by Paul Magrs
Brenda didn’t look at all convinced. All she would say to him – very darkly and mysteriously – was that time was a funny old thing. Absolutely nothing could be taken for granted. And what was more, time travel was an absolute bugger.
They settled down for the night shortly after that, making up pallets of some kind of rushy grass to sleep on. They were going to take turns to sit up, tending the fire and making sure that none of the increasingly noisy jungle beasts came into their camp.
Gila came to lie down near Robert, some distance away from where Brenda kept watch.
‘We can’t fool around,’ Robert warned him, shocked at even the suggestion. ‘Don’t be daft. I’m not doing anything . . . rude. Not with Brenda just over there.’
Gila rolled his lizard-like eyes at his primness. They looked more alien than ever in the firelight.
‘Anyway, I’d feel weird . . . messing around like that in an alien land . . .’ Robert wasn’t sure why, however, and what he’d just said struck him immediately as a particularly dopey comment. He rolled over, away from Gila, and tried his best to fall asleep.
The next morning saw the small party in a subdued mood. In the misty, mulchy dawn, after a night in which no one had managed to get a good rest, everything seemed a bit bleak. The reality of their predicament was starting to settle in. As they struggled to brew some tea on the revived camp fire (Brenda had stuffed her handbag with spicy tea bags), they were all very quiet. Mumbling, achy and stiff.
Robert was thinking about how there weren’t any guarantees at all. There was absolutely no guarantee that they were going to find their bearings in this bizarre place. And even if they got to the palace, who was to say it wasn’t all going to go wrong? They could be in the wrong time altogether. There was no guarantee whatsoever that they could ever go back home.
He sat back with his tea feeling very gloomy indeed.
He couldn’t let despair come over him, though. He needed to buck himself up. We’ve been in worse places, haven’t we? Things looked pretty bad and pretty inescapable, that time we went down into hell. And just a couple of months ago, just last Hallowe’en, Brenda and Effie wound up in a very strange place. They fell into the DVD extras of a movie that shouldn’t even exist! So really this place should be a doddle. Just think of it as a quick jaunt. A trip to see Gila’s folks.
‘Hey, I’ve not asked,’ he said. ‘Have you got family here? Will I meet them?’
Gila’s smile as he turned to look at Robert rapidly faded. ‘No, Robert. I’ve never told you the whole story. I was taken away from my homeland, deep in the swamps, when I was just a child. Slavers took me away, as they do with all the lizardkind. Bringing them here, to serve the Warrior Women of Qab. I’ve got no one here.’
‘Ah.’ Robert wished he hadn’t asked. So much for bucking himself and everyone else up.
‘Come on, let’s pack up our camp,’ Brenda said, though there wasn’t much to take. Just some empty Tupperware. They’d eaten all the biscuits and sponge cake for breakfast.
We’re caught in a prehistoric land with nothing but Tupperware to defend us, Robert thought. That’s just typical of us.
Nothing much was said for the rest of that morning as they set about trekking in earnest. The going was hard. Every few yards they had to do battle with the thick foliage. Their hands were cut to pieces and sticky with lurid green sap. Their faces ran with sweat as the sun rose higher above the canopy. The weird cries of alien birds rang out above them. They caught sight of brilliant, flaming plumage in amongst the boughs and they saw stranger creatures lurking and slipping past. Gila went first, plunging into the jungle, quite at home and moving lightly between the trees.
Some time in the middle of the day they found a shadier spot and paused to eat some peculiar fruits that Gila had picked for them. He said they were safe, but they tasted horrible. Like feet, Robert said. Again he felt like he was on that daft celebrity jungle show. But at least on that, people were watching at home to make all the tribulations worthwhile somehow. At least on that, people could suddenly say they’d had enough and be taken home.
They set off again. That afternoon they were more talkative, settling into the rhythm of their march. The going seemed easier. The ground was less rough, the trees less thickset. There was a gentle incline, but nothing too exhausting. Their spirits lifted because Gila reminded them that it was higher ground they were looking for. From a hill they could see where they were going.
Brenda spoke a little more about her recovered memories. She described the days she’d spent in Edwardian London, tending to the novelist Beatrice Mapp.
‘Imagine what the ladies at The Spooky Finger would say!’ Robert said. ‘If they knew you had known her personally . . .’
‘But you’d best never say, Robert,’ Brenda puffed, pausing for breath. ‘I’ve had to warn you about this before. You must never spread word about my . . . previous lives and anything you ever find out about me. You must never make that kind of thing public. I don’t want any more attention drawing to me.’
He nodded. He should have remembered that Brenda could be touchy about her secret longevity and her amazing connections.
‘I’m just saying that it’s extraordinary. There you were in Bloomsbury in those days. You must have met them all. All the famous writers and thinkers and stars.’
‘I suppose I did,’ said Brenda. ‘But you know, I was mostly below stairs. Waiting on. Tending to them all.’ She sighed deeply. Robert could tell she was still distressed by the thought that her mistress had betrayed her, all that time ago. Mrs Mapp had hoodwinked her into coming to Qab so she could barter with her servant’s blood.
They plodded and plodded as the mossy ground grew sandier and rockier and the vegetation more sparse. The sky was a lurid purple in the late afternoon. There was no doubting it now that they were on the side of a hill. They could see a crest ahead of them.
‘The valley’s on the other side,’ Gila burst out, with great certainty. He put on a sudden spurt of speed, legging it up the hill, and his enthusiasm proved infectious to the others. They clambered and heaved themselves up the last two hundred yards, steeper and steeper, until at last they teetered at the very top.
Gila was right.
A vast crater welled open before them. A darker, deeper, even more verdant jungle spread out below. There were buildings, taller than the trees. Smudges of lilac smoke. Signs of life. Their hearts lifted on seeing these things.
‘We’re almost there!’ Gila grinned at them. ‘This is it! This is the city! This is Qab as I know it! We’re here!’
They had covered most of the distance down the slope on the other side when they made their stunning discovery.
They were yomping down the hill, ploughing through crimson sand and stumbling in their haste to reach the cooler shade of the trees. It was just as they entered the forest that Robert tripped on some kind of rock.
‘I’ve twisted my flaming ankle,’ he cursed, sitting there and feeling a fool. The others fussed around him. ‘Typical. Why don’t you just abandon me here? I’ll only hold you up. I knew I was bound to do something bloody clumsy sooner or later . . .’
‘Calm down,’ Gila told him. ‘Where does it hurt?’
Brenda had moved away and was studying the rock that Robert had fallen against. Except it wasn’t a rock. It was a brick. A whole pile of bricks, covered in sticky blue moss. And as she hacked her way through the bushes, she found more bricks and the remains of some kind of wall. ‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘Look at this!’
Both boys caught the note of shock in her voice. ‘What is it?’ Robert got Gila to hoist him up and prop him against his shoulder.
They heard Brenda swear very loudly and fluently, which was quite unlike her.
‘Brenda, what is it?’
She had vanished inside the undergrowth now. They followed awkwardly and the light was soupy. ‘Brenda?’
‘I’ve . . . err, found something, boys. It’s a building. Or it was a building
. A long, long time ago.’
Gila nodded. ‘That’s not that unusual. Qab is an ancient place. Settlements come and go. Buildings are abandoned. The fertile jungle claims their remains and gradually reduces them to rubble.’
‘Hm,’ said Brenda. ‘I’m sure that’s quite true. But I think you had better come and see this. Robert especially.’
Now they could see her. She was standing in front of a whole heap of bricks and rubble, mostly overgrown. Robert tried to put as little of his weight as possible on his painful ankle and Gila helped him manoeuvre his way across the messy glade until they were standing right beside Brenda.
She stood up, dusting her hands. She had a hanky in her hands, and she had been scraping the accumulated muck away from what seemed to be a very wide plank of wood.
‘Look,’ she told them.
They looked.
It wasn’t just a plank of wood she had been dabbing at with her hanky. ‘It’s a sign,’ Robert gasped.
‘A sign?’ Gila said. ‘Like a portent, you mean?’
‘No,’ said Brenda. ‘A sign.’
And suddenly all three could make out what it said.
Cod Almighty.
They were quiet for quite some time, absorbing the shock.
Robert said, ‘But . . . but . . .’ But that was all.
They backed away from the undeniable sign and emerged back into daylight. Robert was hobbling still, but the pain was nothing compared to the pounding in his head. Was it possible to get a migraine from being perplexed?
The three of them moved away from the rubble and bricks and sat down heavily. They looked at each other.
‘This can’t be right,’ Gila said at last.
‘But we all saw it!’ Robert said, suddenly irritated by his helpless tone. ‘It’s Cod Almighty. That’s Cod Almighty back there. That’s the remains of a fish shop! Our fish restaurant! It even had the bloody phone number on the sign still!’
Brenda was trying to puzzle it through. ‘What if . . . somehow . . . the whole restaurant fell through a Dreadful Flap in time and space and was transported to Qab?’
Robert seized that idea. ‘Is that possible?’
‘I don’t know. Gila?’
The lizard boy shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard of whole buildings coming through the gaps.’
Brenda shook her head savagely. ‘No. Our first thought was correct, I think. Our instincts were telling us something else, weren’t they? That fish restaurant has been there a very, very long time. Thousands of years, even. Mouldering away. It hasn’t moved anywhere. It’s where it’s always been. Right here.’
Robert stared at her. ‘But . . . that means . . . You’re saying that . . .’
‘I am.’ She nodded grimly.
‘You’re saying that this is Whitby! Qab is Whitby! Far in the future!’
Gila hissed, ‘Whaat?’
Robert stood up quickly, crying out at the pain in his ankle. He staggered about excitedly. ‘But it has to be, doesn’t it? Can’t you see, Gila? We’ve been propelled into the far future and this place . . . your world . . . is what will eventually become of our world. But how will it happen? How will everything end up like this? And how far forward are we?’
‘I can’t accept this,’ said Gila woefully. ‘Qab is its own world. It’s in a different dimension. Clear across the cosmos from your earth. The connections are very tenuous . . . we’re a world in our own right . . .’
‘I don’t think you are, lovey,’ Brenda said, patting him gently on his back.
‘So that’s it!’ Robert burst out. ‘That’s the truth at the heart of Qab!’
They all fell quiet then, as their minds raced to catch up. They were wondering what it all meant.
‘But . . . where’s the sea?’ Brenda said. ‘Whitby’s a harbour town. Cod Almighty is right on the water front. Where has the North Sea gone?’
Robert whistled. ‘Gone! All of it gone! We must be a long, long time into the future. Gila, you told me that you had never seen the sea before. You hardly knew what it was. There must have been great seismic shifts here . . . or some ecological disaster . . .’
Brenda said, ‘And all the tea shops and cobbled streets and locals of Whitby have been replaced by jungles and lizardkind and warrior women . . .’
They didn’t get any more time to think just then.
Their raised voices had attracted attention of a very unwelcome sort. If Gila had been less astonished and more in his right senses, he would have warned them of the dangers of this part of the jungle. He was reminded rudely by a hideous, keening cry that cut through the swampy air.
‘Oh no,’ he said.
The other two were instantly on the alert. ‘What is it?’
‘Blood beasts,’ he gasped. ‘Quick. Grab something, anything, to defend yourself with. Get wood, see if we can make torches. They can’t stand anything bright . . .’
Robert was just about to yell at his boyfriend when he saw his first blood beast swooping out of the trees towards them. He fell back with an agonised shriek.
The thing was six feet tall and looked like the fattest bat he had ever seen. Its wings were ragged and satiny. It was almost impossible to believe they could support the weight of so corpulent a creature. The thing screeched, dive-bombing the small party. It was joined by more of its kind, all of them just as fat and equipped with fangs that were hissing and dripping like steam irons.
Brenda had produced a Whitby Gazette and a People’s Friend and was rolling them frantically and setting light to one end. Robert even heard her shouting, ‘Back, foul fiend!’
It was suddenly darker, as if a great cloud had passed in front of the Qab sun. Robert looked up to see that the light was being blocked by a pulsating mass of leathery wings. ‘There’s dozens of them!’ he realised. ‘We’ll never fight them off!’
‘We mustn’t,’ Gila said. ‘If we fight them now they’ll slaughter us. I’ve seen this before. Our only chance is to give ourselves up to them. They won’t hurt us, not at this stage. They’d prefer to take us back to their lair quietly and with minimum fuss.’
‘All right,’ said Robert, who hadn’t relished the idea of a fight to the death. ‘Brenda, did you hear? We have to give in.’
She was lashing out with her smouldering torch and her collapsible brolly, which was now little more than a flapping remnant. ‘What? What did you say?’ she grunted.
‘Gila says it’s best if we give ourselves up. Go with them.’
‘Go with them where?’ Brenda shouted. Her hair was hanging down in tatters. She looked appalled at the filthy beasts that were now dropping out of the sky, parachuting gently to join them on the jungle floor.
Gila said, ‘They’ll take us back to their larder. They’d really rather not damage their food supplies. That’s why we’re relatively safe from harm. For now, that is.’
It wasn’t a very comfortable journey, what with Robert shambling along on his damaged ankle and, somewhere along the way, Brenda managing to cut her hand with her wrecked brolly.
‘So that’s it,’ Robert said, sounding rather sulky. ‘We get eaten by these terrible things and that’s the end of it?’
‘We’ll get away,’ Gila said. ‘We have to. We’ve come so far.’
Brenda added, ‘That brolly was a gift from Effie. Christmas 2006. It was ever such a nice one.’
Soon enough they were approaching a dripping cavern deep inside the forest. This was the larder of the blood beasts, Gila explained, which cheered no one, especially when they encountered the rank smell and the scattered body parts and bones in the grassy dell outside the murky place.
The blood beasts were lumbering, oafish beings. They grunted and hissed at their prisoners, urging them along.
‘All right,’ snapped Brenda. ‘We’re hurrying as much as we can.’ She waved her hands in the face of the creature nearest her.
Her bloody hand scattered a few dark drops, which landed on the creature’s golem-like face. Its eyes widened and t
urned a strange colour. Brenda’s blood on its purple flesh hissed. Then the bat creature gibbered and drew back in fear.
‘What have you done to it?’ gasped Robert. ‘What’s the matter with it?’
Brenda stared at her bleeding hand. Other blood beasts were pulling back now, gurning and gurgling at her.
‘It doesn’t like my blood, for some reason,’ she mused. ‘I wonder if that means they’ll let us go?’
No such luck.
The blood beasts regathered their nerve and shoved their prisoners inside the dark larder.
They sat there in the gloom, quiet for some moments.
‘This place stinks,’ Robert said.
‘I wonder how long we’ve got,’ Gila said. ‘Before they get hungry.’
Robert groaned. ‘Shurrup.’
‘They’ll put on some kind of ceremony,’ Gila said. ‘With chanting and dancing and blazing braziers. And then they’ll drag us out and hang us upside down—’
‘Enough!’ Robert shouted at him. ‘Why do you have to live in such a bloody awful brutal world? Why couldn’t you have come from somewhere nice?’
‘Where’s nice?’ Gila muttered. ‘Every world is full of monsters, isn’t it?’
Brenda wasn’t paying the boys much attention. ‘I wonder what it is about my blood. They certainly seemed spooked out by it. I wonder . . . I wonder if what Cleavis and Effie and her Aunt Maud thought was true . . .’
‘What was that, Brenda?’
‘Oh, just things that were said at the very end of my recovered memories about this place. Things that they were saying about me . . . about the reason they brought me here in the first place . . .’
Robert frowned. ‘They said you had no soul, and so your blood was quite different.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Why don’t you have a soul?’ Gila asked. ‘Even the humblest creature, we are told, has a soul. Even lizards. Why don’t you, Brenda?’
‘There isn’t time to go into that now, lovey,’ she said kindly. ‘But rest assured, it’s true. I’m a unique creature on the face of this earth. Well, apart from our Frank, of course, though goodness knows where he’s beggared off to.’
