Tales of the Talking Picture

by Tom Slemen

  ‘Is that you sir?’ the agent asked, recognising the voice of Controller.

  ‘Yes,’ Controller replied, and with great impatience in his voice he told the doctor to switch off the light.

  Quarrenden looked at the clinical white ceiling tiles, and Controller’s head swum into view. ‘You did it,’ he said with a subdued smile, ‘you succeeded.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Quarrenden tried to sit up in the hospital bed but almost fainted with the pain in his back, even though he’d been given shots of morphine.

  ‘Yes, yes, we’re sure – take it easy!’ Controller reassured him and stood back as a nurse adjusted Quarrenden’s pillows. ‘ It’s a miracle you survived,’ Controller informed him.

  ‘If he can vanish into thin air, he may not even be dead,’ Quarrenden said with a worried look in the midst of so much agony.

  Controller shook his head. ‘No, he’s gone alright; we found some hair samples and a few particles of bone that fit all the profiles of a child of his age. ’

  ‘The taxi – I was sloppy – ‘Quarrenden grimaced.

  Controller shook his head. ‘It was unfortunate and yet it as a stroke of luck in a way. Get some rest and you can get out of here. You’ve done the job now, so relax.’

  Three days later, Quarrenden was home, and he suffered nightmares about destroying Blond Boy for a while, despite the various deep-sleep medications Dr Klein had prescribed to him to prevent any dreams, good or bad. And then a week later Calum Quarrenden and his wife Penny and their 5-year-old son Jacob boarded the plane at Heathrow, bound for Gran Canaria. Calum rested beside his son, who had the window seat, and on his left, the agent held Penny’s hand. He wondered what they’d think of him if they knew he’d killed a child. Jacob suddenly turned away from the window and looked at his father – and he wore the very same evil face as Blond Boy. ‘Die!’ Jacob shouted at his father.

  Calum yelped and opened his eyes. He turned to look at his son, who was smiling like a cherub as he drew a picture of a cloud with a blue felt-tip pen in his Jumbo Sketch Pad.

  It had been a bad dream.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Penny grabbed her husband’s hand and began to rub it.

  ‘Yeah, thanks. Sorry if I startled you,’ Calum said, and he kissed his wife.

  The captain made an announcement to the passengers: 'Hi, this is the captain...ring a ring o roses, a pocketful of posies, atishoo! atishoo! We all fall down!'

  And the jet went into a dive

  'No!' screamed Quarrenden.

  The bedroom came back into focus as Rhiannon’s tale about the near-future ended. Matthew and Christina hugged each other as they lay on the bed... Christina ran her index finger along the contours of Matthew’s bruised nose, and said, ‘Hey, it’s broken.’

  ‘What?’ Matthew tried to get up, intending to go and look at his nose in the bathroom mirror, but Christina stopped him and said she was only joking. ‘Your nose is fine, Matthew. Do you think I’ve got a piggy nose?’

  ‘A what nose?’ Matthew asked with a smirk.

  Christina pointed to the tip of her nose and said, ‘Like, does my nose sort of go up at the end like a pig and can you see my nostrils?’

  ‘No, it’s not a piggy nose, you have a perfect nose,’ he decided, and the two of them kissed.

  ‘Please say you’ll never leave me,’ Matthew suddenly said to his girlfriend. She smirked and seemed fascinated by the question. With puzzlement in her eyebrows she said, ‘Why don’t you want me to ever leave you?’

  ‘You know very well why,’ Matthew told her, and he seemed to have a tiny tear welling in the inner corner of his left eye.

  ‘Ha! You look as if you’re gonna burst into tears,’ Christina told him, and deliberately crossed her eyes as she focused on that welling tear.

  ‘I’m not crying, it’s hay fever,’ Matthew said, defensively, and looked down at the bed cover.

  ‘Aw, he’s sulking now, ‘ Christina seemed to be torturing him. ‘Come on, why don’t you want me to ever leave you? Spit it out Brindley.’

  ‘Because,’ Matthew muttered, and that tear finally dripped down his cheek.

  Christina hugged him and said: ‘I will never leave you, I love you too much now.’

  Matthew sniffled, and Christina suddenly talked about that scene at the end of the film Titanic, where Rose said she would never let go of Jack, and Matthew laughed and said, ‘But she did, didn’t she? And he sank under the sea.’

  ‘That’s not funny,’ Christina pushed Matthew away. ‘I love that film. I think I’ll go home and watch it soon.’

  ‘No, don’t go home,’ Matthew told her, and he apologised for joking about Jack and Rose, and he turned to Rhiannon and asked her if people like Rose and Jack had died in each other’s arms on the real Titanic. Rhiannon nodded with a faint smile on her lips, and said, ‘Shall I tell you what really happened to that ship?’

  ‘Oh Yes!’ Christina said excitedly, ‘Please do!’

  Matthew expected the walls of his bedroom to dissolve into some seascape, but instead he and Christina found themselves in a rather dilapidated, dull-looking room…

  Destination Titanic

  As the snow fell across Liverpool that grey December afternoon in 1960, 21-year-old art student Paul Mandarin sat in a fireside armchair, reading an old musky-smelling 1944 edition of a hardback entitled An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne – a metaphysical work which analyses our concept of time – a concept that had always fascinated Mandarin. Besides art, Mandarin cherished history, local and international, and he had always harboured a secret fantasy in which he could travel backwards and forwards into the great vistas of the future and past to meet the famous personages of bygone days and revisit historical events such as the French Revolution, the Jack the Ripper murders and so on. Mandarin’s 18-year-old girlfriend Georgina Kelly sat at his feet, reading the Liverpool Echo broadsheet, and across the room in the wide top drawer of a sideboard rested the baby son of the couple. People react different ways to tragedy, and Georgina, still suffering from shock, had put the baby, who had been found dead in his cot two days ago, in the drawer. She and Paul knew very well that the hour was near when the authorities would have to be contacted and the infant would have to be buried pretty soon, but for now, Georgina needed to grieve in her own way.

  The third person in the bedsit was 19-year-old Giles Lawson, a musician who was well-versed in the guitar and piano. He dreamed of creating a whole new genre of music based on electronic devices, and his hero was Stockhausen. He was lying lengthwise on an old sofa with faded floral prints upon it as he fingered the battered-looking Spanish guitar. When Giles stopped playing the guitar for a moment as he took a drag on his two inches of a roll-up, everyone heard a strange sound invade the room. Paul Mandarin looked up from the book and turned his spectacled eyes to the door. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. Everyone listened intently.

  ‘Number nine….number nine…number nine…’

  It was coming from down below in one of the other student flats of Gambier Terrace. Paul Mandarin got to his feet and he left the hardback on the seat of the armchair. As Giles continued to gently play the Spanish guitar, the art student went to trace the source of the eerie chant. It led him three floors down to the ground floor flat – Number 3 Gambier Terrace. He knew a fellow art student there named Stuart, and so he knocked, but received no reply, so Paul simply turned the handle of the door, which was always unlocked to allow the bohemian friends of Stuart to come and go, and in Mandarin went.

  He saw Stuart and two other young men – one, he later learned was John Lennon, and the other was a man in his late teens that he had never seen before, and Paul never found out who he was. The three were sitting in a triangle with blankets tacked up over the windows to keep the wintry daylight at bay. In the centre of the triangle a candle flickered in the draft from the opened door.

  Stuart Sutcliffe turned around and said to Paul Mandarin: ‘Hiya. Do you want to join us?’

  ‘For what
?’ Paul asked, and walked over to the candlelit gathering.

  Stuart told him. ‘We want to sell our souls to the devil. You interested?’

  Mandarin never laughed or smirked as most ignorant people would do, for he knew a bit about the Occult, and this was not a matter to take lightly. So he nodded at the Stuart’s question and sat with the three dabblers, making the triangle a square.

  The unknown man with Stuart and John seemed to know a lot about grimoires and the evocation of demons, and he talked in tongues for a while, and then urged those present to chant the number of this demon who would grant anything that was requested.

  ‘Number nine….number nine…number nine…’

  And suddenly, a strange tranquil quietness descended on that room as everyone stopped chanting. The clock over the mantelpiece stopped ticking, as if some great hand had come down and put its hand on it to stop time. The door opened steadily by itself, and a fascinating golden light shone into the room which mesmerised the foursome. The vague penumbral shadow of something approached, and Stu, John, Paul and the stranger looked to the doorway with wide eyes, all thinking the same thing: was this the Devil Himself approaching?

  A peacock, silhouetted against the golden radiance walked into the room. ‘Hello,’ it said in a fine English upper-class accent which had a likeable musicality about it.

  ‘Hello,’ said Stuart, and then John and Paul muttered: ‘Hiya.’

  The peacock addressed each of the sitters individually: ‘John Lennon, what is it that you require from My Lord?’

  John swallowed, then coughed to clear his voice and said: ‘I want to be world famous. I want to be the most famous rocker who ever lived. Just that.’

  And the peacock said: ‘Granted. And you, Stuart Sutcliffe, what is it that you require from My Lord?’

  Sutcliffe answered immediately: ‘I want to be a good artist, and never see a future where I have to work as a binman to survive.’

  ‘Granted,’ the peacock said in its monotone way. ‘Paul Mandarin, what is it that you require from My Lord?’ ‘Bring my baby back to life –‘ Mandarin began, and the peacock interrupted him by saying: ‘No! My Lord cannot do that. Is there something else you would require from Him?’

  Paul Mandarin felt so disappointed with the answer from the familiar, but thought hard. Would he like to be rich, or would he like some supernatural power. He realised what he had always wanted and asked the peacock: ‘I want the ability to be able to travel into the past and the future – and in case you try to trick me, I know I can already travel through time into the future at a rate of sixty seconds per minute, but I mean real time travel.’

  ‘Granted.’ The peacock then began to walk backwards with a strange gait as its fan of radial feathers trembled, and it left the room as the golden light faded and the door slammed shut with great force, generating a blast of air that blew out the candle, which left the room in darkness.

  John Lennon uncapped a lighter and thumbed the wheel to produce a spark and a steady flame. ‘Let there be light,’ he said, and turned to the person sitting next to him. ‘How come you didn’t ask for anything?’ he queried.

  ‘Because I sold my soul years ago. You are all probably damned as well now,’ said the young man who was unknown to Mandarin, and he got to his feet, said ‘Ta-rah!’ to Stuart Sutcliffe, and left the dingy bedsit, never to return.

  Well, after that visitation of the peacock, the Lennon’s life reached a very positive turning point. After years of playing in clubs and all sorts of grimy dives from Hamburg to Glasgow, his band suddenly exerted a strange fascination on all of those who heard their songs or saw them perform, and the term “Beatlemania” was soon coined by the Press. Sutcliffe became a ‘good artist’ for a few years, and as requested, he never did see a future of hardship and struggle – he dropped dead of a mysterious brain haemorrhage which baffled doctors. And what of Paul Mandarin? That day, when he asked the Peacock of Promises for the ability to travel through time, he went outside onto Hope Street, and tried out his new power. He mentally pictured the year 1892, and wished he was in that year, and immediately he found himself on a cobbled street. The Anglican Cathedral – the largest in Europe – was now nowhere to be seen. In 1960 this cathedral had loomed over the student’s bedsit, but now there was nothing there, just a graveyard and a grassy hill. A hansom cab almost ran him down and the driver on top of the quaint old vehicle swore at the time-displaced student and waved his whip in the air. Mandarin laughed and ran around the streets like a madman. He saw the men in top hats and the frumpish-faced dowdily dressed women in little bonnets. And then Paul Mandarin willed himself back to the present, and was so relieved to be back in December 1960. He went up to his bedsit and told Georgina and Giles about the conjuration of the peacock, who was some emissary of the Devil, and of his new power to travel through time. Giles was very sceptical, and Georgina, still in shock from the death of her baby, couldn’t really care less.

  ‘This ability seems to work best when I really concentrate – pure mind power,’ Mandarin reasoned, and Giles suggested that he should go back and save the baby, but Mandarin had never wanted the child, and selfishly declined the idea, saying he had already tried and had been unable to travel so near to the present. Giles knew somehow that the art student was lying, and was quite sickened by his selfishness.

  Paul sat in his armchair and began to feed pieces of coal from the scuttle into the flames as he wondered where he would roam in time. He’d have to find Jesus, and Jack the Ripper, and he would go forward in time to explore mysteries that had not even occurred yet, such as the assassination of JFK, the attacks on the World Trade Centre, and the detonation of a nuclear device in New York City. But for now he sat gazing into the flames, and turning over the historical events he would like to visit, when a mischievous thought entered his head: could he change the course of history? And straight away, he thought of averting the Titanic disaster and saving all of those lives. Yes, that seemed like an adventure he would be willing to embark on.

  He reclined back in his armchair and decided he would project his mind back in time to 14 April, 1912, to visit the Titanic before it struck that infamous iceberg. He would try – to the best of his ability – to warn the captain of the vessel about the berg and change world history. It was just an experiment. Georgina and Giles were told not to disturb him during his trip into the past. Paul wasn’t sure whether he time-travelled physically or whether his body stayed in 1960 and his mind went into the past. What he did know was that it all seemed to be down to concentration – pure concentration, so Mandarin asked for black coffee and a purple heart pill to hyper-focus his mind’s eye. The resulting feeling of wellbeing and wakefulness seemed to amplify Paul’s ability, and he found himself falling from the fireside armchair in a vast spiral through time and space. Giles and Georgina saw Paul vanish into thin air, and the coffee cup he had been holding fell onto the rug. They looked at the depression in the armchair where Paul's bottom had sat seconds ago, and then they looked at one another, dumbfounded, lost for words.

  Paul Mandarin fell through the razor-sharp North Atlantic night air – and already in the starlit waters below he could see the wake of the world’s most famous liner, heading westwards to her doom. He could smell the coal-smoke from her funnels, the product of 159 furnaces burning 850 tons of coal per day. And the length of that ship – 882 feet 9ins – was as long as the Church Street back in Paul’s Liverpool home. Paul was descending at some speed towards the back of the ship – or the stern, to use the maritime term. As Paul was floating just thirty feet from the stern, he saw to his horror, a line of uniformed officers watching him – and one was pointing a pistol his way. Only then did Paul Mandarin believe they could see him – and that was a big shock, as there should have been nothing to see; he felt unreal and had assumed he was just a travelling mind’s eye –not physically there all – but he felt as if he was here, in April 1912. Paul looked at his hands, then glanced down at his shoes, and the violen
t frothy waters of the ship’s wake below. He was physically here! As he glided down onto the poop deck of the Titanic, a gunshot rang out.

  Mandarin rolled across the deck as two more shots rang out. He played dead, but when he looked up he realised that the officer with the pistol was not firing at him; he was aiming at someone or something in the turbulent waters behind the liner, and five other deck officers were all staring and pointing beyond the great wake of the ship. No one had seen the arrival of the visitor from 1960. Paul lay there in the shadows, nettled by the stinging cold.

  ‘What is it sir?’ asked one of the younger officers.

  ‘It’s been following us since we left Queenstown!’ said the Officer of the Watch, a man named Lightoller. He had a cigarette in one hand, pistol in the other. Mandarin angled his head and looked beyond the rails into the waves, which were sparkling with starlight. He saw something dark emerge from those waters for a few seconds then slowly submerge again, and this mysterious object stimulated quite a reaction amongst the six ship’s officers. ‘Bloody hell! I see it! What is that sir?’ asked a young well-spoken man.

  ‘We should tell Captain Smith sir,’ said another young voice.

  ‘He’s having dinner,’ replied Lightoller, and through exhaled smoke he said: ‘Well, I don’t think that thing is the Loch Ness monster, and it’s not a whale – ‘

  An elderly First Class passenger wearing a straw boater and a deckhair-stripes jacket approached and said, ‘Was somebody firing a pistol then? What’s going on?’

  ‘Don’t worry sir, we were just carrying out a test,’ said Lightoller with a troubled smile. The old man wanted to know what type of test involved the discharge of a firearm but two of the young officers laughingly escorted the man back to his quarters. The Titanic was run by only seven officers, all overseen by the Commander – Captain Edward J Smith, and so, six of the officers returned to their duties, but Charles Lightoller, the Officer of the Watch, lingered at the stern for a while, smoking the last inch of a Rothman as he fidgeted with the pistol. Lightoller’s eyes scanned the dark waters for the thing stalking the ship. He flicked the cigarette into the sea and returned to the bridge to inform First Officer Bill Murdoch of his grave suspicions – that a submarine from some foreign nation was following Titanic.