There was something about the way the man said urgently that Kellerman didn’t like. Nothing was urgent any more. There was nothing you could do today that you couldn’t put off until tomorrow, and that was a fact.
“The mayor isn’t available,” Kellerman said. “But if you tell me what’s so urgent, I can pass on a message.” I’ll pass on the message, he thought. I’ll pass it on to my boys, along with five warrants. You like banging on fucking doors? Let’s see how you cope down at the gaol, you fucking—
“We’re trained electric-icians,” said one of the callers, pressing his face so close to the door that Kellerman could only see one giant eye. It appeared to be caked with dirt and oil.
“Shhhhh!” the one at the front said, pulling the one with the big eye back into line. “What he means,” he went on, “is that we’ve recently discovered something. Something that will change your little town forever.”
“Is it bleach?” Kellerman said. “Because we tried that already. Didn’t seem to make a difference.”
“No, not bleach,” said the head caller. “When was the last time you read a book by bulb-light? When was the last time you put your food into a small box that went ding! and then came out all lovely and warm, at least on the outside? When was the last time—”
“You’re not Jehova’s Witnesses, are you?” Kellerman said. “Because we don’t tolerate that sort of nonsense in Oilhaven. In fact, we had the last pair hung, drawn, and quartered before setting fire to the remains. Then we took it in turns to wee on them. It was a great night…”
“Not for the Jehova’s Witnesses,” said the leader.
“Indeed,” Kellerman said. He’d completely lost his train of thought.
“What we’re hoping to sell to you today is a vision. One of power. Of growth. Of a return to some normality. I’m talking, of course, about volts.”
“Votes?” Kellerman said, frowning needlessly. “I’m not interested. I get plenty of those, year-in, year-out. Fortunately, I’m the only one to ever run for office. Strange that.”
“Not votes,” said the woman, who was not as pretty as Kellerman had first thought. In fact she was hideous, in a lovely way. “Volts, as in Ohms.”
“But we’ve already got homes,” Kellerman said, growing tired of all this nonsense. “Most people are happy with the ones they have, and the ones that aren’t, well they make do or I toss them out into the desert.”
“Not homes!” the leader said, huffing exasperatingly. “Ohms! As in Watts!”
“What?”
“Watts!”
“What Watts?”
“Hasn’t this joke run its course yet?” the lead caller said. “Look, we’re here to offer you an opportunity. Now, we can shout it through the door, no problem, but there are a lot of people gathering down here, pointing things at us and, if I’m being completely honest, making me very nervous, so why don’t you just let us in and we can talk in private? We think that you will want to hear what we have to say.”
Kellerman stared out through the peephole, the shotgun growing heavy in his hand. “Oh, alright,” he said. “But at the first mention of God, loft-insulation, or raccoon adoption, I’m going to shoot you where you sit.”
He unlocked the door just as his stomach started to roll once more.
Not now, he thought. Please not now…
20
The Barrel was heaving by the time Roger Fox arrived. Covered in filth and grime so thick that you couldn’t see the man beneath, he stepped up to the bar and beckoned Roy, the landlord. “Hello, Roy,” he said, trying not to touch anything. The bar wasn’t exactly spotless – nowhere was, not anymore – but he didn’t want to make it worse with a flick of the wrist or a misplaced elbow. “I was wondering. Did a little old lady with an umbrella leave something here for me?”
Roy stared him up and down, and then said, “Is that you, Roger? For fuck’s sake, I didn’t recognise you under all that filth. What can I get you?”
Roger smiled. “The thing?” he said. “The thing the old lady said she would leave here for me to pick up?”
“Oh,” Roy said, grasping what the miner was getting at. “That’s right. Little old lady, umbrella, mad as a box of frogs, came by this morning, early, wanted me to give you these.” And with that, he reached into his trouser pocket and produced…
“That’s my rock!” Roger said, baffled. “And my plastic button.”
“And now I’m giving them back to you,” said the barkeep. “Enjoy.”
“What about the milk?” Roger said, snatching the button and the rock from the man standing on the other side of the bar.
“Oh, not bloody you as well,” Roy said, shaking his head. “All day I’ve had people coming in here, yapping about Lou’s Milk.” He put on a whiny voice for the next part and, to be quite frank, it warranted one. “’Oh, it’s lovely’. ‘It tastes just like heaven’. ‘I hope he gets some more tomorrow’.” His voice returned to normal, he said, “If you ask me, no good will come of that milk. Nobody’s stopped to think where it’s all coming from. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of rumours today – some bullshit about an invisible well; some more bullshit about a cow from another dimension – but if you ask me, Lou Decker has sold his soul to the devil, and I, for one, won’t be touching a drop of the stuff.”
Roger was about to speak when there came a growl from the far end of the bar. Both he and the barkeep turned to find Reverend Schmidt, nursing a large scotch (99% water), batting it from side to side as if he were a cat and his glass a dead mouse.
“It’s not the devil’s work,” said the clergyman, turning his attention to Roger and Roy. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Unless you’ve tasted it – and Lord, have I tasted it – you should keep your opinions to yourself, you pair of clueless cunts.”
Now, Reverend Schmidt was a devout Catholic, the kind of clergyman with all the faith in the world for himself, and some spare for those around him. He hadn’t missed a sermon in over forty years, even in the weeks following The Event, when there wasn’t even a church in Oilhaven, just a pile of rubble and a battered old cross. If you were to ask anyone what they thought of him, words such as wonderful, nice, affable, and delightful would come back at you. In Oilhaven, perhaps even the world, there was no better man left standing.
So to hear him call two ‘haveners ‘clueless cunts’ came as quite a shock to anyone within earshot, and there were plenty. A card-game in the corner came to a complete halt as three of its players toppled back off their chairs. One of them, a man by the name Derringer (no relation), was so shocked that he went into cardiac arrest and was carried out by his friend, who was, until that point, having a very nice afternoon.
“You’ve tried the milk?” Roger said, forgetting, for a moment, that he had just been called a clueless cunt. Besides, there was no point in arguing with religious men. They had God on their side; Roger had a pudgy bartender and an ashtray full of acorns on his.
“Tried it?” said Schmidt. “Oh, I’ve tried it. And I won’t have a bad word said against it.” He sipped at his scotch and hissed as the burn reached his stomach. There wasn’t actually enough alcohol for a burn, but old habits die hard. “Look at this,” he said, holding up a hand, which was shaking so much that you had to really look just to see it was still there. As he lowered it, he said, “I’m hooked on the stuff. I’m counting down the hours until tomorrow, until Lou gets more.” He wasn’t going to tell them that he had plans to pop in on his way to the church later, just in case an order had arrived early; it didn’t seem important, and they didn’t seem to understand, judging by the way they were looking at him. It was as if he’d just told them a recipe for dog-shit sandwiches. He gave them both a gregarious nod before returning to his drink
“See?” Roy whispered, so only Roger Fox could hear. “Nothing good can come of it.”
Roger tried to conceal his disappointment (Rita and the kids would have loved just a taste of Lou’s Milk) with a forced smile, but he looked
as if he was trying to push something terrible from his body, and so soon stopped. “So he’s getting more tomorrow?” he said, mainly to Schmidt, who seemed to know more about it than Roy.
But something was not right with the reverend, hadn’t been for some time, if his cursing was anything to go by. He looked pallid, bilious, not quite with it, and when he next spoke, there was something in his voice that suggested he wasn’t the same man that had given countless sermons and never missed one. “It’s mine,” he said, a whisper at first, but repeated over and over until it became an unnerving roar. “It’s mine! It’s mine! It’s mine!” He stood, back-kicking the stool he’d been sitting upon so hard that it flew across the room and shattered against the wall. As splintered wood rained down, the reverend leapt into the air and came crashing down on the bar, as if he weighed twice – nay, thrice – the amount he had a second ago.
“He’s paying for that chair,” the barkeep told Roger. To Schmidt, he said, “Walter, either you calm down or I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” That was the thing about Roy; he was fair to those he knew, offered them second chances, and in some cases, third, fourth, and fifth, depending on how desperate he was for the custom. There were, in fact, seven people drinking in there at that very moment who were barred for life.
“You know,” Roger said, taking a tentative step away from the bar and scrutinising the maniacal clergyman as he stalked along the countertop. “I don’t think that’s the reverend.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Roy, spit-polishing a glass before placing it on its shelf.
“The way his head’s doing that weird thing, for starters,” Roger said, pointing at the anomalous way in which the reverend’s noggin pulsated, as if something was fighting to break out of it.
“Now that you mention it,” Roy said, also taking a step back, “that is a bit freaky, even from a clergyman.”
Kicking empty glasses and bowl of acorns aside, Reverend Schmidt rushed across the bar. His body and head bloated and drained, bloated and drained, as if he was being inflated by some imperceptible force. His eyes lost all colour – except white – and his lower jaw hung listlessly, as if it had become detached from the rest of his skull.
“Yeah, there’s something very not right about Walter,” Roy said, reaching under the bar for his baseball bat. Roger scrambled back, toppling over a table and the three people sitting around it.
“Hey!”
“Watch it!”
“Is this your rock and button?”
But Roger didn’t hang around down there on the floor of The Barrel. He struggled to his feet just in time to see Roy administer the first clobbering.
“This…is…my…pub…” he said, punctuating each word with a swing of the bat. The reverend took the blows as if they were nothing but a hindrance; blood and…something else, something sickeningly creamy, sprayed from his nose and mouth as the bat made contact.
People were screaming, now. Running from The Barrel, leaving their watered-down drinks where they sat. After a few seconds, there were only four people left in the room (including the malfunctioning clergyman), and for the life of him, Roger Fox couldn’t fathom why he was one of them.
“Tiny!” Roy said, rushing around the bar. “Finish him off for me, would you? There’s a good chap!”
The big man cracked his knuckles and took a step toward Schmidt, who had now taken on the appearance of a hippopotamus. If it wasn’t for the moustache and the torn clothes dangling from its distended body, the similitudes would have been uncanny.
It rolled off the counter, somehow managing to land on its huge, mutating feet. For a second, Roger thought he saw fear in the eyes of the man about to take it on.
“I don’t know where to hit it!” said Tiny, ducking this way and that, as if competing in some strange 1920s bareknuckle bout.
Roy, now behind his bodyguard but still holding the bat, said, “Just hit it all over. Something’s bound to knock it out.”
Roger Fox had seen a lot of fights in his time. Usually, disgruntled miners went at one another over something or other, but down there, where it was so dark it wasn’t considered odd for one’s shadow to get laid off, people seldom landed punches on their intended targets. Broken hands were the number one injury for miners in Oilhaven, because rock walls are incredibly hard, and nowhere near as malleable as a human face.
So, yes, he had seen a lot of fights, but nothing quite like this.
The reverend lunged for Tiny, swinging a giant fist through the air. Tiny dodged to the right, and not a moment too soon. The fist slammed into the wall, knocking the dartboard from its rightful place and revealing a relatively clean patch compared to the rest of the wall.
Tiny kicked at the beast with a huge, lumbering foot, and connected with its god knows what. The whole thing shook, as if made of jelly, and it screeched and cursed in so many different voices, it was impossible to tell whether there were words in there or not.
“Hit it again!” Roy said, swinging the baseball bat for effect.
Roger was rooted to the spot. Sure he could run, but it wasn’t every day you saw a clergyman turn into a monster…at least, not anymore. This was something he could tell his kids, his grandkids (if his kids ever met kids they weren’t related to), and he wasn’t about to scamper now, when it was about to get good.
The clergy-monster hissed and growled as Tiny began to pummel it with fist after fist. At some point during the trouncing, the creature’s moustache fell off and shrivelled up like a dehydrated pomegranate, leaving nothing of Schmidt to see in its angry and wounded countenance.
“Yeah! You like that!? You fucking demon! You fucking like that!?” Tiny was really getting into it, and for a moment, Roger Fox almost felt sorry for it, whatever it was. “You like that!? Oh, I bet you like that, you filthy fucking hippo!” Punch, punch, kick, kick, headbutt…
And it was the headbutt that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, as the clergy-beast reared up onto its hind legs and spewed forth a torrent of white liquid, coating Tiny from head to toe in an instant.
A strange stench washed over the room, far worse than anything either the miner or the barkeep had smelt before. It was like dirty socks, filled with edam, left out in the sun for three days, then pooped on. In other words, not the kind of smell you’d want caught at the back of your throat.
Tiny turned, the white liquid dripping from him in thick globules, and for some reason, as if it already knew the fight was over, the creature stepped back, forfeiting its best opportunity for attack.
There was really no need…
Tendrils of white smoke began to curl up and away from the drenched giant, accompanied by a gentle hissing noise, the kind that suggested something was cooking.
And then Tiny’s mouth fell open and he screamed. Pain racked through his body as his skin began to melt. For some reason – Roger couldn’t figure it out at that point – Tiny began to pull at his flesh, which only made things worse. Thick clumps of meat slapped onto the pub floor, still hissing and dissolving where they landed. Tiny dropped to his knees, which were nothing but bone and liquefying sinew by that point anyway. Roger Fox was grateful when the poor man’s vocal chords had dissolved, for he was making a right fucking row.
Roy, frozen to the spot as if Medusa had just popped in for a cheeky half, said, “No! Not Tiny!”
The rest of the landlord’s favourite giant fell apart with an almighty squelch, proving that, yes, yes Tiny. There was just a puddle of viscera and white gloop where he had stood a moment before. It would take one helluva recovery for the poor man to get up again.
The clergy-beast roared, filling the room with an unsavoury stench, and then it turned on Roger and Roy, not quite sure which one it was going to destroy first.
Roy did the first thing that came to mind; he took a step back and pointed a tremulous finger at Roger Fox. This one! Take no notice of the dirt, he’s much tastier than me!
A thousand-and-one thoughts tore through Roger
’s mind as death stared him square the face. It was true what they said; life really did flash before your eyes in the moments before death. It wasn’t a bad life, he thought, gulping audibly. Kids, missus – the only one in town not averse to putting out, once in a while – nice house, if not a little open plan. There were far worse off out there. Such a shame it was all going to come to an abrupt, and painful, end.
“Miiiiiiiilllllllk!” the clergy-beast bellowed, and then it was galloping toward Roger Fox, its long, black tongue flapping up and down as it loped.
“Shit, shit shit, shit, SHIIIIIIT!” Roger Fox said, shutting his eyes. He’d had some truly awful days in his life, but this one was up there with the worst of them. Still, if he was going to die, he was damn well going to do it with his eyes closed. He wasn’t a complete masochist.
Just then, something whooshed past Roger’s head. He felt the wind from it, heard it whistle as it coasted by. He opened his eyes just as a sharp stake thumped into the clergy-beast’s grotesque face. The creature roared in agony and, more importantly, stopped careering toward Roger. Dazed and wondering what the fuck had just happened, the beast staggered back, knocking several tables aside before slamming into the bar. Its roar developed into a shrill squeal as it thrashed and writhed, trying to remove the projectile from its head.
But it was buried deep, and the creature seemed to be somewhat lacking when it came to opposable thumbs.
Roy, sensing an opportunity, barrelled forwards, the baseball bat raised high. “This is for Tiny!” he snarled, and brought the bat down as true as possible. The clergy-beast whined as the thick, wooden stake was pushed deeper into its head. There was an audible crunch and, pretty soon after, the clergy-beast decided to give up the ghost and allow the inevitable death to steal it away.
Breathless, sobbing, Roy of The Barrel allowed the bat to fall from his grasp. Only then did he look up to see the person who had come to their aid.
“I knew this place was lively,” said the naked alleyway man, “but where the fuck did you get an albino rhino from?”
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