The Thing That Lives Under the Hill (Chapter 2)

Some more of the novel that I posted the other week. This is just the first part of Chapter 2, althought, to be honest, this is such a raw, early draft that the structure of the whole thing will be changed dramatically at some point anyway.

Feel free to go back and read the first chapter to refresh yourselves.

Thanks :)

 

...

 

SOLOMON - 2

 

It was winter when Horatio and I had what would turn out to be the first of several 'sessions'.

It was a Thursday morning in early January, that very first time, and the streets of London were filled with mist. Streetlamps, archways, hordes of commuters all emerged ghostlike from the gloom, as if around every corner and down every alley the city was just making things up as it went.

Trees stood dead and forlorn, and even the birds that adorned their branches looked corpse-like, waiting for the spell of Spring.

Christmas and New Year were still being packed away – I saw the occasional sad, wilted Christmas tree, the occasional string of lights still clinging to lampposts like gaudy cobwebs that had gone un-hoovered – and every soul that had braved the gloom seemed to wear the same expression of disbelief: Really, we have to start this all over again?

The air was writ with the breath of thousands as I turned onto Southampton Street and the briefcase felt unnatural in my hand, containing as it did so many precious things that had never ventured beyond my childhood bedroom.

I had had to go back to my mother’s house to find it all. The old key still worked, so I was able to slip in and out unnoticed. The place stunk even worse than I remembered.

As I crossed the last set of traffic lights before my destination, I felt the sort of nerves you feel before a first date. All the usual curiosities and worries were there: What would he look like? Would he match the image my mind had conjured up over the phone? What would he think of me and the way I looked? Would we get on? Would there be long, painful silences? Who would pay?

But if meeting up with a stranger to see if you might be romantically compatible was strange, then meeting up with a stranger to discuss the contents of some obscure, lost corner of your mind was stranger still.

And to do it all in a public place ...

To an eavesdropper we would sound like two crazy people.

The risks of public, though, were trivial compared to the risks of private. I didn't know this man from Adam, and if he revealed himself to be some demented psycho kidnapper type - you know the type - then at least in a public place I could make my escape with a minimum of fuss.

"Should our first meetings prove a success and you decide you do wish to burrow down this rabbit hole," he had written over email, "then eventually we can move to a different setting."

For now, though, it was the Costa Coffee on the corner of Southampton Street.

The Costa Coffee where the neuroscientists of University College London tended to go, he told me.

Because he wasn't just a minion after all.

He was a man of science. A man who studied brains.

And now - by what means I did not know - he was going to study mine.

 

…

 

Type into any internet search engine ‘world’s ugliest animals’ and you will find, without fail, on every single list, probably somewhere near the top, if not the very top, the Psychrolutes marcidus – better known as, simply, the blobfish.

The scientists who named it were unimaginative but accurate.

The blobfish does indeed look just like a blob. A big, snot-like blob with a child’s drawing of a sad face superimposed on it.

An unlikely-looking thing, all in all.

It looks as though it has been made with the flesh of an obese man’s stomach: the folds form the sagging head, the broad nose, the jowls. Seems an inventive way to repurpose a skin graft.

On a particularly ugly day, the blobfish can be seen with a mucousy parasite (a copepod) dangling from the corners of its mouth. The sight makes you appreciate that a drooling mouth is not exclusive to babies and invalids; it is also a powerful symbol of the decadent. It says: I don’t care what you think. I will go on as I like. I will not apologise. The symbolism represents a small victory for the blobfish.

When you see the blobfish, your mind instantly wonders what it would feel like to touch one. The answer, I imagine, is that it would be unpleasant. There is something foetal about its shiny, membranous skin; it looks as though it has been pickled in amniotic fluid. No doubt it would feel clammy – slimy, even – in your hand.

But here’s the thing …

All this – the blobfish’s famed ugliness – all of it is, it turns out, just a big fluke.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘But isn’t all nature a fluke? Isn’t life on Earth just one long accident.’ Well, in that case, the blobfish’s ugliness is a fluke on top of a fluke. It shouldn’t look the way it looks. Or, at least, we should never have seen it in its most famed form, for it only appears as a flabby, snot-like mess when it is ripped rudely from its home and brought above the surface of the ocean. In its natural habitat – 2000 to 4000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface, barely above the sea floor, where the pressure is 120 times that which we experience on dry land – the familiar sagging skin of the blobfish becomes taut and robust; it forms the basic physical structure of what looks like a perfectly normal, serviceable fish.

No scientist would look at it and call it the blobfish.

Fifteen years ago, when I was a thirteen-year-old in Year 9 at Bowland High Comprehensive, Grant Birch and Dorian Stead – who, along with Henry Hopcroft, had come round to my house the previous weekend – wrote and illustrated a comic strip made out of the back of a maths worksheet – they folded the sheet in half three times over to make all the panels – about a blobfish that is desperate to return to the bottom of the ocean so that it can be restored to its normal – entirely non-ugly – true self.

Spoiler: it doesn’t make it.

I remember seeing the pair of them hunched over something whilst the white noise of Mr Bishop’s voice fizzed in the background. They were scribbling away at it, their shoulders shaking with laughter. It looked far too interesting to be work.

When I asked them what the deal was, Grant Birch gave Dorian Stead a look. Then they whispered something to each other, and suddenly the comic was being unfolded and thrust before me.

At that point, a few people – including Grant Birch and Dorian Stead – knew that I liked to do illustrations, knew that I was no slouch at it all, so it was with a certain air of smug authority that I told them that I really liked the comic, that it was gross but that I liked gross, that it was weird but that I liked weird, that the ending was sad but that I liked sad.

They both gave me the strangest, most unreadable looks then.

A week later Henry Hopcroft told me that Grant Birch and Dorian Stead had got such a kick out of the story of the blobfish that they’d done others.

One about an elephant seal – all blubber and hair.

One about a naked mole rat – its skin like the skin of a ballsack.

One about a giant slug – how it leaked yellow pus when it got doused with salt.

Each one was weirder than the last.

I was impressed.

I doubted that they knew just how clever and sick and funny they were being.

‘No, you dunce,’ Henry Hopcroft said. ‘Don’t you get it?’

‘Get what?’

He shook his head in despair. ‘They’re all supposed to be your mum.’

‘What are?’

‘The animals? They – are – all – your – muh – ther.’ He looked at me like I was deeply, profoundly, supernaturally thick. ‘Understand?’

I didn’t really.

‘They’ve got names for her,’ Henry Hopcroft went on. ‘The Sea Cow. The Blob. Demon Slug. The Creature of the Deep. The Tumour.’ His eyes went up, like he was trying to remember others. ‘They said they saw her come out of the bath or something, that day round your house. Saw everything, apparently.’ He patted me on the shoulder. ‘They’re massively taking the piss out of you, mate, is what I’m saying. Thought you should know. Y’know: pal to pal.’

Pal to pal.

I’ll be completely honest with you: I still don’t know, to this very day, whether Henry Hopcroft telling me all that stuff was him being a good friend, or him being … well … him being something else.

Either way, I never invited him round again.

Nor the other two, obviously.

In fact, no friend of mine ever came round to the sad, old house after that.

It was the beginning of the end, really.

Me not inviting anyone round – maybe you think I did it for my mum; maybe I was defending her honour, or something like that.

Nope.

I did it for me.

I did it because I was embarrassed.

I did it because those boys were right.