Kill The Monster, Chapter 13

XI. ODYSSEUS AND PENELOPE

The Hirondelle purred up the drive like a stalking tiger. Its headlights were turned off. He wanted to surprise them.

He was unable to park it properly in the yard. It was as big as a boat, and reversing a million pounds of car with centimetric accuracy in the dark was a feat he didn't feel up to.

At last, after forty-eight hours of propheteering with Lang - a man who had bits of food in his beard that Sean remembered from before Christmas - after Stansted, London, Reading, Swindon, Bristol, Exeter, Okehampton, Launceston, and Bodmin, Odysseus was home to see his Penelope. He had braved one-eyed cyclopaean legions of motorway speed cameras, had been forced to choose between the Scylla and Charybdis of the North Circular or the M25, had steeled himself against the siren songs of local radio telling him that fantastic discounts on tyres and exhausts existed only a ten minute detour off his route. Finally, though still wanted by the police for unlicensed firearms possession, he was home.

He'd had to stop the car numerous time son the way to allow Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley to squat straining on the hard shoulder, looking immensely put out at being forced to defecate in front of an entire motorway of traffic. They were very good dogs, and had only done their duty on the grass verge.

There was a light on in the house, and the comforting bulk of his Toyota loomed overhead as he got out of the Hirondelle. Sam's beetle was parked next to it, a nice husband-and-wife combination. She must have retrieved the Toyota from the street he'd parked it in in Penzance; after all, she had several spare keys. He shut the car door on Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley, who knew better than to complain.

There was smoke coming from the chimney. There was even a candle in the window. There were, in fact, many candles inside the house, inside the living room specifically -

His key did not fit the lock.

That was, perhaps, only to be expected. The back door, then. She never locked the back door. This being rural Cornwall, this wasn't normally a problem, but he nagged her about it constantly on principle. Rural crime, after all, was on the increase, and -

The back door was locked too.

He could hear a stereo playing upstairs. Someone was home, without a doubt.

He heard, abruptly, the sound of a toilet flushing upstairs, and the bathroom light went out. Standing in the darkened yard below, he saw an indistinct naked male figure cross the upstairs landing, moving toward the guest bedroom. The curtains in that room were closed.

As he looked out around the house from the back yard, he realized that the lines of the heavy SUV parked beside Sam's beetle were not the flat, long box of his Toyota, but the more angular lines of a BMW X5. A far inferior four-by-four, in his opinion.

He listened to the sound of the stereo in the master bedroom - Ravel's Bolero. Sam had a slavish devotion to it born of exposure to far too much Torville and Dean as a child. He waited till it ground ponderously to a climax and, at that climax, broke one of the back door windowpanes and tried to open the lock from the inside. He had told her a thousand times to shut the door so a burglar couldn't open it with his hand; every time, she'd nodded, and carried on doing it the wrong way. This time, she'd done it right. There was, all of a sudden, someone outside the house she was afraid of.

It took him another twenty minutes to locate a length of wire from the vegetable patch, bend it into a hook at one end, and use it to reach across the kitchen and dip into the bowl of assorted keys he knew stood on the worktop. He hooked ten wrong keys by accident before he located the right one. That done, he patiently fed the wire back through the broken window until he had the back door key in his hand. It turned in the lock, but the lock still wouldn't open.

There was only one lock on the outside of the door. That meant a bolt, or bolts. He realized that one of the keys in the dish he'd misappropriated earlier had been an unfamiliar one, not a proper key at all, but a star key made for inside deadbolts.

He reached down through the open catflap and grubbed around the base of the door until his fingers felt the outline of a circular hole in the door surface.

Blast.

Still, he'd hooked the star key once, and he could do it again. In the event, it took him another twenty minutes. The hole in the star key was smaller, and took longer to hook. When he had it, it was the work of seconds to turn it in the lock. But the door still would not pull open.

Bugger. There was a second bolt up at the top of the door, and she'd locked that one as well. He waited quietly in the dark, aware that there was a further frosted glass pane higher up in the door, breaking which would allow him to reach up and open the top bolt. He could not, however, risk smashing the pane against a background of silence.

As luck would have it, an overloaded farm truck passed on the road, rattling the cover on the coalshed and vibrating all the windows in their frames. He used the cover provided by the sound to smash the final pane, open the final bolt, push open the door - Yes! - and win through into the kitchen.

He pocketed the keys for later copying. Now - what to do?

The other man had gone into the guest bedroom, not the master. Maybe Odysseus had come home just in time. Or maybe Penelope simply had not been able to bear soiling the marriage bed.

In any case, he was too tired for a confrontation. He just needed to be warm.

Being now sure of access to the house, he slunk back across the flowerbeds, treading on earth and flowers rather than gravel, and let the dogs out of the car. With a pack animal's instinct for the need for stealth, they slunk after him into the house. He left the kitchen door ajar, allowing them to walk out into the garden to do their rich brown business; he pulled a blanket from the airing cupboard and laid it in front of the Aga, which was their accustomed place; they had been in the house many times before. The cat growled softly as they padded into the kitchen and screwed themselves down onto the blanket.

Gingerly, with a mountaineer's precision, he eased himself up the stairs and slumped into the ornamental chair on the landing that no-one was supposed to ever sit in. Remembering the last time he had unwisely fallen asleep in his own house, he pulled an anaemic daffodil from the vase of flowers in the landing window, clenched it in his fist, and fell asleep as if the Sandman had hit him with a sack of sand.

***

He had been on the cross at least three hours now.

He was trying to judge time by the progress of his own crucified shadow. It had started out hardly a shadow at all, a blob of dark huddled beneath the Rood, at midday when they had hoisted him up. John's Gospel had mentioned the Sixth Hour; accordingly, he had expected dawn, forgetting that the Romans measured time from dawn to sunset. Thus had his life had been extended by another six hours.

Now, his shadow was sweeping round like a sundial toward the gap of Gihon. He knew he would not live to see that happen.

It was becoming ever more difficult to breathe. The tendons in his arms were drawn tauter than telegraph wires. He could no longer feel anything in them but searing, nightmarish pain. His ribcage was flapping weakly in and out like a paper bag in a light breeze. The long bones in his feet, splayed apart by the third nail, would surely never bear weight again.

He didn't know what he had done to upset anybody.

The Roman troopers had seized him in the garden, without charge, without reading him his rights, certainly without a phone call. Their gubernator, who had had to speak to him via an interpreter - Latin had never been his strong point at school, and Aramaic was almost certainly not the governor's - had accused him of stirring up trouble, of stopping the necessary flow of credit, of interfering with the course of summary marital justice. A list of accusations a rood long had eventually been produced, including the bizarre allegation that he had subverted the good and decorous work of bankers by claiming that money buried underground was somehow sinful.

The woman who claimed to be his mother was wailing convincingly at the foot of the cross. He'd seen her only a few times in the last thirty years. As a boy, he'd visited infrequently. As a man, he'd spent most of his time away from home, called away periodically to The Wilderness, a place which might be only around the next corner or over the nearest hill, but which was thousands of miles, thousands of years away from this dusty oven of a country. He'd been tempted in a high place by the Devil, or at the very least, a devil, who had been very convincing, equipped with a full set of horns, a forked tongue, and a totally prehensile tail. He wondered how the genetic engineers had managed to graft that one on. He'd met a shaggy-haired madman on the banks of the Jordan who'd tried to push his head under in the name of the Lord.

This had to be the end. There'd be no more returning to this place, no more being forced to forget at the end of it. No more of the hideous things they did to force forgetfulness, so awful that the mind blocked them out.

The crowd pressed around the cross were actors to a man. The mother whose child had been switched at birth, who might not even know she wasn't his. The man who'd darted in at precisely the right moment to seize up the Cross when he'd dropped it. The soldiers who'd held the reeking sponge filled with vinegar to his lips.

He realized suddenly that he could make it over. All he had to do was skip a page in the script, miss out the wordy bits where he admonished mankind for failing to embrace universal love, brotherhood, the enlightened self-interest of global capitalism, and the will of a strong leader. Possibly he could also skip over the paragraphys advising against birth control, electric cars, and solar energy.

He was too tired. He was in too much pain.

He let his head loll convincingly on his chest, looked down at the horrified crowd, and breathed out the words:

"It is finished."

They were only horrified, he knew, because he'd diverted from the script. It was nothing to do with him dying.

It was growing dark now, though the sun was still high in the sky. He wondered where he would be going next.

It didn't matter. Surely it could be no worse than this.

"Oh my God."

His eyes flicked open. He prepared to defend himself with the daffodil. He could not feel his legs, and needed to piss.

He yawned. "Honey", he said, "I'm home."

"Sean, what happened to your face?"

Sam was staring at him, in a nightgown, from the master bedroom door. Not the guest bedroom door. He noted the importance of this development. From the guest bedroom, he heard an uncoordinated stumbling, shortly before the door was thrown open; he found himself eye-to-eye with a man in horrible pink-and-brown-striped pyjamas.

"Hello, Craig", he said. "My, I admire your brand loyalty. It takes endurance not to have changed your pyjama supplier between now and the late nineteen seventies."

"What?" said Craig.

"Call the police", said Sam. Craig scurried down the stairs in front of Sean; Sean did not attempt to trip him, though he could have done.

Somebody, however, did attempt to stop him. There was a soft growling from the foot of the stairs. Craig stopped dead on a low stair. Mr. Darcy was sitting below with an instinctive nose for an enemy.

"Call your dog off, Agnello", said Craig.

"I never called him on", said Sean. "Besides, until my mother's will is read, he's not my dog."

"If he bites me, I will have him put down", said Craig.

Sean hissed at Mr. Darcy, who sat down meekly, though without taking his eyes off Craig's appetizing exposed flesh.

"For God's sake, Sean", complained Sam, looking down over the bannisters at Mr. Darcy. "What are they doing here."

"Sorry, dear. Just a little business of my mother being dead. Don't let it spoil your day."

"Well, they can't stay here."

"I'm sorry, dear, I'll have them exterminated straight away."

"I didn't mean that."

"Oh? What did you mean?"

"This isn't what it looks like", said Sam. "Craig was staying with me for a couple of days because I felt I needed someone in the house."

Sean nodded. "At your parents' suggestion, no doubt."

She didn't answer, but scowled at the carpet by way of saying yes.

"And it was their idea to keep Mickey with them for a couple of days too, to give young love time to blossom", said Sean.

"Sean, I didn't know you were coming back. You didn't phone, you didn't write, you didn't even bloody email. And let's get one thing straight here, there is no young love blossoming here, Craig has been a perfect gentleman -"

"- which is why Mummy and Daddy love him so much", said Sean. "Who is he working for now? Still News International?"

"No." Sam's gaze moved down to the carpet again. "The Packet. He's moved back downalong from London. Dad bumped into him the other day in town."

"How fascinating. And does he have a reason for this sudden change of heart?"

"He likes it down here." Downstairs, Sean could hear Craig's voice whispering urgently into the phone in the kitchen. "Armed response, please, we think he may have a gun -"

"I'll bet he fucking does." Sean rose unsteadily from the chair, crossed the landing to the bathroom door. "When the Armed Police get here, if they want to shoot me I'll be in the bath." He handed her the daffodil. Removed from the water, it had shrivelled.

When he locked the bathroom door behind him, he realized he had given her neither the deeds, nor the bank statements, nor the share certificates.

"Odysseus", he said to himself wearily, "has fucked up."

When the police came knocking, he was asleep. Being in the bath naked had been a good strategy. He came out of the bathroom staring bleary-eyed down the barrels of three revolvers.

***

"Three guns to take in one unarmed man."

"We had very good reason to believe you might have been armed, Mr. Agnello." The Inspector shifted in his seat in embarrassment. "It would have been four guns, but one of our men died suddenly this morning. Brain embolism, in his sleep."

Aha. So, was that the one who might otherwise have killed me? Hirondelle are behind every continued breath I take. "I'm sorry to hear that. Was he a good officer?"

"A bit trigger-happy, to be honest. He'd been under investigation for an incident where an unarmed suspect was shot. But that's immaterial. You have been arrested on a charge of possession of an unlicensed firearm, a very serious offence. I've read you your rights; do you have anything to say?"

The Glock lay on the table in front of him, shiny and beautiful. He'd had enough good sense not to have any futuristic house-destroying firearms on his person when arrested.

The interview room was whitewashed, solid, brick-built. A mandatory colleague sat beside the Inspector, minding the tape recorder. There were no windows, and Sean was, by now, wearing neither belt nor bootlaces.

"I smuggled the Glock in to Britain on a bet. I bought it in Kinshasa, in Zaire. It's very easy to get hold of firearms there. A five year old could buy one. Couldn't buy himself enough rice to eat, but large calibre handguns, no problem."

"You smuggled it in on a bet?"

Sean explained. The Inspector nodded without yielding the slightest glimmer of sympathy.

"Your wife's father claimed that you threatened your wife with it."

"Did my wife claim that I threatened her with it?"

The Inspector was reluctant to concede a point. "Not as such, no. Did you?"

"In my job", said Sean, "I work in Africa, with a good number of military clients. All for the UN, all above board. But my job is very dangerous. For my wife's sake - and probably for my own as well - I recently gave it up. There are people who don't like partners running out on a contract."

"I don't follow", said the Inspector. "Have you received death threats of any kind?"

"No", said Sean. "But I've had blazing rows with people who scare me, and the imagination is a very powerful thing. It's more about what I'm scared of happening than what I think might happen. I fell asleep in a chair because I'd come home from the three separate job interviews I'd set up in the north of England. I'd been put more or less in the picture that I'd failed all of them. I was, quite frankly, suicidally depressed. I fell asleep in the chair with a gun in my hand, and when Sam woke me up I was having a nightmare. You can guess the rest."

"Take me through it. Did you point the gun at her?"

Sean sighed. "I'm afraid so. For one half second, before I realized it was her."

"But the gun wasn't loaded", said the Inspector.

"No." Sean grinned. "I've got to be the world's biggest coward."

"What were you going to do with it, pistol-whip yourself to death?"

"I really have no idea. But in any case, I no longer have any need to feel depressed. I have recently, following my parents' death, become the sole shareholder of a very large company. My mother died in the London disaster two days ago", he explained.

"And you no longer have any need to be depressed", said the Inspector.

Sean shrugged. "She had a good innings. I discovered her body, you know." He grinned. "It was in a terrible state, all grey and wrinkly."

The Inspector glared at Sean.

"In any case, you'll probably be relieved to hear that we have more on our plate than we can handle right now, and for this reason and this reason alone I am deciding to release you with a caution. I don't like unlicensed firearms, and normally I'd throw the book at you. But our cells are completely full of London refugees right now, and there are a number of other incidents -"

"Such as?" said Sean innocently.

"Well, a rumour's surfaced in the press that the Home Office have released a multiple child rapist into the community in Penzance. There have been demonstrations, and an address has been firebombed. One person died."

"Any truth in it?"

"None that we can see. That's the message we're putting out. If anybody of that description were to be moved into this area, I'd certainly like to think we'd know about it, and we don't."

"So the person who died was entirely innocent."

The Inspector's face was grim. "Nice old gent who waved at schoolkids out of his flat window, far as we know."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

The Inspector nodded. "We're confiscating your firearm, of course. If you have any more, you'd do well to tell us about them now. Otherwise it'll go very hard on you if we ever find them."

"I don't have any more."

The Inspector looked up at Sean with an odd glint in his eye that did not bode well for his future. "When you were arrested, you didn't phone a lawyer. You phoned the Hirondelle car company."

"I did."

"What for?"

"To check the current value of my stock."

Barely controlling himself, the Inspector rose to his feet and opened the door.

"The desk sergeant will see you out."

***

So, here I am.

Sitting in my back garden, on the swing I built for my son. Who his grandparents will not let me see. When I drove up to collect him yesterday afternoon, he'd 'gone out for a walk', and Sylvia wouldn't let me in the house. She was maintaining constant mobile phone contact with Andrew, of course. When I called Sam and made a fuss, Sam drove over and shouted at them, and they gave in. But when Mickey was opening his presents in the living room, he asked me if I wanted to kill Mum.

And that bastard Craig is still here. She says she 'doesn't feel safe without him in the house'. Says she 'doesn't feel she can trust me any more'. And he's still in the guest bedroom, because it would be impolite to put a guest on the sofa. Which means I'm on the sofa, and Sean asks why I'm on the sofa every morning at breakfast, and I have to suffer that snide bastard's supercilious sneer every morning every time he hears it. 'I'm not in the master bedroom - yet.'

I've been here two days, net browsing, playing soldiers and wargames with Mickey, taking him out to the movies, doing odd jobs that I've wanted to get round to for ages, trying to be as nice as possible to her. Get on her good side. And the balance is starting to tip ever so slightly in my favour. We have the deeds to the house. We have a guaranteed income for life. And Craig is beginning to look just a little bit like the irritating third guy in the room after the party who just won't go home at two in the morning when both you and this really hot girl want to get it on really, really badly.

In my own bastard house.

Dear God, I can't stand this much longer.

And this afternoon, he announces that he wants to go to Truro because he's heard that there's a ten screen multiplex cinema opening and he thinks Mickey might be interested. And of course Mickey is. Why wouldn't he be, he's only nine.

God on a stick, why can't I just kill him?

But of course, I can. I haven't used the terrible power I seem to possess to explicitly order someone's murder quite yet. A lot of people have died, but I haven't personally crossed that line.

It's cold out here. The clouds are amusing shapes. That one over there looks like a mutated cow foetus. Come to think of it, they all look like mutated cow foetuses. What are the odds on that, eh?

He pulled out the already battered pocket notebook and turned to page one. Page one read:

Four p.m., January 2nd, 2007: George Edward Wilson comes back from 2040 on 1 p.m. Portsmouth-to-Jersey ferry. Source 1 ringtailed lemur + 2 daughters

He could quite easily add an entry that said 3 a.m. January 14 2007. Craig Watkyn dies peacefully in his sleep of a brain haemorrhage.

I won't cross that line.

Not today, at any rate.

Is that because I'm scared of some sort of Judaeo-Christian hell? No. It's because my father told me not to win any game by cheating. If I beat anyone, I'm going to beat him fair and square.

Then I'll kill him.

So, how to proceed? I have to become the worst global dictator the world has ever known inside thirty years. Only by so doing do I have any chance of stopping that dictator - because, of course, he's me.

I hope.

I could do with some assistance here. Some friendly advice on how to get through the next three decades. So why don't I just arrange to have a chat with me?

He unclipped a biro from his inside pocket and wrote in the first page of the diary:

15 January 2020 15 January 2007
15 January 2025 15 January 2013
15 January 2030 15 January 2019
15 January 2035 15 January 2025

I will come back from the first column of dates to see myself on the second column of dates, at 2 pm, at the locations specified in column 3.

He chewed the end of his pen. Now for column 3.

He might as well have some fun. Choose your favourite locations. But I'm really, really tired right now, so choose an easy one for tomorrow.

He put pen to paper and wrote Coffee shop, Tate Gallery, St. Ives. It would be virtually deserted at this time of year. Now, where next? How about a second honeymoon in Venice? What's the name of that absurdly expensive café on Piazza San Marco, the one I can afford to eat in now?

He wrote down Harry's Bar, Piazza San Marco, Venice.

Better get Venice over with quickly, it probably won't be there for much longer. And what was the name of that place that had actually caused his credit card to bleed in the machine? He'd spent one glorious night there subsidized by the army on Arctic warfare training...

Perlan, Reykjavik.

The Pearl overlooked the bay, rotated gently to provide panoramic views, and was the most extortionate culinary experience known to man. In January, an evening meal at the Pearl might be accompanied by spectacular auroral displays. It was truly a place fit for a great dictator.

Iceland was, after all, a nation in the middle of a thousand miles of nowhere, having neither an army nor a navy. Its capital was unlikely to disappear from the map in the next two decades.

Finally, on a whim, he wrote:

The Russian Tea Room, New York City.

That surely had to be the most expensive restaurant on earth. Movie directors ate there. By 2025, however, he'd have enough power not just to eat there, but to sit there and watch movie directors eat shit out of their own backside with spoons at the next table, and yell at them to put more feeling into the process.

How long should my limo be? It'll be a Hirondelle, naturally. Platinum-plated and so long it'll need to be triple-articulated to go round corners.

Tomorrow, then. At the Tate. At two.

That hedge needs a good trim. Do I have time to do it before sundown?

His mobile phone rang. He answered it.

"Agnello." Now he was a millionaire, he imagined he could dispense with the 'Sean'.

"Mr. Agnello? Hello, I'm Dr. Lang's assistant, Adrian Lamb. I'm sort of his second-in-command -"

Oh GOD.

He realized only after Adrian Lamb had finished several sentences that he had to remember to breathe. He learned that Adrian Lamb had been one of Dr. Lang's most devoted followers since the Church's very early days, handled much of the Church's finances, and was affectionately known to his fellow devotees as 'The Pastor'. Pastor Lamb! Adrian Lamb was of the opinion that that was a Chicken Guarding the Hen Coop situation. Adrian Lamb would very much like to know what manner of transfer Sean intended to make his donation to Church funds with - would it be SWIFT or IBAN?

"Are you still there?"

Sean felt a tightness in his chest. He could find no words to reply.

Kill him! Kill him kill him kill him kill him kill him NOW -

I've crossed the line. He gripped the mobile tightly in his fist, tightly enough to crush the delicate circuitry inside it. The man on the other end of the line, however, refused to die.

"I'm very sorry, I think I might have a wrong number."

The call ended. Sean sat staring at the phone, all his efforts at willing death on his enemy in vain.

Why didn't it work? It worked last time, with Wilson and the lemur.

He had a brainwave, took out the notebook, scribbled KILL ADRIAN LAMB AT he looked at his wristwatch 15:45 GMT JANUARY 14 2007.

He clicked to the RECEIVED CALLS menu on his phone, found Lamb's call, and clicked REPLY. The number dialled. A living human man answered.

"Hello, Mr. Lamb? This is Mr. Agnello returning your call. Uh, how are you feeling?"

Pastor Lamb was in irritatingly rude health. He enquired as to Sean's own wellbeing.

"I've been worse", lied Sean. "Regarding the bank transfer, I believe it will be IBAN. Dr. Lang has already given me the codes. Would it suit you for the first installment to reach your account tomorrow?" It wouldn't do to be impolite to the man who was due to be the Great Dictator, after all.

"Yes, that'll be fine. I'll be on the same number. I'll look forward to your call, and thanks again. Bye."

"Bye." All the world's futures, down the toilet. It's not you! It's him!

Even if I only get to be a major Church dignitary, though, I'll still get to muck around with time, maybe even send the odd Resistance member back with the odd Malagasy prosimian. But that doesn't mean I get to be Pastor Lamb.

He stared into the floating foetal fog piling up against the high moors. It would be down here in earnest soon, a whiteout.

Of course, if he's Pastor Lamb, and if he discovers I'm walking around with a slip of paper in my pocket at all times reminding myself to kill him, then he'll have me liquidated for sure -

He tore off the strip of page that contained the KILL ADRIAN LAMB message, crumpled it up, and sat with it scrunched up in his palm.

He stared at it, and was infected by a grin which spread out into a humourless laugh.

It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know it won't work, so I've just decided not to do it. Which is why it won't work.

Causality was a terrible thing.

Given that I'm not Lamb, is there any point in me keeping the appointment I just made tomorrow?

But if I'm not Lamb, then I still know who he is. Can't I have the Hirondelle engineers cook up some slow-burning cancer or compound that will take until 2035 to kill him? And then administer it to him here and now, in 2007?

On the plus side, I won't have to live with the fact, for the rest of my life, that I am Pastor Lamb.

Yes. There is a purpose in going. Even if I can't be the Czar, I can still be a footsoldier of the Revolution.

Mr. Darcy slunk across the grass and thrust his head up under Sean's hand. Sean scratched absently at the crown of Mr. Darcy's head, up near the tiny sagittal bump which Lilianne One had always said contained his brain. Mr. Darcy sidled up to the swing and leaned on Sean, tail wagging like a big ginger flywhisk.

Sean looked up across the garden.

That hedge could really do with trimming. But it's too late to do it now.