By John Travis and D.F.Lewis
Knuckledraggers, Inc.
published 'The Zone' 1999
‘Love a coffee if you’re making one, love.’ the men asked as Mrs.Pinton left the house. She tutted and shut the gate behind her. She saw one of them eyeing up her windows.
‘Hey, what about that coffee?’ the other men laughed.
‘Are you going to be much longer?’ said Mrs.Pinton. They’d been here for four days now. Where were they laying these cables to? She swore she hadn’t seen any of them work for the past day and a half.
‘Don’t you worry about that love,’ the coffee monster told her. ‘Not be long now.’
He turned back to his colleagues. ‘Okay, I think that’s us. I haven’t noticed any curtains on rings, except hers. Let’s get on with it.’
Together, they all vanished, equipment and all. It was as if they’d fallen through a dream.
Two hours later Mrs.Pinton returned with full-to-bursting shopping bags. Looking around she breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Oh, thank God they’ve gone.’.
She was just about to go into the house when she squinted at something on the pavement near the green box the men had installed. It couldn’t be snow - it’d all cleared two days ago, even the gritty stuff. She moved closer.
That’s not snow - what on earth is it then? She delicately placed her foot onto it, unsure of what it could be. If feet could feel, it was like stepping on sand.
A few seconds later Mrs.Pinton vanished too, through the granular groundswell.
The craft came in at an angle, heading towards a crash which the silence made inevitable: except its tail led the way, its nosecone of a cockpit bringing up the rear.
Charlie Waters (descendant of a famous blues singer) pointed the craft out to his young friend, Pinny.
‘Hoops and Hoooooos!’ he screamed.
The craft crossed the lake and lurched into the nearby forest, ploughing down the strongest, tallest trees that had always flourished thereabouts. A plume of smoke - suprisingly meagre - trickled into the sky as the silence renewed its almost visible sway.
There was no wind.
For once, Charlie was shaken and at a loss for words.
Knuckledraggers, Inc. had started slots all round the town of Scarrow and green boxes had appeared in various inconvenient places. It was assumed that this was a firm setting up shop for a new TV network but nobody had seen the actual laying of cables; there was merely the faintest inference of such goings-on going on. The men were mostly taciturn individuals with dimples above the back of their low-slung belts. Only the coffee-coloured ones could talk at all, it seemed. Mr.Pinton didn’t worry too much about the situation because greater affairs had hit his household: Mrs.Pinton had failed to come back with the shopping. He had lodgers to feed. Also, Charlie and friend were calling in for brunch after a night’s teenage trek. Mr. Pinton had dubbed the friend Pinny. He’d always wanted a son like Pinny, you see.
Mr. Pinton no doubt tended to believe the latest pack-of-convincing-lies... a belief which, in many ways, is like life itself. A mood is ever the current one, isn’t it? And death the final certainty. But any happiness entailed, by necessity, eventual unhappiness. Unlike vice versa.
He may not even have thought all of this out but if he did, he probably put it at the back of his mind where forgotten memories flourished. He hadn’t lost his touch for words, however clumsy such words turned out. Yet it was perhaps his word against the world’s, but could either be believed?
He looked again at the pantry floor. Best just to lock it for a while, see if any ideas suggested themselves.
He’d heard Charlie and Pinny coming in the back door. From the kitchen he’d called out to them. ‘Have a look and see what you want to eat. Mrs.Pinton’s not back yet.’
After a few minutes Mr.Pinton went to the pantry. The boys stood inside, staring at nothing, which was difficult in such a confined space.
‘Well, then. What are you having?’
‘Has it been on the news yet?’ said Pinny.
‘Has what been on the news?’ Said Mr.Pinton.
Charlie took over. ‘Well...’
About five minutes later Mr.Pinton stood there shaking his head. Would this pair never grow up? He’d listened as Charlie (and a surprisingly talkative Pinny) detailed where they’d been this morning, and how they couldn’t believe their eyes, and how they’d tried to pry it open, and the dust around it-
‘Listen, lads,’ Mr.Pinton had interrupted at one point. ‘this kind of thing may work on your young friends, but not on me. Mrs.Pinton is late and I’m really not in the m-’
Charlie stared at him. ‘You mean she’s not here? That’s what I was going to say. We walked back through Scarrow and the town’s half empty. The ground’s full of snow.’
‘Now you’re being silly. I’ve been stood at the window on and off for the past hour-’
‘Mr.Pinton, did we have pepper on our food last night?’ Charlie asked.
He thought about it for a moment. ‘I don’t think so, no.’
‘Didn’t think we had. But that dust around it-’ Charlie moved his mouth around. ‘Reminds me of pepper, that’s all. I’m sure I inhaled some. Pinny too.’
Pinny’s tongue chased around his mouth, inflating his cheek. It stopped under his top lip, and came out of his mouth in a downward motion, like a drawbridge over a lake. On the end of it was a small black dot, not unlike a pepper corn. Mr. Pinton watched as the lad slipped the tongue back in his mouth. Then another up the left nostril of his nose.
Mr.Pinton let out a long sigh. He was just about to speak when there came from outside a series of metallic clangings.
‘God!’ put in Charlie. ‘We heard that all over the place!’
Pinton was getting impatient. ‘It’ll have to be tinned stuff, I’m afraid. When she comes back-’
There was a sharp cracking noise. Pinton turned just in time to see Pinny clamp his jaws shut. His eyes stared. Outside the clanging got louder.
Suddenly Charlie wandered past them both and went back outside. As Mr. Pinton turned back he saw Pinny sink to the floor, but not in the correct fashion. His arms went first, then his face, dissolving and dripping and bending like the view in a carnival freak mirror. His legs and torso slid towards the floor like wax from a melting candle. His clothes and shoes were starting to smoke. Pinton moved back over the threshold, standing in the hall, looking inwards. Within a minute the pantry floor was swilling around in some kind of runny psychedelic plasticine, turning, immediately, into fibrous vegetable matter of grey-green hue.
A few seconds later and the colour had bled from it, leaving shavings like flakes of white wood.
In his confusion he turned right instead of left and was looking out at the street. It was full of workmen again. Pinton saw one of the green boxes snap shut. He absently wondered where Charlie had got to.
Where Charlie had to go...
He saw the dust, the sawdust...
This ought to be presented as written by someone else pretending it’s Mr. Pinton. He’d have to get the body of it word-processed from this rough draft to carry off that little ruse, there being no hope of disguising his handwriting for such a length. Simply the end-signature would have taken eternity’s to get the tails and loops just right, in any event.
No, the creature from the backward-motion crash course in astropsychonautics had no real confidence in being able to comprehend Mr.Pinton’s writing. But it would have to believe what seemed natural by the time it had finished scouring the contents. All it needed to do was simply reserve judgement till the very end, when it could compare the signature appended to the previous missives Mr. Pinton had sent it - all those lovey-dovey ones with pierced hearts summoning spirits but (in Mr. Pinton’s case) aliens to earth from outer or inner space.
Mr.Pinton expected the creature’s signature was a template of its unsullieable soul.
Charlie Waters once recalled workmen in green Knuckledragger overalls exploring his mother’s wardrobe, to see if they could find evidence of his father’s strange hobby. The smell of mothballs, the deeper-than-usual coat pockets, the dark dresses - all were signs of something like forgotten memories: signs, in the end, of nothing.
When Charlie eventually tried to describe the craft to the firemen and ambulance drivers and police who had belatedly arrived (in that order) from Scarrow, the closest town to the secluded landing-spot, all he could keep saying were things like not a plane - wings wider than Scarrow Park - beautiful sight - beautiful, real beautiful...
And he cried at this their first lesson in beauty’s sadness. Beauty had a far greater store of grief than ugliness. Ugly people were usually cheerful and full of hidden talents. Beautiful people who tended to skim, smile and float lurched more heavily when their time was up. Pinny had been a pretty boy in this way. He was always just a nose short of Charlie’s head, most of him now having a preservation order thrust on him as a hot human curry for Scarrow’s famous Museum of Curiosities.
But if not a plane...
That was now, and this is then. What the Knuckledraggers were really intent on finding were Charlie’s father’s tie-pins and cuff-links, his wires, rings and prongs and, yes, his surgical umbrellas, steel enemas and iron mouth-stretchers, all representing his own unmistakable means of signature. Every tail and loop were in place and recognisable - even when they came to identify the stigmatised body itself, one gloomy autumn afternoon, in the bright mortuary.
‘Did your father have plastic surgery?’ was the chief Knuckledragger’s first question, pointblankly ignoring Charlie’s evident distress and wondering how such a tall corpse could have fathered somebody as short as him.
‘Plastic? No it wasn’t - plastic,’ Charlie answered, without really thinking, his eyes still locked upon the corpse who’d once given him birth. The body’s eyes were coppered. Nose bent out of joint by the fatal accident.
But this was all subterfuge, as it turned out. His mother’s wardrobe of clothes, ranked like starved orphans, strung like faceless body-puppets, was the very clue the Knuckledraggers had missed. With his father dead, he could now concentrate on factors that should have been too obvious to miss. His mother was indeed party to his father’s tricks. Their marriage actually hung on mutilation. Why the rents, otherwise?
But he put it out of mind. Friendship with Pinny. Boyhood adventures. Regular enjoyable suppertimes with Mr.Pinton and Mr.Pinton’s shopeasy wife.
Then the strangeness of vindaloo vines under the pavements...
The street seemed somehow louder that night than it had during the day. You could hear leaves swishing past on the pavements, and the faint humming of streetlamps. And, he was convinced, something else...
He’d tried all day to find out what had gone on after he’d left the house. Mr.Pinton’s door had been found locked. The emergency services had been no good. The other doors that he’d knocked on were not opened, making him feel like a Jehovah’s witness.
The only thing he’d had to think about was one of the workmen he passed in a street down the road. The man looked uncannily like the man from the mortuary, and had looked away when Charlie had spotted him.
So he’d spent the rest of the day wandering around Scarrow, wondering why the town was falling apart and no-one seemed to care. Then as it was getting dusk he had a lucky escape. He’d kept passing those damned piles of grated snow all the day, deliberately side-stepping them; shoes were important to him. (although not in the way they had been for his father) Avoiding one such mass on the pavement, his shoe caught a stone which hurtled towards the patch of whiteness. As he watched it vanished downwards, snow and all, as though dumbwaiters were in attendance all over the town. Quickly he looked around for objects; he broke branches off trees, picked up tin cans, bits of gravel left behind by the cable layers - and one by one, dropped them onto the patches of snow. They soon vanished, leaving clean patches of stone behind.
He lost all track of time, and before he knew it, it was dark.
Charlie nodded in the hedge, waking suddenly. He’d been dozing, or at least hoped so. He’d dreamt there were metallic clangings under the pavement, like being stood at the top of a mine. He looked at the other side of the street. There were two green boxes, their metal dull and cold in the night. Tree branches fanned them from above.
Then there was a noise from below. It was movement of some kind, to-ing and fro-ing like people rushing around a shopping centre. His eyes were automatically drawn to the boxes opposite. Slowly, one box door opened, then the other.
For a few seconds the view was blank; then, coming up as though in a lift, thin but wickedly strong looking wires snaked upwards towards the daylight, sprawling onto the pavements, creeping along onto the road. There were dozens of the wires; each one with its own destination in mind, spreading far and wide along the deserted street. Suddenly, a thin stream of liquid emerged from one of the wires - just like the snow! thought Charlie, nearly saying it out loud. Within seconds the pavement was sporadically covered in the stuff. Slowly the wires retreated, towards the boxes once more.
Then, a hand appeared above the lip of the floor, then an arm, a body and a pair of legs, clambering out of a hole far too small to contain it. Within seconds eight or nine people stood on the pavement as though awaiting further orders. Eventually, they made their way across the street, back to their own homes.
A police car took Pinny and Charlie to their homes on the outskirts of the Industrial Park, whilst the rest of the emergency forces planned their route into the mighty forest. From the boys’ story, the authorities had estimated roughly where the ‘craft’ had ‘landed’. Strangely, there was nothing coming through on the mobile communication systems about airplanes being lost nor, even, reports of any UFO sightings. Only the noise of the crash itself - to the extent of making ‘naked eyes’ shiver in Scarrow - had stirred the seismic direction-finders, instruments which scientists watched around the clock in one particularly secret building on the Industrial Park, thus serving to alert the authorities...
Charlie did not sleep well that night. He dreamed of nine people emerging from under the ground of a dream!
He dreamed of Pinny and himself in a police car and then inside the craft which they had both seen swooping low over the treetops. There were countless faces - Charlie knew they were faces despite them not looking like human ones at all - and these so-called faces were speaking in a language that evidently needed no mouth to speak it - or ears to hear it, or, for that matter, a mind to make meaning from it. Strobes were set into the otherwise dark ‘ceiling’ which cast an unsteady light that settled on the floor around them like dry ice.
‘Gashes and slits!’ announced Pinny, as if such familiarity and contempt would prove to be ingredients in a recipe for the great meal of waking. Life was like that, gobbling things, tucking into Mrs.Pinton’s homely grub, sniffing freshly made coffee, oozing upon cherry-lip pies, absorbing experiences, supping on light, sipping darkness like fine old wine, sucking love from every crevice, cracking knuckles like walnuts, picking hate from between your teeth...
The morning brought a glorious dawn to Scarrow. The distant fringe of the forest was dipped in yeasty blood, almost fizzing with a glut of cuckoo-spit dew. The sun was redder than anyone could ever recall it. Charlie Waters glanced at the wall where a photo of his blues-singing ancestor leaned outwards. It had sat flush only yesterday. His toy soldiers, too, were no longer smartly ranked, since a couple of them had fallen flat on their faces.
He picked up his father’s old Mickey Mouse phone and dialled Pinny’s number. But damned if he could remember it. Indeed, there were no such things as numbers. Even the dial had been cleared of any suspicion of digits. He could see where they’d been scratched off. Flakes of paint peppered the top of my table. He tried to count his soldiers, as if to prove that numbers still existed, but found himself saying a sort of sad wordless music.
He picked up the phone and fingered the loose dial round in a random fashion, in the hope of getting at least someone at the other end.
The eventual rhythmic tone was like being held at the other end by a firm’s switchboard with meaningless musak.
Yes, Mr.Pinton lied when he said it was him writing this. Death being the only certainty, Pinton needed to unpick the wire stitches of alternate generations. Pirouettes and harlequinades, cyborg primadonnas, peopled puppets, whatever beast of metal, wood and wire, none were his idea of deja-vu. Black hearted beads and corrupt pearls fixed on spikes were more owner-friendly, however, than dolls that blindly hugged you to death. Smuts for eyes, blade-chain hoops for alabaster necks. Giving birth to metal meat-hooks was never fun. Septic boils disguised as green cable-boxes on earth’s flesh... He couldn’t bear the prose to flee his pen like this.
The authorities reached a clearing in the forest. They could only judge the time by the angle of the crimson balloon in the sky. Wreckage was strewn everywhere. Pinny’s father - who happened to be Scarrow’s sheriff - scratched his head. He had long since lost his watch, in scrabbling through the undergrowth.
The other emergency teams were beaded with a sweat that looked more like snow than bodily salts. The heat was intense... if unmeasureable, turning the lake into an expanse of throbbing white muddiness.
Charlie’s dead father - who was also in the vicinity by virtue of his empathy skills - started crooning. He heard something in his ears that was not coming from without but from within. Strange for him, he couldn’t keep to the beat, not even to the beat of his own heart. So the tune came out decomposed.
Charlie clunked the phone down. He didn’t know where he was anymore. Turning away from the wall he walked back to the desk and stopped before the paper that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. He kept finding these things out one step too late, it seemed to him.
It appeared his late father was working on a thesis, of sorts. Charlie smiled at the rather flippant title “Decomposition’s for the young and old - can we really live alongside Them in ignorance?”
He shouldn’t be smiling, not really. He wondered if his father had ever shown this to anyone - he had died in rather odd circumstances after all.
The paper roughly detailed (and with much angry crossing and correction) cases of what his father termed “dissolution”. At the time of his death he didn’t know who the Dissolutionists were; or if he did, he never had a chance to write it down. He sighed heavily, like he had in mid-adolescence.
‘Oh Dad, wh-’
He stopped suddenly.
The picture on the wall... the wall was there, and the wooden edge frame was there, and the protective glass was there...even his father’s guitar was stood to attention within the frame.
But his father wasn’t there.
It didn’t know what it was now. It couldn’t be expected to distinguish between itselves, not now!
Outside, a boil burst. Cables leapt from the warm earth like frying spaghetti, slapped the floor like daredevil pythons. A few fizzled and wriggled.
How long could the facade be maintained? It daren’t look in the mirror - it would probably bend the glass with the heat anyway. Suddenly it smelled other than its own brittle scent. It wasn’t the pen, it was too low down for the pen.
Below it, carpet fibres whittled away to embers.
He could only hope the boy would understand. He could cope with the incipient heat; but looking at the teams as their skins burned and the trees took on a greasy sheen - they would fire matchwood in all directions if unsprayed.
He had a vague idea that he was rebelling against type; the music sounded now like music played by one band, with each member in a different continent, all with badly transcribed sheet music, knuckles rubbing over the edges of a skiffleboard.
And a Chinese juggler can only keep all the plates spinning for so long...
As he ran Charlie could not keep his eyes from the streetlamps. Broad daylight gripped everything tightly, but those lights bore down on him, as though each one was fitted with-
He tried to put the thought from his mind. The forest was still some distance away, but he could not slow down; from time to time he’d look and see blank faces staring at him from house windows; people he’d known all his young life, now gazing as though he were an escapee from some grubby institution.
Images flitted through his mind in quick succession; of the Dark Room at school which only nine people were ever allowed into; electronically tagged waxworks in a chamber of horrors which seemed more disturbing than the exhibits themselves; the chain-mail fencing around a pond in a local park...
He tried not to think of cameras as he hurtled on through empty streets.
Mr.Pinton looked at his face in his bedroom mirror. But it looked more like Pinny’s.
‘Puppets and pokes!’
But even the letters couldn’t string themselves together and they came out as grunts and gushes. He tugged a girlie magazine from under his mattress, to test the value of verities in this fast-shifting world and gazed on a butchered abstraction of red orifices plastered in the middle of a page. He wondered how he’d kept this secret from his homely loving wife. Where was she? Where was everybody?
In the distance there was silence roaring back into the hungry sky, at exactly one moment of valedcitory: the same abstraction, but this time with a signature tune in hues of blue. Charlie, guitar on lap, sits at the porthole wondering if the earth he left below was a desert or simply a huge biryani of ground greeness and sea-salt. Luckily, good people are on board too... like Mrs.Pinton. ‘Love a coffee, love?’ she says with more than just a motherly smile. She takes the knuckledusters off his aging fingers before kissing them.
Yes, you understood it even before you begun. Even without a sneaky look, you knew there was no signature at the end. Quill-points and knuckle nibs, without fluid for words, you see, may only quicken a midget marionette’s finger-joints: each with a ring, echoing more rings, rings piercing other parts. You press numberless needle-points into each prickly knuckle. And your mood is at the tail-end of hope, when you see, as well as no signature, there are sadly no x-kisses etched into the papery, peppery skin. Crosses and Creases! The only possible mood is the current one. And when you claim you possess not even a prick between two hardened knuckles, Pinnocchio, it’s your nose that grows longer instead.
