The Monster Trilogy

He started to scratch a figure with sharp teeth on the wall as he spoke.

‘Talk sense, man,’ said the ginger man, sternly.

‘There soon will come a scientist who will say even stranger things about space and time. We can’t comprehend infinity, yet it’s in our heads.’

‘Together with the blood?’ He laughed impatiently, turning to the door to be released.

As he rapped on the panel, the madman said, ‘Yes, yes, with the blood, with a whole stream of blood. You’ll see. It’s in your eyes, kind sir, she said. A stream of blood stretching beyond the grave, beyond the gravy.’

He made a jump for the distant spider as the door slammed, leaving him alone.

The ginger man walked with the doctor in the bloodstained coat. The doctor accompanied him gravely to the door of the asylum, where a carriage waited. As the ginger man passed over a guinea, he said, with an attempt at casual small talk, ‘So I suppose there’s no cure for dementia praecox, is that so?’

The doctor pulled a serious face, tilted his head to one side, gazed up into the air, and uttered an epigram.

‘I fear a night-time on Venus means a lifetime on Mercury.’

‘You wretches live in the dark,’ Joe Bodenland said. ‘Don’t you hate your own sickness?’

He expected no answer, speaking abstractedly as he finger-tipped the keyboard in the train’s chief control panel. The driver stood by, silent, offering no reply. The information had been squeezed out of him, like paste from a half-empty tube.

‘If you’ve told me right, we should be back in 1999 any minute.’

Bodenland watched the scattering figures in a globe-screen, peering through the half-dark.

As the time train slowed, the grey light lifted to something brighter. The driver screamed with fear, in his first real display of emotion.

‘Save me – I’m photophobic. We’re all photophobic. It would be the end —’

‘Wouldn’t that be a relief? Get under that tarpaulin.’

Even as he indicated the tarpaulin stacked on a rack with fire-fighting equipment, the driver pulled it out and crawled under it, to lie quaking on the floor near Clift’s body.

The light flickered, strengthened. The train jerked to a halt. Generators died. Silence closed in.

Rain pattered softly against the train body. It fell slowly, vertically, filtering down from the canopy of foliage overhead. All round the train stood mighty boles of trees, strong as stone columns.

‘What …’ Pulling down a handle, Bodenland opened the sliding door and stared out.

They had materialized in a swamp. Dark water lay ahead, bubbles rising slowly to its surface. Everywhere was green. The air hummed with winged life like sequins. He stared out in amazement, admiration mingling with his puzzlement.

The rain was no more than a drip, steady, confidential. The moist warm air comforted him. He stood looking out, breathing slowly, returning to his old self.

As he remained there, taking in the mighty forest, he became aware of the breath going in and out at his nostrils. The barrel of his chest was not unmoving; it worked at its own regular speed, drawing the air down into his lungs. This reflex action, which would continue all his days, was a part of the biological pleasure of being alive.

A snake that might have been an anaconda unwound itself from a branch and slid away into the ferns. Still he stared. It looked like the Louisiana swamps, and yet – a dragonfly with a five foot wingspan came dashing at him, its body armoured in iridiscent green. He dashed it away from his face. No, this wasn’t Louisiana.

Gathering his wits, he turned back into the cab. The train gave a lurch sideways.

The LCD co-ordinates had ceased to spin. Bodenland stared at them incredulously, and then checked other readings. They had materialized some 270 million years before his present, in the Carboniferous Age.

The cab rocked under his feet and tilted a few more degrees to one side. Black water lapped over the lip of the door up to his feet. Staring out, he saw that the weight of the train was bearing it rapidly down into the swamp.

‘You,’ he said, shaking the supine driver under his cover. ‘I’m going to pitch you out into that swamp unless you tell me fast how we get out of here.’

‘It’s the secret over-ride. I forgot to tell you about it – I’ll help you all I can, since you were merciful to me …’

‘Okay, you remember now. What do we do?’

The dark water came washing in as the driver said, ‘The override is designed to stop unauthorized persons meddling with the time-controls. Only the space controls responded to your instructions, the rest went into reverse.’

While he was speaking, the train tilted again and Clift’s body slid towards the door.

‘What do we do, apart from drown?’

‘The train is programmed for its next stop and I can’t change that. Best thing is to complete that journey, after which the programme’s finished and the over-ride cuts out. So you just switch on, cancelling the previous co-ordinates you punched in.’

The water was pouring in now, splashing the men. A bejewelled fly swung in and orbited Bodenland’s head.

‘Where’s this pre-programmed journey taking us?’

With an extra surge of water, a warty shape rose from the swamp, steadying itself with a clumsy foot at the doorway. A flat amphibian head looked at them. Two toad eyes stared, as if without sight. A wide mouth cracked open. A goitre in the yellow throat throbbed. The head darted forward as Bodenland instinctively jumped back, clinging to a support.

The lipless frog mouth fastened on Clift’s body. With a leisurely movement, the amphibian withdrew, bearing its meal with it down into the waters of the swamp. It disappeared from view and the black surface closed over it.

Bodenland slammed the sliding door shut and staggered to the keyboard. He punched on the Start pressure-pads, heard the roar of generators, which died as the engine seemed to lift.

The outer world with its majestic colonnades of trees blurred, whited out, faded to grey and down the colour spectrum, until zero-light of time quanta came in. The driver sat up in the dirty water swilling about him and peered haggard-faced from his tarpaulin.

Drained by the excitements of the last few hours, appalled by the loss of his friend, Bodenland watched the numerals juggling with themselves in the oily wells of the display panel. He came to with a start, realizing he might fall asleep.

Making an effort, he got down a length of thin cable and secured the driver with it, before locking the door to the corridor.

He stood over his captive, who began to plead for mercy.

‘You don’t have a great store of courage.’

‘I don’t need courage. You need the courage. I know you have ten thousand adversaries against you.’

Bodenland looked down, contemplating kicking the creature, before overcoming the impulse.

‘Where are we programmed for?’ he asked, thinking that almost anywhere was preferable to the Carboniferous.

‘We have to visit Transylvania,’ said the driver. ‘But the programme is set only as far as London, in year 1896, where we let off a powerful female agent.’

‘Oh yes? And what’s she up to?’

‘She has business at the home of a man living near London, a man by the name of Bram Stoker.’

7

She went over to look at the little glass panel of the air-conditioning unit. It was functioning perfectly. Nevertheless, the motel suite felt arid to her, lifeless, airless, after her flight through the sky.

Mina Legrand’s rooms were on the second floor. Her years in Europe prompted her to open a window and let in a breeze, sanitized by the nearby desert. Enterprise sprawled out there, the park and sign of the Moonlite Motel, and, beyond them, the highway, on which were strung one-storey buildings, a store or two, and a used car lot, with a Mexican food joint marking the edge of town. Pick-ups drove by, their occupants preparing to squeeze what they could from the evening. Already dusk was settling in.

Turning from the window, she shucked off her green cover-alls and her underwear and stepped into the shower.

Despite the pleasure of the hot water coursing over her body, gloom settled on her. She hated to be alone. She hated solitude more of late. And perhaps Joe had been absent more of late. Now she would be seeing less of Larry, too. And there were the deaths in the back of her mind, never to disappear. Sky-diving was different; paradoxically, it took her away from loneliness.

She was at that age when wretchedness seeped very easily through the cracks in existence. A friend had suggested she should consult a psychoanalyst. That was not what she wanted. What she wanted was more from Joe, to whom she felt she had given so much.

She discovered she was singing in the shower.

‘Well, what did I do wrong

To make you stay away so long?’

The song had selected itself. To hell with it. She cut it off. Joe had let her down. What she really needed was a passionate affair. Fairly passionate. Men were so tiresome in so many ways. In her experience, they all complained. Except Joe, and that showed his lack of communication …

With similar non-productive thoughts, she climbed from the shower and stood under the infra-red lamp.

Later, in a towelling robe, she made herself a margarita out of the mini-bar, sat down, and began to write a letter to Joe on the Moonlite Motel notepaper. ‘Joe you bastard —’ she began. She sat there, thinking back down the years.

Finishing the drink, she got a second and began to ring around.

She phoned home, got her own voice on the answerphone, slammed off. Rang through to Bodenland Enterprises, spoke to Waldgrave. No one had heard from Joe. Rang Larry’s number. No answer. In boredom, she rang her sister Carrie in Paris, France.

‘We’re in bed, for God’s sake. What do you want?’ came Carrie’s shrill voice, a voice remembered from childhood.

Mina explained.

‘Joe always was crazy,’ Carrie said. ‘Junk him like I told you, Minnie. Take my advice. He’s worth his weight in alimony. This is one more suicidal episode you can do without.’

Hearing from her sister the very words she had just been formulating herself, Mina fell into a rage.

‘I guess I know Joe light years better than you, Carrie, and suicidal he is not. Brave, yes, suicidal, no. He just believes he leads an enchanted life and nothing can harm him.’

‘Try divorce and see what that does.’

‘He was unwanted and rejected as a small kid. He needs me and I’m not prepared to do the dirty on him now. His whole career is dedicated to the pursuit of power and adventure and notoriety – well, it’s an antidote to the early misery he went through. I understand that.’

The distant voice said, ‘Sounds like you have been talking to his shrink.’

Mina looked up, momentarily distracted by something fluttering at the window. It was late for a bird. The dark was closing swiftly in.

‘His new shrink is real good. Joe is basically a depressive, like many famous men in history, Goethe, Luther, Tolstoy, Winston Churchill – I forget who else. He has enormous vitality, and he fends off a basic melancholia with constant activity. I have to live with it, he classifies out as a depressive.’

‘Sounds like you should chuck Joe and marry the shrink. A real smart talker.’

Mina thought of Carrie’s empty-headed woman-chasing husband, Adolphe. She decided to make no comment on that score.

‘One thing Joe has which I have, and I like. A little fantasy-world of mixed omnipotence and powerlessness which is very hard to crack, even for a smart shrink. I have the same component, God help me.’

‘For Pete’s sake, Mina, Adolphe says all American woman are the same. They believe —’

‘Oh, God, sorry, Carrie, I’ve got a bat in my room. I can’t take bats.’

She put the phone down and stood up, suddenly aware of how dark it was in the room. The Moonlite sign flashed outside in puce neon. And the bat hovered inside the window.

Something unnatural in its movements transfixed her. She stood there unmoving as the pallid outline of a man formed in the dusky air. The bat was gone and, in its place, a suave-looking man with black hair brushed back from his forehead, standing immaculate in evening dress.

Fear brushed her, to be followed by a kind of puzzlement. ‘Did I live this moment before? Didn’t I see it in a movie? A dream … ?’

She inhaled deeply, irrationally feeling a wave of kinship with this man, although he breathed no word.

Unconsciously, she had allowed her robe to fall open, revealing her nudity. The stranger’s eyes were fixed upon her – not upon her body, her breasts, the dark bush of hair on her sexual regions, but on her throat.

Could there really be some new thrill, something unheard of and incredible, such as Joe seeks? If so … if so, lead me to it.

This was a different hedonism from the aerial plunge from the womb of the speeding plane.

‘Hi,’ she said.

He smiled, revealing good strong white teeth with emphatic canines.

‘Like a drink?’ she asked. ‘I was just getting stewed all on my ownsome.’

‘Thanks, no,’ he said, advancing. ‘Not alcohol. You have something more precious than alcohol.’

‘I always knew it,’ Mina said.

Lack of motion. Stillness. Silence.

‘More goddamned trees,’ Bodenland exclaimed.

At least there was no swamp this time.

He stepped over the driver, tied and cowering under his tarpaulin,and slid open the door. After a moment, he stepped down on solid earth. Somewhere a bird sang and fell silent.

These were not the trees of the Carboniferous. They were small, hazel and birch and elder, graceful, widely spaced, with the occasional oak and sycamore towering above them. Light filtered through to him almost horizontally, despite heavy green foliage on every side. He guessed it was late summer. 1896, near London, England, according to the driver and the co-ordinates. What was going on in England, 1896? Then he thought, Oh yes, Queen Victoria …

Well, the old Queen had a pretty little wood here. It seemed to represent all the normal things the time train, with its hideous freight, was not. He savoured the clear air with its scent of living things. He listened to the buzz of a bee and was pleased.

Seen from outside, the train when stationary was small, almost inconsiderable, no longer than a railroad boxcar. Its outside was studded and patterned with metal reinforcers; nothing was to be seen of the windows he knew existed inside. Somehow, the whole thing expanded in the relativism of the time quanta and contracted when stationary. He stared at it with admiration and curiosity, saying to himself, ‘I’m going to get this box of tricks back to my own time and figure it all out. There’s power beyond the dreams of avarice here.’

As he stood there in a reverie, it seemed to him that a shrouded female figure drifted like a leaf from the train and disappeared. Immediately, the wood seemed a less friendly place, darker too.

He shivered. Strange anxieties passed through his mind. The isolation in which, through his own reckless actions, he found himself, closed in about him. Although he had always believed himself to have a firm grip on sanity – was not the world of science sanity’s loftiest bastion? – the nightmare events on the train caused him to wonder. Had that creature pinned to the torture-bench been merely a disordered phase of sadistic imagining?

He forced himself to get back into the train and to search it.

It had contracted like a concertina. In no way was it possible to enter any of the compartments, now squeezed shut like closed eyes. He listened for crying but heard nothing. The very stillness was a substance, lowering to the spirits.

‘Shit,’ he said, and stared out into the wood. They had come millions of years to be in this place and he strained his ears as if to listen to the sound of centuries. ‘We’d better find out where the hell we are,’ he said aloud. ‘And I need to eat. Not one bite did I have through the whole Cretaceous …’

He shook himself into action.

Hoisting the driver up by his armpit, he said, ‘You’re coming too, buddy, I may need you.’

The smothered voice said, ‘You will be damned forever for this.’

‘Damned? You mean like doomed to eternal punishment? I don’t believe that crap. I don’t really believe in you either, so move your arse along.’

He helped the creature out of the train.

A path wound uphill, fringed with fern. Beyond, on either side, grew rhododendrons, their dark foliage hastening the approach of night. He peered ahead, alert, full of wonder and excitement. The trees were thinning. A moth fluttered by on a powdery wing and lost itself on the trunk of a birch. A brick-built house showed some way ahead. As he looked a dim light lit in one of its windows, like an eye opening.

Tugging his captive, he emerged from the copse on to the lawn. The lawn was sprinkled with daisies already closing. It led steeply up to the house, which crowned a ridge of higher ground. A row of pines towered behind the roofs and chimneys of the house, which lay at ease on its eminence, overlooking a large ornamental pool, a gazebo and pleasant flowerbeds past which Bodenland now made his way.

A young gardener in waistcoat and shirtsleeves saw him coming, dropped his hoe in astonishment, and ran round the other side of the house. Bodenland halted to give his reluctant captive a pull.

On a terrace which ran the length of the house stood classical statues. The sun was setting, casting long fingers of shadow which reached towards Bodenland. As he paused, another light was lit inside the house.

Uncertain for once, he made towards the back door and took hold of the knocker.

The ginger man was watching and listening again, an opera glass in his right hand. With his left hand, he stroked his short red beard appreciatively, as if it had been a cat.

He stood in the wings of the Lyceum Theatre with the delectable Ellen Terry in costume by his side, gazing on to the lighted stage.

On the stage, before a packed auditorium, Henry Irving was playing the role of Mephistopheles in a performance of Faust. Dressed in black, with a black goatee beard and whitened face, the celebrated actor spread out his cloak like a giant bat’s wings. Back and forth he stalked, menacing a somewhat aghast Faust, and chanting his lines:

So great’s his Christian faith, I cannot grasp

His soul – but I’ll afflict his body with

Lament, and strew him with diverse diseases …

Thunderous applause from the audience, all of whom believed in one way or another that they were in some danger of damnation themselves.

When the play was finished, Irving took his bows before the curtain.

As he made his exit into the wings, he passed the ginger man with a triumphant smirk and headed for his dressing room.

Both Irving and the ginger man were smartly attired in evening dress when they finally left the theatre. The ginger man adjusted his top hat at a rakish angle, careful that some curls sizzled over the brim to the left of his head.

The stagedoor keeper fawned on them as they passed his nook.

‘’Night, Mr Irving. ’Night, Mr Stoker.’

The ginger man pressed a tip into his hand as they passed. Out in the night, haloed by a gas lamp, Irving’s carriage awaited.

‘The club?’ Irving asked.

‘I’ll join you later,’ said the ginger man, on impulse. He turned abruptly down the side alley to the main thoroughfare.

Irving swung himself up into his carriage. ‘The Garrick Club,’ he told his driver.

In the thoroughfare, bustle was still the order of the day, despite the lateness of the hour. Hansoms and other carriages plied back and forth in the street, while the elegant and the shabby formed a press on the pavements. And in doorways and the entrances to dim side-courts were propped those beings who had no advantages in a hard-hearted world, who had failed or been born in failure, men, women, small children. These shadowy persons, keeping their pasty faces in shadow, begged, or proffered for sale tawdry goods – matches, separate cigarettes, flowers stolen from graves – or simply lounged in their niches, awaiting a change of fortune or perhaps a nob to relieve of his wallet.

The ginger man was alert to all these lost creatures of the shadows, eyeing them with interest as he passed. A thin young woman in an old bonnet came forth from a stairway and said something to him. He tilted her head to the light to study her face. She was no more than fourteen.

‘Where are you from, child?’

‘Chiswick, sir. Have a feel, sir, for a penny, bless you, just a feel.’

He laughed, contemptuous of the pleasure offered. Nevertheless, he retreated with her into the shadow of the stairs with only a brief backward look. Ignoring the two children who crouched wordless on the lower steps, the girl hitched up her dress and let him get one hand firm behind her back while with the other he rifled her, feeling powerfully into her body.

‘You like it, sir? Sixpence a quick knee-trembler?’

‘Pah, get back to Chiswick with you, child.’

‘My little brothers, sir – they’re half dead of starvation.’

‘And you’ve the pox.’ He wiped his fingers on her dress, thrust a sixpenny piece into her hand, and marched off, head down in case he was recognized.

Newsboys were shouting. ‘Standard. Three Day Massacre. Read all abart it.’ The ginger man pressed on, taking large strides. He shook off a transvestite who accosted him outside a penny gaff.

Only when he turned off down Glasshouse Street did he pause again, outside the Alhambra music hall, from which sounds of revelry issued. Here several better dressed whores stood, chatting together. They broke off when they saw a toff coming, to assume a businesslike pleasantness.

One of them, recognizing the ginger man, came up and took his arm familiarly. Her face was thickly painted, as if for the stage.

‘Ooh, where are you off to so fast, this early? Haven’t seen you for ages.’ She fluttered her eyelashes and breathed cachou at him.

This was a fleshy woman in her late twenties – no frail thing like the girl Stoker had felt earlier. She was confident and brazen, with large breasts, and tall for a street walker. Her clothes, though cheap, were colourful, and bright earrings hung from the fleshy folds of her ears. She faced him head on, grinning impudently, aware with a whore’s instinct that she looked common and that he liked it that way.

‘What have you been up to, Violet? Behaving yourself?’

‘Course. You know me. I’m set up better now. Got myself a billet round the corner. How about a bit? What you say? We could send out for a plate of mutton or summat.’

‘Are you having your period?’ His voice was low and urgent.

She looked at him and winked. ‘I ain’t forgotten you likes the sight of blood. Come on, you’re in luck. It’s a quid, mind you.’

He pressed up against her. ‘You’re a mercenary bitch, Violet, that you are,’ he said jocularly, allowing the lilt of brogue into his speech. ‘And here’s me thinking you loved me.’

As she led him down the nearest back street, she said, saucily, ‘I’ll love what you got, guv.’ She slid a hand over the front of his trousers.

He knew she would perform better for the promise of a plate of mutton. London whores were always hungry. Hungry or not, he’d have her first. The beef first, then the mutton.

‘Hurry,’ he said, snappishly. ‘Where’s this bleeding billet of yours?’

The knocker was a heavy iron affair with a fox head on it. It descended thunderously on the back door.

‘Eighteen ninety-six,’ said Bodenland aloud, to keep his spirits up. ‘Queen Victoria on the throne … I’m in a dream. Well now – food and rest with any luck, and then it’s back to poor Mina. Can’t even phone her from here.’ He laughed at the thought.