Guy Adams - The Clown Service

This was Toby’s first look at the man he’d heard so much about. He was reminded of Shining’s description: the normality that hung over this man without quite managing to obscure what lay beneath. His eyes were slightly too narrow, his mouth slightly too wide. He seemed to be looking directly at them.

‘I thought we were just observers,’ said Toby.

‘At this distance, we are,’ Derek replied.

‘Then how come he sees us?’

Krishnin continued to walk toward them.

‘He can’t,’ insisted Derek. ‘It’s coincidence – he’s looking at something else, he…’

The image in front of them changed yet again: the young August Shining had returned, still backing away from whoever it was on the stairs. He raised his gun…

Daylight again, the skeletal rat, spinning around and around, becoming dust that spiralled in a tiny cyclone around its dwindling cadaver.

‘One minute!’ shouted Derek. ‘I’m going to have to power down. We’re hitting the breaking point of causality.’

Then night again, and they were gazing out into what seemed like nothing but darkness. More sparks, and the whining from the speakers grew louder.

‘But we’ve found out nothing we didn’t—’ As Shining suddenly stopped talking Toby turned to look at him. Shining wasn’t alone: one gloved hand was clamped over his mouth, another held a knife to his throat.

More sparks.

Derek didn’t know whether to tackle the theoretical danger surrounding him or the very real threat standing next to him. In the end, the safety of history won out. He reached for the netbook.

‘Wait!’ Toby shouted, because he had recognised the figure holding Shining, seen his face in the glow of the netbook’s screen as it turned towards him, nudged by Derek’s hasty fingers. It was Krishnin.

‘I can’t… I have to—’ Derek yanked the netbook free from its cables and the room was filled with daylight and the sound of the speakers winding down, a long electronic sigh.

Shining had vanished.

‘Where’s he gone?’ Toby asked.

Derek was in a panic, his eyes darting everywhere, a confused giant, with the little netbook still in one hand. ‘He can’t have… he can’t just vanish.’

‘He didn’t “just vanish”,’ Toby insisted. ‘He was taken, by Krishnin.’

‘Taken where?’ Derek looked incredulous. ‘There’s no way that the past could interact with us. No way at all. It’s like expecting your TV to talk back to you.’

‘You said that if we got too close we could affect it.’

‘Yes, but we’re the active part of that. We’re the observers; they have no idea we’re even here. Honestly, it’s impossible.’

‘That word…’ Toby sighed, ‘used to mean something. Over the last twenty-four hours it’s become hollow bluster. Turn that thing on again.’

‘I can’t.’ Derek shook his head, holding up his hands placatingly. ‘Even ignoring the risks of using it again so soon, the equipment has to cool down and reset. You may have noticed the odd explosion here and there… There are bound to be repairs needed. It wouldn’t help Leslie one bit if we blew ourselves sky high. Besides, I’m telling you… wherever he went, it wasn’t into the past. It’s just not possible.’

‘I know what I saw and from now on that’s all that matters. I’ve got to get him back.’

‘And I’ll help in whatever way I can, though right now there’s nothing we can do.’

Sometimes , Jimmy thought as he made his slow, spiralling way along the street, they move the fucking bus stops . It was the only explanation he could come up with. He had given it considerable thought as he trudged along stretch after stretch of unfamiliar pavement. It had almost displaced in his mind his own behaviour over the last couple of hours. Tomorrow morning, once the texts and emails began to pour in, the pictures, the proof… then such things would be part of his mental furniture. Until then, he’d ignore them. But now was all about bouncing along this road looking for bus stops. And needing a piss. Yes. Very much about that too.

Taking a short break from pondering shifting bus stops, Jimmy redirected his mental focus towards the possibility of those bastards at Stella Artois (or perhaps the good lady herself) putting something in their brew that fucked up your bladder. He was wrestling with how such scurrilous behaviour could be monetized when he spotted a church ahead. He immediately decided the only thing to do was to hop over the wall into its graveyard and deal definitively with at least one of his problems.

In his drunken state, Jimmy managed the leap over the wall perfectly but struggled on the flat, ending up lodged against a gravestone. Gravity, equilibrium and ancient stone briefly conspired against him.

Finally, escaping the gravestone, he marched forward assuming all would now be well. It wasn’t. After a few seconds the world around him turned on its axis. Jimmy thought he was still walking in a straight line, legs rising and falling, arms swaying by his side. However, his face was recognising it had just been whacked by the ground – which simply didn’t happen when you were walking properly.

It took time for Jimmy to accept that he must have fallen over. He pushed that thought to one side and concentrated on how incredibly sick he felt. It became dominant, he could consider nothing else. Had anyone ever felt so wretched? Jimmy felt a wave of self-pity, so strong he would have burst into tears if he hadn’t suddenly been so busy emptying his stomach’s contents onto the grass that lay above ‘Gladys King, (1919 – 1983) “Alive in our memories” ’. If Ms King objected to this roaring donation of stuffed-crust Pepperoni Bonanza and Belgian lager she kept quiet about it.

Eventually, spent, wet-eyed and feeling as close to death as a person can when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them that twenty-four hours rehydration won’t fix, Jimmy rolled onto his back and looked up at a starless London sky. He had entered that stage of drunken dejection where pride is meaningless. He had neither the will nor the strength to deal with anything more complex than simply existing.

Hearing a scrabbling noise a few feet away, Jimmy decided it was probably a rat come for its nightly prayer. Perhaps even visiting a loved one in a small area of the graveyard especially dedicated to rodents? This struck him as absurdly funny and he spluttered saliva-soaked amusement for a few moments before rolling onto his side to look towards the source of the noise.

His eyes were slow to focus because they were filled with tears. The street lights shed diffused light across the world like a shower of insipid fireworks. The scrabbling noise continued. A sound of dislodged earth. Perhaps it was a badger, Jimmy thought, then asked himself whether badgers lived in cities? Why not? he generously concluded. Everyone else did . Maybe it was building a sett? Burrowing its way through soft soil and old bones. A Gothic lair constructed from ancient remains, a gloomy cathedral roofed with rib cages. Jimmy decided this was a good thing.

Scratch, scratch, scratch …

What was that? It didn’t sound like a badger. Not that Jimmy knew what a badger should sound like, but in the barely used mental file he possessed marked ‘Badger – Likely Sounds’ there was no correlation with this unrhythmic, lazy scrabbling. A fox? A cat? Oh, who knew?

If only he could see properly. He listlessly brushed away from his hands the remains of dead leaves and dirt, smearing his jacket with soil, and rubbed at his eyes. That sorted out the tears but it didn’t help with the lack of light.