Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  “Happy?” he challenged.

  “Inordinately,” Chamberlain confirmed, his smile not slipping at all. He opened the door and proceeded inside.

  Gough followed him and stopped dead on the other side of the doorway.

  “What is this?” he asked angrily.

  “The library,” Chamberlain revealed.

  It was certainly a library. The room was a cube 30 metres on a side and it contained row after row of shelving, every inch of which was stuffed to capacity with books. There were paperback books, hardbound editions, encyclopaedias, leather-bound volumes, loose-leaf portfolios, even a couple of scrolls. Gough thought that if he looked closely enough he would probably be able to find some papyrus in there as well.

  “You did request all the documents pertaining to the purpose and activities of this department,” Chamberlain explained. “Every volume here, every page really, falls into that category.”

  “The ICO…”

  “…ordered full disclosure.” Chamberlain overrode Gough’s objection and threw his arms wide to encompass the contents of the whole room. “This is what full disclosure looks like.”

  He then led Gough to a small utilitarian desk in the exact centre of the floor. There was a small pile of books and papers on the desk, along with a spiral-bound notepad and a biro.

  “I would suggest that you start with these. They should contain most of the answers that you are looking for. I would strongly advise against consulting any of the other books, but the choice is, of course, entirely yours.”

  The civil servant then turned and headed for the door.

  “You’re not staying?” Gough asked in surprise.

  “I haven’t found journalists poring over documents and making notes entertaining since All the President’s Men,” Chamberlain responded. “Besides which, I don’t like to be in here for too long.”

  Before Gough could ask him what he meant by that, the portly bureaucrat was gone. He could hardly have left the room any faster had he been running.

  Gough banished the man’s curious behaviour from his mind and shucked off his jacket, draping it over the back of the chair that was as utilitarian as the desk. It seemed that the provision of the plush ergonomic furniture did not extend to this room. He picked up the biro and the pad with distaste and examined them closely. They did not seem to possess any unusual characteristics. He glanced around the room, looking for CCTV cameras. If they were there, they were well hidden.

  “Chamberlain is an arse,” he said for the benefit of any hidden microphones in the room.

  Ignoring the papers on the table, he asked the room in general, “So what is it that they don’t want me to find?”

  There was no answer. He would have been both surprised and worried if there had been.

  He walked into the first aisle between the banks of shelving and browsed some of the titles there. Most were meaningless, rendered in languages (and occasionally alphabets) that were unknown to him. True, he could only speak English, but he could usually recognise other languages. He did not know any of these. Some of the other books held titles that appeared to be in Olde English and, as a result, a few words were decipherable, but not enough to make sense of.

  “What is this?” he asked again, this time asking himself, wondering if some sort of trick was being played on him.

  There was a thump from the other side of the shelving. He went around it gingerly, expecting to find Chamberlain, or some other lackeys, trying to restrain their amusement at the trick they were playing on the reporter. They wouldn’t be laughing when his articles hit the net and the newspaper vendors. He would do a job on them that would make them regret their parents being born, let alone themselves.

  Instead of giggling civil servants, he found a book lying open on the floor. There was a space between books on one of the shelves. He picked the book up and replaced it on the shelves. He had gone only a pace or so further before he heard another thump, just like the earlier one. When he turned around again, the book was back on the floor. He didn’t recognise the book, but the space on the shelf was in the same location. He picked up the book once more and looked at the open pages. The words were again unfamiliar to him, but they were illustrated by old photographs of hazy, indistinct figures. There were names under one of the photographs, which showed three fuzzy figures. He tried to sound out the names, assuming that his pronunciation would be utterly terrible. As he placed the book back in its spot for the second time, a draught ran through the room. Someone had probably opened an outside door.

  Deciding not to play Chamberlain’s game any longer, Gough went back to the table in the centre of the floor. He would start with the documents that Chamberlain had suggested and then move on from there. The table, though, was empty. The books and files that had been piled there were scattered across the floor. At either end of the table stood a figure. They were dressed in identical surgical smocks and hair nets. Their hands were encased in latex gloves. Their faces…

  Gough fell back a step and bit off a shout of fright.

  …were a mess of scars and open wounds. Each of the pair had been cut in at least a dozen places on the face. Some of the wounds had been clumsily stitched up again to heal crookedly. The most recent wounds still had sutures visible, like tacking stitches in the hem of a dress.

  The two men, which they must have been at one time, stared back at him through eyes that were half shut by the puffed and scarred flesh. Even so, he could see enough of them to be able to read the hunger that lay within them. One raised a hand holding a bone saw. The other raised a steel scalpel.

  Gough took another step backward, but his arms were caught suddenly in a tight grip. Intense cold seared his skin through the thin cotton shirt and he cried out in pain as it burned him.

  The blurred figures from the book flashed into his mind, unbidden. There had been three of them. Could it be? Was it possible? How was it possible? Could he have somehow summoned these things merely by reading their names in a book? Gough suddenly wondered if this was why Chamberlain and his team had fought so hard and for so long against the Freedom of Information request that had brought him here.

  The cold grip on his arms tightened and he was lifted bodily from the floor. Before he could shout out, he was slammed down onto the vacated surface of the desk. The air was forced out of his lungs, making any further shouting momentarily impossible. Even when the position of the burning cold hands holding him down changed, he was unable to summon up the breath to scream at the new agony that burned him. He heard something tearing, but had no sense of what it might be. Then he felt the unmistakeable sensation of a fingertip being drawn across his back. Did these things really mean to…?

  Sometime later, Chamberlain put down his bone china cup at the sound of polite knocking on the door to his office.

  “Come in, Hudson.”

  Hudson entered the room, stooping to get safely through the doorway. When he spoke, his voice was soft and cultured. “The screaming appears to have stopped.”

  Chamberlain sighed heavily. “I suppose that we had best go and see what the damage is.”

  He followed his tall colleague down the short hallway along which he had led Gough what seemed both a short time and forever ago. Outside the door at its end, he took a deep breath to fortify himself and then opened the door.

  Gough’s body lay on the desk in the middle of the floor. Most of it. One limb had been casually abandoned at the base of a bank of shelving. The nature of the wounds on the rest of the body told Chamberlain that, had he cared to look, some of the major internal organs would be missing.

  The civil servant reached down and picked up a steel scalpel, the blade stained a deep red. It was painfully cold to the touch.

  “The Vivisectionists,” he said, mainly to himself. “Well, at least it wasn’t the Mermen.”

  It had taken months, and a new carpet, to get rid of the dead fish smell.

  “The usual?” Hudson asked gently.

  “Consi
dering the nature and extent of the damage,” Chamberlain assessed, “I think, throw him under a train. Not the Tube; the Mayor will only start complaining again. Inform our friends in the Metropolitan Police and in the Coroner’s office.”

  The tall man left the room to make the necessary arrangements. Chamberlain looked over the bloody scene once more.

  “Sometimes,” he muttered, “I bloody hate the FoI Act.”

  The Egg Mk II

  Jordan found the egg whilst desultorily attacking the weeds that were forever trying to encroach onto the crumbling tarmac of the equally crumbling gas station. The station had been left to him by his parents. They had been as unable to make a success of the place as he had since inheriting it and they had bequeathed him only the station, a ratty mobile home that served as living quarters and a few almost-empty bank accounts.

  Jordan had no idea why his parents had chosen to build and operate a gas station wedged between a dying town and the desert Badlands of Nevada, but in doing so they had condemned themselves, and their only offspring, to a life of continual struggle and no expectations. He had never heard the phrase ‘lives of quiet desperation’, but if he had he would have instantly recognised the relevance.

  There had been the early morning rush of folk who needed to fill up their tanks before heading out to low-paying jobs in larger townships further off, as there was most days, but that was well past and the weeding was an attempt to stave off the inevitable boredom that threatened to settle over him until the evening rush of those who were returning and had forgotten to fill up that morning. It was either that or go inside to watch TV with his wife, Marcie, and hope that he heard any unexpected vehicles pulling onto the station’s forecourt. He’d done that twice already this week and wasn’t keen on making a habit of it, not least because she smoked like steam locomotive’s stack and watched an endless chain of the worst daytime soaps.

  He almost broke the egg, poking listlessly at a bunch of intransigent weeds with his makeshift hoe, fashioned from the handle of a broken broom and a blunt steak knife. The knife had been part of a set given to him by a salesman trying to take over the supply of his cigarette stock. The supplier had not changed and the steak knives had proven to be cheap trash. The two facts were not unconnected.

  As he brought the homemade implement down on the weeds, something shifted and rolled out of the vegetation. At first, he thought he might have disturbed a lizard, or something less friendly, but when it stopped rolling and remained still, he felt brave enough to take a closer look and saw that it was an egg. After examining it from all sides and looking around for an angry mother, he reached down and picked it up.

  It was warm to the touch, not like those he had in the store for the occasional customer who had forgotten to pick up the fixings of dinner. Off-white in colour, it was mottled with irregular splotches of a darker beige, but as he turned it between his fingers, he saw shining hints of colour. He didn’t know the word ‘iridescence’, but if he had then it would have been the exact word that he was looking for.

  “Well now, that’s a curious thing,” he said to himself, not having anyone else to say it to.

  He took the egg into the store and looked behind the counter, coming up with one of the empty cartons of cigarette packs that the steak knife salesman had not supplied. He lined it with some old, but clean (well, sort of clean) rags and then placed it by the window because he had read somewhere that you had to keep eggs warm if you wanted them to hatch. The sun coming in through the window was plenty warm enough.

  Cell phone coverage was crap so far outside of town, but Jordan’s parents had been forced to have a landline data connection installed to handle all the credit card transactions. Cash was still the preferred method of paying for anything out here, but card usage accounted for a third of his business. He hooked up a laptop that was so old it was practically steam driven to the line and started to search the internet for images of eggs like the one that he had found. He didn’t expect it to be anything too special, still thinking it most likely to be an abandoned lizard nest, but he expected it to be something. Instead, he came up blank. He searched on every variation of ‘egg’, ‘lizard’, ‘bird’, ‘colour’ and ‘rainbow’ that he could think of, but found nothing that resembled the egg now residing in his rag-stuffed cigarette carton. He searched for egg-laying creatures that were local to the region and when he found nothing of note, he cast his search wider on the net.

  He became so engrossed in the search that he was startled, and swore both violently and blasphemously, when the phone rang. It was the single ring that denoted the dedicated link to the phone in the mobile home out back.

  “What?” he asked grumpily, upset by both his lack of success and the fright that Marcie had just given him.

  “Don’t get snippy with me just because you missed your lunch,” her peeved voice snapped back and he just managed to catch her muttering, “I don’t know why I bother,” as she slammed the phone back down.

  Jordan looked up at the clock on the far wall of the store out of habit, even though he knew that it hadn’t worked for the past week. He then looked at his watch, which did still work, though the Lord only knew how considering its age and the bashing that it had been subject to. His internet researches had taken him well past his habitual hour for lunch, so he slipped off the stool and trudged around to the trailer, pausing to flip over the sign that had been amended to ‘Not closed. Round the back. Sound horn’. His regular customers knew well enough to do that, but the sign had been written in times when he was more optimistic about attracting business from passing traffic. Since the station was located between two regions of nowhere, passing trade proved to be rarer than an honest senator.

  “Oh, so he honours us with his presence, does he?” Marcie demanded from the back of the trailer when she heard the door squeak open.

  He knew that she wasn’t going to let up on him for a while, so he just asked tiredly, “Where’s m’lunch?”

  “In the dog,” she shot back.

  “We don’t have no dog,” he pointed out, wondering why he even tried.

  “Then it must have been a coyote,” was her response.

  “OK, I’ll alert the sheriff,” he said, opening the squeaky door again.

  “It’s by the stove,” Marcie snapped, upset that he had managed to get one over on her. Only Marcie would refer to the battered, bargain-priced microwave oven as a ‘stove’.

  The humble grilled cheese sandwich is surely one of the easiest of meals to prepare, but Marcie had managed to make a pig’s ear of it. The bread was nearly burned in some places, raw in others. She’d slathered butter over the toast before adding the cheese, so that it had turned soggy and torn in places. The cheese slices had been thrown on haphazardly and were hanging over the edges of toast as well as being misaligned to an almost deliberate angle. There was a smear of something oozing out that might have been pickle, but the colour suggested it was on the verge of going off. Only Marcie could turn making a grilled cheese sandwich into an act of defiance.

  “So what was so important you couldn’t be bothered to come home for lunch?” Marcie demanded, re-entering the trailer’s main room. She was wearing one of her loudest flowered dresses over a pair of pants with an elasticated waistband. It was her standard mode of dress, becoming increasingly popular with her for every pound that she added to her body weight.

  Jordan smothered a smart comment about the quality of the local cuisine and instead told her all about the egg and how he hadn’t been able to find a single picture anything like it on Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL or any of those other search engines that you only ever use when what you’re looking for is so obscure that even the internet’s never heard of it.

  “That Reverend’s into birds ain’t he?” she asked, barely paying attention to his story, which was a good deal more attention than she usually paid. “You know, the one from the other church, on the far side.”

  She might as well have been saying ‘The Dark Si
de’ because her tone said everything that needed to be known about what she thought of the odd people who frequented the home of that strange strain of the same religion.

  “Yeah, I guess I did hear that somewhere,” Jordan agreed, thoughtfully.

  “Of course you did; I just told you,” his wife pointed out with an expressive roll of her eyes that he did not have to see to know had taken place.

  Jordan munched on his sandwich and considered which of the chemical-heavy treats from the snacks stand in the station he would use later to take the taste away. Marcie thumped down into her favourite chair with an impact hard enough to shake the whole place. Jordan recognised it as a statement on her general dissatisfaction with how her life had worked out and her specific dissatisfaction with how Jordan had failed to make it better. There was a click and a whine, followed immediately by the sound of voices screaming at each other. The 15 minutes of fame seekers on whatever daytime conflict show she was watching were already hurling abuse, and in the case of the young woman who believed her man done her wrong her shoe, at each other. Jordan took his cue and departed back to the station, dumping what remained of the sandwich thoughtlessly into the garbage on the way, but retaining enough interest to make sure that he covered it up with last night’s pizza boxes. He didn’t need an argument over his not appreciating Marcie slaving over a hot butter knife.

  Though he wasn’t keen on the idea of bothering someone he didn’t know, especially someone he didn’t know who was likely to bring up the subject of church attendance, the idea that Marcie had put into Jordan’s brain continued to fester and grow. Another couple of fruitless hours of searching the highways and byways of the internet gave him the frustration he needed to scuff through the phone book for the Reverend Talbert. He’d been local for a while, which was just as well since the phone book was a good five years out of date.

  “And what is it that I can help you with today, Jordan?” the reverend asked, having recognised the station owner for the rare times that he called in to fill up his shiny Ford hybrid.