Роберт Грант - The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

Plainly, I could remember certain things. I could speak, for instance, and read and write. I seemed to know London quite well, and I’d recognised the Prime Minister almost immediately. I had, however, no recollection of my past in any way. Not my parents, nor any siblings, certainly not my schooling: nothing at all biographical.

I was clearly not a Cockney – I didn’t say ‘stone the crows’ or anything like that – but beyond that, I really had no idea about my background. My hands were quite smooth, so I obviously wasn’t a manual labourer, and I had no tattoos, so I’d never been a sailor. I tried saluting, but I didn’t seem very good at it – I wasn’t sure which way round my hand went at the top – so any military career was probably out of the reckoning. Quickly checking the others were still slumbering, I stood up on an impulse and tried tap-dancing. No good at that, either, especially in embarrassing suede moccasins. Thank heavens I wasn’t in show business!

I found a long stick and made an attempt at drawing the head of a noble horse in the dust at my feet, but it just looked like a slug with a grin. No George Stubbs, I. Ah! But at least I could recall art history. And some algebra! I could decline the Latin noun mensa with consummate ease, but that appeared to be the entire extent of my grip on other languages. On the other hand, I seemed to have a quite startling reservoir of arcane cricket minutiae. I found I instinctively didn’t really trust foreigners, and the thought of a lukewarm suet pudding and thick custard with a rubbery skin filled me with deep yearning.

Clearly, I was an Englishman.

In fact, I was beginning to feel a deep-seated need to stand behind someone and wait for something.

More than that, however, I really couldn’t tell. Was I a good man? I certainly felt like one. But then, why was I spying on these people who seemed to be my friends? And hadn’t I just acted as a decoy so a dear colleague could be blasted to smithereens?

Despite these tortured thoughts, and the occasional glance to reassure myself that the piano was flying the plane properly, I found the regular chop-chop-chop of the props had begun to make my eyes feel heavy, and I surrendered, finally, to Morpheus’ embrace.

It was a troubled sleep, in which I ran backwards and forwards with no trousers, pursued by huge psychopathic vegetables spouting Latin grammar and hurling sloppy custard-covered intestines at my head. What could it possibly mean?

And there were other dreams: I was lounging on a riverbank with a woman, listening to an enormous radio – was that my mother? My sister? My wife?… Me, in a dark cave tied in a chair with giant mole-like creatures giving me Chinese burns while chanting some infernal dirge… Tearing open my shirt to find a player piano roll embedded in my chest… Walking into Lyons’ Corner House at 213 Piccadilly and being served afternoon tea by Winston Churchill in a waitress outfit. I had no idea which were memories and which simply disturbing dreams. I was praying the naked trigonometry exam with my fountain pen full of bull semen was the latter.

The Professor’s laboratory was far away from… well, from everywhere. We made our way from a makeshift airfield in a very old jeep with a large Q stencilled on its side. It appeared to have had its roof sawn off and its suspension deliberately removed. Troy spent a great deal of time looking for the door, until Dr. Janussen pointed out it wasn’t there, and he was finally persuaded to jump in.

For some reason, it became clear that I was expected to drive, and I was relieved to find I remembered how. More interestingly, whilst Dr. Janussen was supposed to give me directions, I seemed to know the way instinctively. Though any mental picture of our destination still eluded me.

On the Carlisle road, the trip was merely horribly uncomfortable, as the tiniest stone in our path rocked the entire vehicle, but once our route took us off it, things rather deteriorated. We lurched down a long, overgrown path, cratered with pot-holes, over jutting boulders and through thick bracken. Overhanging branches snapped alarmingly on the windscreen and raked the top of my head. I found it exhausting trying to wrestle the wheel just to keep us pointing vaguely in the right direction.

I’d planned to ask Dr. Janussen a great many questions, but conversation was impossible. Troy, however, had once again fallen into deep and sonorous slumber. This time, he seemed to have glued himself to the seat by means that escaped me, and was untroubled by the bone-rattling vibrations. And was it my imagination, or had his skin turned ever so slightly the colour of the upholstery?

As we got closer, I began to spot a sequence of warning signs nailed to the trees, featuring mind-boggling graphics I couldn’t begin to guess the meaning of: a silhouette of a man being rained on by penguins; a Red Indian being electrocuted whilst sitting on a fat woman; a rabbit and an ‘=’ sign followed by a skull and crossbones with a Robin Hood hat on. And those were the less bewildering ones.

Finally, the rude forest gave way to a clearing, leading to the crest of a hill. As we trundled over its brow, the dawning sun cast a red/orange glow over the long-abandoned exhausted quarry below, inside which the vast laboratory complex nestled.

From the journal of Brian Nylon, 1st January, 1952 – Iteration 66

It was far more extensive than I’d imagined. It sprawled below us, a hotchpotch of dozens of buildings and outhouses, scattered randomly. At its heart were rows of ex-military warehousing, Nissen huts and the like, but there were many and varied later additions, some conventional, others inexplicably eccentric. One or two of them towered dizzyingly upwards, to be cut off by the early morning fog.

We lurched down towards a set of imposing gates, which were cast from some peculiar shiny chocolate brown alloy I couldn’t identify. I stopped the jeep.

There was an unnerving pause, then a chorus of servos screeched into life, and a whole bank of articulated box cameras swivelled as one in our direction.

I was unaccountably nervous. For some reason, I pulled the genial face I usually put on for photographs. The one Mumsie always told me off about, because it made me look like Simple Simon. (What? Was that an actual memory?)

Eventually, the cameras lost interest and turned away, dropping their heads. The great gates began to swing open majestically.

From a high-mounted speaker a curiously metallic woman’s voice said: ‘ You are positively identified. Welcome back, everyone .’

‘Thank you.’ I smiled, and turned to Dr. Janussen. ‘Who’s that charming lady? Is she the Professor’s wife?’

‘Not every woman in the world has to be someone’s wife ! You clot!’ she chided, rather more brusquely than was called for in my opinion. Looking closer, I noticed there was something ‘off’ about her appearance, but I couldn’t fathom what.

I drove very slowly through several layers of indescribably strange defensive measures, including, rather worryingly at one point, a dog kennel the size of a sentry box. From its dark interior, a pair of red glowing eyes followed us hungrily. Clearly, the Professor did not welcome the uninvited visitor.

Finally, we rattled up to what I assumed was the main laboratory building, which appeared to be an old abandoned fever hospital. I pulled up in the cobbled quadrangle outside it, where some very peculiar vehicles were parked, all stamped with that same Q stencil.

Troy opened his eyes and pulled himself off the seat with a strange sort of suction noise, and panicked momentarily trying to find a door again, until Dr. Janussen brought him a loose one stacked nearby. ‘Thanks, Gem.’ He grabbed it and jumped to the ground. ‘Thought I’d be trapped in there all day.’