Роберт Грант - The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

The good doctor’s brow was furrowed as she peered intensely into the wing mirror, clearly perturbed by something. ‘Are you all right, Dr. Janussen?’ I asked.

‘Look at my face, Brian,’ she ordered earnestly, turning to me. ‘Tell me honestly: what do you see?’

I gazed at that lovely countenance. Again I sensed there was something askew. But I couldn’t for the life of me work it out.

‘It’s a spot, isn’t it?’ she smiled, with a faintly unnerving kind of calm.

I leant in closer and squinted. There may have been some kind of minor discolouration about the size of a single pore, just beside her nose. ‘There might just be a tiny—’

‘Trust you to point it out! How d’you think that makes me feel?’ She punched me quite hard on the shoulder, spun on her heels and attempted to march with dignity towards the lab, her hand cupped over her nose. Sadly, this obscured her view, causing her to stumble ungraciously over protruding cobblestones until she tottered through the entrance and raced up a stairway.

Troy and I exchanged glances, then tramped across the courtyard after her.

A small plumpish man appeared at the doors to greet us. His upper lip was obscured by a full tash, which had at one time been well kempt, and probably at that one time had considerably fewer biscuit crumbs decorating it. He wore a faded dark green uniform and peaked cap to which the letters of the word ‘JANITOR’ had at one time been glued, though the ‘J’, the ‘A’, the ‘O’ and the ‘R’ had long since fallen off, leaving only the word ‘NIT’. I didn’t say anything.

He called to Troy: ‘You can leave that door, young sir – we’ve plenty of our own.’

‘Oh, right-ho, Jenkins,’ the lad chirruped. He hurled the door away a quite superhuman distance and disappeared inside with a cheery wave.

‘Good morning, Mr. Nylon, sir.’ Jenkins offered a very smart salute. Turns out the palms face outwards .

‘And you’re… Jenkins… the janitor?’

‘Yes, sir. The Professor told me you’d gorn and lost your memory again.’

‘ Again?’

‘We’ll just do the usual thing: I’ll show you around the place, as per. This way, sir…’

For some reason, I instinctively mistrusted this Jenkins fellow: there was something going on behind his eyes that belied his servile manner. He led me down corridors with dark green linoleum floors and chocolate brown painted walls, seemingly without end.

We walked in silence for a while. There were yet more inexplicable warning signs on most of the doors: a coalman whose teeth were on fire; a pair of goggles with legs fleeing a giant lightning bolt with a bow tie. Some doors had been nailed up extremely securely with planks across them, others hung off their hinges loosely. More than one colour of smoke issued from underneath many of them. The occasional alcove held what looked like heavily modified fire extinguishers crossed with flame-throwers, others fire axes, and now and then, disturbingly, the odd samurai sword.

Out of the blue, Jenkins piped up: ‘Rum business, innit, sir?’

‘What particular business would that be?’

‘What they done to Miss Virginia, turning her into a vegetable like that. Ain’t decent.’Course they says it was an accident, but they always says that.’

I felt a horrible tightening in my bowels. ‘Are you suggesting it wasn’t an accident?’

‘Least said, soonest mended.’ Jenkins tapped the side of his nose and half-winked. It wasn’t a particularly fetching gesture. However, I took the hint, and we mounted a staircase without further conversation. At the landing, we passed through a green baize door to a corridor where the décor was somewhat softer and less institutionalised.

‘Here’s the living quarters, sir.’ Somehow, Jenkins managed to imbue the ‘sir’ with a kind of dumb insolence.

I heard a strange buzzing thudding sound, like a giant wasp hitting a window. I looked at Jenkins querulously.

‘That’s young Master Troy Quanderhorn’s room.’

‘ Quanderhorn? Is he the Professor’s son?’

‘They put it about he’s the Professor’s son,’ Jenkins nodded, ‘but some do say he grew him in a petri dish.’

‘ What?’

‘Used his own genetical material and made him extra strong with a pinch of insect.’

‘He’s part insect ?’ Well, that did explain rather a lot.

‘Word to the wise, sir: do watch out when he’s swarming.’

‘ Swarming?’

‘The Professor’s terrible proud of him, though. Claims he’s a “major breakthrough in Artificial Stupidity”. Least said, soonest mended, sir.’

We passed the next door. Jenkins nodded at it. ‘Dr. Janussen you already know.’ He raised a cheeky eyebrow. What was this upstart implying?

‘Was she all right just now? I mean, she seemed a bit—’

‘Nothing wrong with her. Nothing at all, sir. Excepting half her brain is clockwork.’

What did one say to such an outlandish assertion? I tried: ‘Surely not!’

‘She was in a car crash, and the Professor had to rebuild her slightly.’Course they says it was a car crash, but they always says that.’

‘Goodness! A car crash!’ The poor darling. ‘And you say her brain is clockwork ?’

‘Just the right-hand side, sir, the logical half.’ He stopped and drew me in closer, lowering his voice and treating me to a wave of Mackeson breath. ‘Sometimes her emotions run the mechanism down, and then…’ He mimed a silent explosion. ‘All I’m saying: if her ear starts to rotate, just get yourself out of there, sharpish.’

Of course! That was what I’d found peculiar about her appearance in the jeep: her ear was at an angle of forty-five degrees! I needed to ask him more before he said “Least said, soonest mended”.

‘Jenkins – this rotating ear—’

‘You’re going to have to meet the Professor, of course.’ He cut me off rather impertinently. ‘I’ll need to go and clear it with him. I’m sure you’d like to freshen up in your own room, Mr. Nylon…’

‘Oh yes. Very much.’

‘Unfortunately, we can’t have you wandering by yourself around willy-nilly with your memory all shot, so if it’s OK with you, sir, I’m just going to put you in here, temporarily, with the Martian.’

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

‘I need to— Wh— Did you just say “Martian”?’

‘That’s right, sir. He’s a hostage, from the last Invasion.’Tween you and me, I don’t think they wanted him back’.

He slid open the door.

I half expected the room to be dark and reek of sulphur, but it seemed bright and smelled of the kind of cheap aftershave a cad might wear.

‘Word to the wise.’ Jenkins leant in conspiratorially again. ‘He learned Earth language watching How Do You View , starring Terry-Thomas – they says it’s the only telly-vision signal they can receive up there, but—’

‘Least said?’

‘In one, sir. His name’s “Guuuurk”, by the way. Four u ’s.’

I tried it. ‘Guuu-uuurk?’

‘Close enough, sir.’ And with a rather impudently firm hand to my back, he shoved me into the Martian’s abode.

I had no recollection of meeting a Martian before, but I did know they were our deadly enemies. I was expecting a furious great beast, chained to the walls and raging. But the figure in front of me was standing quite free and unencumbered. I bunched my fists by my sides involuntarily as he slowly turned towards me.

He had a bulbous purple head, about twice the size of a human’s, with six eyes arranged symmetrically in pairs, three on either side of his face, a prominent beaky nose, and beneath it a rather fetching pencil moustache. He was surprisingly dapper, sporting a gold velvet smoking jacket with ebony facings and slightly shiny elbows, black dress trousers, sharply pressed, and a pair of inappropriately coloured moccasins, such as might be worn by a particularly shifty Italian gigolo. And at the moment, me.