Of Cows and Women
A story of death, destruction, project management and cows. Originally started for NaNoWriMo in 2015, it took over two years to actually write a first draft, which in the end turned out only half as long as a NaNoWriMo novel is supposed to be. Presented here is that first draft - at the current pace of work editing, corrections and revisions are on course to be completed sometime around 2027. Behold my magnum opus, please forgive its unfinished nature and beware of wet paint.
Introlude
Written in locations including but not necessarily limited to: Southampton (England), Bexhill-on-Sea (England), Crawley (England), Montpellier (France), Avignon (France), Arles (France) and various airports, stations, flights and trains connecting the above. Not written whilst driving, since the Police take a dim view of that.
The Opiatini was, as far as I know, the creation of Mike Licudi. He has not specified to me whether he has actually made and drunk one.
Thanks to Dan for help world building, and to both Dan and Kathryn for putting up with me writing the first few chapters whilst notionally on holiday with them.
Extra special thanks to Emma for proofreading and encouragement.
In no particular order, I must also tip my hat to Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Edgar Wright, Andy Hamilton, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman for stylistic and thematic inspiration. I can’t hope to be as good, but I do hope that I’ve provided a different take.
All events and characters are fictional, except for the ones that aren’t, and they’re fictionalised versions of the real ones. No resemblance to real people, living or dead, is intended except when it is, and in those cases the events they’re involved in are not intended to bear any resemblance to any event they may or may not have experienced in their life.
I mean, John Dee was real, and he died in the early 1600s, but it probably wasn’t anything like what happens in this book. Oh, you know what I mean.
All together now - repeat to yourself “it’s just a show, I should really just relax.”
Epilogue
Minty the Cow sparked up another truly incredible spliff and relaxed onto her chaise longue, reminiscing about the previous few days’ events. She’d been lucky to get out alive, if she was honest with herself. Who would have thought that inventing the Opiatini would have had such incredible and far-reaching effects? And it wasn’t just the village of Little Congleton Abbey that would never be the same again - England would never forget the scandal that erupted, and the World would forever have a new perspective of its place in the cosmos.
The rest of the herd were quietly shuddering in the corner of the field. It would be days, weeks, maybe even months before they got their heads back together again, and Minty counted herself lucky that she’d had the presence of mind to get so colossally baked that her mind could withstand anything that was thrown at it. The Massed Forces of Darkness were a pretty heavy philosophical concept to deal with, and cows were never the best at that kind of thing.
And so it was that one cow, baked up to the nines on the best hash she could steal from the Farmer’s secret greenhouse, reflected on the last few days. Days which had shaken the very foundations of everything the human race believed in up to that point.
Prologue
Minty the Cow had sparked up another truly incredible spliff and relaxed onto her chaise longue when she was hit by the most wonderful idea: the Opiatini! It would be like a regular martini, but she would stuff the olives with tramadol for that little extra kick.
She leapt up from the ersatz sofa (actually just a selection of hay bales and a tarpaulin, but nobody was going to tell her that) and wobbled over to the drinks cabinet, just about staying balanced on her rear hooves whilst her front legs span madly to try and stop her fake fur coat falling off her shoulders. Around her neck she wore an elaborate gold and diamond necklace, accidentally flushed down the toilet by a local resident a few weeks ago - or so Minty thought.
“Grace,” shouted Ian, “have you seen my glasses?”
“They’re on your head! They’re always on your bloody head! I’m sick to death of these stupid, inane questions. It’s too much, Ian, it really is. We talked about this! We went to your stupid therapist and we talked for hours and hours, wasting money, but did it work? Did it my foot! So you can take your glasses and your house and your bloody necklace and stuff them, Ian. I mean it. I’m leaving you!”
There was a deathly silence.
“I don’t want the necklace or the house or my glasses, Grace, I want you. You could flush the necklace down the toilet for all I cared. I want this to work.”
You can probably guess how that turned out given that three weeks later the necklace was adorning a stoned cow. But back to the story.
Minty finished stuffing the third tramadol olive and popped it on the cocktail stick so she could pour in the martini. Shaken, not stirred, of course - she was a cow who was used to the finer things in life. Drink complete, she lounged back onto the tarpaulin and hay bale furniture as smoothly and gracefully as she could, and sipped.
It was four in the afternoon, and it was time for the day to begin.
Chapter One
“I love maths, let’s do more maths!” said Manny, the maths-obsessed cow.
“Stop it, Manny,” replied Minty, “you’re so obsessed with maths that you might as well be a number. Live a little! Eat some grass! Trot around the field a few times! Scare some sheep! Do the odd line of coke!”
Everyone knew that Minty had a problem, but nobody wanted to admit it. Finally it had come to the point where nobody could ignore it any more, since Minty was busy having some kind of rush from the Opiatini she’d just downed. She was bounding across the field towards where the Farmer parked his tractor, shouting that she was going into town for some groceries and did anyone want a lift?
Manny looked at Flo. Flo looked at Manny. They were the closest thing the herd had to leaders, generally keeping the peace and trying to get everyone out of trouble. Manny had previously calculated that 98.4% of the times the herd ended up in trouble were down to the drunken fur-coat-clad disaster currently yomping her way towards the green John Deere on the Southern edge of the field and waving a “genuine” Gucci handbag. The other 1.6% of occasions were largely a result of trespassers in the field, something the cows took very badly to and really couldn’t be blamed for - a fact which had been established in the local courts after a burglar attempted to steal the Farmer’s TV and make a quick getaway past the herd.
Flo was the first to speak. “Manny,” she whispered, “shouldn’t we stop her?”
“I’m not sure. On the one hoof, she’s almost certain to cause shenanigans, but on the other, surely she can’t start a tractor?”
“She probably can’t. And even if she could, how would she drive it? We aren’t exactly evolved for gripping.”
“Fair point. Bit more grass and Countdown through the Farmer’s window?”
“That, my friend, sounds like a good afternoon.”
Tramwell Valley Farm was about two miles outside its nearest village - the village of Little Congleton Abbey. The village was small, and the minds of the people were smaller. The local Women’s Institute ran the place with an iron fist - which was difficult for them since the iron fist was larger than most of them and made of solid iron. Mostly they sat on it and issued their decrees. Normally on Tuesday morning, because Tuesday was the least likely day for it to rain.
(It might seem unlikely that a human construct such as days of the week could influence the vast global weather systems such that there was actually a single day of a seven-day cycle that was less likely to recieve inclement weather than any of the others, but somehow it happened. Manny’s calculations had confirmed it - not that the WI had access to them of course - it very rarely rained on a Tuesday in Little Congleton Abbey. Three times in the last hundred years, to be precise.)
The only other locals of note were an ex-punk who got rich from selling butter and a farmer who had made lots of money selling butter to an ex-punk, but I digress.
The Women’s Institute of Little Congleton Abbey wasn’t your average Women’s Institute. (Incidentally, the average Women’s Institute is located in Maidstone, Kent if you take the median of cake weight or slightly outside Cardiff if you take the mean.) For starters, they were unusally dedicated, unusually wealthy and unusually widowed. Of the thirteen committee members, no less than twelve had been left large fortunes by their recently-deceased husbands in the last three years.
The thirteenth was Rose Booker, the chairwoman. She had never been married, but in her younger days had been quite the socialite. Through a series of wild, passionate love affairs she had come into posession of a set of film negatives that had ensured continued prosperity and safety for the rest of her life. The negatives were copied multiple times and deposited with friends and relatives who would immediately deliver them to tabloid newspapers upon hearing that anything unsavoury had happened to Rose.
Admittedly, the negatives had become less scandalous of late, what with the people involved having passed on, so the silence payments had dried up, but there was plenty enough put by for a rainy day.
Rose banged her gavel and called the committee meeting to attention. To her left the treasurer, Edwina Fenchurch-Weston (of the Somerset Fenchurch-Westons) was shuffling papers and preparing her report. To her right, the secretary, Betty King, was starting to take notes.
“Order, order. We have a packed agenda today so let’s keep it lean and mean, please. Nothing frivolous and no spitballing. Right, with that out of the way I think we’re ready to start. But first, let us pray. Helen, would you like to lead us in this one since you’re our spiritual guide?”
Helen Eltham nodded serenely and stood. She wasn’t tall, though she wasn’t short either, and she had an open, matronly appearance. Her cardigan was a calming shade of blue and her pearl necklace lent her an air of sophistication and elegance. Unlike most of the other committe memebers, Helen wasn’t retired and still had a part-time job at the Church Hall, preparing urns of tea and coffee and sweeping up after events before she locked up for the night. She spoke timidly, not quite stuttering but never completely sure of herself.
“Ok, everyone, join in when you know the words,” she joked. Everyone knew the prayer.
The room nodded, clasped their hands, bowed their heads and intoned as one:
“Hail, great Satan, Lord of the Darkness. Watch over us whilst we conduct the proceeding, and guide our hands that they may be true and do your work on Earth. Hail Azazel, General of the Forces of Darkness. May your approach be ever nearer, we welcome you to this land. Hail Abbadon, Bringer of Doom…”
Yep, the Women’s Institute of Little Congleton Abbey were Satanists.
The planet Extros 5 is a small planet orbiting a blueish star a few hundred thousand light years from Earth. It’s inhabited, which is rare enough in the galaxy, but is actually quite nice and somewhere you might want to go on holiday, which is even rarer. The species that live there call themselves the Extroxi and are not too dissimilar to the Little Green Men that humankind have scattered throughout their cultural history. About five feet tall, spindly appendages, large eyes, flat head - it’s almost like they had modelled themselves on the X-Files.
Except, of course, the X-Files had been modelled on them. Whilst Extros 5 was somewhere you might want to go on holiday, the Extroxi didn’t really do stay-cations, so they holidayed on other planets around the galaxy thanks to their faster-than-light travel technology, which really would have put the wind up Einstein if he’d heard about it. Not possible, he would have said - nothing can travel faster than light without ripping up all the basic assumptions of Relativity.
Little did he know the Extroxi had been tearing up Relativity and burning the bits to get around for thousands of years now.
The Extroxi we’re particularly interested in is called Nigel. In point of fact, he actually isn’t, his name is beyond human pronunciation or expression, somewhat like Prince when he decided to be known as an unpronounceable symbol. But for the purposes of the story, our favourite Extroxi is called Nigel.
“Susan,” shouted Nigel, “have you seen my glasses?”
“They’re on your head! They’re always on your bloody head! I’m sick to death of these stupid, inane questions. It’s too much, Nigel, it really is. We talked about this! We went to your stupid therapist and we talked for hours and hours, wasting money, but did it work? Did it my foot! So you can take your glasses and your house and your bloody necklace and stuff them, Nigel. I mean it. I’m leaving you!”
There was a deathly silence.
Then both Nigel and Susan the Extroxi doubled over in fits of hysterical laughter at Susan’s impression of the primitive Earthlings they’d watched on their most recent holiday. It was a warm, caring laughter, but it didn’t help them find Nigel’s glasses. He hadn’t seen them since he’d put them in the suitcase when they were packing up ready to leave Earth.
He hadn’t seen the suitcase either, if he was honest.
A sudden realisation dawned on Nigel - his suitcase, containing not only his glasses but also technological wonders far beyond the comprehension of the tiny-minded warlike savages on Earth - was still in the cottage.
Oh dear.
Susan saw the concern on her partner’s face and realised what he was thinking. It wasn’t hard - their species was telepathic. They dropped everything and scrambled for the car keys to make a mad dash back to Earth before some jumped-up monkey got their paws on the suitcase and accidentally blew the whole planet to smithereens. If that happened, there would be hell to pay, lawsuits and tribunals and paperwork. If they got there in time, they could just grab the suitcase and get away and maybe next year they could just have a stay-cation.
Chapter Two
Done with praising the Dark Lord, the WI committee got on with the business of the meeting. Firstly, there was a discussion of what to do about the plague of buskers in the village, and then a discussion of what to do about the plague of youths, the plague of drinkers, the plague of holidaymakers… Basically everything they didn’t like was a plague and they had to do something about it since they were the great Moral Majority of Little Congleton Abbey and if they wouldn’t do something about it, who would? Wouldn’t somebody please think of the children?!
It is probably prudent at this point to remind you, dear reader, that this group of morally outraged old ladies had just recited a prayer to Satan. Normally they’d be outraged that anyone would be doing such a dreadful thing, but there was something about the last few years that had convinced them they were moving in the right direction, that Satan was on their side, watching over them.
And indeed he was.
He was actually called Gary because there was no demon called Satan, nor had there ever been, and Hell was just an alternate reality where demons ruled the Earth rather than humans. But he was indeed watching the WI, mentally clawing at a patch of reality where the walls between worlds were at their thinnest. He had chaired the demons’ escape committee since it was formed, ready to lead them out of this fiery Hell-hole and into a new world where towels were fluffy rather than burnt to a crisp, and water could actually be cold for longer than a few seconds, and where they would encounter no meaningful resistance from a petty little race that they could easily enslave for doing their bidding.
Gary drew himself up to his full height - around eight and a half feet - and banged his fist on the table to call the meeting to order. His horns twitched with anticipation, his eyes burned red with the fire of purpose and he opened his mouth to reveal a series of rows of terrifyingly sharp teeth. He took a breath in and began to speak…
“Right, everybody, settle down please. You at the back, stop that. Put Bianca down, Pete. Ben, don’t pick your nose, you’re a demon, not a snot dispenser.”
Ben looked ashamed and tried to find somewhere to wipe his fingers. Gary’s voice was actually fairly nasal and not really the booming roar you’d expect from a demon, but he was good at organisation and the raffle he’d run had raised a lot of money to fund the escape effort.
“I’d like to present the latest status report - we are nearing completion of the other side of the portal, and so that means we should be ready to make a first attempt at the crossing, so that’s good - and we are currently running ahead of the timescale laid out in Gantt chart 15B of your papers, so that’s doubly good. On the basis of current projections we should finish the project earlier than expected and under budget.”
There was a ripple of polite applause and Gary continued.
“So if you could all direct your attention to Diagram 7, you will see the proposed structure for the queuing system to enter the target reality, and how we’ve revised it to snake the holding area laterally rather than longitundinally. This means we can fit the same length of queue with less turns and so customer satisfaction should hopefully rise by around 3 percent, with a consequential additional buy-in projected to be in the order of 0.5% and bringing associated revenue growth.”
Please be assured that you won’t be missing anything too crucial if we return to Earth whilst Gary discusses the placement of wi-fi base stations in the holding area and whether or not a landing page should be used for identity verification when joining the network. Let’s check on the cows.
Minty waddled up to the tractor and clambered on in a dreadfully undignified way. Her front left hoof smacked the ignition and the engine shuddered and spluttered into life. Suddenly finding herself vibrating in a most alarming way, Minty flailed and hit every knob, lever and pedal she could find.
And then the tractor lurched forward.
“Oh my stars! Oh, this is worse than the time I ended up on the bouncy castle at the village fete! Stooooooop, you monster, take my jewels but leave me alooooooone!”
The farm wasn’t large, just a cottage and a few barns, so it wasn’t going to be easy to get out of there without demolishing something. Minty span the wheel madly and swerved around a pile of hay bales and into one of the barns. The sheep were in there, resting and chanting Buddhist mantras. They were remarkably Zen sheep - Flo thought it was because they already resembled clouds so had no trouble picturing themselves as a cloud, floating freely through the sky.
The sheep flock had been chanting for peace and and end to conflict, for understanding and compassion. Leona was leading the session and had just struck the bell to bring everyone back to the circle when Minty crashed through and demolished half the barn on her way.
“Bloody cows!” screamed Leona.
“Sorry! I didn’t mean to! The tractor has a miiiiiind of its own you know!”
On the way out of the barn the tractor’s fender caught on a rope and dragged it along. The rope snaked back across the barn and around a support beam, so anything Minty hadn’t previously demolished was promptly pulled down on top of the flock as she exited. The roof was barely made of metal any more with the amount of rust in it. Honestly, it had done pretty well to manage up until this point, but it was this point where it gave out and surrendered to the cool breeze of death and disintegrated all over the flock. The walls of their barn were in pieces around them and brown flakes of roof were raining down on them. It was not one of their most successful meetings, but they resolved to forgive Minty anyway and look for a new meeting place - for they were the enlightened, and if the rest of Little Congleton Abbey had followed their lead, then the rest of this story would have been very different.
“So next we move onto the car park - no changes here, and I believe that the markings should be going down any time around now. We’re anticipating a lot of requests for long-term parking so the layout is heavily biased in that direction. Charges yet to be decided but we’re looking at a fairly stable revenue stream here so we want to pitch them right…”
The tractor swung out onto the main road and narrowly missed an Audi estate, which began tailgating Minty, flashing its lights and beeping its horn. Minty, totally oblivious, thought the driver was trying to play a game and so began to pull more levers and twiddle more knobs in an attempt to reciprocate the attention she was enjoying.
The tractor came to an immediate halt and the Audi ran into the tow bar on the back, splitting the engine right up the middle and deploying the airbags into the driver’s face. By the time he had overcome the shock and jumped out of the car to remonstrate with the idiot in the fur coat stopping a tractor on narrow country lanes, Minty was on her way again and waving to him, dragging his Audi along the road, briefcase, wallet, phone and all. He ran to try and catch it but even a tractor can move faster than a tired mobile phone salesman and he eventually gave up and began the long walk home.
“Snacks - we’re thinking packets of crisps, peanuts, light things like that, just as a little extra whilst waiting in line. Fizzy drinks might be difficult as the area is very warm and could cause pressure build-ups and consequent structural failures in the bottles…”
The Society for Paranormal Investigation and Detection, or SPID for those in the know, was originally founded in 1878 as the Society for the Upholding of God’s and Her Majesty’s Peace Against the Threats of the Evil Magicians by Victorian explorer and committed Christian Hugo Ford. Ford had acquired his fortune in the biscuit business, but was inspired to open the society later known as SPID after being contacted by an occult brotherhood who were looking for him to join their ranks in the hope of bleeding him dry of all his cash to finance their operations.
The invitation was deeply misjudged and had accidentally brought the Brotherhood of the New Moon into the crosshairs of Hugo Ford. As it happens, they would indeed consume all his effort and money, but in his attempts to destroy them rather than to fuel their purposes. Ford decided he would recruit like-minded men of money to dedicate their lives and fortunes to locating and destroying the literature and tools these cads and bounders wished to use to disturb the ways of Christians in the British Empire.
Ford had a number of great successes, tracking down and destroying a huge amount of occult literature, but his greatest prize was the Raison d’Etre of the Brotherhood of the New Moon, the collection they searched for - the Forbidden Collection of John Dee. He knew that if he could find and destroy this collection before the Brotherhood could get their hands on it, he would have dealt a deathly blow to one of the Empire’s greatest enemies within.
Research was easier for the society later known as SPID, since they were on a righteous crusade. Ford was eventually invited to a secret audience with Queen Victoria herself, where she expressed her gratitude to him for the work he was doing keeping such evildoers at bay in her empire. Though there was no possibility that she could publicly support him, for it would be utterly scandalous for the very existence of the Brotherhood to be revealed - which was why the society later known as SPID would remain largely under wraps. But despite her public denials, she could and would provide resources and assistance to Ford in a discreet manner.
The society’s members gradually gained public offices, and holders of public offices gradually became members of the society. The Bank of England itself funded a number of covert operations to keep prying eyes at the Treasury in the dark - most notably the ill-fated expedition to Wales in which Ford would seek, locate and destroy the Forbidden Collection of John Dee, and finally thwart the dreadful plans of the Brotherhood.
It was thanks to the funding of the Bank of England that Hugo Ford went forth to an untimely and gruesome demise.
The houses on Denton Road in Little Congleton Abbey are remarkable in their decoration, and none more so than numbers 22 and 24. The residents had been engaged in a friendly game of one-upping for years now, meaning that their gardens were full of intricately planned and executed gnome tableaux. To mirror the gentle rivalry, the two gardens were engaged in a series of battles of their own. One company of red gnomes (from number 22) were scaling the fence whilst a team of blue gnomes (from number 24) were throwing buckets of rotten fish over them. In number 22 some captured blue gnomes were being interrogated whilst a cabinet of red gnomes pointed at maps on a table.
Jeremy Quartermaine was the resident of number 24, and his brother Arnold Quartermaine was the resident of number 22. Their brotherly gnome rivalry was common knowledge among the village and they played up to it, putting on special displays for Christmas or Halloween so that local families could come and enjoy their gardens. It was the middle of summer at this point, though, so the gnomes weren’t getting up to anything special beyond the normal war games and raiding parties and pranks.
Denton Road wasn’t normally in the habit of accommodating tractors, but today was never going to be a normal day, and so Minty rolled down the road utterly out of control, demolishing hedges and ripping branches off trees. The child who lived at number 19 saw the tractor coming and ran inside to warn her mother.
“Mummy, mummy, there’s a cow in a fur coat driving a tractor down the road!”
“Now, dear, we talked about this, didn’t we? It’s bad to lie.”
“But Mummy…”
“Enough. Go to your room.”
She was largely vindicated when Minty drove the tractor through the house’s front and ripped out most of the Rumpus Room. Minty span the wheel and swerved back to the road, heading straight for the front gardens of numbers 22 and 24. The tension was unbearable - Minty could see the disaster that was about to unfold and time went into slow motion. It was like The Matrix, sweat beading on the cow’s forehead, every muscle in her body taught and locked, her hooves gripping the controls as she tried to pull the tractor around and away from the fragile little porcelain figures…
After what seemed like an eternity the wheels seemed to gain some purchase and the tractor swerved away from the garden just in time, sparing the gnomes a nasty end. Minty relaxed and straightened up. If she could get to the end of this road, she could go around the roundabout and set off back to Tramwell Valley Farm. Shouldn’t be too hard to find the right exit.
What Minty hadn’t noticed was that the wrecked Audi she’d been towing had become detached from the tow bar, leant up onto its side and rolled gracefully over the gardens of numbers 22 and 24, destroying years of careful, tedious and time-consuming work. Not a single porcelain gnome survived unscathed.
“So that’s the fire exits. Ben, I told you not to pick your nose. We’ll just quickly recap the plan for opening the gateway and then I think we can wrap up. Now, I know that getting mortals involved wasn’t a popular idea but I hope to prove everyone wrong and for all of this to go off without a hitch.
“We’ve tried cults before and they’ve never turned out well, so this time we’ve chosen a tight-knit, highly organised society with a strong sense of moral superiority and very little chance of mass suicide or delusions that we want them to do things like assassinate their leaders. We’ve had to fit into their cultural norms, so there’s going to need to be a few cheat sheets with notes on personalities, aliases and the like, we’ll get those handed out shortly before we go through so it’s all fresh in your minds.
“Ben, I know I said not to pick your nose, but did you really think it would be more acceptable to pick someone else’s?”
Chapter Three
“So that’s the fire exits. Barbra, don’t snooze off. We’ll just quickly recap the plan for opening the gateway and then I think we can wrap up.”
The WI committee had finished with the plans for the village fete - it wasn’t for a number of weeks and it was quite possible that the entire village would have been burnt to a crisp by the raging forces of evil by then, but as they say - fail to plan, plan to fail. No sense in arousing suspicion by not having anything on the boil after P-Day, as they were referring to the day of the portal ceremony.
Just as an aside, P-Day was the nom de plume of a rapper from Scunthorpe who Rose had once had a fling with. She wasn’t overly proud, but then again, he was a change from her normal type and mercifully uncomplicated, unlike that dreadful bore she’d bumped off a few years back. What on Earth was his name? Frightful man, might have been a junior cabinet minister or something. Bland to the core, and yet startlingly offensive, unable to hold an opinion of his own, and yet disagreed with everything she said. Eventually she decided enough was enough and smacked him round the head with a Le Creuset frying pan - which was when the WI had gotten their first taste of the darker arts and crafts.
Disposing of the body wasn’t hard, the garden was big and the gardening group were happy for the nutrients to feed to their ailing pumpkin crop. The interior decoration group had really gone all out though, not just making the kitchen look like there hadn’t recently been a gruesome murder there, but making it look so sparklingly clean and tidy that it seemed nothing bad could ever have happened there.
Eventually the local constabulary got bored of the case and gave up trying to pin the disappearance on Rose, simply because it was too infuriating. Every time they thought they had her, suddenly there was an alibi or the evidence had gone missing. It wasn’t far different for the string of dead husbands who showed up (or didn’t) for the next few years. It was absolutely bloody obvious to anyone who looked that the WI were bumping off their husbands for the wealth and the freedom, but could they ever get enough of a case together to get one on trial? Not even once. Eventually they gave up and spread some rumours about a serial killer and stuck up some posters on how to secure your home properly, just to make people think something was being done about it.
Several husbands cottoned on pretty quick and a small group left under cover of darkness and fled to Kenya, where they lived quite happily until a drug cartel riddled their villa with bullets in a case of mistaken identity.
Bet you can’t guess which local group were on safari two miles away…
Minty stared at the diagram of the roundabout she was trying to navigate. It only had four exits, yet somehow it was a five-lane monster merry-go-round and the markings were no help at all. TOWN CENTRE was fairly obvious, but L’CONG’AB’ was no help since she was in the middle of the place and wanted to get out, and SUPERSTORE would have seemed obvious but for the fact that the nearest shop legally required to charge for carrier bags by virtue of having more than 250 employees was over twenty miles away.
Eventually Minty gave up trying to figure out the correct route (to the relief of the exasperated queue of honking traffic behind her) and just went for what felt natural. Unfortunately, what felt natural to a cow who’d drunk a martini and eaten olives stuffed with tramadol was to just plough straight across all five jam-packed lanes of traffic, onto the central reservation, off the other side, over five more lanes of traffic and down the high street towards the Church Hall.
One of the WI’s best scams over recent years was the continual state of disrepair of the Church Hall. They had a fundraising drive about once a year and put a bit of scaffolding up for a while, complained the builders were feckless layabouts and took the scaffolding down ready for next year’s drive.
It would be difficult for the builders to be anything other than feckless layabouts when the WI had never actually hired any of them, just “borrowed” a van from a few towns over and parked it outside occasionally. It was a silly pretence, but very important if they were to keep milking the Church Hall fund to pay for goats, candles and dry cleaning.
Flo and Manny were desperately searching for Minty on one of the farmer’s quadbikes. Flo was driving and Manny was clinging on, helmet straps flapping in the wind as she tried to work out where the stupid cow had gone and what trail of devastation she would have to clear up this time - if she even could clear it up this time. It was entirely possible that Minty had just managed to cause such devastation that there was no way it was going to be explained away by a few carefully placed pieces of incriminating circumstantial evidence against an unlucky local selected at random out of the telephone directory.
Manny caught sight of a demolished hedge and tapped Flo on the shoulder, motioning to follow the trail. It was leading towards the village, which was a bad sign. Along the length of it, trees were stripped of their branches, hedges and scarecrows were flattened and various traffic accidents appeared to have taken place. It was possible that a pair of cows on a quadbike would arouse a lot of suspicion around the village, but given that they were chasing a cow on a tractor wearing a fur coat, the cat might just have been out of the bag already.
Flo revved the quadbike’s engine and leant down, speeding towards the disaster that was sure to be unfolding in the town centre.
People don’t often like to be confronted with things they don’t understand, particularly in front of other people to whom they wish to project an air of dignity, sophistication and general brainyness. So when, say, a cow in a fur coat drives a tractor through the centre of a small village on a busy afternoon, it’s not totally out of the bounds of possibility that someone might just shout “Wonderful parade!” to look like they know what’s going on - and thus distinguish themselves from all the other gormless idiots staring at the spectacle and wondering what to make of it.
Thing is, once someone says something like that, they’ve raised the stakes. It’s no longer enough to just see what’s happening and be puzzled by it - no, the rest of the crowd realised they needed to understand what was going on as well. Of course, they had no idea and so they went for the next best option, which was pretending they understood what was going on.
Minty waved aristocratically to the assembled masses who had come out to greet here as she rode through the village. So nice of them to come to see her parade!
“So, basics of the ceremony to open the gateway. The bring and buy sale will be runnning in the Church Hall on the day to try and keep a lid on proceedings until as late in the day as possible. It’s inevitable that we’re going to be found out sooner or later, but later would be better than sooner.
“If the worst comes to the worst and we’re ‘busted’ early on,” (Rose actually air-quoted the “busted” - she wasn’t 100% down with the kids) “then half of us will continue the ceremony as a bare minimum and the others will man the barricades. Start with two and add if the need arises. Remember, seven to open the portal - minimum.
“We’ve got the goats being kept by that dimwit at Tramwell Valley Farm - we’ll just collect them on the day saying we’re testing the petting zoo out ahead of the fete. Obviously, the human soul we need is going to be harder to come by. Remember, ladies, clean and unblemished. A pure soul. We’re hoping we’ll get someone at the bring and buy we can spirit off into the back room.
“Final thing - don’t forget to wear loose-fitting clothes and comfortable shoes, there will be running involved if we’re successful. Oh, and don’t wear anything you don’t mind getting goat entrails on.”
The Church Hall of Little Congleton Abbey - picturesque, Olde Worlde, remarkable, Grade I Listed, banana-flavoured. These were the adjectives used by little Tommy Watts to describe the building in his Year 2 project on local landmarks. Only one of them was incorrect - it wasn’t banana-flavoured all over. His teacher had marked him down for not licking a statistically significant proprotion of the external faces of the building, noting that his conclusion was “unsound” because of it. Tommy, at this point not versed in complex matters like statistical significance or the realtively advanced mathematics required to calculate it, was understandably upset and complained to his mother, who was horrified that his teacher had been letting him lick the Church Hall in the first place, what with all the strange rumours about it that went around the village from time to time.
“What rumours?” I hear you cry!
Well, they mostly centered around the large green leather-panelled doors at the back of the main hall, which were remarkably out of keeping with the rest of the decor. They were a good twelve feet high, arched at the top and secured with a sturdy and old-looking lock, for which there were only a handful of keys - all held by members of the WI committee. Many years ago the holders of various public service posts within the village used to have the keys - clerks, magistrates, vicars, the bloke who stood outside ringing a bell and shouting the news out as if nobody knew what a newspaper was, people of solid and true character who had devoted their lives to the village. And, until recently, they were uniformly men.
An odd thing had started to happen within the past ninety years, as there were gradually a series of first women - first woman to be a town clerk, first woman to be a magistrate, first woman to be a vicar, first woman to stand outside ringing a bell and shouting the news out as if nobody knew what Teletext was. This wasn’t in itself odd, but the fact that each holder then tended to either join the committee of the WI and hand their key to their successor in that post, or hand their key to a member of the WI committee and almost immediately leave the village under cover of darkness was.
And so after a number of years the WI committee held all the keys to the Church Hall back room. Originally it had been a man cave for the elders of the town to play card games and indulge in a spot of wenching, but they had to stop that in 1904 when the entire enterprise was blown open by an outbreak of the clap. After that it became a storeroom and occasional party overflow. In the second summer of love in 1988, it became useful as a chill out room for ravers partying in the main hall. Once the WI held all the keys in 1993, they set it up as a bakery room for their legendary cake contests. It was only later that Rose Booker had risen to power in the bloody coup of 2001 and set about perverting the normally-respectable institution for her own evil ends.
Her first calling to the Dark Way was in the late 90s when Tony Blair was on TV and decided to address her personally and tell her that she must summon the Hordes of Darkness and provide the portal to have them lay waste to the Earth. Surprised at this turn of events, Rose checked the papers for the next several days to find out if anyone else had heard the same things she had. She tried all the major broadsheets, several tabloids, and she even asked the increasingly mad woman who stood outside shouting the news. Nobody else had heard.
No, no Bird is the Word jokes, please.
So Rose returned to her normal life and tried to ignore the experience, but then William Hague started doing it and she knew something was up.
Oh yes, rumours. And not the Fleetwood Mac LP.
Rumours about what was going on behind those doors included the normal things like sexual deviancy and cooking meth, but also some more outlandish and interesting ideas. One woman said that she heard bleating noises and arrived at the conclusion that this was the site where Noah’s ark was being constructed to prepare for the forthcoming floods that were being covered up by the Met Office with Michael Fish as the head of the conspiracy. This never came to pass and the floods turned out to be a light shower which slightly moistened a few tourists.
A child had once seen someone disappearing behind the doors with a large box of candles and decided it was a “kissing room”, which was a cross between a candlelit dinner in a nice restaurant and the rather gothic candlelit rooms he’d seen on a TV programme about vampires which he shouldn’t have been watching in the first place. The argument between Mummy and Daddy about why he’d been watching that was quite a blinder, so there must be something in the theory, which spread through the fifth year like wildfire.
Finally, a slightly unhinged man had heard chanting and started a website to discuss his theories. In varying colours, but mostly typeset in Comic Sans. Here’s an extract:
LITTTE CONGLTON CHURCH HALL CONSIPRACY
THERE IS DEEP SECRET BHIND THE GREEN DOOR PAR OF CHURCH HALL MAIN HALL
THEY DO NOT WNAT YOU TO KNO ABOUT
I HAVE PRESONALLY HEARD CHANTS COMING OUT OF THE BACKROOM
THIS IS MY ONW EVIDENSE I DO NOT NEED MORE BUT YOU SHEEP SHOUDL OPEN EYES AND LOOK
I HAVE HEARD THIS WITH MY OWN EAR
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IS COVER UP THE CREATION OF NEW GAY MAFIA
THE PREISTS ARE DOING THIS WITH CHANTS
IT IS THE BACKROOM
THERE IS WHERE THEY ARE MAKING THE GAYS AND HIDING THEM IN OUR VILLLAGE
THE IVORY TOWER IS WHERE ACADEMICS LIVE AND THEY WANT TO USURP OUR WAY OF LIVES
THEY DO NOT REPRESENT US
I AM NOT ACCEPT THEIR RULES
YOU WILL NOT ACCEPT?
MY VIDOE WILL BE ON YOUTUBE SOON SO LONG AS THE ROMAN GAY MAFIA DO NOT REMOVE
JOIN ME IN COMMNETS FOR COJENT DISCUSSION
It wasn’t particularly erudite.
Meanwhile, Flo and Manny made a daring jump on the quadbike, using a pile of hay as a ramp and exploding across a road in a malestrom of dust and dried grass, and elsewhere Minty was grappling with the controls of the tractor as a family of ducks waddled out across the road in front of her…
Chapter Four
Rose Booker was not amused when the entirety of BBC One’s output was dedicated to public figures and celebrities instructing her to follow the Dark Path and open a gateway to Hell. She wrote several stiff letters to the Controller of BBC One and made her distaste known but received only platitudes and assurances that that was not the intent of BBC One programming and finally suggestions that she seek some form of psychiatric help. Little did the medics know that Rose was in fact perfectly sane and that in an alternate dimension populated by demons, Gary was concentrating on implanting thoughts into her mind.
Gary’s psychic powers had previously only really been used for various pranks and suchlike - making teachers think he had done his homework when he’d actually just scribbled a picture of a cat, persuading his parents to let him go to parties or getting friends to snort a line of sherbert so their noses fizzed and foamed. He’d considered thing like robbing banks but decided against it because he was, at heart, not evil. He wanted to help his fellow demons, and letting them rampage into a parallel reality populated with mortals that were no more than ants to his kind seemed to be a Good Thing in his mind. It wasn’t any more evil than a human bulldozing some woodland and evicting the local wildlife.
Eventually the conditioning overtook Rose - as someone who wasn’t especially pleasant in the first place she was a good target - and she staged a sudden and remarkable return to full health and checked herself out of the remarkably expensive rehab-cum-spa she had managed to get a place in by abusing her influence to have a D-list celebrity evicted. The D-list celebrity was not allowed to return once Rose left.
Minty swerved to avoid the ducks, which was a ridiculous thing to do because the ducks could manoeuvre faster than the tractor could. But hey - nothing really has to make sense to a cow doped up on tramadol, gin and vermouth. The ducks waddled safely out of the way and Minty breathed a sigh of relief as the tractor smashed straight into the corner of the Church Hall and tore down most of the eastern wall. The gabled roof hung precariously and stones scattered across the street as Minty tucked and rolled, with her thick fur coat cushioning her as she hit the tarmac. She picked herself up and dusted her coat down in about the most ineffectual way possible when she saw the room she’d just opened to the elements.
For starters, the selection of slaughtering and disembowelling tools hanging on the wall put Minty right off whoever had decorated it, and even she knew enough to know that painting a giant pentagram and a number of infernal symbols all over the floor wasn’t the calling card of a sensible interior designer like Laura Ashley, John Lewis or Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. There were red candles scattered around the floor and on rusty iron stands, wax dripping and coagulating around and underneath them to form stalactites of wax that managed to look somehow monstrous in the flickering darkness of the half of the room that the sunlight couldn’t reach.
The dank smell of the place was appalling - fetid and vaguely rotten. The goat blood up the walls could have something to do with that, horrific sprays and splatters that betrayed the room’s evil and violent uses.
But nobody noticed all that because a cow wearing a fur coat had just crashed a tractor. Cameras flashed, people pointed, Minty felt like a celebrity accosted by a baying mob of paparazzi. She covered her face and ran away, ashamed of what she had done, the damage she had wreaked, the dreadful sight she had uncovered.
In the ensuing confusion, the WI committee (who had been holding their meeting the in main Church Hall) had burst through the leather-panelled doors and quickly started soaking some cleaning rags in the paraffin oil they kept for the torches on the walls, scattering them around the candles and throwing them into the wooden rafters. A few candles were kicked over, a few documents were retrieved and then they disappeared again as one of the paraffin cans went up. An inferno engulfed the infernal room - the evidence was gone, the crowd had either not noticed because they weren’t close enough or were distracted by Minty. Not one person would have any idea what just happened, and in fairness even the WI were sketchy on why a tractor had just hit their base and why a cow in a fur coat was trotting away. But they paid it no heed, it was probably part of an advertising deal that had gone wrong.
Now the prime concern was to find a new temple to open the gateway from - there was no way the plans were to be delayed at this late hour.
(Extracted from the Parish Magazine of Little Congleton Abbey, page 2)
There was a fracas on the High Street earlier this week as a tractor demolished the eastern end of the Church Hall, which soon caught fire and burnt down, leaving little trace of the Grade I listed building which tasted of bananas, according to local experts. Currently the reason why a tractor hit the Church Hall, or even was driving down the High Street in the first place, is unknown. Police are urgently seeking a cow in a fur coat seen fleeing the scene.
(Extracted from the Sun, page 3)
Council planning expert Lisa, 19, from Little Congleton Abbey, is concerned by the recent unscheduled demolition of a Grade I listed building without prior permission. “These buildings are national treasures,” she says, “and we wouldn’t just let someone demolish Stephen Fry or Dame Judi Dench, would we?”
(Extracted from the Financial Times, somewhere in the middle underneath reports about obscure floatations on the London Stock Exchange)
Local markets were shocked today by the demolition without permission of a Grade I listed building in Little Congleton Abbey. The Church Hall was partially felled by a rogue tractor, with fire later claiming the remainder of the structure. Butter and diesel were up as people started to stock up in preparation for potential Divine Retribution, and strawberries were down due to their short shelf life and paranoia about them containing spider eggs that would hatch in a similar fashion to the film “Alien”, which was shown on TV three nights before. The rumours are believed to have started at a local primary school and are as yet unproven.
(Headline from the Daily Sport, page 12)
CHURCH HALL COW SECRETLY VISITS TO CHEW ON ME CLAIMS LOCAL WHO BELIEVES HE IS A CABBAGE
Minty stumbled through a back street and found Flo and Manny bouncing down it on a quadbike. Flo slammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt. The cows who weren’t drunk and/or high on opiates slung Minty over the back of the bike, got back on and spun around to head back to the farm. Flo drove again, with Manny behind her, sitting on Minty to stop her getting away whilst she tried to rant and rave about the scene behind the wall.
There was no way Manny and Flo were going to let her get away again, it was back to the farm and possibly barn confinement for a few weeks. Maybe they’d even make her detox after this one - the previous intervention hadn’t worked out all that well, Minty had just answered the question “Will you accept the help we’re offering?” with “No.” and another mojito.
Social media is a very strange thing - normally it’s just a series of disconnected voices screaming into an uncaring, unresponsive void but it sometimes throws up a useful set of parts that can be assembled into a whole when needed. And so it was that Manny and Flo managed to piece together a story - with Minty’s drunken testimony and the videos and photos posted on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Buzzfeed ran a piece along the lines of “A tractor drove into a Church Hall, you’ll never guess who was driving it!” and collected a few, so that reduced the research time required a little.
Minty had rambled and babbled about the awful things she’d seen all the way back to the farm, despite Flo’s vocal derision. Eventually Minty had annoyed everyone to the point that Manny agreed to investigate just to shut her up for a bit. The fact she had popped a tab of E on the way wasn’t helping matters.
The masses who had watched Minty plough into the wall (well, a few dozen people) had been from a reasonably well-to-do village and so had all been outfitted with the latest and greatest smartphones, children and adults alike. Some were Android, some were Apple, one even had a Windows Phone. But all of them could take photographs and record HD video, and so within minutes of the, er, incident, the videos had been uploaded to various social media platforms and spread like wildfire.
Flo had managed to grab an old laptop out of the farmer’s bin at one point, and after hooking it up to some power in the barn, splicing the internet feed and installing Linux on it, she was online and surfing. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a cow, and Flo had been writing for several major publications for a number of years without being discovered. She found that adopting a hugely offensive persona tended to result in more commissions from publishers looking to bait for clicks, and that for best results two of her personas should start some kind of spat in order to boost awareness of both from warring factions of media consumers who would take to Twitter in their thousands to raise their side onto a pedestal and throw insults at the others.
It was all very childish, but it brought in the money needed to support Minty’s drinking, Manny’s whiteboard requirements and the rest of the herd’s taste for a higher quality of grass than was readily available in their field.
Manny started with the basics - check news sites and aggregators to look for potential leads. This is when she found the aforementioned Buzzfeed article. She played the YouTube video embedded and scanned up and down the timeline looking for the best freeze frame she could find.
“Flo, look at this!” Manny tapped the screen with her hoof whilst Flo winced at the mud she’d have to clean off it later.
“It’s the Church Hall, half demolished by that drunken sow.”
“No, look inside, see the markings…”
“It’s some questionable paint stains.”
“In exactly the colour of blood?”
“That’s a bit of a stretch.”
“And the fact that you can see the WI rush in and start to try and set fire to it all the moment it was revealed?”
“It’s very far-fetched, Manny… the video is basically just a blur and mostly full of Minty. I will grant you that if you squint you can see something that might be some old women setting fire to things, but also might be some old women fleeing the scene. Minty is not a reliable witness (or indeed reliable in any way) and we need more to go on.”
“OK, so what about some of the photos?”
“Again, blurry due to the fact they were taken by gawping morons with smartphones.”
“Would you at least agree it warrants further investigation?”
“Maybe. We’ll sniff around the WI for a bit but if there’s nothing there we pull the plug. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
The WI had moved their headquarters to Rose’s house for the moment in order to finish the meeting that had had to be hastily adjourned in order to cover up their evil deeds. Luckily, all the important manuscripts had been saved and the details and chants for the ceremony were intact. An emergency addition to the agenda had been tabled as the first item - finding a new location for the summoning.
They mulled over various options when Edwina hit on an excellent idea - use a local farm and transform the bring and buy into a family farm fun day. There would be animal rides, petting zoos, and almost certainly a discreet barn that they could use in private. And if they wanted the goats close at hand, there was one shiningly perfect option… Tramwell Valley Farm!
Chapter Five
Arnold Quartermaine the mobile phone salesman had arrived at his home to a scene of physical and emotional devastation. Not only had his gnomes been destroyed, but so had his brother’s - and by no less an instrument than his own wrecked Audi estate. It was gnome genocide, a shattered field where comrades in arms lay, twisted, broken and shattered. He knew that this was going to be difficult to explain to his brother.
He’d barely looked at the scene for more than a few seconds before Jeremy was outside, shouting and screaming at him, but Arnold didn’t really listen. He was looking at the body of a gnome that had nearly survived - it was almost intact apart from missing one foot. He picked it up, Jeremy still ranting at him about how could he do this, how could he crash that stupid Audi into their priceless gnomes? The gnome’s hat was blue, meaning it was one of Jeremy’s. Jeremy paused in his ranting and started to babble about how the gnomes could be fixed, that they could rebuild the display and it would be better than ever, and this gnome would rule the new world as the sole survivor of the old one…
Arnold threw the gnome to the pavement and smashed it into a hundred pieces. The face just about survived, so he stamped on it for good measure, grinding it into dust before Jeremy’s horrified eyes. As he saw the rage begin to boil in his brother, he knew what to do.
“Jeremy, Mum’s gone, and no number of gnomes are going to bring her back. She might have liked them all those years ago, but she ran off to Barbados with that limbo dancer and she’s not coming back. I’ve accepted it, Dad’s accepted it, and now you have to accept it. She left us.”
Something inside Jeremy finally snapped and he realised the lie he’d been living since 2004 had finally fallen away. He burst out into a fit of sobbing on Arnold’s shoulder, and the two brothers stood there, emotionally connected for the first time since they’d found the note their mother had left them.
Because their mother had loved garden gnomes, Jeremy had retreated into collecting as a way to numb the pain. He might have somehow felt on an unconscious level that if the gnome collection and display was good enough, then maybe she would return and make the family whole again. Their father had wanted rid of all his ex-wife’s possessions and so Jeremy had adopted the gnomes and Arnold had joined in with the display to try and get through to him. He’d eventually given up and just went along with the gnomes to keep the peace. Eventually, he’d grown weary and bitter, and if he was honest with himself now he was absolutely delighted to see the carnage in front of his house, and wished he’d thought of mowing them all down before.
(Point of fact - he had. He’d watched the episode of One Foot In The Grave where Angus Deayton executes 60 garden gnomes with a machine gun and started Googling where to buy an AK-47, but he was absolutely sloshed and couldn’t operate the computer, so he instead got some cat videos, which was a Good Thing because he didn’t end up on a terrorist watchlist.)
Jeremy’s wife had left him a few years before and Arnold’s wife had threatened to leave if he’d continued indulging the gnome obsession, but she never had the heart to - underneath all the bluster, Jeremy was a very confused and broken man who needed his brother. And as she looked out of the window, she felt that she was vindicated, and that life was going to be moving on soon.
Preparations for moving into the new summoning headquarters were underway by the morning. The farmer had agreed to the idea of a family farm fun day in aid of the Church Hall (donations now needed more than ever) and was able to provide the WI with the use of one of his barns, though they would have to share with the goats since one of the barns had recently mysteriously been demolished after his tractor had accidentally started of its own accord and driven into the village ridden by a cow. Hosting the fun day to raise repair funds was the least he could do to make it up, and the Police had made that very clear to him once they’d finished the interview and determined that the whole affair was clearly some kind of unfortunate freak accident.
The investigating officers were outright baffled by the whole incident, but after reviewing the footage from the aforementioned Buzzfeed article and the village’s ridiculously over-intrusive CCTV network they determined that the farmer had nothing to do with the tractor and couldn’t even be charged with negligence since it would be pretty hard to pin the actions of a cow with free will on its owner. The case would never have stood up in court, and even if it had it would have made the force and the village a laughing stock across the world.
In the end they settled for telling the farmer in no uncertain terms that he definitely had something to be sorry for but they couldn’t make anything stick to him in a legal way since the cow was clearly not under his control or direction at the time.
So, as an attempt to soothe over the very angry WI members who no longer had anywhere to hold a bring and buy sale, the farmer agreed to the family farm fun day and made some space in the barn in the least bad state of repair. The goats wouldn’t mind, they were already better off than the sheep who had been moved into the one next door to share with the cows.
The cows and the sheep divided the barn between them, mostly because Leona was threatening the cows with a Japanese worry ball in a sock. The sheep set up their meditation circle and shrine and Flo had to run an extra-long ethernet cable for her laptop. The sheep tried to negotiate for her to stream calming music and Tibetan bells for them, but Flo was having none of this and demanded Led Zeppelin. Eventually a compromise was reached whereby Flo was allowed Led Zeppelin outside of meditation times, but during those she had to switch over to ambient sounds like waterfalls or Brian Eno.
Manny started work on a periscope-like contraption that would allow the cows to spy on proceedings in the next barn over. She salvaged some mirrors from the farmer’s piles of junk, some tubing that Flo could weld them into and some tracks and bearings that the contraption could slide along. Soon, she was peeping into the WI’s affairs, though there was nothing out of the ordinary going on yet. The women were assembling tombola drums and cake stands in an oddly haphazard way - almost like there was some form of mass confusion among them.
Gary’s mind was not on mental manipulation of the WI at this particular moment, which led to a bit of confusion and doubt in their minds. Was this really a good idea? Should they really open a gateway to allow the Massed Forces of Darkness to rampage into their world?
The reason Gary’s mind was elsewhere at this point was another demon called Dave.
“Gary, you’re a fucking demon. Stop acting like a project manager!”
“OK, Dave, I am listening to your contribution.”
“Don’t start that non-confrontational sharing bullshit with me. We are 8 foot tall infernal creatures from a fiery dimension where we’ve destroyed all other lifeforms. Project management is not what we do. Spreading chaos, discord and death is what we do. There should be a colossal rush of screaming death-bringers through that portal, not a systematic queue of neutered fucking poodles!”
“Dave…”
“Using my name repeatedly is a psychological technique designed to build rapport and it won’t work on me because if you try it again I will rip your head off and shit down your throat.”
“I have taken your concerns on board…”
Gary couldn’t help squeaking at the end of that sentence and he knew that Dave would take this as a sign of weakness. He drew himself up to his full height and said what he knew needed to be said.
“Very well. We will settle this with trial by combat.”
Demonic trial by combat is a messy and destructive affair. The crowds pack out the arena and the competitors undertake a series of tests of speed, strength and combative ability - normally culminating in defeat but only very rarely death, and even then it was mostly accidental rather than deliberate. For the first round, there’s a brief ceremony of sword-crossing to demonstrate that the contestants intend to compete in an honourable way.
The Master of Trials offered the ceremonial sabres and the contestants took them and bowed to him and each other. They turned and walked to their positions for the commencement of the duelling, the crowds roaring and screaming for the first round of the tournament. The Master turned to the table behind him to retrieve the bell he would need to ring when suddenly the crowd gasped and fell silent.
Gary had spun around and plunged his sword into Dave’s back and straight through his heart. Dave had fallen to his knees and slumped onto his face, dead within seconds.
“I think we’ve settled that. Any more questions?”
With Gary able to renew his concentration, the WI suddenly became far more committed to what they were doing. They had mostly been ambling around and doing the non-evil jobs. Even Rose had decided to set up the board with the amusing painting that people stick their heads through rather than set up the ritual slaughtering apparatus. The iron device was not dissimilar to an Iron Maiden, but looked a lot nastier. It really was an awful machine, and possibly far beyond what this book should really be describing. The reason it hadn’t been in the Church Hall when the fire consumed the rest of their toolkit was because they weren’t entirely sure they should be using it.
The Device, as it shall henceforth be known, had been found along with the other tools and the manuscripts in a walled up vault in a disused monastery in Wales many years before and passed through the hands of a number of private collectors. It had taken years of painstaking research to find the last resting place of the collection - assembled by none other than John Dee of the Elizabethan court. He had sought out the items as part of his investigations into magic and been horrified by them, directing them to be put beyond any possible use by curious souls.
It had crossed his mind to destroy the devices, possibly publicly, as a demonstration of the danger of following the paths they led down, but he could never bring himself to do it. It was one of his greatest regrets, and on his deathbed he nearly gave the instruction that the vault should be opened and the contents destroyed, but before he could finish a sudden fit overcame him and he passed away. Those who were with him were terrified that a malevolent force had intervened to stop Dee issuing the order and dragged his soul away to ensure the collection’s survival, and it was decided that the artefacts were too dangerous to be allowed out into the world - despite the enormous sums of money they could fetch - but that it was too dangerous for them to be destroyed.
A compromise was reached - all records of the vault were destroyed, but word had spread whilst Dee was alive, and once he was gone a number of secretive occultist sects began to mobilise to try and get their hands on the items that had been sealed away. Several known associates of Dee were kidnapped and interrogated, often tortured, in an attempt to get them to give up the secrets Dee had taken to his grave. This, in turn, aroused the interest of several organisations dedicated to stamping out occultism and what they saw as unholy acts of devil worship, but few were as successful as the society later known as SPID.
Hugo Ford’s battle with the Brotherhood of the New Moon culminated in his unfortunate demise in 1889, just as he managed to locate Dee’s Forbidden Collection with the express intention of destroying it - combined with the rumours about what became of Dee, the collection’s reputation for having some form of infernal protection was sealed, and Ford’s associates retreated immediately.
Needless to say, Gary might have had something to do with that. But even Gary would have recoiled in horror if he came face-to-face with the reason that Hugo Ford’s body was never recovered.
The demons in the arena had filed out in respectful silence after Gary, escape committee chair, project manager and stickler for detail, had brutally slaughtered his competitor by - very literally - stabbing him in the back. Whilst patient diplomacy was normally Gary’s way, Dave had had that coming for years. He’d been a pain in the arse ever since he joined the committee - he was young, hot-headed and rebellious.
Gary had tolerated his agitation for what he thought was a long time, and indeed it had been a long time at three hundred years. The trial by combat had always been a ruse to get Dave into a position where he could be cut down like an animal in front of anyone else who might have considered following in his hoofprints. If they’d actually gone through with the combat then Dave would have won fairly easily, at thirteen centuries old to Gary’s forty-seven. Sadly the last resort had become necessary and Dave had had to pay the price for his relentless insubordination.
The Master of Trials approached Gary. He was even older at eighty-seven centuries, and rarely offered his great wisdom without request, but this he thought to be an exceptional situation.
“You realise you’ve just galvanised every other challenger? Before you might have had a few isolated individuals who wanted the power for themselves, but after this they’ll likely just get over their differences so they can try and depose you with an anybody-but-Gary candidate.”
“I realise, Master. But I couldn’t let the insubordination go on - apart from fomenting discord he was just so damn annoying. And if everything goes to plan in the next few days there’ll be no need for a revolution as we pour out into the sunlight.”
“And if you fail?”
“I have looked at my people labouring under the dark and smoky skies of this world for far too long. If I fail, I shall step aside to let a new leader take my place.”
“Very well. But remember this - you will have accelerated any plans against you that might have been forming. Watch your back for the next few days.”
“Thank you for your counsel, Master.”
“You are welcome. Now, give me a hand with Dave - if you get the sword out I’ll send it for cleaning and then we can probably dump the body in that lava pit over there…”
SPID - the Society for Paranormal Investigation and Detection - had formed out of the ashes of Hugo Ford’s expedition of 1889, since everyone fancied continuing to wield the power and influence of stopping evildoing within the Empire, but nobody fancied sharing Hugo’s dreadful fate. They would continue Hugo’s crusade, tucked safely away behind desks, sat in comfy chairs with nice views out of their plush office windows. It was the least they were owed after having to see their friend shredded before their very eyes, not to mention the smoke that poured out of his lifeless body and formed a horned face full of malevolence.
It was the Device that had claimed Hugo and used his life essence to rip a small hole in the fabric of reality - a hole which could be easily stretched by someone with the appropriate incantations and ceremonies, but which simply snapped closed again before the astonished faces of the assembled expedition.
Gary’s previous attempts to get the gateway opened had all failed because of incompetence on the part of the cults, but this one wasn’t even planned on the other side and so was doomed to failure from the beginning. All that ended up happening was Gary getting a quick eyeful of the Welsh countryside, which was a surprise but left him with an enduring view of the other side of the divide that drove him onward in his purpose.
Meanwhile SPID had become a looser society that started to dedicate itself more to the advancement of the the careers of its members than to actually investigating and detecting paranormal events. Eventually they reformed themselves into a covert funding body - somewhat like the UK’s Research Councils but on a distinctly less official and yet more powerful footing. They awarded grants to a number of other secretive organisations and people in sheds who thought they could contact aliens.
By 1967, SPID had become a drinking society that occasionally gave some money to conspiracy theorists to justify their continued partying, utterly incapable of defending the empire as their founder would have wished. Had Hugo had a grave, he would have been spinning in it, but the body had gone missing during the time the remainder of the expedition had been running around losing their minds, barfing or passing out.
Unfortunately, one of the 1960s members of SPID - who cannot be named for reasons that should become obvious - had gotten a bit too enthusiastically drunk at a diplomatic reception and spilled a few beans to a young socialite who had been on the arm of another visiting dignitary. They’d had a rather good night of it, all in all, and ended up going home together. The young lady’s date wasn’t best pleased since he’d hired her to make him look respectable and heterosexual, but she refunded half the fee and gave him a small kiss as she left to try and make it up to him. It worked out well for him, though - he’d gone home with a rather dashing young man from the Home Office who he later discreetly moved in with. It worked out less will for SPID, which folded in the wake of the drunk member’s indiscretion.
The socialite had been a splendid evening’s entertainment for the man we shall refer to as Mr. N, and he opened up to her about SPID, wondering whether she might become the first Associate Lady Member. Full membership was men-only, of course, but she might be a rather fun presence at what were increasingly seen as rather stuffy sausage-fests.
It might all have worked out if the awful cow hadn’t disappeared in the middle of the night with a selection of film negatives. The negatives were from a photoshoot carried out by one of Swinging London’s hottest photographers at Mr. N’s last orgy, which had a guest list covering all walks of life and guaranteeing scandal and media coverage for years to come if it ever got out.
There were rock stars (which wasn’t unusual), there were politicians (also not unusual, allegedly), civil servants (slightly more surprising), socialites (many of whom knew and hated Rose) and no members of the aristocracy (for legal reasons). Basically there was a Who’s Who of people who have lots of money and don’t want pictures of them at an orgy making it into the papers for fear of reduced album sales or reduced majorities at the next election.
And that’s where Rose’s stream of money came from… and why she had to institute a selection of protection methods to ensure she remained alive to spend it.
Chapter Six
Flo finished scanning the WI’s activity in the next barn and reported back to Manny and the rest of the herd.
“They’re definitely up to something - the thing they’ve got in there is not a cake stand.”
The rest of the herd rushed forward but Flo batted them away, saying they didn’t want to see the sight. In truth she was unsure she’d manage to forget it.
“Right, ladies - our next task is to infiltrate the barn and gather intelligence. We don’t want to reveal our hoof yet, but we need to start laying groundwork if we’re going to firstly find out what’s going on, and secondly stop it.”
“What if it’s actually a good thing they’re doing?” piped up a voice from the back of the herd.
“Trust me, the device they have in there is doing nothing nice ever, ever, ever. You’ll need strong stomachs to look at it. Next question?”
“Why do we have to stop it?”
“Because the humans have screwed up everything we’ve seen them do so far. Next.”
“Can I wear a black turtleneck?”
“You can wear whatever you want, Minty, because you’re grounded. I’m not having you impersonate a drunken secret agent in a turtleneck and expose us all. And another thing - you’re cut off! No more booze or drugs for you, it’s cold turkey from here on in, and Una will make sure you stay put. Manny will be coordinating, anyone who wants to volunteer for infiltration - follow me and we’ll get ready. Let’s move it!”
The Brotherhood of the New Moon. A secretive occult society founded in the mid 1600s to search for the Forbidden Collection of John Dee and use it for their own, nasty ends. Their core belief was that the only purpose to existence was constant indulgence and pleasure by the elite of a two-tier society. The upper echelons would indulge in the pleasures of food, drink, narcotics and deviant sexual behaviours whilst the underclass would be enslaved to provide for and serve their masters. In other words, not a very nice bunch.
As part of this philosophy, the Brotherhood’s leaders realised they would all be going to Hell were the Christian traditions to prove true at the moment of death. Their plan to deal with this issue was to open the Gates of Hell and allow all the damned to roam the Earth and continue to indulge in the delights. This removed any issues of incarceration post-mortem and provided a new set of people to drink under the table. Obviously, righteous souls would still die and be transported to Heaven, but that would be fine because they would probably have been pretty boring anyway.
Unfortunately for the Brotherhood, this meant they needed the Forbidden Collection, and the founders laid down an edict that the members could indulge in only a limited selection of pleasures until the Gates of Hell had been opened. This stopped the society losing its way by ensuring there was always a better prize on offer.
As an aside, it is probably worth noting at this point that the Brotherhood had been one of Gary’s previous, abortive attempts at portal opening. He used the promise of further narcotics and pleasures of the flesh to lure the members into working through his plan, but found they tended to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory through insisting on adding to ceremonies or changing chants. It was incredibly annoying, because they got within a hair’s breadth of getting the ceremony right several times, only for the drunken idiot in charge to slur a line or arbitrarily change something at the last moment. Clearly this lot weren’t good with following instructions, so Gary decided not to throw good time after bad and tried something new, leaving the Brotherhood at a loose end.
Thing is, once you’ve instilled a religious fervour in a cult, it tends to stick around, even in the absence of demonic mind control. The Brotherhood’s members recruited other members down the ages, normally already wealthy and generally of ill repute by one means or another. They stalked the corridors of power like a bad smell, often whispered of but rarely glimpsed thanks to the serious punishments meted out to members who spoke out of line to outsiders or betrayed the Brotherhood to the authorities.
This was one of the points on which they differed with SPID, which was incredibly touchy-feely and rarely punished its members with anything worse than having to buy a round of shots for the others. And so this is how the Brotherhood of the New Moon survived where SPID became a laughing stock and collapsed after the incident involving Mr. N.
The Brotherhood had been largely dormant for a number of years, but continued to meet every few months to ensure that tabs were kept on the location of the Forbidden Collection and any other groups that might be seeking to locate, use or destroy it. Thanks to the web of connections they had spun, this was relatively easy and was likely to prevent another fiasco along the lines of Hugo Ford and his blundering expedition of righteousness. Little did Hugo know that it was in fact the Brotherhood that had ensured the funding of the expedition as an experiment to see what would happen if someone located the vault and opened it. (Obviously, the expedition was filled with their associates and spies.) Their suspicions were entirely vindicated when poor Hugo marched into the vault and was immediately eaten alive by the worst item in storage there.
And so the Brotherhood decided to safeguard the location of the vault for the moment, until they could decide how best to neutralise the Device. Thanks to their habit of modifying messages and changing meanings at the last moment, this temporary halt morphed into a mission to hide and prevent use of the Collection - which was pretty much exactly the opposite of what they had been founded to do.
It’s remarkably difficult to be stealthy when you’re a cow, covered in black and white splodges and weighing three quarters of a ton. The first order of business for the infiltration party was to cover themselves in mud and hay, which they did by going out into the field and rolling around a bit under cover of darkness. Once they were sufficiently indistinguishable from haystacks, they sneaked around the back of the WI barn base and found a few loose planks so that Ellen could pop her head through and get a good look around, since she had the best night vision.
After Ellen had determined that there was nobody on guard (which was a mistake on the WI’s part, but at least they weren’t incorrigible drunkards like the Brotherhood of the New Moon or Minty) the cows squeezed through the gap in the barn wall to get a better look at the items inside. This ended up not being nearly as stealthy as they hoped, and they actually ended up putting a reasonably cow-shaped hole in the side of the barn.
Ellen switched on her head torch and motioned to her two accomplices to do the same. The three beams of light danced around the darkened space, picking out cake stands, tombola drums and facets of the Device. The shadow it cast looked almost like the head of the titular creature from the film Alien, long and pointed at the back with a jaw of monstrous teeth that had opened to reveal another, smaller jaw with teeth that looked every bit as ferocious as their larger siblings. Had the Device not been made of iron that was covered in a patina of rust, it would have been right at home dribbling acid saliva. As it was, it was made of iron so it couldn’t dribble acid saliva without destroying itself.
The cows had been primed well by Flo, who was with Manny and monitoring the output of a small video camera worn by Ellen. They knew what they were expecting to find and they knew not to touch it.
“bzzztEllenbzzzt” crackled Manny through the headsets “bzzztchuck a cake stand at it!bzzzt”
Ellen looked around, scanning for a likely-looking victim. Ideally, she was looking for something with a reasonable amount of heft but as little organic content as possible - who knew how the Device would react? Her eyes dismissed the ceramics - too many small pieces when they smashed - and alighted on a solid silver cake stand that was just about the right size. She picked it up and felt it - just the right weight, and would be thought stolen if it was damaged and had to be removed.
Drawing back, Ellen motioned to her comrades to be vigilant and lobbed the cake stand right at the Device. What happened next will shock you! (If you are the kind of person who reads badly written internet click-bait. If you’re not, look, just go with it for the moment.)
The Device must have sensed the cake stand coming because it swivelled to catch it in the lesser set of jaws it possessed, biting down hard and releasing purple sparks of electricity. Something must have been wrong, because it almost immediately spat the mangled lump of silver out and almost seemed like it was attempting to cough and splutter. The purple sparks dissipated and the Device gradually settled to sleep again, waiting for another morsel to devour.
“bzzztHuhbzzztwasn’t expecting thatbzzzt”
Chapter Seven
The Device was designed and constructed by the diseased mind of Abdul Alhazred, the Mad Monk, in the late 1090s. A devout worshipper of the Great Old Ones, he had used the ideas recorded in his Necronomicon to devise a mechanism that could rip holes in the fabric of reality when powered by a blood sacrifice. His plan was to rip open a gateway to sunken R’lyeh to summon the sleepers forth to wreak havoc upon the world, but he never got to try it out because he wandered onto a road in front of a horse and cart which moved him closer to his Gods somewhat earlier than he had expected.
Nevertheless, the Device survived, imbued with a strange, malevolant yet primitive intelligence that directed it to attempt to eat anything that came near it. The movements started after Alhazred had tested the jaws on a chicken, and simply became more pronounced and accurate with every further soul they claimed. By the time that the Device had been shipped to Britain in the 1500s and come into the hands of John Dee, it had passed through a series of cults and sects who either never attempted to use it because it was clearly incredibly bad news, or attempted to use it and then were either unwilling or incapable of using it again, because it was Incredibly Bad News indeed.
The Cult of Mandragora made a good go of it all but ended up managing to sink an entire costal town, and one or two of the more disreputable Popes considered using it for disposing of heretics but decided it was going a little far to shred someone into pieces and remove their soul just because they were spouting strange ideas about the Earth orbiting the Sun.
Dee saw the evil that animated the Device and, well, we’ve covered this before. Dee locked it up and threw away the key because Gary was ensuring that it wasn’t going to get destroyed, and eventually it fell into the grubby hands of Rose Booker by way of blackmail.
The WI had considered using the Device but decided against it because it really did not look pleasant and had eaten several leather handbags (actual, genuine Gucci in exactly the way Minty’s wasn’t) right off the shoulders of members who had strayed too close to it. So they packed it off to Rose’s basement and left it there until a drunken cow demolished half their working area and forced them to burn the rest of the building down and leave their tools in the wreckage. Unless they were going to commission new tools from a blacksmith who wouldn’t ask too many questions, they were going to have to go ahead with plan B and use the abominable thing.
There wasn’t time to rethink, there wasn’t time to have new tools made - they had to use the thing they didn’t want to use.
Guess who was making them think this?
Gary could just about cope with making someone who didn’t know what the Device was use it, or making people believe that using it was a last resort, but he’d never managed to make a person who knew what it was and what it did want to use it. They would rather wade around in goat entrails themselves than touch the almost-sentient machine that gobbled up anything that strayed too close. Gary’s working hypothesis was that the human brain hated the very idea of what was happening so much that it could muster the strength to fight even his mental powers.
It was a fascinating phenomenon, and one he would put to the test extensively when his people had overrun the planet and humanity were their playthings.
Flo called the espionage party back to base for a debriefing. After they had recounted their version of events to ensure it matched with the video feed, Flo and Manny began to discuss what the thing was and what it did and why it would go all sparky over a silver cake stand. It was clearly a hideously dangerous item and the WI were definitely up to no good with it, but what was their plan?
Ellen pulled out one of the books she’d picked up whilst they were infiltrating and started flipping through it, looking for good cake recipes. The recipes were pretty strange, to be honest, and she wouldn’t normally have considered putting goat meat into a cake and OH GOODNESS THIS WAS NOT A RECIPE BOOK. She dropped the weighty tome and the other cows looked at her. Manny picked the book up and hoofed through it. Her expression told Flo that she was going to wish she hadn’t gotten involved in all this in the first place.
The cows couldn’t read all the passages that were bookmarked since some of them were in Latin, and everyone had done French, German or Spanish as their GCSE language, but they could read the Old English ones and didn’t like the sound of them one bit. There were discussions on how best to sacrifice animals and people, a selection of demon profiles and something for spotting which element you had just released from your victim (Earth, Air, Fire, Water or Aether.)
Eventually they came to the section that was effectively the instruction manual for the Device - in so much as an evil sentient killing machine needs an instruction manual. It pretty much boiled down to “don’t touch” by way of “don’t approach” and “you really shouldn’t be touching this”.
The instruction manual didn’t dispel the opinion of the cows that the WI were very definitely up to something pretty fishy. The English sections of the manual mostly covered the minutae of various ceremonies, hints and tips and how best to clean up afterwards without being burnt as a witch. Not massively useful for the modern day, where the easiest way to get burnt as a witch or for having forbidden knowledge is to admit that you “work with computers” and brace yourself to be attacked by a mob of peasants asking if you’d mind having a quick look at their phone because it’s not running as fast as it used to, oh and Granny is having terrible trouble with the laptop they bought her and are you able to pop round on Sunday?
It was Nils Bohr who said “anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics does not understand it” and it is not far from this sentiment that the truth of computers lies - anybody who is not utterly shocked that we trust the running of our world to these silicon chumps does not understand them. This was a sentiment shared by a number of members of the Brotherhood of the New Moon, who do not have a website or an email address.
As such it was not easy for Rose to find them in the early 2000s when her research had led her to the Forbidden Collection of John Dee as the most likely route for stopping everyone on BBC One from endlessly telling her to open gateways to Hell. It was playing merry Hell (ha ha!) with her TV viewing and she’d completely lost track of what was going on in Eastenders.
So how did she manage to locate the Brotherhood and blackmail them into giving her the collection?
Well, part of it goes back to the night that Mr. N was indiscreet to Rose about the existence of SPID - for Mr. N was a Brotherhood infiltrator into SPID, and the subjects of the photographs taken at the orgy included a number of high-ranking members of the Brotherhood who feared they would be ruined if their little secrets came out. That had kept Rose safe for the few decades she spent in blissful ignorance of the existence of the Brotherhood, but the story about secret societies and paranormal collections had lingered in the back of her mind.
Then again, it wasn’t like the people in the photographs were wearing ceremonial cloaks - in point of fact the clothes they were wearing were few and far between, and certainly nothing so respectable as a ceremonial cloak from a secret Brotherhood consipring to hide demonic machines from public knowledge and scientific examination, so what else had Rose got on them?
Good question. We’ll come back to that later.
Meanwhile the cows were still trying to work out what the Device was and the WI’s purpose for it… oh, hang on. We haven’t heard from Susan and Nigel the Extroxi recently, have we?
“Susan, I know where I’m going, it’s left at the black hole!”
“I’m just saying - if we had stopped at Alpha Centauri to ask that nice little furry creature for directions, then we’d probably be most of the way there by now.”
“Do you want to drive? If you want to drive, I’ll pull over and you can drive.”
“I don’t want to drive, you know how much I hate the gearbox on this thing!”
“Oh, here we go again, the bloody gearbox, Zarquon forbid that I get to forget how much you hate the gearbox…”
On second thoughts, let’s leave them alone for the moment to sort a few things out. In point of fact, Nigel should have gone right at the black hole, and is as we speak heading for the Horsehead Nebula. Which he’s going to discover is not a very nice neighbourhood at this time of night.
Anyway, the cows were still trying to work out what the what the Device was and why the WI had it.
“Oooh, is that a cocktail recipe book? Gimme!” shouted Minty as she tottered towards a visibly shocked Manny.
“No, Minty, it is not. It’s full of… disturbing things.”
“Bet that’s just a tasty cocktail and you don’t want me to have it!”
“Una!” cried Manny, holding the book as far as possible from the rapidly-sobering idiot waving her hoofs around like she’d got BSE.
Una galloped over and sat on Minty, pinning her to the ground beneath a sizeable bulk.
“I say, unhand me, madam! Take your bum out of my face!”
“Stay right there, Minty. Don’t make me wiggle.”
“I have neeeeever in my life been subject to such outraaaaaage!”
Whilst Minty was subdued, Flo, Manny and Ellen could continue their study of the instruction manual for the Device, looking for clues to what the WI were planning to do with it. To say the least, they weren’t overly enthusiastic about the potential for the sausage roll baking Satanists to sacrifice a selection of local residents and use their souls to tear a hole in several of the dimensions making up our universe. The deductive process took a good half hour and required Manny, Flo and Ellen to drag out the old flipchart they’d found abandoned at the bottom of one of their fields and decided to keep for when they had murder mystery evenings and Flo wanted to pretend to be in an American cop show.
The flipchart had ended up dumped in the field after a strategy away day for a selection of local managers of franchised sandwich shop outlets of a particular chain that is highly successful and well-known but not mentionable in this story for legal reasons pertaining to a strategy away day that got a bit out of hand.
It is absolutely certain that in no way did a selection of local franchised sandwich shop managers steal a flipchart and a selection of wheeled chairs from their conference centre in Greater Congleton Abbey and make an ersatz surfing platform which they took turns climbing onto and riding down hills in the local countryside. All was well and good until Jason Fisher bet Mike Phillips that he couldn’t surf down that hill over there and Mike accepted the bet, surfed down the hill and smashed through the hedgerow at the bottom of a field towards his untimely demise. He survived the crash but was trampled by the cow he startled.
Minty wasn’t happy that the idiot in the shiny suit flew across the hedge in her end of the field but was willing to overlook it until he started laughing at her new bikini.
Then she got a bit cross, and that’s how a franchised sandwich shop manager was beaten to death by a cow in a bikini who had just taken four lines of coke.
“Over there, over there, Nigel!”
“Yes! Told you I knew where I was going!”
“Head for the red one, there’s no parking on the one that looks like a blue marble.”
“How will we get across?”
“We could take a bus!”
“There’s no bus service from Mars to Earth.”
“Bloody backwater. If push comes to shove, park on some double yellows and when we see a traffic warden I’ll keep looking whilst you drive round the solar system a few times.”
“Or we could shoot the traffic warden.”
“We could…”
“But that’s a last resort.”
“Absolutely.”
“Yeah, just a last resort.”
Time passed.
“Juuust a last resort…”
Death cut an imposing figure in the whole cape-and-scythe garb as he hiked up a Welsh hillside in the wind and the rain to sort out the mess that had been left for him to clear up. He had no idea why that idiot Alhazred had built the stupid thing, and it was about the messiest of the various ways that humans could die for him. Large amounts of paperwork about why there was no soul to bring home for the Archives, and no end of entrails to sweep up. Obviously, he was the Pale Reaper, the Angel of Death, he wasn’t under any obligation to tidy up after a passing-on, at least that was what his therapist kept saying.
It was very much one thing for her to sit there and say that, quite another to be in the field like he was, day in, day out.
In this particular case, the jaws had comprehensively punctured Hugo Ford, but only left a small lump of entrail visible. Death decided to indulge his morbid curiosity and extended a long, bony finger and a stubby, bony thumb. He gently grasped the piece of small intestine that poked out of one of the gashes across the explorer’s chest.
With a small pang of guilt, but only a small one, Death - Bringer of Death and Gatekeeper of the Underworld - started to pull. The gooey pink tube slid smoothly out of the abdominal cavity like an unfilled sausage skin. And continued to slide out.
Death took a step back and held the tension on the intestinal tract, but with no sign of stopping the nasty cable kept coming. Another step. Another.
The gelatinous rope ran out after 7.4 meters. Death gave a small tug and Hugo Ford fell ignominiously out of the jaws of The Device, landing with a thud, face down, on the muddy hillside outside the vault. The Reaper sighed and looked at the scene in front of him - a wet field with a dodgy-looking collection of old rubbish (incorporating the most perverse and devious mechanism ever created) inside a damp stone shack, with a corpse lying in front of it and a string of intestines trailing out to his hand.
WHY DO I DO THIS SHIT?
Death, Angel of Destruction, went to look for a broom.
Chapter Eight
It did not feature in Gary’s plans for the WI that one of them should own a small row of holiday cottages east of the village of Little Congleton Abbey. But own a small row of holiday cottages Edwina Fenchurch-Weston did - she had always had an eye for a good investment, which is why she was the treasurer of the WI, investing the funds in safe places. Tobacco, oil, arms… they’d all done pretty well out of her management, and owning a controlling stake in a boutique assault rifle manufacturer had never hurt.
But after her husband, God rest his soul, had been found dead in Kenya four months after his mysterious disappearance from Little Congleton Abbey, she had fully inherited his half of the joint estate and used the money and a little downsizing of the family mansion to buy a row of holiday cottages (previously used to house miners) which she refurbished and let to holidaymakers at truly incredible rates. People paid them of course, and it was no surprise when the cottages overlooked the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that was Tramwell Valley. It even had a little farm in the bottom.
Once in a while a forgetful bunch of holidaymakers would leave a suitcase behind, and Edwina would hold onto it for a few weeks until she had one of those evenings, got utterly sloshed on her favourite Argentinan Malbec and opened the suitcase to go through her ex-guests’ most intimate secrets. The best one had been a couple of years back, when she found a full-body fursuit. That in and of itself was fun, but the fact it had been a lobster fursuit (carapace-suit?) had just made it all the better.
Naturally, she would use anything she found to blackmail the owner of the suitcase. Often they just told her to fuck off and refused to pay, and in all honesty there was very little she could do to force them - “Local woman owns neglige” is hardly the stuff scandals are made of. But once in a while a prominent talent show judge left a lobster fursuit in her cottage and the WI’s coffers were £100,000 better off for its return.
But the latest suitcase was different. As Edwina tottered over to it, wobbling like Minty after a tab of LSD, she noticed that there was no obvious zip. In fact, there was no obvious way to open it at all. Or even an obvious seam. It was a rounded cuboid, about the size of four large cornflake boxes stacked on top of each other, made of a slightly grey-silver metal that wasn’t nearly as cold to the touch as it should have been. Edwina ran her hand over it and picked up a slight electric charge, throbbing and twitching around her nails and through her fingertips.
She snatched her hand away as the throbbing grew to a vibration and finally a spark. Puzzling little box, almost like it wasn’t of this Earth. Now, who was the owner, totter over to the ledger, flip flip flip… Susan and Nigel Extroxi. Hmm, wonder where that name comes from? Address…
…seven indeciperable symbols, almost constellation-like. How the hell had she missed that on the booking form?
There was no doubt after the brainstorming session - the Device was Very Bad News Indeed and the cows resolved that it must be destroyed.
Minty struggled under Una’s not inconsiderable bulk, but was resigned to the fact she was going nowhere and so retreated into a sort of contractual obligation struggling and the occasional outburst about outrages and dreadful manners and couldn’t she just have one little G&T?
Manny and Flo were deciding on the plan for destroying the Device. Manny was in favour of pushing it into a lake, Flo was going a little further and suggesting they ship it to Mexico by airmail and stage a plane crash. In fairness, they suspected the Device would almost certainly make the plane crash of its own accord, but there was no sense in doing things by halves.
It would not be unfair to say that Flo had become slightly hysterical by the revelation of the Device’s purpose and may not have been in her right mind when she suggested sabotaging a plane.
“Flo, you’re hysterical. Snap out of it!”
“I am NOT hysterical, YOU are being unreasonably laissez-faire about a giant evil machine!”
Manny grabbed a nearby pail of water and dumped it over Flo. As she stood there, dripping and furious, her eyes suddenly softened as realisation dawned and she snapped back to reality.
“I guess we push it into a lake then?”
Ellen stepped in to offer a suggestion.
“What if we concreted it into a disused mine shaft?”
“Oooh, that’s a good one!”
“I know, right?”
“Have we got a disused mine shaft?”
“Plenty. All we need is someone mad enough to drive the digger.”
Ellen looked at Minty.
Flo looked at Minty.
Manny looked at Minty.
Una stood up and looked at Minty.
Minty pulled herself together and looked at the assembled crowd. She had a feeling things weren’t going to go so well, given that only a few hours ago she’d been cut off and now Manny was reaching for the secret stash of Vermouth that Minty thought nobody else knew about.
Gary sensed something, something new. It was as it somebody had lifted a veil and revealed something that he suddenly desired with every fibre of his being. He hadn’t felt this way since Apple’s last iPhone announcement (which, incidentally, he was going to miss when he subjugated the peasants of the target dimension and had to destroy their entire communication infrastructure to ensure they couldn’t coordinate an uprising).
It was no coincidence that Edwina had just drunkenly taken an arc welder to the unusual object that Susan and Nigel had left behind in their holiday cottage. The sledgehammer had done nothing, the axe had done nothing, and the acid had burnt a hole in her remarkably expensive Persian rug, which she was of a good mind to charge Susan and Nigel Extroxi for, if she ever worked out what the address they had left was.
But Gary’s horns were twitching, his nostrils were flaring, his entire body was tingling with an…
tici…
…pation. There was something so wonderful and amazing on the other side of the divide between worlds that he just had to know what it was, had to examine it through the eyes of one of his servants. He closed his eyes and concentrated - there - just there - one was nearby. He pushed gently at the walls of reality, made of little more than plasterboard at this point, and looked through Edwina’s eyes.
Edwina felt an odd twinge in the back of her head, almost like something was burrowing in through her skull, towards her eyes. It hurt, it hurt so badly, a burning pain that stung through her brain like superheated knitting needles…
And suddenly Edwina wasn’t there, she was paused, backgrounded, suspended, hidden. The entity that animated the body of Edwina Fenchurch-Weston was now Gary.
He used her hands to pick up the smooth cylindrical object inside the now-disembowelled case, ran her fingers over it, manipulated the sphere on the end, pointed it, squeezed and saw his own face through a rip in the fabric of reality. Oh, he’d heard of these things, but those devious little Extroxi shits had always kept them hidden from his kind in insulated cases.
“Brothers,” he announced to the other demons who were milling about whilst the meeting was adjourned, “we can dispense with the sacrifices. Something rather wonderful has just come into the hands I control. Rework the Gantt chart, the project completion is being brought forward by ten days. Announce the new date immediately, tell the gateway room to finish essential preparations for a soft open tomorrow. Ben, what have I told you about picking your nose? And to do it with a custard cream, really…”
But it didn’t matter. Snot or no snot, his kind would swarm into the light tomorrow morning, and there would be no time for anyone to plot against him.
Edwina’s experience of being backgrounded in her own mind was somewhat surreal. It was as if the entirety of the world accelerated around her and became a blur, largely magenta but with streaks of taupe. It span clockwise until it became a solid smear of colour, then it seemed to imperceptibly change direction and decelerate from the anticlockwise spin.
“Did you hear me?! Fucking hop it!”
Edwina was stood in a field with smoking craters all around her whilst a cow bellowed onscenities at her. Her mind snapped and her body screamed an infinite, detached scream as the world melted.
We’ll come back to the events leading up to that scream at the appropriate juncture, in the fullness of time.
Chapter Nine
The cows were desperate to be rid of the Device. And as the saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Which is why, in the middle of the night on top of the nearby hill, Flo was tending to the concrete mixer and Ellen and Manny were waving spotlights around, whilst down the hill at the barn, Minty was on a Vermouth drip and Una was hot wiring the digger with the nice big clamp attachments.
“bzzztCome in Una, over.bzzzt”
“bzzztReading you loud and clear, over.bzzzt”
“bzzztConcrete’s cooked, ready when you are, out.bzzzt”
Una sparked the wire against the steering column and the digger roared into life, waking the farmer up with a jolt. He fell out of bed in his hurry to get outside and stop the thieving little turds who were making off with his heavy machinery - or at least to make a show of trying to stop them whilst recording a bit of footage that would be useful for claiming on his rather generous new-for-old insurance policy.
Minty stopped supping on the Vermouth and flailed as she climbed up on to the digger and looked over the controls. Why, oh why, oh why had she let the others talk her into doing this? Her fur coat tangled around the levers as she jabbed ineffectually at them with her hooves. Yes, it was her that had caused all this mess and yes, she was the one who had put the herd in danger, but surely this was all the more reason for her to not do the driving when they were putting an ancient death machine in a mineshaft and concreting over it?
But there was no more time for talking. Minty found the lever she needed and the digger lurched forward towards the barn that contained the WI’s careful preparations. Manny had calculated the exact position of the Device and chalked Minty a target on the barn wall. No turning back. Minty gunned the engine and the digger’s giant metal claws smashed through the rotting woodwork like giant metal claws through rotting wood. Another lever and the claws opened - just a little bit closer, wait for the sparks…
First contact between digger and Device was like a firework display lighting up the night with explosions of blue electricity arcing through the air and grounding on anything nearby. Minty pressed back into the cab, trying to stay as far away as she could, but the discharges were making her fur coat stand on end and there was a disturbing sizzling on the surface of the cab window.
Throwing the lever to clamp down on the Device, Minty fumbled with the gearbox and somehow engaged reverse. She stamped on the accelerator and dragged the lightshow backwards up the hill as fast as the engine would take her, with Una chasing a safe distance behind.
“This is nooooot my idea of a big night out! I demand to snort MDMA off a stripper’s abs!”
Ellen and Manny guided Minty towards the mineshaft with their spotlights, in as much as Minty could ever be guided anywhere, and shouted updates to Flo.
“30 metres! 25 metres!”
Flo readied the concrete mixer and rolled her hoof around the drop control.
“15 metres!”
Nearly.
“10 metres!”
The plan was for Minty to drag the Device up the hill, then manoeuvre between Ellen and Manny so that the digger’s wheels went either side of the opening to the mineshaft and the Device dropped straight down. Release digger clamps, pour concrete, job’s a good’un.
This was not quite what actually happened.
Minty did not have one job. She had two. She actually managed the first part quite remarkably well, in that a drunk cow in a fur coat managed to back a digger up a hill dragging an abomination accurately enough that she drove right over the mineshaft and the Device and clamps dropped in. But this was a run of luck that could never continue, and at this point, Minty had one job.
The lever that released the clamps and the lever that raised the bucket were right next to each other and Minty pulled the wrong one.
The digger began to raise its bucket, but given that said bucket was stuck down a mineshaft and clamped around a couple of tons of demonically possessed iron, well, that wasn’t going to happen.
But to the credit of the digger, the hydraulics were willing to give it a damn good shot and it began to rise. Shortly thereafter the clamps stuck on the side of the shaft and the digger itself started to point itself skywards. Minty panicked and leapt out of the cab and on to the concrete mixer. Flo, in turn, leapt away from the concrete mixer as Minty’s bulk landed on the back end and it tipped forwards as she tried to take another jump.
The concrete mixer joined the digger in the opening to the mineshaft and most of the contents sloshed out over the clamps and the Device. Not a solid block like the cows had intended, but certainly enough to jam the whole sorry sight into the shaft and away from use for at least a few weeks.
But the concrete mixer wasn’t switched off and had a rapidly overheating motor unstoppably forcing against an immovable digger. Smoke billowed forth and after a few seconds Ellen saw the first flickering of a flame.
“Everyone back!”
The four cows scrambled onto their hooves and scattered as the farmer strode up the hill and looked on in horror as some of his herd ran away after crashing thousands of pounds of farm machinery into a mineshaft. His digger straightened up into the air and the flames licking up from the concrete mixer ignited the fuel tank as he fell to his knees cursing the cows.
PC Rick Vine was unlucky enough to be on duty at the Little Congleton Abbey Police Station that night and took the panicked and borderline unintelligible call from the farmer screaming something a bit racist about who had set some of his farm equipment on fire. PC Vine was fairly young, not even 30, and thought that maybe this was one of the older members of the force playing a bit of a prank on him. In fairness, he was not the sharpest tool in the box but was basically the spitting image of the tall, dark and handsome policeman who turns up in adult movies before getting his kit off and having it away with the protagonist, which made him perfect to have on duty for the tourist season.
Sadly, it did not make him perfect to have on duty when a hysterical farmer alerted the local constabulary to an existential threat to all mankind. PC Vine, to his credit, did go and investigate the situation but upon arrival he immediately jumped to one conclusion too many and arrested the farmer for arson and a selection of other crimes that he couldn’t remember the technical terms for at that precise moment. He was absolutely sure that there were some other offences than arson involved in turning a digger into a giant flaming torch on a hillside.
Meanwhile, back at the barn, Minty was settling for snorting a line of MDMA off Leona whilst she tried to get some sleep. Leona’s wool kept absorbing the powder and so Minty kept pouring more on. Eventually she just licked as much as she could off before Leona punched her square in the jaw.
Thankfully for Minty she rolled at the right time and got away without a broken jaw, but since it now hurt a bit she popped a few oxycodones for good measure and went to stare at a particularly knotty plank of wood.
Flo, Ellen and Manny kicked back and relaxed, satisfied with a job well done and blissfully ignorant of the fact that they had made absolutely sweet fuck all difference to the WI’s plans now that the Extroxi Dimensional Remote was in play.
In Edwina’s house, Gary used Edwina’s hands to feel the Dimensional Remote and let out a blood-curdling laugh of triumph.
In Rose’s house, the rest of the WI were sharing a couple of nice bottles of sherry and a few male prostitutes.
In a Police cell, the farmer ranted incoherently at a nonplussed PC Vine.
In London, about halfway up Regent Street, Susan and Nigel were vaporising an innocent traffic warden after he tried to ticket their saucer for double-parking when it landed on top of a Ferrari.
Chapter Ten
“Leave him, Nigel, he’s not worth it!” cried Susan whilst Nigel threatened the traffic warden with a handheld disintegration maser.
If the traffic warden had actually seen what had happened without having chunks of his vision search-and-replaced by an Extroxi perception filter, he’d just have run for the hills screaming and lived unhingedly ever after. But the perception filter replaced the aliens with a regular Essex couple, who spoke regular Essex phrases, and who had just managed to crush a redundantly-named but hugely valuable Ferrari LaFerrari with their white Range Rover Evoque.
The Ferrari LaFerrari belonged to a famous musician and car collector who had inexplicably parked a hideously expensive non-road-legal car on Regent Street in order to gain more followers on Instagram ahead of launching his new coffee table book of classic gear knob design, 1945-2015. In order to avoid being seen as promoting this unrelated and competing book, the musician’s name shall not be mentioned.
At 23:22, the traffic warden responded to seeing a Chelsea Tractor causing hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage by attempting to ticket it for double parking, which drew Nigel’s attention.
“Oi mate! Have a banana!”
(The translator in the perception filter was not good. Nigel had just asked what the traffic warden thought he was doing.)
“Sir, you have parked your car illegally…”
It was at this point that Nigel pulled the disintegration maser and Susan appeared to shout to Nigel to “leave him”, but sadly the translator was once again failing to translate Susan’s actual words - “Oh, just vaporise the little shit already!”
The first traffic warden could be said to have attracted the attention of the Extroxi, but it was the second who really got up their noses. By, for starters, marching over to a couple who had just shot her colleague and attempting to enforce the ticket he had died trying to serve. As a gambit, this was spectacularly poor thinking and could probably be compared to the moment when someone at the BBC said “Let’s make a game show based on a four foot high robotic bunny!”
After disintegrating two traffic wardens, Nigel had well and truly got the taste for it and Susan climbed into the driving seat of the saucer and flew it around Central London for a while whilst Nigel rode shotgun - in a pretty literal way.
Let us turn to an anonymised thread from Twitter - the first time a member of the public outside of Little Congleton Abbey knew something was wrong.
User A: shit man a flying saucer is shooting traffic wardens #wtf #london
User B: @userA Are you high?
User A: @userB no man i swear it’s true regent street
User C: @userA serves them right working for the fascist state
User B: @userC @userA Christ on a pogo stick, shut up with calling everything fascist! #moron
User A: @userB @userC comeon man, let him express hisself
User B: @userA @userC Fine, but only because he’s legally allowed to have shit for brains.
User C: @userB @userA why is you followin me anyway, your my probation officer!!! #notok
User B: @userC “You’re”. See you on Monday and try not to smell of weed this time.
Police response units were soon on the scene, followed shortly after by news crews, and shortly after that by the people who put up tents so that the Police can work on the crime scene without the news crews filming them doing it. The entirety of Central London went into lockdown and panic spread quickly. The broadcast media soon pre-empted regular news programming for live coverage of the situation - the BBC News Channel interrupted a pre-recorded arts interview at 23:41.
“We interrupt this programme to bring you some breaking news, there is currently an ongoing terrorist situation in Central London. Details are currently scarce but we have confirmed multiple casualties and that a vehicle is driving around and that one or more of the occupants is armed and shooting. Police are urging everyone in the area to stay indoors. We go live to aerial footage…”
At 23:36, a Police intercept unit thought they had the Range Rover cornered and prepared to fire on the occupants when it reached their roadblock. To their horror, it passed straight through them and continued down the road.
At 23:47, a second roadblock failed to stop the Range Rover.
At 23:55, Nigel concluded he had shot all the traffic wardens he was going to find. Susan suggested they change the cloaking settings on the saucer to throw off the Police tailing them, but whilst she looked through the flight system’s menus, she clipped a lamp post.
At 23:56, on aerial footage being broadcast live on TV, a white Range Rover Evoque clipped a lamp post, spun in an improbable manner and crashed into a branch of Topshop. With a strange flickering, it started to look at first a bit fuzzy, but the fuzz soon reformed into the shape of a flying saucer.
At 23:57, Susan and Nigel made a run for it with the saucer’s emergency packs, cloaking themselves as a respectable mid-30s hipster couple and disappearing into the crowd.
At 23:58, the Prime Minister ordered the use of a set of emergency protocols that barely anyone knew existed.
At 00:01, a state of emergency was declared.
At 00:04, the BBC News Channel switched to showing a pre-recorded arts interview. All other channels showing live coverage followed suit and returned to regular, unalarming programming within 3 minutes.
At 00:09, every on-call squaddie within 100 miles of Westminster got a rude awakening.
At 00:36, every BBC TV channel joined a simulcast where the duty newsreader announced in a shaky voice “This is the BBC from London. An unprecedented situation has arisen and Her Majesty’s Government has invoked emergency powers in the interest of public safety. Here is the latest information…”
At the same time, all other UK TV channels ceased broadcasting and carried a static caption instructing viewers to switch to a BBC channel for an important announcement.
At 02:14, a convoy of official Jaguars set off from the headquarters of the Brotherhood of the New Moon. Flanked by a Police escort they headed out of the otherwise closed-off city and towards Little Congleton Abbey.
At 06:32, PC Vine arrived at his home and found his boyfriend of three years waiting for him. He began to loosen his tie and started… no, wait, this is NOT that kind of story. Get a room, Rick and Rick’s boyfriend. Oh, you have several in your house already? Right, well, carry on. We’ll leave you alone.
At 08:48, the eyes of the world were on London and Rose Booker couldn’t believe her luck.
Can we just take a moment to do a little bit of scene-setting here? OK, cool, thank you. Please imagine a barn full of drunk cows and Zen sheep high on life bouncing around to a selection of excellent acid house tunes, as spun by Leona. That’s what went on all night. Clear? Cool, now we can cut to the scene of devastation after an all night illegal rave held by some farm animals who are now waking up ridiculously hungover. Some of them in piles of their own vomit.
Nobody died. This was not a lethal rave.
“Please, somebody kill me…” slurred Manny as she woke up and suddenly felt the weight of the world press down on her head, trying to turn her brain to mush and squash it out through her ears and nose.
“Aaaaaaaagh my eyes! I can’t see!”
“Take the blanket off your head, Flo.”
“What was it that we drank last night?”
“Everything. I think we were on diesel mojitos by 5am.”
“Is Minty still alive?”
Minty was, as previously indicated, alive. She was also, as not previously indicated, absolutely fine and up and about already.
“Moooooorrrrrrning everyone!”
“Quiet! Can’t you see we’re dying here?”
“Absolutely not, all you need is a little morning pick-me-up. Here, take one of the yellow pills, two of the blue and sniff a spoonful of the green crystals.”
The concoction had stood the test of time, Minty having honed it through a thousand painful morning-afters. A potent cocktail of uppers, downers and a little something for the subsequent gastric distress. The other cows began to come around, much to the chagrin of the sheep who had partied in an entirely dry and safe-to-drive-home-afterward manner and were entirely unhappy about losing their smugness rights.
Nobody was even thinking about the WI and how their plans were utterly ruined. Nobody thought it was worth thinking about, given that everything was clearly all absolutely fine, maybe even fine enough to go and have a picnic next to the still-smouldering remains of the digger and drink lemonade and think of names for the new artwork they had created and were going to sell for a lot of money by pretending it was a genuine Banksy.
Meanwhile the WI were processing up the hill towards the “genuine Banksy” dressed in white silken robes (though goodness alone knew why Rose demanded to bring a genuine Gucci handbag - it would get filthy!) and chanting unearthly chants, led by Edwina, who was holding aloft the Extroxi dimensional remote. Gary was wearing Edwina like a glove - in a metaphorical and possibly spiritual sense - and piloting her towards the entombed Device where there were already ripples in the walls between the worlds. He had felt that something had been done to it, but no matter. At this point the only use for it was to provide additional feedback when he was getting close to the right setting on the remote.
The operation of preparing to invade Earth had kicked into high gear for the previous night - not that night was really a concept that Gary’s dimension really went in for, what with it being an infinite labyrinth of caves and lava. The demons had had to invent time based on lava flows in order to allow a Gantt chart to actually have meaning - which was proof that their dimension was not actually Hell itself, for in Hell itself any attempt to actually measure time is doomed to failure since it actually doesn’t exist there. In Gary’s dimension time did exist, it was just very shy and retiring and didn’t like being disturbed when people measured it.
Provisions had been collected, forces had been massed and armour and weapons handed out. Gary stood on a long platform in front of hundreds of rows of demons in the largest cavern they had mapped. Behind him was the wall that he would rend out of existence and connect to a leafy hillside in rural England.
“My brothers, we are nearly ready to march!”
The sight was imposing to say the least - thousands of eight-foot-tall creatures wearing plate metal armour and carrying swords that appeared to glow with a horrible, hot light. Nostrils flared and lips were licked. You could cut the tension in the air with a knife. Among the ranks were at least seven would-be usurpers who were close to overthrowing Gary and claiming his chair as their own, but who now had to admit he had pulled an absolute blinder with finding the dimensional remote, and fair play to him he deserved to be where he was for the moment.
Of course they’d still be ready to overthrow him the moment he made even the slightest misstep.
“Today, we leave the tunnels of darkness that we have cowered in. Today, we swarm. Today, we fulfil our birthright, we crush the pitiful little things on the other side of that portal under our heels and take their world for our own!”
The army whooped and cheered, fired up from the pep talk and the battle hormones their brains were secreting. In their adoration, Gary threw his arms back and used Edwina’s fingers to rend spacetime in two. The wall behind him began to glow with indescribable colours and patterns, almost as if an interdimensional analogue television set was having its dial twiddled, being retuned from the drab cavern wall to an episode of Gardeners’ World.
A pinpoint of blinding white appeared in the centre and gradually began to expand.
That seems as good a time as any to return to the early 2000s and consider how Rose Booker blackmailed the Forbidden Collection of John Dee out of the hands of the Brotherhood of the New Moon who are at this very moment running up that hill in order to make a deal with God.
In the early 2000s, Gary had started working on mind-controlling Rose, and afterwards Rose had begun to acquire a sizeable body of occult literature, through which she discovered John Dee’s life’s work. She had come into possession of a few of the scant pieces of paper that referenced the existence and founding of the Brotherhood of the New Moon, and she had made it her mission to locate them and extract the secrets they kept - for there was an item among the Forbidden Collection that she would be keeping very much to herself when she acquired it. Her whole plan hinged on that artefact and on the Brotherhood being utterly ignorant of what it did.
She had spent years wondering if that idiot at the orgy had been telling the truth when he had babbled to her about occult artefacts and the secret societies that sought them or wished to stop others seeking them. As it turned out, it was true! She fished out the negatives from the safe and ran off a few prints of a man who was now a High Court judge, but back then was just a junior barrister who enjoyed interesting activities that involved golf balls and were most definitely not legal to perform on a golf course. From this old acquaintance, Rose had received a brief explanation of the Brotherhood and a few pointers to current members. She’d had to give up the negatives for all the photos the judge appeared in, but no matter. It was almost amusing to see him validate them and then instantly burn them in the ash tray on the table of the restaurant they had discreetly rendezvoused at. His silence from the other members of the Brotherhood was bought with a bit of sleight-of-hand involving his champagne glass and some cyanide.
SPARKLING CYANIDE, read the headline of the next morning’s Sun - the judge was found dead, in disguise, in a private room in a restaurant in London, and the killer had covered their tracks so well that there was no doubt it was the work of a criminal syndicate taking revenge for a previous conviction.
Armed with the secrets she had squeezed from the judge, Rose had gotten herself invited to a few society bashes and ingratiated herself into the affections of an up-and-coming Tory MP called James Milton-Redbridge. Well turned out and terminally posh, James represented a nearby constituency to her base in Little Congleton Abbey and so it couldn’t have been easier to become his official mistress. As it turned out, he and his wife Emily were heavily into polyamory and so there wasn’t even any sneaking around required. It was like shooting fish in a barrel!
Within six months, Rose was spending most weekends with James and Emily in their constituency home and James was occasionally coming to Little Congleton Abbey to see Rose during Parliamentary recesses.
James was a good old-fashioned no-nonsense Tory. Economically liberal, he believed that there wasn’t a problem the free market couldn’t fix. If there was a problem the free market hadn’t fixed, then clearly the free market had not been applied hard enough and the entire sector needed to be deregulated. He was also relatively socially conservative, believing that marriage was a sacred institution that was passed down as the Word of God - though he gave a wide berth to the stuff about not sleeping with women who weren’t his wife. He figured that since his wife could be utterly terrifying when he hadn’t put the bins out and she was fine with it then surely God wouldn’t have too much of an issue, or could easily be negotiated with at the Pearly Gates.
As it happens, James was not a member of the Brotherhood of the New Moon, but he had far more promise than any of their current crop and so was swiftly inducted after he attended a masquerade ball where Rose had ensured he was introduced to the current leadership.
And so James had risen through the ranks of not only the Brotherhood, but also the Tory party. Eventually he was elected leader and had to break things off with Rose for fear of the damage that might be done should his lifestyle hit the front pages. Separately, Emily broke off her other relationships in order to pursue charitable projects and become the dutiful politician’s wife. She hated it, and the marriage fell apart within months of James’ election victory and the move to 10 Downing Street. Not that the world was told - Emily remained trapped in a bubble of loathing for her once-close husband who was now distant and cold. The lying took its toll, and she eventually found release, but only through being admitted to a very specialist mental health clinic.
James gave a number of speeches where he successfully feigned being distraught and promptly launched a campaign to break down the stigma of discussing mental health problems. Emily screamed obscenities at the TV.
Rose only visited Downing Street once, for a private audience with the Prime Minister. It was at that meeting that she laid down her terms - if he did not hand over the Forbidden Collection, she would drive a tank over his career. James reluctantly agreed, but warned Rose that he and the Brotherhood would never give in. Rose blew him a kiss as she left the room.
There were a number of items in the vault that were of dubious provenance and unknown function, but Rose wanted the lot. She needed most of the paraphernalia for the ceremonies to open the gateway, but there was another item that would come in particularly useful later. It was an odd-looking crown that she quietly stuffed in her handbag as the larger items were loaded up and transported to the back room of the Church Hall. The fact it was not the original but a very detailed copy was known only to the Brotherhood, who had laid a few of their own plans.
On one of his visits to Rose’s house, James had stumbled upon the pile of arcane books and paperwork that Rose was using to determine the correct way of using the items he was sworn to protect - inside a large ottoman in the back bedroom. Knowing that it was Rose who had led him into the Brotherhood, he smelled a rat and every time she went to the toilet or for a shower, he would spend a few minutes rifling through the contents of the ottoman.
Somehow, he managed this without alerting Rose to what he was up to. Thanks to a cameraphone snap of a particularly interesting page, the use of the odd-looking crown was revealed to James, and with it Rose’s true intentions.
Chapter Eleven
The sound of the fabric of reality splitting open like a two-litre bottle of fizzy drink would split open a partially-biodegraded cheap plastic supermarket carrier bag was not something anyone was likely to miss, and the sight of the tear opening up over one of the hills in the farmland a few miles away combined with it to ensure that the entire village of Little Congleton Abbey was consumed with panic.
The entire village, except… PC Rick Vine. Who had not had a lot of sleep since he only got home from his overnight shift a few hours ago, and after he got home he’d been, well, busy. But now, snoozing gently, he was rudely awakened by the carrier bag of reality splitting open to let the fizzy drink of terror spill all over the pavement of the world.
Instantly, he was out of bed and getting dressed - his town was in trouble and he would answer the call.
The sound also stirred the collected cows and sheep of the farm, who were busy engaging in a little bit of stress relief by generally wrecking the WI’s preparations for the village fete. Tables kicked over, tombolas kicked over, stocks and buckets of old tomatoes kicked over… well, they were pretty much just kicking everything over and stamping on it. Minty tottered around in her fur coat, “genuine” Gucci handbag helicoptering away as she waved her front legs around madly and swore vengeance against the WI for everything they had put her through and all the valium she had used up trying to keep calm.
The noise that emanated from the top of the hill was, as it turned out, the noise made when two of the omniverse’s tectonic plates are rammed up against each other, and it was deeply unsettling for a herd of cows and a flock of sheep who believed that they had just last night defeated an existential threat to their planet. They piled out of every door, window and hole in the barn and headed for the sculpture they had decided to call “A Fit Of Banditry”.
Upon arriving on the hillside, they were greeted with the sight of the WI chanting and a big hole in the sky through which appeared to be a landscape that approximated Hell, apart from there wasn’t an unsettling sense of timelessness about it. What was unsettling was the army of demons that was massing there and the flaming rocks that were shooting randomly out of it.
“I am having nooooone of this!”
Minty strode up the hill to Edwina Fenchurch-Weston and slapped her hard in the face whilst Flo, Manny and Ellen looked on in shock.
“Whatever you are doing, I demaaaaand you stop right now!”
At this point, the WI stopped chanting and turned to look at Minty in shock as well. Helen Eltham was the first to break the silence.
“Holy fuck, it’s a talking cow!”
Edwina collapsed backwards and dropped the remote, which Minty scooped up and started fiddling with.
“Hooooow do I turn this thing off? I don’t like Game of Thrones and don’t see why I should be fooorced to watch it…”
PC Vine gunned his Police car’s engine and shot over a mini-roundabout with the lights and sirens working overtime. It was only a few miles to the hill he thought was likely to be the source of the disturbance, and luckily he remembered the route from last night. There was no way this was a coincidence.
Sadly Rick did not look nearly as heroic as he thought he did because he was driving a Vauxhall Corsa.
Gary lost connection to Edwina when that stupid cow had hit her in the face. He shook his head and cleared his thoughts, letting his mind control fall away and allowing Edwina’s own consciousness to start running again. She’d be just fine when she came round. Gary bellowed at the massed army and pointed through the portal to the world that would soon be theirs.
“Brothers, our plan is threatened! ATTACK!”
Rose opened her handbag and retrieved the crown, sliding it over her forehead and allowing the odd protrusions to sit gently on her temples, cold iron against her damp brow. She started to form her thoughts and direct her will as she repeated over and over in her head that the demons would obey her, for she was their mistress, and that they would obey her, for she was their mistress…
Minty fiddled with the remote but kept hoofing the wrong buttons and consequently got nowhere with trying to close the portal before the massed army of demons began to spill through into the realm of the light, eyes blinking at the brightness of the morning sun. Roaring and snarling they began to run towards the cows and the WI, but stopped short of actually engaging them.
The strangest part to Manny was that there was a pattern - snarling demon comes through portal, confusion increases, eventually becomes pacified demon stood there looking lost and without purpose in life. This even happened to what she assumed was their leader - the one wearing golden armour as opposed to the other silver breastplates. Eventually a new sense of purpose seemed to dawn on the crowd and they marshalled themselves into lines before collectively going down on one knee and declaring as one:
“We obey you, for you are our master.”
Rose was overjoyed, apart from being misgendered, and laughed manically as she surveyed her army and thought about all the people who she would make pay under the claw of her new regime. But then she heard a voice from behind her that she hadn’t expected to hear ever again.
“Long time, no see, what?”
“James! You there,” she indicated to Gary, “kill him.”
Gary did not move, just knelt in respectful silence with his head bowed. Only then did Rose turn around to see the members of the Brotherhood of the New Moon, headed by James, who was wearing a very fetching crown that was exactly like hers in all respects apart from being an actual occult artefact instead of a cheap knockoff of one.
“You BASTARD! I’ll kill you for this!”
Rose flew at James and knocked him to the ground, dislodging the crown. It bounced away down the hill as both of the conspirators screamed at the potential loss of their dreams. The fight escalated to biting, scratching and other dirty tricks as the WI and the Brotherhood all piled into the brawl. Seeing this on his way up the hill, PC Vine turned on his dashcam and bodycam as he skidded the Corsa to a halt and leapt out, shouting at everyone to calm down until he saw the demons and screamed in the way he was trained not to.
Gary began to come around from the conditioning and thought it would probably be a good idea to get hold of that fucking crown thing before anyone else used it, so he repossessed the unconscious Edwina and woke her with the mental equivalent of a bucket of cold water. Still regaining control over his own body, he sent Edwina chasing after the inconvenient headgear.
As a few of the other demons began to move, he told them to start dealing with the brawl. They strode, more confident with every step, and picked up a struggling human each. After a quick sniff, one decided it had been a long time since breakfast and bit a large chunk out of a mid-ranking cabinet minister. Soon the others were following and the stench of death and raw meat began to waft around.
Minty had tried to run away from this disaster with the rest of the herd, but lost her footing and tripped up. By the oddest stroke of luck she noticed a rather pretty tiara lying in the mud and decided that if it was the end of the world she might as well dress for the occasion. Hauling herself up she donned her crown and lit a spliff that was closer in ancestry to a cigar than a regular cigarette. She tottered back up the hill to see what was going on, inhaling deeply.
Gary started to relax, feeling like everything was going just fine. The other demons did the same, sitting down on the grass, belching and discarding half-eaten corpses. After all, the whole place was rather lovely - it was just so green and comfortable… and why shouldn’t he let that Edwina woman think for herself?
The brawl had largely ceased to be an actual fight between the Brotherhood and the WI after demons had started eating the participants, but it was continuing in a sort of half-hearted way as an attempt to prove the adage about safety in numbers correct in the face of overwhelmingly poor odds. But after the demons started sitting down and stroking the grass, Rose slithered out from under the pile of bodies - some alive, some not so much - and made a break for it down the hill and towards her getaway quadbike. Sadly for her, Una noticed the dash for freedom and decided this was mighty suspicious. Rose didn’t make it to the quadbike because it’s difficult to move when a large cow sits on you and insists that you’re going nowhere.
Minty gazed out at the portal, and the demons, and the mess, and just wished things would go back to normal and the demons would go home. For starters, it was nearly lunchtime, she had a nice bottle of Prosecco chilling in the fridge and she had just re-stuffed her chaise-longue. Did this really have to go on much longer and cut into her valuable drinking time?
(Extracted from PC Rick Vine’s report)
The situation appeared to spontaneously resolve itself when the creatures lost interest in killing people, and started to nonchalantly wander back through the portal. The presumed leader remained seated on the hill until long after all the other creatures had returned.
The Prime Minister began addressing the creature, but it batted him away and that is why he required medical attention, which I summoned immediately, along with backup.
I am unable to explain the sudden escalation or de-escalation, what the creatures were and why one remained behind.
Gary was unhappy. He didn’t think this was a particularly unusual state of mind given that he had just seen his life’s work unravel at the hooves of an example of a species that was clearly not at the top of the food chain on this planet, but he just couldn’t cope with the idea of going home and being deposed as committee chair. It was his chair, and he loved it. Maybe he could stay here?
The body of Edwina Fenchurch-Weston stumbled down the hill and found Una sitting on Rose. A moment passed whilst Edwina’s mind gradually restarted, but Una broke the silence and told Edwina to hop it. Edwina’s glazed eyes seemed to roll around in their sockets and then her mouth opened and produced a garbled slur that sounded like Minty after a few too many Long Island Iced Teas.
“Did you hear me?! Fucking hop it!”
Edwina was stood in a field with smoking craters all around her whilst a cow bellowed onscenities at her. Her mind snapped and her body screamed an infinite, detached scream as the world melted.
Minty tottered over to Gary and sat down next to him, quite hard.
“What’s wrooooong with you? You look like you could do with a hat!”
Minty took the crown off and balanced it on Gary’s head. Gary sat bolt upright and looked for his brothers, just in time to see the portal close as Minty started chewing on the Extroxi dimensional remote. So that was that, it was all over and he was stuck here, alone and… well… frightened. He looked at the thing next to him, the thing that had ruined his life.
“Ohhhhh, still sad even with your hat on? Try thiiiiis!”
Minty held out the cannabis cigar and Gary took it from her. Unsure of what to do, he ate the whole thing in one bite and laid back. The thing was having a go at him, so obviously he had done something wrong, but for the life of him he couldn’t find the will to care inside himself. The thing laid off him after a human came over and clamped some restraints around his wrists. Half walking, half being dragged, he was led to the human’s car and shoved roughly into the back. He made a mental note to complain about that, but forgot almost instantly. He sighed and his scalding breath singed the inside of the human’s car, which just seemed to make the human angrier. What was it saying? Something about going to a station? Was he going on a train?
Epilogue (Reprise)
Minty the Cow sparked up another truly incredible spliff and relaxed onto her chaise longue, reminiscing about the previous few days’ events. She’d been lucky to get out alive, if she was honest with herself. Who would have thought that inventing the Opiatini would have had such incredible and far-reaching effects? And it wasn’t just the village of Little Congleton Abbey that would never be the same again - England would never forget the scandal that erupted, and the World would forever have a new perspective of its place in the cosmos.
The rest of the herd were quietly shuddering in the corner of the field. It would be days, weeks, maybe even months before they got their heads back together again, and Minty counted herself lucky that she’d had the presence of mind to get so colossally baked that her mind could withstand anything that was thrown at it. The Massed Forces of Darkness were a pretty heavy philosophical concept to deal with, and cows were never the best at that kind of thing.
And so it was that one cow, baked up to the nines on the best hash she could steal from the Farmer’s secret greenhouse, reflected on the last few days. Days which had shaken the very foundations of everything the human race believed in up to that point.
(Extracted from PC Rick Vine’s report)
I arrested the remaining creature and escorted it back to Little Congleton Abbey Police Station whilst the backup squads were cleaning up the delinquents at the scene and medical teams were treating the wounded. I did not see the Prime Minister again, nor did I witness him when he allegedly escaped on a quadbike.
(Extracted from The Times, front page)
DEMONS INVADE SMALL ENGLISH FARM
PM INVOLVED AND NOW MISSING
PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED BY ROYAL PREROGATIVE
An invasion of demons began and ended in mysterious circumstances yesterday morning, with Police video evidence seeming to verify that the creatures came from another dimension. The presence of the Prime Minister is unexplained, as it was assumed he was in London dealing with what was previously thought to be a terrorist incident but now appears to be a minor alien incursion. The Prime Minister himself has gone missing, as have several other prominent members of the Government and the Shadow Cabinet. In view of the situation Her Majesty the Queen has dissolved Parliament and is now ruling directly until such time as an election can be held.
Unusual emergency powers used seemingly improperly by the Prime Minister have now been withdrawn and a public inquiry will examine their legitimacy in due course…
(Extracted from the Today programme, BBC Radio 4. John Humphreys interviews a prominent physicist and presenter of science programmes.)
“…this is all a bit ridiculous, isn’t it? I mean, do you really expect us to believe in aliens and other dimensions?”
“Good morning, John, now before I discuss the quantum multiverse I’m going to start by explaining the concept of scientific evidence to you, you fucking knob…”
(Extracted from The Sun, page 3)
Alien abductee Melanie, 18, from Portsmouth, says that our visitors come in peace: “They’re really lovely, like? You just have to get to know them. They love Chardonnay and TOWIE.”
(Headline from The Daily Express, front page)
DID ALIENS KILL DIANA?
Second Epilogue
Minty refused to go to rehab and became an Amy Winehouse tribute act.
Manny accepted a Chair of Maths at Cambridge University and made the ancient institution a laughing stock for having given a teaching position to a cow. Around a millennium of academic tradition collapsed within a decade and the university eventually closed down. The final graduating cohort largely received degrees in Klingon Language Studies.
Flo, Una, Ellen and the rest of the herd dealt with the psychological trauma of the invasion in the end. They credit peace and quiet and eating lots of grass for their recovery.
Leona the Zen Sheep found a new calling as a DJ. She is available for weddings, birthday parties and suchlike.
The farmer was sectioned for describing the events that had taken place to the Police. He currently resides in the Countshire County Asylum and is making progress.
Rose Booker was arrested for her part in the scandal but disappeared in mysterious circumstances shortly after. She is widely rumoured to be in South America looking for deposed Prime Minister James Milton-Redbridge, who also made it out of the country but has no idea that Rose is looking for him.
Edwina Fenchurch-Weston is in indefinite detention in a facility for the criminally insane. She is sometimes visited by nameless government officials who want information about potential weapons of mass destruction but can never get anything more than deranged gibberings about demonic powers.
Betty King and Helen Eltham tasted like chicken.
Gary the Demon provides intentionally poor mediation services in industrial disputes. He recently came close to creating Hell on Earth by escalating a long-running industrial dispute between a well-known British train operator and the trade union of their staff. Eighteen months in, the dispute is still running and has caused an unprecedented increase in despair along all routes served by said operator.
Dave the Demon was buried in a lava pit with full honours since he was slain in battle. The fact he was stabbed in the back by Gary was quietly glossed over.
Jeremy Quartermaine reconciled with his estranged wife and they adopted a pug. It wasn’t very useful as a dog but provided them with a much needed direction in their relationship.
Arnold Quartermaine and his wife finally decided to go on a walking holiday to the Alps, and whilst there conceived their first child, Francesca.
Mrs Quartermaine remained in Barbados, but was alarmed when Jeremy mailed her a box of broken chunks of gnome.
PC Rick Vine was promoted in view of his heroism in arresting Gary and exposing the Brotherhood of the New Moon. The promotion made little practical difference except that he could now afford to shop at Waitrose.
Susan and Nigel the Extroxi continue to live as a mid-30s hipster couple. They found their way to Brighton and opened a cafe that serves only foodstuffs whose names contain two or more vowels.
Grace and Ian divorced soon after the necklace incident. Grace now lives with a decorator called Steven who is half her age, has a ludicrously low body fat percentage and incredible muscle definition, enjoys gymnastics as a hobby and owns varying amounts of seventeen different brands of body oil. What she doesn’t know is that Steven is seeing Ian on the side.
Death spends his time meeting interesting people such as Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. He describes his job as “important but thankless”.