It Started on a Monday Morning (REVAMPED)

It was the morning of the first Monday in May, and under a hazy post dawn mist in London, commuters crept yawning to their work on the crowded buses and even more crowded trains, their cars jamming up the roads and making people as late as on the delayed Underground. The mounting heat of the early summer day made tempers fray quickly.

One of the many thousands making the laborious and polluted journey was an accountant in a suit, one of hundreds, employed and underpaid by a small firm of lawyers in Lambeth. His name was John Doe and as he staggered off his bus and meandered his way to his train, which was as late again as he was, he expected nothing more than an ordinary day, full of paper and pens and the loud complaints. His mind was dull and fuzzy from lack of sleep and he just knew that Mr Smith the Head Accountant would run him ragged over his lack of comprehensible work, or which there was plenty but much was ignored.

Someone bumped into him as he held onto a pole on the train, swaying with the motion of it. He almost dropped his battered old briefcase but grabbed it back quickly before the metal edges could make a loud din in the sleepy compartment, the midnight dark of the tunnels making the atmosphere even drowsier than it already was. He yawned widely, unable to help himself awake, and blearily looked at his fellows in their crisp, straightjacket suits, most of them a dull grey or funereal black.

There was one uptight business woman, however, who was mummified in a yellow pencil skirt and blazer so unbearably garish that it blinded John Doe’s slumbering eyes painfully. He yawned again and a collective groan was heard from almost everyone as the train juddered to a halt in Aldgate East station, signalling the mass migration of commuters off the train and into the city for the day. The crowd buzzed with an irritated depression akin to bees as the platform, stuck with globs of chewing gum and cigarette butts, awoke and throbbed with life.

Jolted and shoved, John found soon himself on the street with its bright sunlight, feeling more exerted than he liked. He drifted over to the park across the road, thinking feebly that as late as he now certainly was, a few more minutes would do little harm.

That so, he collapsed onto a park bench, making sure it was firm first before he did so. He dropped his briefcase down beside him and yawned once more before surveying the local area with weak, vague eyes. To an onlooker, it may well have seemed that he was unsure where he was, though in truth it was the very opposite. He looked at the gaping maw of the station, a huge hole in a redbrick façade.

It was there that John first noticed the hooded man, a great monkish cowl pulled over his head and thick robes obscuring his hunched over form. He stood to the side of the great gush of people, quite easy to spot, moving with some mixed motive, like anticipation and anxiety, but despite that and his funny dress, no-one else seemed to be aware of him. John thought that even the most callous and busy commuters would have at least stared in passing at the queer little man, who dithered and was jittery on the London streets in front of everyone, Tom, Dick and Harry, and yet he was ignored, as if he was not there and was part of his own, different plane.

John blinked, confused.

The strange little man was gone.

John stared in disbelief. Amongst the charcoal coloured suits and hundreds of briefcases, the bowed hump was nowhere, as if the man had vanished into nothing. It only sought to confuse John more.

The clock on the nearby spire chimed; John looked around and got up quickly, dragging his briefcase along as he stumped to the crowded bus stop to catch the 57, still thinking as he clung on to a pole for dearest life about the unusual commuter. His brain refused to dismiss it as a mirage, a trick. It screamed that it was something else, an omen, a sign, but John shrugged it off and pushed it to the depths of his mind as he got into work nearly three hours late.

As he stared at the clock that deemed it nearly eleven in the morning, John swore that less time had elapsed than really had. However, the time slip was forgotten quickly as Mr Smith, his boss, a rotund man with a bushy moustache, came round the corner and started shouting at him, first for lateness and then for laziness. Between such shouts and no tasks, John sat staring out over tall tower-blocks and run down streets of houses, seeing a few glassy scrapers here and there. He watched a beetle crawl slowly across the window sill, beady black body button shiny. He drank his cold coffee and stared dully at an advert that popped onto his screen, declaring with vivid flashing lights and lots of noise that he had won a cruise in the Caribbean for a fortnight.

Mr Smith shouted at him for causing a disturbance that added to the already deafening din of scanners whizzing and scores of phones ringing. He typed, he printed, he copied, he faxed, and then the clock on the wall announced that six o’clock had come. His colleagues around him left in a sea of tired groans and joyful sighs, leaving messy desks and empty mugs everywhere.

John got up too, packed his papers away, and picked up his briefcase. He stepped away from his tiny, cramped desk and walked right into the miniature walrus that was his boss. The man’s blotchy face had a violet hue to it, and his eyes were little more than slits of apocalyptic fury as his tea ran down his shirt.

In a very loud voice, Mr Smith shouted his final shout.

“You’re fired! Get out, Doe! And take your cactus with you!”

Feeling strangely detached from the scene, John just shrugged, said good night and left the building, forgetting about his potted cactus as he took the bus back to the still humming, buzzing station. From there he got his crowded seven o’clock train to Wimbledon Station and then from the terminal outside he got another crowded bus, the number 11. He stayed on it until it reached a small, grimy pub with a peeling sign reading ‘Crown Free House’.

“A pint, please,” John asked the barman, taking his grubby glass over to a window seat in the corner.

He sat and watched his beer get stale, the sun going down over the houses as the oily truckers dispersed one by one. There was not another suited man and battered case to be seen and several times the barman shouted at him to get out; John just bought out-of-date peanuts, crunching them and them and thinking.

“Closing time!”

“What?”

The beefy barman cast a large shadow over John as he leant the latter’s tiny table. A barmaid with a ratty appearance stared at him from beside the open door, her face screwed up and plastered with fake tan. The beer glass in her hand was making a horrible squeaking sound from where it was being over-enthusiastically cleaned with a filthy rag.

“Closing time,” the barman repeated, snatching John’s half-empty beer glass from the table, “now get going!’

John followed the pointing fat finger to the door that the barman and his girl were hinting none too subtly at. He felt rather despondent as it swing shut with a sad creak after him, leaving him standing on the curb in the dark. He tramped the bus stop, watching the cars go by as he waited for ages until some pitying passer by told him that it was well past nine. He sighed, watching the woman disappear down Mason Drive. He didn’t even bother to curse the bus company for getting rid of their night service the month before as he quietly resigned himself for the long walk home.

He started winding his way through the streets of Victorian terraces, almost as ill lit as they had been a century ago. John stumbled once or twice in the gloom, dropped his briefcase in a puddle of something, and walked into a lamppost or three before he finally turned into the broader street adjacent to his 1970s cul-de-sac.

He had walked several paces into Pickering Lane until he realised there were no cats or cars to be heard or seen. He also noticed that the many tall chimneys about seemed to be smoking or steaming, and that the lights in the windows were all on without the curtains being pulled to.

No one moved inside the houses either. Nothing stirred and there were no noises beyond the far rumble of traffic on the motorway. The bags of rubbish put for the bin-men hadn’t been torn open the foxes yet and when he saw that did John realised that something strange was up. He had an awful ticklish feeling inside of him, as though he had swallowed multiple hairy caterpillars alive inside of eaten old peanuts.

It was a chilly sensation, and persistent. Something told him to hide behind the pungent dumpster that squatted like a hulking monster in the alley nearest the where he stood, conveniently beside the only working street light.

John, although never really one to follow strange senses that came over him suddenly, retrieved his damp briefcase and screwed up his nose. He crept into the alley between two tall houses converted into flats and sat himself on a squishy cardboard box, waiting for something-anything-to happen.

Moments later, exactly where John had been standing, a tall figure in black appeared as if from nowhere. His robes dragged on the pavement, and his hood was pulled back, although it was no until he turned around that John saw his face.

The man was old, with grey-white hair that fell to his shoulders. His moustache and goatee were the same colour, but bushier and several inches long. A long and slightly aquiline nose was topped by a beetle brow, under which were eyes unlike any that John had seen before; they were large and glowing a marginally dimmer yellow than the lamppost, which suddenly bent as the old man was thrown onto it by an invisible force which pinned him there.

“Asmodeus!” The man cried out in a harsh and angry voice as he thrashed unmoveable, his trailing sleeves batting the night like murderous wings.

A horrid cackling like broken glass being shaken in an ice bucket echoed over the ethereal and eerie street, and from nowhere as well, a familiar hunched figure came out of the shadows behind a nearby car.

“Asmodeus!” The little man repeated in his own hissy, lisping voice, “Asmodeus!”

He cackled again and his hood fell back, revealing something that was not quite a man. His head was nearly spherical and as he had no neck, it wobbled on his fat, round body atop two, apparently very bowed, legs. He held his short, withered arms to his chest in a manner much like Igor did in the Dracula movies, long, gnarled nails like sharp claws tipping them.

“Asmodeus he cries!” The monster man warbled.

His face was taken up almost entirely by a mouth that stretched from one invisible ear to the other, a maw filled with inwards curving black fangs, with large gaps between them for torture. His eyes took up a lot of space as well, they being round and yellow like headlights, thick black slits like a cat’s in their centre. A bump, squashed between them and his mouth was all there was of a nose. “He cries for Asmodeus!”

“Unhand me, Mamilion!” The old man struggled vainly, “Release me!”

The thing, Mamilion, cackled again and John recoiled, shuddering.

“Master says to play,” Mamilion sang, “Master says to win.”

“And where is your Master? Where is Asmodeus?”

“Master is taking his place. Master is wearing his crown-”

“The crown is mine!” The old man shouted. His face was growing grey from his fruitless struggles, “it’s mine until I die!’

“Die…” Mamilion’s grin grew wider, “Die! Die!”

There was a winded grunt and then a load snap, followed by an unnatural cheer from Mamilion, who, from what John could see as peered in terror around split grass-sacks and rotting rubbish bags, was skipping down the road in maniac ecstasy, chortling and yipping, his black cloak and robes swishing and dancing with him. With a final happy squeal, Mamilion vanished into nothing as suddenly as he came, disappearing on the edge of the pool of electric light.

With his departure and the old man’s silence, an oppressive blanket seemed to have been lifted from the cul-de-sac and John’s cold, ticklish feeling dissipated in moments. He stayed though where he was though, scared stiff from what he had just witnessed. He shivered with fright, unnerved by Mamilion’s laugh.

John jumped and screamed as a rat squeaked and streaked over his foot.

Wild with fear, John bolted, spraying festering fruit and ancient teabags over the suddenly alive street, his briefcase forgotten in his terror. It was a long time before his breathing slowed down with his heart, John swearing at himself and the games his mind played. He stood in front of his maisonette, rationality only just starting to kick in as he raised a hand to his throbbing head; with some fear, he turned around and saw a body lying by the now bent streetlight. Common compassion had his feet leading him over to it, away from the safety and normality of his flat. He retched when closer.

The old man lay dead in the round, his neck broken backwards, blood on the crooked lamppost where his head had struck it and cracked like an egg. His eyes were still open, grey now, almost clear like light bulbs in need of a clean, flecked with age. John closed them, trying to think of them as dirty headlights and nothing more as he shivered at how cold the skin already was. He hesitated for a moment before closing the man’s gaping mouth too, then straightened, wondering whether he should run back to his flat and phone the police to report a murder.

However, something nagged at him not to. The same voice that had told him to hide now told him to back away and go home. John guessed that it was doubt telling that no-one would believe his story.

After all, John reasoned, few would believe that he had met a toad-like monster called Mamilion on a dark London street. His head throbbed warningly just then he groaned, a sudden craving for aspirin welling up inside of him.

More worried for himself than a corpse whose owner he had never known, John spun around and fled.