The hysterical radio announcer summed it up best of all, as he signed off his show like this: ‘Good luck to everyone out there. I’m going to switch off now, perhaps for good. There’s something outside my room and I just don’t know what it is. Goodbye!’
The first sip burnt Oswald’s tongue. Agonisingly, he drooled his soup back into the bowl before lurching backwards off the chair to flush out his mouth with tepid tapwater. On his return to the chair, the prickling discomfort began right away, like a bruise and a graze combined. He wriggled his tongue, as if the undulations would help break up the consolidating agonies. Silently he cursed the 750-Watt microwave oven, and wondered what kind of idiot would blast his food with lashings of invisible energy before sticking it straight into his mouth. There should have been some kind of safeguard.
He looked back at the soup. It was a beige lentil soup ‘fixed’ with a dash of lemon juice. It was a food for paupers, but paupers who would be privy the most exquisite tastes. His menu, he decided, was an arrangement of simple foods for complex men. Oswald considered how his previous girlfriends had looked down on the soup, disregarding its subtle blend of nutritious split peas and sharp citrus juice. They had looked down on Oswald too, disregarding his subtle blend of psychedelic dreaminess and languid wit. They saw only his sexual hunger, his twitchy paranoia and his obsessive energy for all the things that didn’t interest them. Things like lentil soup, acrylic paints, and theories. Unusual theories.
Oswald sighed. He sipped cool water as he pondered burnt tongues and sad realities. Sunday mornings always held this kind of melancholia. Today this was partly a side effect of the whiskey that he’d drunk the night before, and partly the ugly blossoming of Oswald’s realisation that this was the month in which his associate, Paul Slater, would travel back through time. This was an event that would potentially change the shape of the last few months of their lives, possibly the universe, in some radical fashion.
Paul was not Oswald’s only friend, but he was the one whose ideas and ambitions were made most active. He was more than a friend. He was the superintendent of Oswald’s life projects, a cicerone for their strange existence, an illuminator of a peculiar psychic gloom. He was, in fact, a doctor of Oswald’s very soul. He was also an inventor. (He called himself a technologist.) Not just an amateur. He was a professional inventor of systems and gadgets. This was surprising to Oswald, the very concept of an inventive man, since he had never expected to know anyone with far-reaching intellectual powers. Smart people, yes, certainly that was de facto of life. But a hidden genius who probed the very frontiers of humanity? Well, that was the stuff of Eagle Annuals and late-night docu-dramas. The nature of Mr Slater’s existence was surprising in a wider sense too, because unlike so many visionaries his talents were familiar to everyone in the entire (Western, consumer) world, although they did not know it. Paul was a master of packaging. He was an auteur of wrapping, a doyen of ergonomics, a phenom of the click ‘n’ seal. Billions of cartons, packets, boxes, baggies and jeroboams carried his touch, his savant-like aptitude for brilliant design. There was hardly a container in existence that he could not improve on with flair and foresight.
But there was another aspect the Mr Slater’s life that he made no money out of at all. And it was this hidden facet that greatly concerned both he and Oswald. The inventor’s laboratory on the third floor of a warehouse on the Gloucester Road was a hub for geomantic activity. It housed thousands of unnatural devices, all of which utilised the unofficial energies of the underlife to facilitate their workings in some way. Paul had invented most of these contraptions, but many more had been purchased in furtive trips to obscure auctions, and some had even been obtained by nefarious means. Private collections had be raided, guards at provincial museums had been bound, gagged and lightly bruised as cabinets were raided for esoteric contraptions. Paul’s lab held Greek earthquake meters, Nazcan artefacts for ley-line mapping and even some Tesla’s lost papers. It remaindered a deathray (unfinished) by the visionary charlatan Grindell Matthews, a device that was still covered in the dust from its one and only outing in a brisk February in 1924. There was electric chair stood in one corner (and to the headpiece pinned a list of gangsters who had died in its arms), while from the ceiling hung a constellation of brass globes, taken from an arcane observatory in Buddhist Tibet. This last item had been purchased on the internet for five hundred pounds. Paul lacked only the time and inclination to reassemble them into the strange machine that they had consisted.
And Slater was far from alone in his dealings with paranormal science. He was a proud member of the Institute of Chartered Leyline Surveyors, a very British approach to the difficult matter of earth energies and their accurate mapping. He was also a member of a far greater network, a society of inventors and offbeat intellectuals that spanned the globe. This organisation had no real name, but they were often mistaken for the Illuminati, a mysterious cabal that Paul insisted might as well be fictional, for all the relevance the had in these modern times. Paul’s associates were an extraordinary people, but their numbers were dwindling, and their future uncertain. A sequence of troubling events had recent reached their zenith and it was now quite clear, to Paul at least, that something quite dangerous now hunted his comrades in strange science. Whatever that thing was, it was ending their lives, one by one. Worse still, this meant an end to their research, unpleasant finalities, often in violent circumstances. Paul meant to find out exactly who or what it was that was responsible for such atrocities, at least in the London area.
Frustratingly, someone in Hampshire had known who the killer was, but that someone was already dead. Paul had initially thought this to be an insurmountable problem but, after some careful consideration, he decided that he could probably get round it, with a little tinkering. Scythe Winthrop, the aristocratic eccentric who had been Acting Secretary for the British Council of Inscrutable Arcana, had been brutally murdered in his country cottage. The clues that Paul had uncovered suggested that the old man had finally discovered who or what had been stalking the inventors for the past five centuries and, like others who had got close to the truth, had been found in his own bed, horribly mutilated and completely dead. But fate had been kind to Paul’s society of inventors, just this once, because the Geomancer of Gloucester Road was just days from completing a time machine. Yes, Slater had contrived a portal to the past. It was a box of tricks that would bend the fabric of physicists and extract a human corpus to the past through which it had already once been dragged. Slater would use this to travel back to the week before today, where Winthrop would, or should, still be alive. Paul would force the doddering old lunatic to release his research to the whole society, so that they might have a decent chance at catching Winthrop’s future killer and finally ending the troubling events that had brought abrupt and colourful ends to so many of the society’s members. Paul had been electrified by these prospects and the experience that awaited him. He would, he believed, be only the seventy-fifth person to have travelled through time since 1945, when records for such things first began.
Back at the Charlotte Street flat, Oswald rifled through the deep pockets of his overcoat and muttered to himself. He removed a pouch of tobacco and found a crumpled sheaf of cigarette papers. He added a sprinkling of bone-dry marijuana to the mix, having discovered an errant bud on the weird little carpeted shelf that overhung the bottom of the stairs. He couldn’t imagine how the leaf matter had got up there, but he was glad of its existence nonetheless. He lit the joint and inhaled deeply. On the second or third toke (he wasn’t counting) the heavy tendrils of intoxication began to wriggle their way into his consciousness. The befuddling energy of the initial high began to erect some kind of psychic big top across Oswald’s stream of consciousness. The perspicuity of his thought processes vanished and was replaced instead by a wild menagerie of ideas - a circus of free-association, which seemed to have no discernable source in the usual flow of thinking. Oswald began to conjure up amusing peculiarities, laughing to himself in a demented little loop of absurd phrases and half-remembered lop-sided jokes.
As he smoked, Oswald made a cup of tea. He began to wonder whether there was an opening for an exhibitor of miniature arguments, to be displayed in local museums vignettes of pub-side altercations, each one beautifully crafted. “Look at the detail on their little grimaces.”
Electrified by this idea, Oswald hooted to himself and looked out of the window for further inspiration. His heart went cold. There was something in the park, beyond the trees. He couldn’t quite see it, but the object was vast, like an enormous stone monolith, or the crest of a concrete egg with the height and girth of a block of flats. The towering curtain of beech trees obscured a clear view of the thing but, in the clarity of his fear, Oswald quietly and lucidly reasoned that there had to be something unnatural taking place: a demonic event, or an alien incursion. He also knew that he’d have to go outside and face it. He set down the mug of tea on the very corner of the table, aligning its base with the edges of the wood, and made for the door, scooping up his overcoat as he went. As he strode purposefully up the corridor he was suddenly cowed by the violent interruption of a letter being forced through letterbox.
“Post on a Sunday?”
Oswald picked up the letter, which seemed to have originated from his place of work, and then opened the door to see who had delivered it. The corridor was empty. Whoever had made the delivery had made a hasty retreat. Oswald put on his coat and made for the second, external, and street-level door. He went outside into a blast of cold air and a swirl of dead leaves. As he paced toward the mouth of the park he tore open the letter and began to try and read it as the tired sheet flapped about in the breeze. He turned into the park entrance and saw nothing but the anticipated avenues of trees and the large, blank playing fields, which were still sparsely populated by unskilled footballers and their sullen coaches. Whatever it was that had been out here when he looked out of the window, it had now vanished.
Standing there under grey skies, Oswald examined the letter. It detailed his transfer from his long-term position in Pecuniary Concerns to ‘General Incineration’, wherever that might be. He huffed unhappily. ‘Any occupational change not instigated by the person or persons affected by that change is liable to cause modest psychological malcontent and a downturn in tensile productive,’ he quoted. Was that right? Something half remembered from his vocational psychology lectures. He made his way back to the flat, deciding that once he’d taken a bath, he’d report both this change, and the incident with the park, to Paul as soon as feasible. These events might well affect their plans to map the psychic geography of the town by Wednesday. And there was still a great deal of work to be done.
Paul was hunched over two lines of cocaine. He was astonished by their perfection. Despite the fact that he had employed a spatula to cut them with casual disinterest, they had formed immaculate ridges, utterly identical and perfectly parallel to one another. Their linear symmetry was off-putting, as if they shouldn’t have been disturbed. This small happening seemed like an omen, but it was Oswald who believed in such things, not Paul. The Inventor was a man of science, /incredible science/. Of invention and of hard drugs.
He snorted the coke, one toot for each nostril. The perfection of the lines was destroyed, but a new and far more interesting effect was underway: the short, hard peak of drug-fuelled enlightenment that would allow the demiurgic mind to make its next intuitive leap. He hammered the keys of his computer, churning out a five thousand-word document of proposals and possibilities. The new fruit juice package nozzle would be a sensation. Its push-button action was so simple that no one who’d seen the prototypes had failed to be astonished. Once again the High King of Packaging had revolutionised the business. He was rich now, but in another ten years Paul Slater would be one of Britain’s wealthiest men. And no one, aside from a few members of the society, knew who he was. Clever-clever.
Of course this kind of quotidian engineering was simply the day job. The devices that Paul actually spent most of his time inventing were not for public consumption. Indeed, the general public could hardly be expected to understand the immensity of his work, not in packaging, and certainly not in geomancy. If they did then there would be need for interference, legislation, investigations and taxes. Paul could not allow that. He would not allow that.
The phone rang. Paul picked it up and sniffed to indicate that he was listening. Oswald reported the morning’s events and Paul stood up to drag the phone cable around, lolling his head from side to back as he listened.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Carry on and report back regarding General Incineration. I think that your infiltration of the company could actually be coming to something.’
Paul listened carefully to Oswald’s response.
‘Well I regard it as infiltration,’ said Paul, testily. ‘I have to go now. Come round after work tomorrow. I’ll be expecting you.’
Paul dropped the phone back onto his sports-bag of drug paraphernalia and turned to look up at the time machine. The vast contraption dominated the vaulted interior of the warehouse. Its mass of wiring and diodes was formidable and, in Paul’s eyes, they made up a portrait of massive intellect. They were externalised thought: a sculpture of pure ideation. He walked across the papered floor, where layers of blueprints lay scattered in a collage of inky intricacy. This would indeed be his greatest achievement, his opus.
‘It’s going to work,’ hissed Paul, white light crackling in his eyes. ‘Winthrop!’ he screamed. ‘I’m coming!’