of the dead, the more chance there is of us being discovered and changed from our current status into rather unattractive, small and slimy red lumps, yes?’
‘Sounds about right… I think!’
‘And all that you have to do in this resting place for the bones of people centuries past, is to draw all of these elaborate little symbols as accurately as you can, take down their location within these enchanting grounds around this quirky little church and analyse all of the collected data in order to ascertain where exactly it is that we need to be going next to find this intriguingly mysterious archaic object that appears to be so important to both you and your employer Mr Winkle?’
‘How did you manage to say all of that without breathing? I mean… shouldn’t you be going blue around about now?’
‘One has many talents George, excessively long sentences is but one of them!’
‘Is there a point coming up any time soon?’ asked George sharply while trying to draw the precise geometric relationship between the carving of a cherub and a bony foot on one of the crypts.
Chunt took out a small metal object from her pocket, ‘I have become aware that you’re particularly fond of note books and writing things down, which I fear may be to the detriment of efficiency; even though the drawings that you’re producing are really rather lovely, I wonder if I might venture to suggest an alternative?’
George simply gave off a low grunt, ‘one will presume that you are, in fact, answering in the affirmative.’
‘Are you capable, at least once,’ spat George, his face reddening underneath the hard light disguise, ‘of just getting to the bloody point!?’
‘One thought that perhaps it might be prudent to use some manner of electronic image capturing device, such as,’ she held up the small metal object, ‘a camera.’
George was struck dumb.
He had, for more years than he cared to remember, exercised his little grey cells to the point of Olympian stature. His brain was among one of the finest on the planet and yet he’d managed to completely ignore the blatantly obvious choice of using a camera rather than spend hours drawing neat little pictures. Not only that but he’d had his idiotic mistake pointed to him by someone that he regarded as a distinct intellectual inferior. He felt extremely sheepish and daft and scanned his brain for some sort of put down that would serve to make him feel a bit better and make Chunt feel small.
He couldn’t find one.
‘Give me that!’ His voice was a mix of pronounced anger and manifest embarrassment as he snatched the camera from her and started snapping away at the contents of the catacomb.
Chunt sat down and chuckled quietly to herself. She loved it when people underestimated her.
It wasn’t long before George was done. He had spend a little time taking measurements with a laser measure and making the odd note but in the end, an exercise that would’ve taken several days ended up taking mere hours. George would never admit it to Chunt but she’d saved them an awful lot of time and probably stopped them from being discovered by the Sphere of influence. They were already getting funny looks from some of the people sitting eating their lunches in the church grounds. If they’d stayed there even an hour longer, George thought, they would have been captured and the ace up his sleeve would have had to have been played. The secret that he’d kept for eons would have been out.
Secretly, somewhere inside him he thanked Chunt. She was quite some distance away from being a confidant but had done well enough to edge her way marginally into his trust. This worried George a little as through experience he’d learned that trust tended to be a word that most people used just before they screwed you over. Despite this though, he still cautiously let her creep a little into his faith.
‘She may prove herself to be of more use than just a body guard.’ he thought to himself as they headed for the graveyard gates, ‘I may be able to consider her for deeper involvement,’
Things were looking good. Chunt had moved the operation along nicely and it looked as though they would get out of Edinburgh without being caught by the Sphere, which was exactly the point at which the Sphere decided to turn up.
Just as they reached the main gates he saw three very large men in black suits and black ties move into the gate opening and block it. His heart fluttered in panic and he felt the blood rush around his body like a rabid dog in a hen house.
‘Bollocks.’ He said with laboured breath, fear in his voice.
Chunt had seen them from across the graveyard. She had seen them too late though and there wasn’t much she could do other than head for the main gates and hope that an opportunity would present itself for her to do them some damage. She’d also seen the sniper hovering in the darkness of a room in a building off to her right. There were two men in the graveyard that, upon seeing the men in black suits, put down the newspapers they had been pretending to read and cut off escape from the rear. Outside the gates Chunt could see at least seven people out on the main street who clearly did not belong there and as the men in black moved forward, they abandoned their surveillance posts and closed in on the her and George. There were at least two other snipers in buildings on the other side of the gate.
All-in-all, it looked a bit like they were well and truly up the creak, not only without a paddle, but they’d forgotten their boat and couldn’t swim either.
‘Bolloks bollocks bollocks!’ hissed George, ‘this can’t be allowed to happen damn it! I’ve worked too bloody hard for too bloody long to have this bunch of…’
‘Calm down!’ Chunt’s voice was authoritative but level and cut through George’s mild hysteria like lightening through a turbulent sky, ‘We’re not done yet.’
George, though a little calmer was still very much on edge, ‘Look, I know that you can handle yourself but these are Sphere agents, they train very hard indeed to be as vicious as is humanly possible. You could take one of them, maybe, but three? I’m afraid you may be getting your hopes up.’ George had clearly not seen the myriad of other agents surrounding them and looking down on them from various windows.
‘One hates to exacerbate your grim mood George, but there aren’t three of them, there are at least eleven more that I can perceive at this present juncture.’
‘Bollocks! Bollocks! bollocks!’ said George again.
‘Calm yourself,’ again Chunt’s voice cut through George’s inability to keep his cool. ‘As one said, we’re not quite finished yet. Just keep calm and I’ll see what I can do for us.’
The agents closed their trap. As they reached the gate that sat in a shallow alley between two buildings they cut them off from the rear and blocked their way out onto the main street.
‘Good evening gentlemen!’ said Chunt, ‘May we be of assistance in some way.’
‘You’re coming with us.’
‘We’d be glad to, would you mind showing us some credentials officer?’
‘No officers here madam, and there’s not likely to be so I wouldn’t look for any help if I were you.’ The man’s voice was deep and grim. His stature was stupidly grand, like he’d been fed steroids since conception.
‘What is it exactly that you think we’ve done, we were just having a look around, it’s a public place, you’ve no right!’
‘You’ve aroused the suspicions of some people that you shouldn’t have. You are coming with us and that’s the end of it!’ His gravely voice had a finality in it that couldn’t be ignored.
‘I’m sure that we can come to some sort of arrangement my good man, would
you like a cigarette?’ Chunt reached into her pocket, the man’s reaction was swift and automatic. His hand whipped into his jacket retrieving a semi-automatic weapon, cocked and loaded with lightening speed.
‘Easy there girly!’ he grunted. Chunt froze with her hand half out of her pocket.
‘Let’s not be hasty!’ she said holding her other hand up in surrender, ‘I’m just getting my cigarettes.’
‘Take it slow, very slow!’ said the man.
Chunt’s hand trailed out of her pocket at a snails pace revealing exactly what she said it would, ‘would you like one?’ she asked the head Sphere agent pointing a cigarette at him.
‘No!’ his face was dropped into outright hatred. ‘You will stop playing games and you will follow me. NOW! And don’t try anything, you won’t last a split second.’
‘I believe you.’ She said as George looked on helplessly.
She conceded to the man but had done exactly what she needed to do. She now had a measure of the agent’s speed. He was quick. Very quick, as were his colleagues who’d dug inside their jackets for their guns too. There would be no point in trying to take them on hand to hand or with obvious weapons, but she was still hopeful that they could make a run for it. The only element that she couldn’t figure out how to get around was the escape itself. If there were more men than she’d seen beyond the gates then they’d be in real trouble.
The men behind them closed in and dug guns into their backs. The men in black in front of them turned and lead the way back to the main street. A car sped down the street screeching to a halt at the pavement twenty yards from them. Chunt took out a cigarette and lit it.
‘I can get us away from them but we need somewhere to run to.’ Chunt whispered. George noticed that her excessive use of long words and mammoth sentences had subdued, ‘and it’d be better if it was as close as possible.’
‘shut up!’ hissed one of the men behind them. George looked at her and nodded his head confirming that he’d get them out of the streets if she got them away from the gunmen.
Chunt pulled tentatively on her cigarette, exhaling a dense cloud. When they were ten yards away from the car she coughed harshly, bending double as she fought her rebelling lungs. Her eyes streaming she stood upright again. ‘Dear me, I don’t think I’m in the mood for this.’ She flicked the butt over the heads of the agents and it landed on the roof of the waiting black Mercedes.
‘Now that wasn’t very clever.’ Grunted the head agent turning and heading toward Chunt, his fists at the ready. He’d clearly decided to teach her that he was the man in charge and wasn’t about to suffer fools gladly. Especially fools who put burn marks on his nice car.
‘Possibly more clever than you know.’ She said smiling.
The agent pondered this for a moment, a little confused; then realisation dawned on him. His eyes widened and he spun back round to look at the cigarette. ‘GET THAT THING OF THE CAR!’ he bellowed as the butt started fizzing. Chunt grabbed George and forced him to the ground as the car disappeared in a violent explosion. From where he was on the floor George saw three men punctured by flying metal before thick cloud of smoke covered the area. The noise was horrific, like standing next to a speaker at a death metal concert and the instant chaos was like someone had opened a door to hell and let Mephistopheles’ rabid hordes loose.
As the explosion came to the end of its fury Chunt grabbed George up off the ground and pulled him into the smoke.
‘Hold your breath and cover your mouth!’ she yelled. He didn’t waste any time in doing what he was told.
Inside the cloud they could hear unearthly screams coming from every direction, the smell of fuel and burnt flesh filled the air and the sound of chunks of flesh falling around them sent George into a panic. They were in a whirlwind of metal, fire and flesh and the insanity of it all grabbed George by the stomach and swung him round. Chunt’s voice came out the black madness.
‘Take this! Put it on!’
She thrust the jacket of one of the fallen agents into his hands. Giving him something else to think about other than the horror around him calmed him a little. He put the jacket on as Chunt yelled in his ear, ‘which way?’
‘Don’t know, can’t see, can’t see!’
‘Down the street or up it?’
‘Down!
They were off. The smoke had covered this much of their escape and was spreading fast in the direction that they wanted to go. The snipers wouldn’t be able to see them through the thick black blanket and when they emerged, they would be neatly covered in the black jackets of the Sphere agents. Through the pandemonium George’s opinion of Chunt jumped up yet another notch.
They ran out from inside the cloud of death, the smoke clinging to them as they ran, coughing and gasping. Hellish yelps and screams punctured the air behind them, a man who’s face had been largely removed by a piece of shrapnel lay slumped against a wall as they emerged from the belly of the explosion. A sniper saw them, saw the black suit jackets and went back to scanning the rest of the carnage. By the time he noticed that something had been wrong with their outfits, the shock of grey hair from George’s hard light disguise, the slight female figure of Chunt, they had disappeared down the street.
George led them down a side alley halfway down the old town street that lead to a filth ridden stairway leading down to another road. They were almost at the bottom of the stairs when they heard sounds of pursuit. George tried a door but it was locked.
‘Bollocks! We need to be in there!’ he yelped in a high-pitched panicky squeal.
Chunt flew into the air without hesitation, spinning and landing a wood splintering kick on the sturdy lock. The door flew open and they were inside.
‘Well done,’ said George, ‘but now they’re going to know we came this way.’
Chunt looked around. There was a plank of wood lying on the floor not far from them, she dived for it, grabbed it, swung it round and jammed the door firmly shut. Seconds later the handle rattled.
‘This one’s locked,’ a voice came from inches away on the other side of the door, ‘go on to the next one.’ then the sound of a dozen feet and silence.
‘It won’t be long until they figure out where we went,’ said Chunt, ‘I hope you’ve got something up your sleeve, and a bloody big raise in pay if we live through the day!’ She turned to see George taking off down a dark corridor strewn with rubbish. It smelled like a toilet. ‘Hey! Wait for me!’ She bolted after him.
‘In answer to your questions, yes I do have something up my sleeve and as for the pay rise, I think I might be able to do a little better than that, but I have to show you something first.’
‘Okay?’ Said Chunt almost tripping over the filth and rubble that covered the floor of the near pitch-black corridor.
‘I don’t suppose you’d have a torch would you?’ Said George as he reached the entrance to a stairway. It lead into total blackness. Chunt reached into her pocket and pulled out a tiny little black cylinder no bigger than a wood screw. ‘Better than nothing I suppose.’
‘Don’t judge a book by its cover!’ Said Chunt.
George turned the torch on, squinting at how powerful it was. ‘Blimey!’
‘That’s exactly what I said the first time I saw it old chap!’
George pointed the beam down the stairs and Chunt got a better look at where they were. The walls were old stone, hundreds of years old and the place looked like it hadn’t had a human foot tread it for the same amount of time. The walls crept up and converged making an arched ceiling from which stalactites hung, dripping unknown rancid liquids onto the rubble, dust and mud soaked stairs. Chunt squinted down to the distance where the torch couldn’t reach.
‘How far does this go?’
‘Quite a way!’ said George.
‘Is that… I think I can see… a hand, yeah, I think that’s a hand down there.’
‘If that’s all we see we’ll be lucky!’ sighed George.
‘What is this place?’
>
‘You’ll find out soon but for now I think we should get a move on.’ Said George and as if the Sphere agents had heard him, there was a banging at the entrance to the corridor. They were trying to break in. George took off down the stairs as cautiously as he could but still slipping on the grime. Chunt followed.
They descended for a while, passing the hand that Chunt had seen. It was covered in thick fur and had course sharp fingernails on it. It stuck out of the muddy corner of a step like some buried creature under them was grasping for air.
‘What the hell did that belong to?’ asked Chunt, ‘I mean, one has been privy to a number of romantic encounters with some rather bushy individuals, mostly of the Mediterranean persuasion, but one can quite honestly pronounce to never having witnessed any individual with a pelt of such dense proportion on any of the gentlemen that I have previously encountered.’
George noticed that Chunt’s desire to fill the air with streams of long sentences had returned. ‘She only does it when she’s relaxed!’ he thought. ‘That’s interesting,’ and saved the nugget of information in his mind for later reference without saying anything to her.
‘It was a werewolf’s hand!’ Said George attempting to test his theory.
‘What?’ She said, voice level but a distinct lack of words in her reply.
‘All will become clear in time.’ Said George. They heard a dull crash from somewhere behind them. ‘They’re coming, I hope we have enough time.’
‘For what?’
‘You’ll see.’
Some time later the long straight stairway turned into a long winding stairway and more unsavoury things could be seen strewn about in the darkness. A hairy leg here, pieces of torso there, a head, all of which seemed to have come from half man, half wolf creatures. The head disturbed Chunt the most. It had clearly been there for quite some time and was partially eaten away and maggot ridden. Its nose wasn’t long enough to be a wolf’s and wasn’t short enough to be a man’s, it sat somewhere between the two. Its dead, yellow eyes glared up at her as if asking for help, its mouth open and wincing in a final death grimace, flesh dangling off its bones in places. Chunt had witnessed her fair share of death before but this was like nothing she’d ever seen. She almost felt sorry for the poor things.
