Muggles Bereaved Page 8

  “What a good job we are not in the USA,” said Lim, “We’d be dead already.”

  The Companions of the Spectacles were quickly joined by two other people, both wearing mackintoshes of the cartoon detective variety, men who turned out to be UFO aficionados. The men were eager to know what the lads had seen under the tarpaulins. And they seemed to have some prior information.

  “Well,’ said Jim, who, being the smallest, had clambered up under several tarpaulins, “there was a very shiny saucer shaped thing and I mean very shiny. I tried to touch it but my hand simply didn’t connect properly. It was like a non-stick frying pan but ever so much more non-stick. It was ‘non’ rather than stick, I’d say.”

  “That was a D35, then,” said one man scribbling in a note book. In truth he had invented the designation D35, as he had learned that an apparent ‘knowledge’ invariably led witnesses to elaborate on their actual experiences.

  “What is a D35,” asked Lim, who had been signalling frantically in an attempt to shut Jim up. What if these people were Men in Black trying to find out what had been discovered before eradicating the witnesses? He wasn’t fooled by the olive green coats the men were wearing. Too much like army surplus khaki.

  “A D35, sonny-boy is a prototype flying saucer based on a Roswell crash site recovery. Reverse-engineered to fly but so far with limited success.” The man had a degree in BS fuelled by the gullibility and wallet-books of American TV stations.

  Lim was doubtful, “How can you reverse-engineer something built by and for an extremophile?”

  “A thinker, eh,” said the second man, “you can do a lot if your extremophile isn’t so extreme at all. What if he has simply slipped through from another universe? He might look like you or me. Heck, he might even be you or me!”

  Lim had to allow that this was a reasonable supposition.

  “The second trailer had a long cylindrical craft, highly polished and with no sign of any windows,” said Jim Blabbermouth III, a prototype Baldrick.

  “A drone,” said the first man, “maybe with nuclear eggs on board.”

  “Eggs?” queried Jim.

  “Nuclear warheads,” said the first man. “You Brits have made some surprising advances. Drones capable of crossing universes with a nuclear payload. Gives you quite an advantage when dealing with those pacifists over there. Read all about it on UFOscope.com. Now we have to skidaddle. Planes to catch and deadlines to meet.”

  “Can’t you file copy electronically?” asked Lim, helpfully, gesturing with his phone.

  “Sure, kid. But what we can’t do is attend symposiums and bask in multi-dollar glory. Not to mention the sexy groupies.”

  Tracy snorted her disgust from somewhere in the background. She had been standing silently taking in all that was said. Now she took her fifteenth photo of the group. It was she who had a record of the men’s faces, and of glimpsed spacecraft and she now removed her SD card, placed it between her reduced bosoms and inserted another already used SD card in the phone.

  “Just in case the air force police want to examine our phones,” she said.

  “good thinking, kid,” said the UFOlogist handing over a business card, “send us copies of your photos and we’ll credit you in our magazine and send you a free subscription.”

  “We’re only kids, aren't we,” said Jim sarcastically, the blabbermouth Jim normally resiled at the thought of being called a kid, “things like postage and email subscriptions cost a lot of pocket money In Angle-land.”

  “Sorry, kiddo, I forgot that this is the back-of-beyond. Hey, here’s fifty bucks to cover your expenses.”

  Tracy looked hard at Jim. Free subscriptions and emails cost a lot of money? Maybe almost touching a flying saucer had addled Jim’s brain. But then, maybe he was under the influence of his wallet. Not a bad trait in a potential boy friend. And fifty dollars was a substantial sum.

  Those fifty dollars lighter, the Americans did indeed skidaddle, later to peddle their conspiracy theory nonsense to an eager world. But an RAF policeman took their place. Not only did he review the Companions phones, he took away the SD cards, primly giving them receipts.

  “That’s all very well,” said Lim, “but the content of the SD card is our intellectual property.” This impressed Jim, but not the policeman.

  “So sue me,” said the policeman cheerfully. “Now skidaddle before I shoot all three of you as spies, and load these SD cards with state secrets for proof.” He swung his Koch and Heckler round to the front where it strained on the shoulder strap.

  A second ‘skidaddle’ in as many minutes, thought Lim. The RAF policeman and those American UFOlogists have a lot in common. What if they were part of the same organisation and bent on disinformation. He was not impressed by the macho display of machine pistols. Threatening kids was typical of the police. They only had a one ‘O’ Level entry exam and consequently were not notable for intelligence or quality of public relations. He knew that they would not be fired upon and the policeman didn’t have the wit to load anything onto an SD card with appropriately rigged markers for date and time. And without activating that little security bomb on Lim’s SD card. He shook his head sadly. If the cops did find anything on an SD card worthy of following up, no-one had taken names and addresses.

  They biked back to base, which was that bench in The Walks in a now completely tiger-free zone. The circus had long since departed, but the wheel marks still disfigured the grass. Seated on the bench they huddled together and reviewed Tracy’s pictures on her iPad, zooming in on each and every little detail. The faces of the Ufologists were clear enough to permit a search and match algorithm to find them online, but it was the shiny craft secreted under tarpaulins that caused most excitement.

  There were definite markings on the craft, markings seeming to shimmer under the slippery silvered surfaces. And the markings were in no script known in this universe. They appeared to be characters formed from a selection of seven horizontal and vertical strokes, making a figure ‘8’ when all were in use. Like old-fashioned LCD character segments. There were also some accent markers which hinted at different tones. There were four of these accent markers.

  “There are 4 tone markers in Chinese,” offered Lim.

  Jim was just a bit leery about Chinese claims to have invented everything from gunpowder to LEDs. He searched for an improbable link to European culture, “Could be based on Rubik’s cube,” he said, blushing at his own transparency.

  Tracy spoke for all, “that is NOT a reverse engineered craft at all. And it is no known Rowling world language. It has to be an alien artefact.”

  “Not necessarily alien,” said Lim, “remember what those Americans said about stuff slipping through from another universe.”

  “But those characters,” protested Tracy, “they are not a Rowling world language. Could be some sort of Cuneiform,” she continued, “and if its from an alternate universe it would still be ‘alien’,” she said. You had to point score with men.

  She was trying to calculate how many different characters you could get out of a mere 7 strokes. After struggling with the mental arithmetic, she guessed at ‘hundreds’. She had started with one stroke having 6 two stroke combinations so that the 7 strokes in the display would have 42 two stroke combinations. But then there were 3 and 4 stroke combinations and so on. Hundreds was not a bad guess. She would ask Lim about it privately when Jim was not around to note her defeat by factorial mathematics.

  “Well,” said Lim, “we have our mystery and our cover up! Whether these are aliens or citizens of the multiverse, they are not us!

  Jim arched his bottom off the bench, “Have you noticed how warm this bench is becoming?”

  “I must say I hadn’t. Since I lost weight I have felt rather cold,” said Tracy.

  “Does seem a trifle warm,” said Lim, “Let’s hope our bums don’t spontaneously combust”

  “Could be an alien thing,” chortled Jim, “a hypergalactic bum-buster.” He turned to look down at the
bench, one hand on the seat back, one on the seat. His heel tapped idly on an end leg.

  At this point, the bottom literally fell out of their three worlds and they fell, clutching at each other, into a morass of tangled roots and water. The bench had yawned open and they had fallen through. Lim had glimpsed a tall, incredibly thin man before the falling. They were not in The Walks anymore and there were no benches or street lamps. Just sloshing, impenetrable jungle and a darkness filed with chirruping and squawking and howls. Jim surfaced with the kind of look of deep anxiety which had made the young Rupert Grint so famous.

  “Wha... “ was all he could manage.

  Tracy essayed a heartfelt “ugh!” and Lim just spat out a stream of brackish water. They were all soaked and muddy and very alarmed. Suddenly there was a loud creaking sound a swirl of images and the three of them were back on the park bench but soaked through and with fronds of plant life poking from their clothing. They sat, arms raised and spewing water and looked down at themselves.

  The tall thin man smiled at them. He was dressed like a Gothic simulacrum of Uncle Sam, the 19th century personification of America. He was all black and grey apart from a vivid pink bow tie and he wore dense black sunglasses.

  “Lucky that I come as part of the portal package,” he said, “An inadvertent triggering of the portal can cause serious problems.” With that he retreated, which is to say he slid and eerily melted away into the hedgerow.

  The companions were more concerned about the state of their clothing.

  “My mother is not going to believe this,” groaned Tracy. Her new clothes were scarcely a day old.

  Lim was examining some of the fauna which had caught up in his jumper. It was definitely not of elm trees in The Walks and probably not of continental Europe. An electric blue tree frog slithered out of a pocket and had to be captured.

  “Well, our parents may not believe us, but let them explain the flora and fauna. There’s a centipede on your shoulder, Jim, catch it and keep it as evidence.”

  Jim jumped up and shrieked and accomplished a thousand shoulder brushing movements in the next nanosecond. It was Tracy who picked up the frankfurter-sized centipede and it was Tracy who got bitten for her pains.

  “It is a millipede,” she announced, sucking her blooded finger. “They have two pairs of legs per body segment. But millipedes do not bite unlike centipedes, so this one is a proven alien!”

  It was all to no avail. Not one set of parents believed the story and shrugged off the ‘evidence’ as contrived from a pet shop. They ignored Tracy’s shrieks of “Check the freaking millipede biting!” They were all grounded.

  Later, a snake from Jim’s pocket was identified as a mildly poisonous gold-ringed cat snake, Boiga Dendrophila or mangrove snake. The insects in their pockets included scale insects and rare tropical caterpillars and crustaceans. But the oddest thing was that some were peculiar to Gondwanaland, and others to diverged Australia and South America. And it was finally agreed that a biting millipede was entirely new to planet Rowling.

  Even the parents came to acknowledge that something odd was afoot. They rang each other and compared notes. Then they visited the park bench and examined other examples of strange flora and fauna lodged in the seat slats. All sat on it experimentally, Jim’s dad calling a mocking, “Open Sesame!” much to everyone’s disgust. But despite the evidence, suspicion of a scam was paramount and Lim, Jim and Tracy faced joint and individual calls to ‘fess up!”

  “Where could we have obtained the insects, the frog and the snake, “ asked Lim. There isn’t a pet shop in King’s Lynn and we are not exactly mobile!” He was here referring to an unsuccessful bid to get his parents to buy him a motorcycle.

  The parents adjourned to the nearby football ground social club for some refreshment and Lim, Tracy and Jim stood looking at the bench with some apprehension. It didn’t look like a portal into another world or dimension or universe. It just sat firmly anchored to 4 concrete blocks. But it was beyond doubt that it had tried to tip them into a swamp that was certainly otherworldly.

  “Look,” said Jim, “this thing is too dangerous to sit on...”

  Lim disagreed, “this thing is a portal and an invitation to cross to other places, maybe other universes. We were meant to trigger it.”

  “It has to be there for a reason,” agreed Tracy, fresh from a miraculous experience of the beneficial properties of jumping into a rabbit hole. Now she thought about it, how come a rabbit hole was big enough to jump into? Was that also a portal?

  “Jim, you stand and watch, while we sit on the bench for a while.”

  “No,” said Jim, “if you go, I go,” he hesitated, “maybe we should leave a note under a stone to let folks know we have, well, transported.”

  This precaution was readily agreed though there was no possibility of a rescue being mounted. It was altogether possible that they would transport, as Jim put it, and never find a way back. In this they failed to understand what Newton would one day discover, the Law of Basic Transportability. This says that if you enter a wormhole of any kind you are bound to return to the point of departure. Eventually. The rules on the date and time of return would still be obscure for another 20 years.

  Jim wrote out the note, which said, “we the undersigned have sat on the bench and transported ourselves to another dimension, world or universe. This is a conscious act of adventure and we place our faith in the universal power of the good.’

  “Well, it is a bit pretentious and awkward, but we haven’t time to muck about,” said Lim, placing the note under a stone beside the bench. They had all signed the note and now they were ready. Jim wished that he had an astronaut’s EVA suit to protect him from those bugs on the far side.

  They sat and they fidgeted and nothing happened. The bench did not grow warm and did not tip them into mystery. They stood up and searched the bench for any sign of a trigger, finding nothing. The aborted launch was a total irritation.

  “Maybe,” mused Tracy, “maybe it was something we said or talked about that activated the bench. Can anyone remember what we were saying when it happened?”

  No-one could remember and Jim’s notebook did not have the minutes of their meeting. Jim hated writing minutes. Right now, Lim and Tracy were feeling a bit judgemental about their Secretary’s failings.

  “I wasn’t asked to write minutes!” protested Jim, “You talk so much, I would need a bigger notebook!” Attack was the best form of defence.

  “Take it easy, Jim, we did omit to ask you to document anything. Our fault. Let us just try and remember what we were saying.” Lim was the conciliatory Leader of the Gang.

  They sat and thought. Sat, without even thinking about sitting. But the bench was unmoved, unchanged and unopened.

  Chapter Six – The Portal

  Each day, when Jim visited the library for his stealth research, he also visited the bench. His library visits were uneventful, for Andrew Carnegie and the others who had witnessed his episode of excreting where no longer there and Margery, the librarian, had not witnessed the event. She had been told that the boy at the centre of attention was called Jim, but it had not registered, such was her pre-occupation with her own son’s shotgun marriage. And she always addressed Jim primly as “Mr Bean”.

  Jim’s stealth research was proving totally unproductive. Even the most advanced research into invisibility shields was yielding a partial transparency and the most effective of these could only be made as a three foot square. It was impossible to make one and impossible to acquire one from the leading, Japanese, university. It was possible to buy ex-military reflective camouflage capes, but these were most effective if you laid still on the ground. Any kind of movement was a giveaway.

  Sitting disconsolately on the park bench after the latest unproductive visit to the library, Jim reflected on ways of getting the bench portal to operate. If it were a recalcitrant machine like his father’s motorbike, just kicking it would be effective. Kick-starting a park bench? Jim grinne
d wryly and lashed out a foot towards the curved foot of the bench. There was no reaction and he kicked it again. Sometimes his father had to kick-start his machine several times before it roared into life. After the third kick, Jim observed a split in his toecap and kicked the bench once more for good luck. He stood up and placing one hand on the back of the bench and one hand on the seat he delivered a kick to one of the legs. It was as near as he could get to treating the bench as a motorbike. He sat down disconsolately. The bench seat was getting decidedly warm and suddenly the bench snapped into life. The back of the bench and the seat of the bench formed a sort of crocodile mouth, snapping shut around Jim and then releasing him. There were no onlookers, but they would have seen a ginger haired boy disappearing and reappearing in the gaping non-stop snapping of the bench’s maw. On his next reappearance, Jim threw himself out of the bench’s embrace and onto the path. He was gasping and dishevelled and his hair had become as flat as Adebayo’s afro, though a lot thinner.