Oddjobs 2: This Time It's Personnel

by Heide Goody

  “They’re claw marks,” said Morag.

  “Feet. Like a spider.”

  “That’s a bloody mahoosive spider,” said Morag. “I’ll call Nina and find out if we should wash it down the plughole or try to trap it under a glass.”

  Nina was in the Vault, the consular mission’s storage facility. The Vault occupied a vast basement level of what was notionally Birmingham’s flagship public library. The consular mission’s office occupied most of the library’s upper floors. The Library of Birmingham had been built with great fanfare at the taxpayers’ expense and then all but closed due to said expense.

  It was a good excuse and it did a good job of keeping the public away.

  The Vault was supposed to be organised and run by the mission’s tech support officer. However, the most recent tech support officer, Ingrid Spence, was dead. Nina’s last encounter with Ingrid had ended when Nina threw Ingrid off the upper balcony of a shopping centre. (It wasn’t the fall that had killed Ingrid...) Without a tech support officer, the mission staff had muddled through as best they could. New Venislarn artefacts, which were cropping up at an increasing rate, were being stored wherever they could find room.

  Nina was clearing space on a shelf when her phone rang.

  “Nina Seth, professional sex kitten and twenty-four-hour party girl.”

  “Nina. Morag.”

  “Hey, Braveheart. How was the weekend?”

  “Not bad. Richard and I took a trip out to Stratford. You know, to do all the Shakespeare stuff. We found this lovely tea room where –”

  “Wow,” said Nina. “That sounds so unbelievably dull. But, hey, whatever makes you old folks happy.”

  “Are you in the office yet?”

  “Yup.”

  Nina plonked the Rubik’s Cube of Prein down next to the vase of multiplication they’d found at the Berry Mound Iron Age fort. Along with the alien typewriter, the keys of Trek-lehn, the pabash kaj effigy doll, a wand of uncertain origin and a purse containing coins from a period of history that never happened, that made seven OOPArts this month alone.

  “Rod and I are down by the canal near Fleet Street, checking out a crackpot story. Rod’s found some claw marks and – oh, he’s now found some slime. He’s very excited – he thinks it might be some sort of giant spider thing with pink and silver eyes.”

  “Dinh’r,” said Nina.

  “Dinh’r,” said Morag.

  “I was close,” she heard Rod say.

  “You said they were called Nurgles,” said Morag.

  “It has an N in it,” said Rod.

  “They’re psychic parasites,” said Nina. “We used to have thousands but there shouldn’t be any left in Birmingham.”

  “No?”

  “They live and feed on Yoth Mammon. They’re her personal fleas. And since she left for Kal Frexo leng-space, whenever that was, they should either have gone with their goddess or died.”

  There was a creak of metal. Morag made a noise that might have been an ah of wonder or an ugh of disgust.

  “Yeah, I don’t think they’ve gone anywhere,” she said. “Are you busy at the moment?”

  “That’s a trick question.”

  “I think we might need you and Vivian down here and possibly some police to guard the entrance.”

  “Entrances. Plural,” said Rod.

  “Entrances?” said Nina.

  “Yeah,” said Morag distantly.

  Nina arrived ten minutes after the police and a good hour before the two British Telecom engineers Rod had summoned.

  Nina craned her neck to look up at the tower.

  “Hundred and fifty meters,” said Rod, consulting his phone. “Birmingham’s tallest landmark.”

  “The hundred and fifty meter high club,” mused Nina. “It could work.”

  While Chief Inspector Ricky Lee, the local police-Venislarn liaison, consulted a sheet map and sent pairs of coppers off to guard certain unmarked doorways and service hatches within in a mile radius, the BT engineers sauntered over to inspect Rod’s discovery.

  Attached to the brick façade of the apartment block was a grey, windowless structure as tall as the building itself but no wider than a parking spot. It had a small, steel door at ground level. The lock was broken, and slight buckling around the latches suggested it had been forced open from the inside.

  “Did you do this?” said the older BT engineer.

  “Ripped open a two-inch steel door with our bare hands?” said Morag.

  “Did you?”

  The engineer had a round, lined face, was bald on top and had thick stubble on his chin. He looked like one of those optical illusion faces that change expression when you turn them. Morag wondered if his upside-down face looked as surly as this one.

  “This is the Anchor Telephone Exchange, isn’t it?” said Rod.

  “Maybe,” said the engineer. “Let’s see some ID, mate.”

  Rod presented his photo card. The engineer looked at it closely.

  “And this is mine,” he said, holding up a card.

  Rod was polite enough to bother to look at it while the engineer looked at his.

  “This must be what Grindr was like before they invented the internet,” Nina whispered to Morag.

  “It all appears to be in order,” said the engineer, in the tones of one who thought things were only just in order.

  “Thank you, Colin,” said Rod.

  “Now,” said Rod, reaching to open the door.

  “Excuse me,” said Colin primly. “That’s BT property. It can only be opened by authorised agents of BT Group PLC.”

  Rod gestured to the door and Colin pulled it open. The narrow space contained nothing but an uncovered manhole in the floor. A ladder led upward, toward a metal grille in the high ceiling. Leaning forward, they saw that it also led downward, into the darkness below.

  “So, we’re going down here,” said Rod, “and we need to know if there’s owt we should be aware of.”

  “Only authorised agents of BT Group PLC are allowed down there, mate. There’s some complex and expensive telecommunications equipment down there.”

  “We’re not interested in the telecoms stuff,” said Rod.

  Morag pointed to a grape-like cluster of spheroids seemingly glued to the inside wall of the shaft. Each of them was the size of a cricket ball, had a silver sheen to its leathery outer layer and, more importantly, was split open and empty. Nina crouched to get a better look.

  “Dinh’r egg cases.” She sniffed. “They stink of bad fish.”

  “No, that’s Rod’s hands,” said Morag.

  “You’ve got fishy hands, Rod,” said Nina.

  “He’s been touching prawns,” said Morag.

  “That’s a euphemism,” said Nina.

  Rod counted fifty-five rungs to the bottom.

  In the end, they’d decided that seven of them would go down: Chief Inspector Ricky and his pet sergeant; the two engineers plus Morag; Rod and Nina.

  “You didn’t bring Vivian with you?” Rod said to Nina.

  “She’s sifting through job applications for Ingrid’s replacement,” Nina replied.

  “How come she gets to do that?”

  “Because no one told her she couldn’t. God, she loves it though. Wasn’t even interested in the OOPArt I’d brought in.”

  “Another?”

  “Adn-bhul Rubik’s Cube of doom.”

  “I had a boyfriend who wrote his master’s thesis on them,” said Morag.

  “Rubik’s Cubes?” said Rod.

  “OOPArts.”

  Rod stepped aside at the bottom to make room for Ricky and waited in the foetid black until Colin found the light switches. Strip lights clicked and tinged into life.

  “Muda,” Morag swore softly in Venislarn.

  They were in a square concrete tunnel, ten feet to a side, like the world’s deepest pedestrian subway. The tunnel, like the strings of telecoms cabling on one wall, stretched off in both directions as far as the eye could see. N
o sign of Dinh’r though.

  Rod realised he was smiling.

  “The Anchor Telephone Exchange,” he said. “Never been down here. Always wanted to.”

  “And this was built as a nuclear bunker?” said Morag.

  “BT Group PLC can neither confirm nor deny,” said Colin superciliously.

  “Excavated in the fifties,” said Rod. “They told the public it was going to be an underground railway.”

  “It’s one of three target-hardened telecoms centres in the country,” said Colin.

  “And how far does it stretch?” said Ricky.

  “Jewellery Quarter,” said Colin. His pointing hand swung from one direction to the other. “Southside. Mile and a half. There’s sleeping quarters, a canteen and offices down that way. Even a meeting room for the mayor and those councillors who might be lucky enough to get down here after the three-minute warning.”

  Colin unclipped a bunch of torches from a charging rack on the wall.

  “You’ll need these. The lights can go at any time.”

  Rod produced the pencil torch that hung from his hourglass key fob.

  “I’m all right. Got my own.”

  “It’s not BT Group PLC authorised kit,” said Colin.

  “Not been tested,” said Colin’s mate.

  “Two hundred lumens,” said Rod. “If it’s good enough for the Israeli Defense Forces…”

  “But Colin’s is bigger,” Nina pointed out helpfully.

  “It’s not about the size,” said Rod before he had time to filter-check what he was saying.

  “Says the boy with the smaller torch.”

  “Can we get on with this?” said Ricky. “Some of us have proper work to do.”

  “But which way?” said Morag.

  Rod looked back and forth.

  “You haven’t even said what you’re looking for yet,” said Colin.

  “Spiders,” said Rod.

  “Spiders?” said Colin. His mate sniggered.

  “Sort of a sea urchin-mushroom-spider thing,” said Nina.

  “Foreign spiders, are they?” said Colin.

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  Rod had already drifted towards the southward tunnel. He wasn’t one to be taken by hunches or “feelings” – growing up in South Yorkshire, folk didn’t take kindly to people with “feelings” – but there was something in that direction that gave off dark and weird vibes. The stark light on concrete, the movement of the air, the almost inaudible murmurs of a bustling city hundreds of feet above. Weird vibes.

  “You know,” Rod said to no one in particular as he led the way, “this reminds me of another tunnel. I mean, this isn’t Iraq and the tunnels I found mesen in there were far smaller but –”

  “So where are they from?” said Colin. “These spiders. They from Mexico?”

  “They’re not from Mexico,” said Morag.

  “There was that bloke who got bitten by a spider that had come over in some bananas. Gave him rabies or something.”

  “What’s the plan when we find them, if we find them?” asked Ricky.

  Rod smiled grimly. “Nina, these Dinh’r. They’re fair game, right?”

  “Totally,” his young colleague replied. “They’re parasites. Not gods. Not offspring, allies or vassals. Go crazy.”

  Rod drew his Glock 21 pistol from the shoulder holster under his jacket.

  “Big spiders then,” said Colin.

  Rod clipped his pencil torch into the slot under the barrel and continued.

  Nina was first to smell it. Or at least the first to think it worth mentioning.

  “Something stinks,” she said. “And I don’t mean Rod’s fishy fingers.”

  “It’s kind of close in here,” said Rod.

  “Bad plumbing?” suggested Ricky’s pet sergeant.

  “This facility was built to house up to a hundred workers for an indefinite period,” said Colin defensively. “Flawless in design and execution.”

  “Oh aye?” said Rod. “Wasn’t this place accidentally built below the water table?”

  “Not true,” said Colin. “The local water table rose following the decline of heavy industry in the seventies and now a system of pumps, controlled by operations panels such as that one there, continually pump out the lower levels.”

  “Shush, the pair of you,” said Nina. “You can all smell that, can’t you?”

  “God, yes,” said Morag.

  At that moment, the strip lights flickered and went out.

  There were sighs, mutters, fidgets and the illumination of seven torches.

  “Rod’s is brighter,” said Nina. “Small but mighty.”

  Colin’s mate was already at the operations panel, torch gripped in his teeth, flicking switches.

  “I’rr ‘ave uh gno ‘ack an’ rrset uh ‘uses,” he said.

  “Eh?” said Morag.

  Nina looked ahead. Her torchlight had picked out a pile of something in the tunnel. A neat and gently sloping pile against one wall.

  “He’ll have to go back to where we came down and reset the fuses,” Colin translated.

  Nina approached the pile. It was reddish brown and nearly as tall as her.

  “I think we should all stick together for now,” Ricky was saying. “We can rely on torches for the time being.”

  “If you’re worried about him bumping into one of your spiders, he’s got his big stomping boots on,” said Colin.

  Nina saw dark red smears on the concrete floor around the pile. Straight lines and curved lines. Someone had used a brush or a shovel to gather it together. It. Nina suddenly had a very good idea what it was.

  “This is wrong,” she said. “Guys!”

  Morag and Rod were almost instantly at her side. Both put their hands to their noses. Rod made a disgusted noise and switched hands.

  “That’s a big pile of rotting flesh,” said Morag.

  “Yes, it is,” said Nina. “Neatly piled, like someone clearing snow from their drive.”

  “Human flesh,” said Morag.

  “How can you tell? Got a lot of experience with rotting human flesh?”

  “Well,” said Morag reflectively, “that’s a scrap of denim. That’s a shoe. That’s a phone.”

  “Aw, crap,” said Ricky. “And now we have a crime scene.”

  Somewhere behind them, Colin’s mate was throwing up noisily. No one paid it any attention.

  “Have you had a lot of people go missing in the local area?” asked Rod.

  “Nope,” said Ricky. “There’s always some. The homeless. People who fall between the cracks.”

  “Those are high heels,” said Morag.

  “You can be homeless and classy,” said Nina.

  “We’ve had to do clean-up on more than the usual amount of suicides recently though,” said Ricky.

  “Someone mentioned that to me earlier,” said Rod.

  “That’ll be the Dinh’r,” said Nina. “They’re psychic parasites. They induce bad thoughts, hallucinations even. They feed off them.”

  “Like telling people they’re going to go to hell.”

  “That’d be enough to tip some people over the edge,” said Nina.

  “So, they fed off Yoth Mammon’s bad thoughts?” said Morag.

  “Like those birds that clean crocodiles’ teeth.”

  “But these aren’t suicides,” said Morag, waggling her torchlight over the terrible pile.

  “And that’s what’s wrong here.”

  “Ah,” said Rod, understanding. “The Dinh’r don’t actually eat people.”

  “Nope,” said Nina, the loud plosive ‘p’ echoing down the tunnel. “Or chew them up and spit them out.”

  Nina produced a pair of latex gloves from her pocket, crouched beside the pile and teased the phone from the clotted goo with her fingertips.

  “We need SOCOs down here,” said Ricky.

  “Let’s not bring any more potential victims down here until we have to,” argued Rod.

  The phone came a
way with a grim sucking sound. Nina tapped the screen but it was dead.

  “If we could ID some of these people…” she said.

  “We’ve still not found sign of the Dinh’r,” said Rod.

  Nina recognised the tone in his voice.

  “Let’s Scooby Doo this one. You and Morag go bug hunting. Ricky and I will get all wet and sticky here.”

  “This doesn’t gross you out?” said Ricky.

  “This girl isn’t scared of nothing,” said Nina.

  “This girl’s got no sense of smell,” said Morag and turned to the BT engineers. “You guys can stay here.”

  “I think I’ll be coming with you,” said Colin, holding his nose. “Matt, you can stay here.”

  Colin’s mate did not look happy about that. He didn’t look happy about much, at the moment.

  Once the explorers had headed off, Ricky and his pet sergeant put on rubber gloves and, while the pet sergeant took photos of the pile of human offal on her phone, Ricky joined Nina in the world’s grimmest Lucky Dip game.

  “First one to find actual cash buys the cocktails tonight,” said Nina.

  “We’re cops,” Ricky reminded her.

  “All right. Buys the lagers. Whatever you lot drink. Hang on,” she said. “What’s this?”

  The pet sergeant angled her phone camera round.

  “Booyah! Mama’s about to strike it rich,” said Nina.

  The object was heavy and flat and slapped wetly onto the floor once Nina had pulled it from the pile. It was an old-fashioned leather school satchel. The buckles were already undone. She flipped it open. There was barely anything inside it. A few pens, a highlighter, a bottle of Tipp-Ex. Ricky bagged each as it came out.

  Nina pulled out a sheet of lined paper in a poly pocket.

  “What I Did On My Holiday by Croesus Smith-Mammonson,” she read. “Aw, crap.”

  “These things have been dismembering kids,” said Ricky.

  “Worse than that, Inspector,” said Nina. “These things have been dismembering Venislarn kids.”

  Ricky Lee, goofy-looking but cute Ricky Lee, frowned at her.

  She stood, stripped off her gloves, took out her phone and vainly hoped for a signal.

  “See, the Dinh’r are vermin. Nothing more. And people,” she said, waving at the pile, “are expendable. No one actually gives a shit about people.” Nina ignored the confusion on the BT engineer’s face. “But the Venislarn,” she said. “Yeah, they get kind of tetchy if their loved ones get turned into kebab meat. Tetchy as in city-squashing tantrums tetchy.”