Glitch (Part One)

Glitch (Part One)
© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

A glowing golden centipede a good four feet long walked into the room through the solid brick wall behind the TV. It crawled leisurely in mid-air some eighteen inches above the carpet on a slight upwards incline opening and closing its wicked looking mandibles, and it whistled a merry tune – it was the Spongebob theme this time. Norton idly watched the creature out of the corner of his eye. “Massive centipedes are the least of my worries,” he muttered. “Anyway, I've seen bigger, and I don't think I have anything to worry about because I'm not a giant gooseberry.” The apparition was on its way from a place that the observer eloquently referred to as Fuckknows, and it was more than likely going to Godonlyknowswhere. It passed straight through the closed door about halfway up, and Norton carried on reading his book.

'There are tears in the usually durable fabric of time and space,' he read, 'warps in the space-time continuum, as Mr. Spock called them Maybe Satan or some other being even more improbable and illogical than that crass invention of a gaggle of pious minds spends his or her (or maybe its) time hacking into God's well-guarded but by no means invincible computer network.

Maybe this hypothetical intelligence infects the heavenly super-system with viruses that run wild, self-replicating, self-altering and self-improving bugs capable of dodging all anti-virus and anti-spyware programmes, creating difficult to trace, almost impossible to eradicate glitches in the divinely endorsed matrix. Perhaps those bugs dismantle, crush, poison or cunningly reprogramme the building blocks of this multi-layered universe that we inhabit. Perhaps the devious gremlins relish mayhem and misrule, perhaps they chisel tirelessly at the strong fortifications surrounding the Lord's smite button and gleefully terminate unwitting, possibly randomly chosen individuals that do not merit smiting by any stretch of the imagination. Call these glitches what you will - they are rare, but they certainly exist. Sometimes, unfortunately, the denizens of improbable worlds find a way of breaking through the natural barriers between our realm and others, often with the sole purpose of interfering with our day to day tedium and making a damned nuisance of themselves.'

Norton put the book down and rubbed his eyes. It was a thick volume called Glitches in Time and Space by a man called PT Choutry. He couldn't find out much about the writer except that he was an immigrant who had fled to Britain from Europe shortly before the outbreak of World War Two. Choutry had published his first and only book a year or so before passing away in a nursing home in Hastings at the grand old age of eighty nine. Norris had read dozens of books concerning the paranormal over the last few weeks, and most of them, he had to say, weren't fit to wipe his arse on. On the whole Choutry wasn't much more helpful than any of the other writers, but Norton kept coming back to the section that he had just been reading because it seemed to hit the nail smack on the head – the notion of a sometimes malicious, sometimes indifferent non-human intelligence fucking around with reality, more than likely for the sheer hell of it, seemed pretty close to the truth.

He turned off the TV, which he had gotten into the habit of putting on to provide a little background noise since Anne left with the kids a fortnight back to stay with her mother where, she said, she intended to stay until her ultimatums were met. He went into the kitchen and put on the kettle, inadvertently stepping on the tail of a pale yellow furry thing of indeterminable species that screeched in indignation and glared at him with its enormous fishy eyes. “Oh Scrimbly, I wish you'd lie somewhere more sensible than in the bloody doorway,” he said, but Scrimbly vanished into thin air without replying.

Anne couldn't take the hassle of living in a window area or whatever supernatural buffs called it, and reading between the lines she couldn't handle living with a loon either. She hadn't witnessed anything unusual in the house, apparently she wasn't a sensitive as psychics called such people. She had come across the results of the intrusions many a time, though, and being a stubborn realist she blamed Norton entirely.

“You're making the whole thing up,” Anne accused him after a brief period of pretending to believe him. Even though their two children claimed to have had numerous odd experiences – that was because their father was filling their heads with nonsense, she snapped. Even though one morning, when she rose at five am after a fall of snow and Norton was still fast asleep, there were strange footprints all over the garden and criss-crossing the roof. “Everything that's happened is of your doing, Norton. There are no ghosts, inter-dimensional beings or otherworldly entities in this house or anywhere else, come to think of it. I reckon you've blown a gasket in your brain, love, you need help, and you need it now.” That comment had really hurt.

Norton had witnessed plenty of weird things, sometimes pretty scary stuff, but more often his experiences were plain ridiculous, so ridiculous as to be completely unbelievable even if you were relating what you had witnessed to the Mad Hatter's markedly crazier offspring. Which was why, he guessed, nobody believed him – not that he had told many people. He was beginning to wonder if he really did need to book an appointment to see a shrink, even his dear old mother agreed with that.

As he made a mug of coffee he watched a fat Garden spider climbing up the outside of the kitchen window frame, and beyond it a little blob of light no bigger than a raindrop appeared. The luminescent bead spun on its own axis for a few seconds like a minuscule planet, then it followed a predetermined outward spiral before turning a dull orange and fizzling out like a dying spark. That odd phenomenon, he had learned, was a sign that something major was about to happen – not necessarily right now, but pretty soon. Which was a good thing, because that afternoon a supposedly very talented psychic medium that he had been communicating with via email for a few days was due to call, a lady called April Amelia Vane. Norton wasn't paying for the woman's services, she had agreed to visit because she was genuinely interested in what was going on in and around the house. Maybe she was genuine, maybe she was a fraud out to con him, maybe she was a plain old fruit and nut-case, he would soon find out.