Oddjobs 2: This Time It's Personnel

by Heide Goody

  Table of Contents

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Leng-time, leng-space

  Authors’ Notes

  Oddjobs2: this time it's personnel

  Heide Goody & Iain Grant

  Pigeon Park Press

  ‘Oddjobs2: this time it's personnel’ Copyright © Heide Goody and Iain Grant 2017

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except for personal use, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9957497-2-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9957497-1-9

  Published by Pigeon Park Press

  www.pigeonparkpress.com

  info@pigeonparkpress.com

  Monday

  Nina Seth watched her feet on the uneven ground as she made her way across the demolition site. Work had stopped and much of the workforce were gathered around a single spot. As she approached the edge of the circle, a construction worker looked back and saw her.

  “Oi. You can’t come in here. This is a hard hat area.”

  Nina looked up. Two massive cranes were angled elsewhere and there was nothing above her but blue sky.

  “Why?” she said. “What’s going to hit me?”

  “You’re not allowed on the site without a hard hat.”

  “Then you’d best get me one,” she said.

  Nina was barely into her twenties and had a figure that she liked to think of as petite but was probably better described as tiny. Being a tiny young woman conferred fewer benefits than people suspected. The ability to get children’s tickets on the bus and buy VAT-free children’s shoes hardly made up for being patronised and ignored by others, particularly by large, older men who thought they knew better. But, even as the builder began to protest, she slipped through the circle of men and to the centre of their attention. Two of the men wore ties and carried tablets. Site management.

  Nina flashed them her ID.

  “Nina Seth. Consular mission to the Venislarn.”

  “What’s that?” said one. “We called the police.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Ricky and his lads will be here soon enough. But I was on my way to work and I heard you found something.”

  The man simply pointed at the block of stone in front of them.

  “It’s Portland stone. A single piece. It was being broken up.”

  “It’s from the Jurassic,” put in the other manager to labour the point.

  Nina looked at the stone: a white-grey cube, two feet to each side. It had been cracked open but the object within was still firmly embedded in the rock.

  “And did they have weird, freaky-ass Rubik’s Cubes in the Jurassic?” she asked.

  The site managers looked at her.

  Birmingham was undergoing a transformation. It always had been, and it always would be. Buildings came down. Buildings went up. Traffic was diverted this way and then that… The city was a constantly shifting maze and its million or so inhabitants negotiated each new surprise with the tolerance of philosophical rats.

  The three squares at the city’s civic heart, Victoria Square, Chamberlain Square and Centenary Square were virtually adjacent. However, in years gone by, pedestrians could only go from Chamberlain Square to Centenary Square through a shopping arcade that ran beneath the inverted concrete ziggurat of Birmingham Central Library. Now the huge, shiny and rarely open Library of Birmingham dominated Centenary Square. The original Central Library was a pile of rubble in Chamberlain Square, the three squares were reduced to two and anyone wishing to walk from Victoria to Centenary would need a thorough grasp of local geography, some of it subterranean.

  Behind the screens that separated the library demolition site from the public, Nina and a bemused workforce considered a lacquered wooden puzzle cube encased in prehistoric stone.

  “Yup,” she said, “I’m going to need to take that.”

  “Is this some kind of hoax?” asked one of the site managers.

  Nina crouched down and waved her fingertip over the iridescent symbols painted on the cube’s individual panels – curved, complex squiggles like octopuses at a disco. “This is third-variant aklo, the welcoming wards for the entourage of Prein.”

  “It’s a Rubik’s Cube.”

  “It’s a tunnelling device for passing between worlds. And, I guess, if you twisted it into the right configuration we’d see some next level stuff – leather, spikes, flagellation – like a Tory MP’s ideal weekend but without safe words.”

  “It’s a hoax.”

  “It’s an OOPArt,” said Nina, straightening up. She brushed her hands.

  “Pardon?” said the site manager.

  “OOPArt,” she said and looked up. “I’ve always wanted to drive a crane.” Light clouds scudded across the sky. “Does it get windy up there?”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Is it terrorists?” voices called from the wider circle.

  Nina looked round to try to locate the individual.

  “Terrorists? Terrorists planted a magical toy in a block of stone so you could knock off early for lunch?”

  “Are we knocking off early for lunch?” called someone else.

  “It’s nine a. m.,” replied a site manager tersely, without even looking up.

  “It’s an Out of Place Artefact,” said Nina. “We’re getting a lot of them lately. Some weird vase underneath an Iron Age fort. Spooky dolls. An alien typewriter – we think it’s a typewriter – in the roots of an oak tree. Dig it up. I’ll take it away.”

  “And that’s it?” said the site manager.

  “What more do you want?” she said.

  “But it’s impossible!”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It must mean something.”

  “Mean something?”

  He spluttered as his brain struggled.

  “You know,” he said. “The end of the world or something.”

  “Sure,” she said and gave him a comforting pat on the upper arm. “It’s the end of the world. Happy?”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” said Rod.

  “I can redo it,” said Annie.

  Rod Campbell took the offered cup of tea. “A spoonful of sugar won’t kill me. You’ve got a smashing view.” He gestured with the cup at the morning cityscape visible from her balcony, sloshing an inch of accidentally-sweetened tea into the canal five storeys below.

  “Thanks,” she said, as though it were her own handiwork. “It’s the main reason I took the place.”

  Oh, yeah, thought Rod. Fabulous views of Birmingham all year round with the bonus of pond scum stink from the canal in high summer.

  “So, tell me about your encounter, Annie,” he said.

  “Encounter,” she said with a nervous smile. “You make it sound so official.”

  “It is official,” said Rod. “You called the authorities. It’s my job to listen.”

  “It’s not an actual ghost,” she said.

  “I understand.”

  “I mean it’s not something I’ve even seen.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, there’s the noise.” She stepped back into the flat and crossed through a living room furnished only with an armchair and a dozen packing boxes. “Sorry. I’ve not yet moved in properly. Only sorted out the broadband this morning. The noise, it comes from sort of here. It’s like a clanking and a thumping.”

  “A clanking and a thumping,” said Rod.

  “And then there
’s the smell.”

  “What kind of smell?”

  “An awful smell. Like something dead. Dead and diseased.”

  Rod sniffed. There was something and it wasn’t the canal.

  “There can often be funny smells in a place, can’t there?” he said. “So, the old tenant moved out a month ago?”

  Annie whirled round, her fluffy dressing gown flying out.

  “That’s exactly it,” she said, wide eyes aglitter. “Did she?”

  “Did she what?” said Rod.

  “Move out.”

  “I’d have thought so. Wouldn’t you have noticed if she was still here?”

  “Thing is, Detective Campbell…”

  “I’m not police, Annie.”

  “She never looked all that happy when I came round to view the property. I don’t think she liked the landlord very much. And, I got to thinking, there’s been all those suicides in the local area recently.”

  “Has there?”

  “There certainly has. And here’s the shiznit, detective. The previous woman, she worked over at the Mailbox and I remember her telling me she always got home bang on six o’clock.”

  “I see,” said Rod, who didn’t. He sipped his tea and winced at the sweetness.

  “The noises and the smell, they always sort of begin at six o’clock. It’s like… It’s like she’s come home. You get me?”

  Rod processed the idea. He gave it time.

  “Did the old tenant smell particularly?”

  “Well she would now she’s dead, wouldn’t she?”

  “Suicide?”

  “Or…” Annie’s eyes widened further. “Is she bricked up in the walls, eh? Eh?”

  Rod looked at the plasterboard walls.

  “Aye. Do you mind if I have a poke about?” he said.

  “Be my guest.”

  Rod walked into the kitchenette and poured his tea down the sink. The boiler was mounted on the wall beside the sink. He pressed a couple of buttons and looked at the boiler clock and timer settings.

  He walked back through to the living room and went directly to the radiator. He ran his hands behind it.

  “Okay, Annie,” he said. “Good news and bad news time.”

  Shortly afterwards, Rod jogged down the stairs to ground level and exited onto the canal towpath. He sniffed his fingers experimentally. They smelled faintly of apple-scented soap and strongly of month-old prawns.

  “Tell me, are you happy with your current provider?”

  Rod looked at the man with a clipboard full of papers who had materialised in front of him. The top of the young man’s left ear was missing and a roadmap of minor scars criss-crossed his entire face. He was either a really bad cage fighter or had lost a war of attrition with a feral cat.

  “I’m not religious, mate,” said Rod.

  “Good one,” laughed the man. His head bobbed and twitched constantly, perhaps reliving his most recent tussle with man or cat. “I’m talking about your phone, broadband.”

  “Not interested,” Rod said and, with the weakest of smiles, pushed past.

  “The most competitive rates,” the man called after him but Rod paid no attention.

  To his left was the junction of the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal and the Birmingham Main Line. The concrete roundabout island at its centre had been aggressively colonised by a family of nesting ducks. To his right, the Birmingham and Fazeley stretched out towards the BT Tower and the tunnels under Snow Hill. Ahead of him, his colleague Morag Murray waited at the apex of a humpback bridge across the canal.

  Morag was only three weeks into her job with the Birmingham consular mission to the Venislarn and Rod had already decided that he liked her. She was Scottish, ginger, enjoyed a drink, didn’t back down from a fight and generally acted like tomorrow was always going to be worse than today. It was like she had bought all her personality traits at Caledonian-Clichés-R-Us. Perhaps that wasn’t fair. Morag, like the rest of the consular mission, lived in the inviolable knowledge that humanity’s tomorrows were well and truly numbered, so Rod could forgive her a certain pessimism. Also, he had seen her eat both fruit and vegetables so she wasn’t totally Scottish.

  “Does this city of yours breed nutcases?” she said, strolling down to meet him.

  “Not my city. Don’t pin it on me,” he said. “I take it that rumours of a man-eating shark roaming the canals of Birmingham were unfounded?”

  “You take it right. Just some mad local who thinks that three halves of bikes he’s fished out the canal are evidence of a giant predator. I take it there wasn’t a ghost haunting that fifth-floor flat?”

  “No. Just a disgruntled former tenant doing the old prawns-stuffed-behind-the-radiator-revenge prank.”

  “Prawns?”

  He sniffed his fingers again, hoping the smell had miraculously gone in the past minute. Nope. Still there. Rotten shellfish and apple soap.

  “Smell that,” he said and held out his hands.

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’ll be washing that off all day.”

  “And you said you liked Crackpot Mondays.”

  Rod shrugged. “Beats processing mad occultists or babysitting a thousand baby godlings that spit acid.”

  “Those wee godlings liked you,” said Morag.

  “Too much,” said Rod. “Right. Who’s next on the list?”

  There were gods. Small g. The Venislarn. Vastly intelligent or dribblingly insane; it was hard to tell. Hideous and angelic. Strange and formless. As familiar as childhood terrors. Hungry. It was impossible to say where or when they had come from. They were recent arrivals from a place beyond the reach of human understanding and they had simultaneously been here forever. They lived below, within and throughout the world we knew and were biding their time until the day when they enveloped the earth and everyone in it in an endless technicolour hell: the Soulgate. In the meantime, they were a state secret because, hey, there’s no mileage to be gained from telling the kiddywinks that monsters are real. The consular mission to the Venislarn were the god appeasers, the end-of-life carers for an oblivious planet. They were the secret keepers.

  But, sometimes, the secrets crept out.

  Morag was in another canalside apartment block, a hundred yards down from poor Annie who had been haunted by prawns. This time it was the devil, not ghosts. Apart from that and what Rod suspected was a great slice of Catholic guilt, the pieces were the same. A naïve lone tenant with an over-active imagination, a dollop of urban dislocation from the real world and an inability to make a decent cup of tea. Rod let Morag do the talking and tuned out completely until Catholic-guilted Rhona said something that brought his attention right back.

  “Sorry. What was that? What you said before, Rhona,” said Rod.

  Morag looked at her notepad, as though she had been making proper notes in there and not just composing a shopping list.

  “He told me I was going to hell,” said Rhona.

  “His eyes, Rhona. Pink and silver.”

  She nodded vigorously. “Pink, with a sort of silver pattern running through them.”

  “Can you show me where you saw him?”

  Rhona crossed to the window. Morag tapped Rod’s knee and gave him a questioning look.

  “Right there,” said Rhona.

  Rod joined her.

  “Outside the window? What, floating in the air?”

  “I think he was holding onto something.”

  Rod opened the window as far as it would go, then he released the safety catches and pushed it out fully. Below, there was a narrow back street and the canal beside that. Rod spotted dusty pitted marks in the brickwork to either side of Rhona’s window.

  Rod climbed up onto the window sill and, holding onto the upright with his right hand, swung himself out onto the exterior wall so he could reach one of the marks.

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed Rhona to Morag. “Isn’t he going to hurt himself?”

  “He does this kind of thing,” Rod heard Morag say.
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  “Dangerous things?”

  Rod touched a hole in the brickwork. It felt like someone had driven a piton into it. He looked down and saw more holes running up from the ground floor – two sets, eight feet apart – as though a team of climbers had raced each other up.

  “Is that how he lost his finger?” Rhona asked. “Doing dangerous things?”

  “Half a finger,” said Morag. “He gets touchy about that.”

  Rod didn’t get touchy about much, reflected Morag as they made their way downstairs. As long as no one accused him of having lost a whole finger in a tussle with the murderous servants of a subterranean god, or mocked his unnecessarily large collection of wearable survival gadgets (which included a belt that could be turned into a hunting bow, an hourglass key fob filled with explosives, and a shirt that turned into a magnesium-infused red-smoke-spewing emergency flare when burned). Apart from those unlikely triggers he was unflappable. Morag wasn’t sure if his easy-going nature was because of, or despite, the fact that he was built like a brick wall and had spent much of his adult life in the army. If there was such a thing as Small Man Syndrome, Rod had the opposite. He was big and beefy and the gentlest man that Morag had known in a long time.

  If he had a flaw – at least in the workplace – it was that his Venislarn knowledge wasn’t up to scratch.

  “So, what is it?” asked Morag.

  Rod kicked among the weeds alongside the canal, as though he might find some clue there, and then looked up at the wall of the apartment block.

  “I can’t remember what it’s called. Nurgle or Numf-numf. Definitely summat beginning with N. Ingrid would know.” He stopped. Ingrid, tech support in the mission Vault, was dead, eaten by a god she’d been foolish enough to summon. They’d cremated an empty coffin as there had been nothing to put in it. “Nina will know.”

  Morag looked up too. Rhona was watching them from her apartment window.

  “So, she didn’t make it up. She saw the devil.”

  Rod shook his head. He crossed to the wall and stretched out his arms: six feet from fingertip to fingertip plus another foot to the mark on either side. Eight feet.