Maxwell strode up to the saloon bar door, the blakeys on his substantial boots raising a fine shower of sparks on the cobblestones. From within came the carefree chatter of happy tongues. The gay badinage of good friends well met. The swell of piped music. The rustle of crisp packets. The tang of nectarines. That hint of Monday lunch-time in an otherwise month of Sundays. And the like.
Maxwell pressed open the door and entered The Shrunken Head.
‘Good day to you, sir,’ said Sandy, grinning from behind the bar counter.
‘Good day to you,’ said Maxwell, ‘and a pint of your very best.’
As Sandy did the business, Maxwell gazed about the saloon in search of some likely fellow who might be all the better for having a Queen’s Award for Industry Award award.
The voice of Duck-Barry Ryan reached him from the public bar where drinks were a penny cheaper and swearing was not only allowed, but encouraged.
‘The worm is the gardener’s friend.’ Duck-Barry was telling a small and uncommitted audience of one. ‘The wiggly worm digs tunnels which help irrigate the soil when it rains. He also eats woodlice and ticks, and, if left undisturbed, would live to be one hundred years of age.’
‘Cobblers,’ Maxwell recognized the voice of Jack ‘The Hat’ Cooper. ‘The wiggly worm eventually turns into the bluebottle, from which spring all the evils of the world. Don’t tell me about wiggly worms, I’ve bred more of the blighters than you’ve had pimples on your bum.’
Duck-Barry resented that remark.
‘I resent that remark,’ he said.
Sandy presented Maxwell with a well-drawn pint. Maxwell counted change onto the counter. ‘What is all this talk of wiggly worms?’ he asked.
‘Please do not mention wiggly worms in the saloon bar,’ said Sandy. ‘I fear that the wiggly worm, its habitat and habit are doomed to be the major topic of conversation in this public house until the Government decides the matter one way or the other.’
‘I am perplexed,’ said Maxwell. ‘Please explain.’
‘The Government is putting a tax on worms,’ explained Sandy. ‘Such will the high-rise dweller benefit and the rich land baron pay dearly.’
‘I am astonished by this news,’ said Maxwell, sipping at his pint.
‘The discussion in progress’, Sandy gestured towards the public bar, ‘is between our two resident wiggly-worm experts and is basically aimed in the direction of: how can one’s wiggly worms be persuaded to vacate one’s garden, during the period when the Worm Tax Inspectors call to make their tail-tally.’
‘My astonishment becomes tempered by suspicion,’ said Maxwell. ‘Surely this is some April first tomfoolery or suchlike.’
‘Scoff if you will.’ And Sandy made a sombre face. ‘But those of us with eyes in our heads and fire in our bellies can see nineteen eighty-four approaching in high-heeled jackboots.’
A man of Romany stock now entered the saloon bar in low-heeled gumboots. He was burdened by the weight of an armchair.
‘Ah, excuse me,’ said Sandy, and to the gypsy, ‘Kindly put it by the fireside if you will.’
The gypsy did so. ‘Blessings, sar,’ he said, presenting Sandy with the bill.
The landlord raised his sandy-coloured eyebrows, cashed up no-sale and drew the sum of twenty-three pounds, two and three pence, old money, from the cash register. ‘Easy come, easy go,’ he said, as the money left his hands.
The gypsy tugged upon his forelock, then once again took flight.
‘How do they fly like that?’ Sandy asked Maxwell, who was staring at the armchair and making small choking noises from the back of his throat.
‘Nice chair, eh?’ said Sandy. ‘That’s a Dalbatto. Not to be confused with a Dalberty, of course. I’ve a member of the peerage lined up for that chair. Worth a king’s ransom is a Dalbatto nowadays.’
Gag and croak, went Maxwell.
‘Two more pints over here,’ called the voice of Duck-Barry, ‘and stick a couple of worms in Jack’s.’
‘Coming,’ said Sandy.
Maxwell picked up his pint of best, took himself over to the armchair, which up until so recently had been his favourite, and sat down heavily upon it.
‘Don’t sit there!’ cried Sandy, from the bar. ‘Are you mad, or what?’
‘I’m beginning to wonder.’
Maxwell removed himself to a table near the window, sat down upon a low stool and glowered into his beer. A hand touched him lightly on the shoulder and a soft voice said, ‘Hello, it’s you again, isn’t it?’
Maxwell looked up to find the ex-new girl from the Tengo Na Minchia Tanta smiling down at him. ‘It’s me,’ she smiled, ‘remember?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Maxwell. ‘At the café. What are you doing here?’
‘I work here. Sandy’s just taken me on as a barmaid.’
‘Eh?’ said Maxwell. ‘But I thought he—’
‘Ssh,’ said the new barmaid. ‘It will be all right as long as he doesn’t want to take up a reference from my last employer.’
Maxwell shook his well-befuddled head. ‘You deserve the Queen’s Award for Industry award,’ he said.
The new barmaid made a wistful face. ‘What wouldn’t I do for one of those?’ she said.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Get a move on, Sandra,’ called Sandy. ‘There’s empties to go in the washer.’
‘Well, I can’t stand around here chatting all day,’ said Sandra, the new barmaid. ‘I won’t get The Queen’s Award for Industry award doing that, will I?’ And with those words said, she was gone.
Maxwell drank his beer in silence, glanced furtively about the crowded bar, and when he felt assured that he was unobserved, took to a violent bout of head scratching.
It didn’t help.
The day was wrong. Everything about it was wrong. Everything that had happened. The way people were behaving. All of it.
Perhaps he was dreaming. Or going mad. Or perhaps the dear one had slipped a tab of bad acid into his breakfast for a bit of jolly.
Maxwell rooted in his zoot suit pocket and pulled out his Queen’s Award for Industry Award award. This was somehow at the back of it all. This was somehow the culprit.
Maxwell spread the thing before him on the table and gave it a good looking over. It did look good and though he had certainly never seen one before, he felt certain that this was the real McCoy.
A sudden lull in the general saloon bar conversation caused Maxwell to look up from his looking down. The lull was a silence and a most intense one at that. Everyone was staring. At him. At his Queen’s Award for Industry award award award.
Maxwell gazed from one face to another. Stern the faces looked. Hostile. Definitely hostile.
‘Ah,’ Maxwell snatched up the certificate, rolled it between his fingers and thrust it back into his pocket. Someone muttered something. Whispers broke out here and there, like little charges of electricity. Elbows were nudging. Fists were being formed.
‘Excuse me please.’ Maxwell rose and made towards the door.
‘He’s got it,’ said someone. ‘He started it.’
‘What?’ Maxwell thrust into the staring, muttering, menacing crowd and battered his way towards the door.
And he was through it.
Outside.
And it had grown somewhat dark.
Maxwell blinked and rubbed at his eyes. It couldn’t be much past midday. What had happened to the light? He blinked and squinted. The lane was blurry. Indistinct.
Dreamlike.
Dreamlike.
Maxwell made for home. He forced his way along. His boots, substantial as they were, seemed sticky about the soles. They clung to the pavement, making every step an effort.
Ahead was confusion. Police cars. Flashing lights. Shouting.
Crowds of people.
A policeman stepped forward. Barred his way. ‘You can’t go any further,’ said the officer of the law.
‘I live down there,’ said Maxwell. ‘Let me by.’
‘No, sir. There’s a fracture in the reality of that street, we can’t let anyone past.’
‘But my house is there.’ Maxwell almost said, ‘My wife is there.’ But he didn’t.
‘There’s nothing we can do about your house, sir. You’d better get out of town quickly. Go abroad. Go to Patagonia.’
‘Let me through, please.’ Maxwell raised a fist towards the policeman.
‘I can shoot you for that, sir. It’s allowed now, you know.’
‘What’s going on? You have to tell me.’
‘It’s a reality fracture, scientists are working on it. Someone moved the chair. You’d better go, sir, before you arouse suspicion.’
‘Yeah, go on. Clear off.’
Maxwell turned. A policewoman sneered at him. It was his wife. The not-so-dear one. But then she was also the new barmaid! It was the same person. Maxwell couldn’t understand how he’d never recognized her in the Tengo Na Minchia Tanta and in The Shrunken Head.
‘Go on, Maxwell, sling your hook. Clear off. Don’t look back. Don’t come back. Don’t ever come back!’
Maxwell turned, ran blindly. Tripped. And fell.
And vanished.
2
And then awoke.
In his favourite armchair.
And groaned mightily.
‘Oh I do hate that.’ Maxwell reached to scratch his head but thought better of it and rubbed his eyes instead. ‘Drop off back to sleep in your armchair, dream a lot of gibberish and think you’re still awake. Horrible.’ He shuddered briefly. ‘Still, at least I didn’t dream I was walking around the streets in my pyjamas this time.’
‘Oh dear,’ said someone in a tired and languid tone. ‘I had hoped so much that we might simply skip over this sequence. It is such a cliché.’
‘You can’t skip over it just like that.’ This voice was sharp and foxy. ‘There has to be a process of adjustment and explanation.’
‘And acceptance.’ The third voice had a youthful quality to it. ‘For him to function of his own free will.’
‘What is this?’ went Maxwell, opening wide his eyes. Then, ‘Aaaaaagh!’ he continued.
‘Why is it always “Aaaaaagh!”?’ asked he of the tired and languid tones.
‘Because it is,’ said foxy. ‘Let him get it over with. Someone pour him some coffee.’
‘Aaaaaagh!’ went Maxwell, which wasn’t a new ‘Aaaaaagh!’ but a continuation of the original. ‘Who? What? Where? How? Why? Aaaaaagh!’
‘Take some coffee, Mr Carrion. It contains a mild soporific. It will calm you down.’
‘Calm me down? I don’t want—’ Maxwell jumped up from his favourite armchair. ‘Who? Where? How?’ He gaped all around and about. This wasn’t his front room. He wasn’t home. But where was he? And was he actually awake?
‘You are awake,’ said languid-tones.
Maxwell gaped now at the speaker. A long tall speaker, towering before him. Somewhere near to seven feet in height, he was. A bony frame shrink-wrapped in a suit of bottle-green velvet. The head was narrow, long, its facial features all pinched in together. A great red beard, a fantastic embroidery of tortured plaits, depended to the chest. Thick-lensed, horn-rimmed spectacles bridged a hatchet nose. The mouth beneath pursed quizzically, then spoke again. ‘Try to remain calm,’ it said.
‘Calm? I?’ Maxwell’s eyes went flashing round this room that wasn’t his. And ‘wasn’t his’, it was, to a most notable degree.
This room was long and wide, yet low of ceiling, each wall bricked with books of ancient leather. Dusty cabinets displayed a wealth of outré objets d’art. Glass domes sheltered beasts and birds and insects, fruit and flowers. There were reliquaries of burnished gold on chiffoniers of satinwood, and deeply buttoned chesterfields and escritoires and astrolabes. What floor was seen was rich with rugs, of Soumak, Shirvan, Susani, Senneh and Savonnerie.
‘Enough,’ croaked Maxwell, gazing this way and the next, yet seeking only the door. ‘If I’m not dreaming, let me out.’
‘You’re free to go,’ said the long tall figure in the bottle green. ‘But I would not advise you so to do, quite yet.’
‘It wouldn’t go well for you if you did.’
Maxwell swung about to view the speaker with the foxy voice. A man of medium height (to those who dwell amongst the very tall and the very short in approximately equal proportion), broad of freckled, smiling face, with a nimbus of white hair rising airily above a forehead of considerable span. This chap was all in green tweed. Watch-chains swagged the waistcoat that curtained his luxurious paunch. Tiny hands toyed nervously on the mount of a lacquered cane. ‘Drink some coffee, compose your thoughts, relax yourself, it’s for the best.’
A third fellow offered a tiny Copeland coffee cup upon a delicate saucer painted in the Imari palette, with gilt line and dentil rims.
‘And who are you?’ asked Maxwell, declining the proffered cup.
The third fellow simply grinned. Young and elfish, he wore a black T-shirt printed with the words ‘FAST AND BULBOUS’ across the chest area. A black leather jacket, soiled Levis and Doc Marten boots completed the ensemble. He had a rather unfortunate cold sore on his upper lip. ‘Sugar?’ he enquired.
‘I’m out of here,’ Maxwell pushed his chair aside, took half a step and fell flat on his face.
‘I took the liberty of tying your boot laces together,’ said red-beard of the bottle green.
Maxwell glared up bitterly from the Soumak, Shirvan, Susani, Senneh and Savonnerie rug-bestrewn floor. ‘Thanks a lot,’ said he. ‘But hold on there.’ He glanced from standing figure to standing figure and back again. ‘I know you, don’t I?’
‘He’s getting there,’ said foxy voice.
‘I knew he would,’ said FAST AND BULBOUS.
‘You know us,’ said red-beard of the bottle green. ‘You do, go on.’
Maxwell fumbled with his boot laces. As with his boots, they were substantial. They would not be untied without effort.
‘Help Mr Carrion back into his armchair,’ said red-beard, and the others hastened to oblige.
‘It’s Karrien,’ said Maxwell, sitting down once more. ‘It’s Maxwell Karrien. But . . . it is you. Yes it is.’
‘It is,’ the tall man nodded curtly from the waist.
‘Then I am dreaming. You’re not real.’
The tall man shook his head. ‘This isn’t helping. Who are we? Go on, say it. Tell us.’
‘You’re them,’ said Maxwell. ‘The characters in the books I read. You’re Sir John Rimmer, fifth Earl of Boleskine.’ The tall man winked an eye behind a pebbled lens. ‘You’re Dr Harney.’ Fox-voiced freckle-face fluttered tiny fingers. ‘And you’re the psychic youth himself, Danbury Collins.’
‘I’m that fellow,’ said the psychic youth himself.
‘The paranormal investigators in the P. P. Penrose novels.’
‘We are they,’ quoth those who were.
‘And you do look very good.’ Maxwell made a most approving face. ‘Just as I imagined you to, in the novels. Except,’ he peered at Danbury Collins, ‘you never had a cold sore. In the novels.’
‘Would you?’ the lad asked.
‘Quite so. Well, brilliant. I’m very impressed.’
‘Good,’ said Sir John. ‘We hoped you would be.’
‘Impressed by my own imagination,’ said Maxwell. ‘That last dream was crap, but this one is a killer.’
‘This one is for real,’ said Danbury Collins.
‘Oh yeah, sure.’
‘What happened yesterday was real,’ said Sir John. ‘That’s why we’re here.’
Maxwell glanced up, about, from face to face, around the room. It did all look so very real. And feel so very real. It even smelled so very real. Musty. Musky. A hint of armpit issuing from Danbury’s direction. Sir John’s beard lotion and the beeswax on the doctor’s shoes.
So very real indeed.
‘It is real,’ said Maxwell. ‘But it can’t be.’
‘Things have changed
,’ said Sir John. ‘The times have changed. Perhaps I might explain. To spare much later anguish. To elucidate.’
‘To allow for the process of adjustment,’ said Dr Harney.
‘And acceptance,’ said Danbury Collins, offering the coffee cup once more to Maxwell.
Maxwell took the dainty thing and put it to his lips. ‘Go on,’ he said, suspiciously. ‘Elucidate. Explain.’
‘Good.’ Sir John lowered his gauntness onto a chesterfield sofa and extended his long legs before him. ‘Have you ever asked yourself why the Old Testament just sort of petered out at the end?’ he enquired.
‘No,’ said Maxwell, sipping coffee. ‘Can’t say I ever have.’
‘Or why the cycle of Greek myths simply finished?’
‘No.’
‘Or why Columbus never sailed over the edge of the Earth when he went off in search of the New World.’
‘That’s because the earth is a sphere, I think you’ll find.’
‘Is it indeed?’
‘Well, it was yesterday.’
‘Ah,’ said Sir John. ‘Yesterday.’
‘You mean it’s not today?’
‘Very possibly not. I’ve yet to find out.’
‘Hold on there,’ said Maxwell.
‘I’ll keep this as brief as I can.’ Sir John twiddled here and there about his beard. ‘And as simple. The history of this planet, the history of man, is composed of “ages”. From the age of chaos to the age of the dinosaurs, to the age of the dawn of man. The Stone age. The Bronze age. The Iron age. The age of myth and legend. The golden age. The dark ages. The middle ages. The age of reason. The age of steam. The technological age. The age of Aquarius. The new age. Ages, cycles, times, durations. Units of measurement, flowing from one into another, but always in the same direction: forward. Why does the Old Testament simply peter out? Because the biblical age came to an end. The age of the prophets and of those who walked with God was over.’
‘Where is all this leading?’ Maxwell asked.
‘Quite simply, Max, the age you knew two days ago has simply ceased to be. The planet earth has moved into another age.’
‘And so what’s this age then? The age of fictional characters?’
His hosts exchanged glances.