The Chronicles of Jonathon Postlethwaite: The Seed of Corruption (24 page)

                            A stack of crates reached the ceiling in one corner of the small room and almost every bottle was empty. Scoggins found a half full bottle on the baker's work top and tasted the contents. He nodded in approval to Flax and handed the rest to him, which he finished with relish. A large oven was the source of the mouth watering aroma which filled the room. Flax assumed the baker was not far away, or else his creations would soon be burned to a crisp.

                            They searched the room quickly, but the baker was not sleeping off an afternoon binge here. Pulling Scoggins away from the stack of crates in the corner, they crept out into the yard, moving like a pair of silky shadows to the door at the far end of the wall.

                            As they slid along the wall, they passed large windows that were evenly spaced along its length. Flax peered in through the rain  washed  glass.  It  was  an ale house he deduced. He saw tables and chairs, strange furniture was stacked against the walls. An odd beer glass stood pathetically alone and deserted on a dusty table.

                            It was much tidier than any ale house Flax had ever visited. In Dubh were never empty  and  furniture was reserved only for those which served only the most affluent and powerful clientele. This one was empty and remarkably clean, except for the thick layer of dust which covered everything. This had been an ale house once, but no longer had he deduced. They now stood at its door. The stone step had been worn concave with the feet of  the many visitors who had come this way  over  decades. Flax pushed his large  and  sensitive  nose  to  the keyhole and sniffed in air like a blood hound.

                            His delicate organ informed him of the absence of the usual smells of an ale house - sweat, beer, blood, vomit and urine. The place was definitely no longer in use, he thought. Flax tried the door handle and found it locked. He gritted his teeth and sniffed the door seams. There was someone here, although the scent was strange.

                            The  air  inside  was  warm  and  there  was  a  faint

aroma of perfume, but the woman's scent here smelt like no woman he had ever run his nostrils over. At least he knew there where no men here, only this strange woman.

                            His mind raced. What should he do? Kick the door down perhaps? He turned around and beckoned the scholar. The small, fat man scurried to his side at his signal. Flax held him by the neck.

“There’s a woman of sorts inside, will she be armed? How do we get in?”

The little man rapped hard on the door, causing both Flax and Scoggins to jump back behind the wall for safety.

“Let me handle this, just keep quiet." he commanded Flax, something twinkling in his eye. A humorous irony, thought the Scholar, that he had the power to order his 'Eminence' Silus Flax to be quiet. He stifled a chuckle.

                            Flax was flabbergasted at his servant's cheek, but his plans hinged on the intellectual qualities of the small, bald bespectacled man and he indicated that Scoggins put away the knife he was aiming at the Scholar’s kidneys. Ivor  mouthed an objection, but Flax  waved it down. It was acceptable at the moment, but the Scholar would eventually regret what  he  had  just done, he would pay for his moment of amusement at Flax's expense and the price would be high. After what seemed an eternity of knocking, a light inside lit up the door frame.

                            Scoggins leapt back from the keyhole.  The  door  opened  a  fraction,  a  security  chain ensuring that it opened no further than necessary.

A small, round heavily wrinkled and worried face pushed itself up to the gap.

"Yes?"  said  a  voice  quivered  with  age  and  fear. The  scholar  moved  quickly  into  the  light,  his bespectacled  smiling  face  seeming  to  reassure  that these  three,  strangely dressed men at her door in the early hours of the morning, meant her no harm.

The scholar spoke.

"Ah, my gracious lady of the inn, my sincere apologies for awakening you from your well earned slumber, but we are travellers in sore need of lodgings on this foul night.....would you have rooms to let?" he said injecting a tone of desperation into his voice. Then as an after thought; “We will pay you well."

                            Agnes Lovenberry considered her position. She was alone here, she was eighty-eight years old and half crippled with arthritis. These people had obviously mistaken her home for a hotel or inn. It was true that this place had once been an inn, then a public house, but it had not seen a customer for twenty-eight years.

“Oh, dear." she mumbled to herself. Such a dreadful night, Oh,  Well  perhaps  they  could  use  the  empty rooms   upstairs, they had beds and sheets although  generation after generation moths of would have made a meal of them by now.

                            The nice mannered man had also said that they would pay her well and the pittance the government paid her as a pension was hardly enough to keep her from starving. A little cash would help her this week,

after all, that drunken baker had forgotten his rent again. She took the door off the security chain and opened          it wide to allow the three strangers in. As they entered, Agnes Lovenberry wondered if in fact whether she was not still asleep.

                            The three men in black top hats and long coats looked very much like undertakers. A shiver of fear ran down  her  spine.  Perhaps  she  was  not  asleep  at   all,  perhaps she was actually dead and having one of those out of body experiences she had read about in Take a Break magazine and these three had come to take her away!

                            The confused thought resided, for a while, in her sleep muddled mind as she pinched her self hard and finally pulled herself back together as gust of cold wind and rain blew in from the doorway and convinced her that she was still very much alive. She slammed the door against the storm and turned to face her guests. They had removed their hats and she indicated that the hat stand was vacant. Obediently and without, a word the three trooped to the indicated object and considered it as if they had never seen one before.

                            It was a relic of pointlessness to them, hats went on the floor or tables or chairs, but never on a strangely carved piece of wood. The scholar however, figured out what they were to do and placed the hats on the hooks and removed his own coat, then the coats of the others, and hung them on the adjoining coat pegs.

                            Mrs.   Lovenberry   was   wide   awake   now   and observed the three men intently as they disrobed themselves. Without their long coats and hats the image of undertakers faded. The little chubby man wore baggy, black trousers and a dark blue waistcoat over his scarlet shirt. He was untidy  and  slightly  dirty  she noticed as he fumbled with his pocket watch.

                            The large shouldered man with the huge nose amnd large teeth was  crisp  and  clean.  He  trousers were of a good cut and quality and he too wore a waistcoat over a white ruffle necked shirt. But he made her extremely nervous, he had not taken his penetrating eyes off her ever since he had entered the house. He looked at her as if he had never seen an old woman before.

                            The other man, if it were a man she thought, wore clothes which were of a feminine nature with frills of lace and embroidered flowers every where. He moved like a woman  too,  which  added  to  her  suspicions  and  his

feminine features and well manicured, long fingernails finally convinced her that this was not a man at all or he was some sort of 'Nancy Boy',  although  of  course you  couldn’t use such names nowadays. He was the first to turn and move toward her. He bent down close to her face, his eyes looking directly into hers.

“Are you ill?” he asked in a contradictory deep male voice. “I have the cure for all known ills." he licked his lips and smiled sympathetically at her. A loud throat clearing came from the area of the hat stand and Scoggins scowled and moved away from the old woman.

                            Mrs. Lovenberry returned to her observations of the three men's attire and noticed their footwear. The two normal, if they were normal men, wore heavy hobnail boots, the other, slim pointed ones. Then she felt a sudden recognition of what she was seeing, it was like her childhood memories, her life was filled with memories of heavy boots, waistcoats, ruffs and top hats too! It was as if part of the past had come through her door tonight and stood in her parlour. The men stood now watching her and, realising that she was staring at them, she coughed nervously.

“Oh I beg your pardons, your rooms of course." she said." Silly me, I nearly forgot" Agnes laughed nervously. "Follow me gentlemen."

                            The plump old lady hobbled to the bottom of the stairs, her arthritic hips and knee joints cracking loudly in the near silence. Flax wondered whether or not to kill the freakish woman now. How could she have become so old, she was an abomination! In  Dubh  a  woman  was  lucky to survive to her thirtieth birthday, the only way  she could have survived, Flax reasoned, was that she had never been a real woman at all or she would have been burned out by childbearing and male usage years ago, after all that was their purpose as women wasn't it?

                            Then he realised that this wasn't  Dubh  at  all and he had to be prepared for such  strangeness, such perversity. Erring on the edge of caution, Flax decided that the old woman could live, at least for the time being. She might be missed and, after all, killing her wouldn't be much fun.

                            Staring around him Flax realised he was now in a bar room. The tables were absent and had been replaced by an old and worn settee and two armchairs. The three High Hats followed Agnes Lovenberry as she made her way painfully across the well worn carpet into a small hall way between the bar room and the rest of the public house. Flax was suddenly hit by the silence in this place. Not even the sound of the pouring rain reached here and the absence of the familiar hum of machinery, which had  always been part his life, unnerved him. He was used to the clamour and noise of the city, this tranquillity disturbed him. This was a strange world, he mused as he reflected on his short exposure to it, a quiet place where the men allowed their women to grow old, or more disturbingly, perhaps there were no men here. Not a nice place at all.

                            Mrs. Lovenberry was now staggering half way up the stairs assisted by the Scholar. They chatted together as the Scholar skilfully extracted information about the old woman and her circumstances.

                            He was doing well, Flax thought. Information was what he needed if he was to succeed in his mission here. He quietly congratulated himself on his choice of companion here. The Scholar already knew that she lived here alone, was a war widow. Her only contacts were a mad, drunken butcher called Victor and Mrs. Simpson, the infrequently visiting, interfering and perpetually nosey, or so Mrs. Lovenberry had said, social worker.

                            She warned them about Victor. He was a big, aggressive, short tempered man who was at odds with the whole world  and  everyone  in  it,  it  seemed.   They must avoid his bakery for it was a sacred place to him. No mortal, except he, could walk there, especially if they were from the environmental health office.  On no account must they argue with him when he was drunk, which was most of the time of course.

                            They had reached the landing now and Mrs. Lovenberry opened a door of flaky, green paint to her right. Scoggins inclined his head towards her suggestively and gave his master a thin smile. Flax knew what he meant and shook his head. Scoggins ground his teeth together again, his displeasure openly displayed.

                            The door opened onto a long corridor which ran along the wall they had crept under and above where the bakery was situated, terminating in another green, brass handled door. The carpet in the corridor had been removed years ago and the bare floorboards groaned and squealed under their weight.

                            The old woman opened the first three doors on the right, revealing three single rooms as she switched on the electric light in each, a surprise for all three, since such a form of illumination was rare in ordinary dwellings in Dubh.

                            In the rooms all the furniture was covered in dust sheets which had been placed there twenty years ago. Mrs Lovenberry removed them with the Scholar's help, which raised clouds of dust into the air. Agnes coughed and sneezed profusely, attempting to apologise, and promising to clean up in the morning.

                            All three rooms where the same, containing a dressing table, washstand, mirror, bed, small wardrobe and an armchair. Scoggins took the first room nearest the stair, Flax the second and the Scholar the third. Mrs. Lovenberry yawned and apologised for doing so, then wished them a good night before she retired to her own rooms through the door at the end of the corridor.

                            After her light was extinguished, the second door opened and Silus Flax crept out of his room bootless and shirtless. He smiled contentedly to himself. It had been a good day, one that demanded celebration. He was here at last and safely ensconced in a strange world without any problems.

                            He peered through the rain spattered first floor windows which gave him a clear view of the centre of the sleeping town. Strings of pearly white and amber light lit the streets, he was quietly surprised at the liberal use to which these people put their energy - either they  had ample supplies or they  were  afraid  of  the  darkness he much so loved. In Dubh, the Upper City had such light when excess energy was available, which was now seldom, and the Lower city depended on the use of oil lamps. Here it seemed all had the benefit t of such power. n  the  centre  of  the  town  the  street,  on  which the 'inn' they were to spend the night stood, led to an open square in the middle of which stood a strange obelisk. It was obviously a giant stone phallus, Flax thought and gave it no more  consideration.  Beyond the square there was a great church, its tower and spire lancing into the darkness of the night sky. Another phallus he decided. The clock on the church tower struck three.