The Quanderhorn Xperimentations Read online

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She may prevent it striking twelve—’

  ‘Why must it strike twelve?’

  ‘There’s no time to explain right now. We need to warm up the cannon. Get out there and delay her.’

  ‘What? Wi-with my bazooka?’ I looked down at the infernal tube. I had no idea which way round it went or how to fire it without being catapulted backwards into the Thames.

  ‘No! Of course not with the bazooka. Distract her.’

  ‘What do you mean “distract her”?’

  ‘Flirt with her!’

  ‘ Flirt? ’

  I looked over at the unspeakable monstrosity, oozing a trail of vile green slime up Sir Charles Barry’s exquisite Gothic revival stonework.

  ‘In front of all these people?’

  ‘You are such a Boy Scout.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘That thing – it’s Virginia.’

  ‘Virginia?’ I shook my head. The name meant nothing to me.

  ‘She used to be part of the team.’

  I looked around again at the suppurating behemoth. I was suddenly gripped by a very disturbing thought.

  ‘Was she my wife?’

  ‘Not everybody’s your wife. What’s wrong with you, for heaven’s sake?’

  I glanced again at the grotesque mutation. ‘And I’m supposed to flirt with her?’

  ‘We all thought she was rather soft on you.’

  ‘But how did she—’

  ‘There’s no time to explain right now – get out there and shout sweet nothings!’

  ‘And why is there never any time to explain anything?’ But Dr. Janussen had hastened over to the extraordinary contraption Troy was finally trundling over the cobblestones. It was on caterpillar tracks, like a tank, but the cannon barrel looked more like a giant elongated version of the valve that my nose had recently accommodated. Troy shimmied up a lamppost, pulled out the bulb and plugged a long flex in its place. The giant valve began to glow blue and buzz like an angry beehive.

  I gingerly leant the bazooka against a wall, adjusted my reindeer pullover to cover the flap of my long johns, and strode purposefully towards the beast. At the base of the tower, I cleared my throat and cupped my hands.

  ‘Uhm . . . Virginia! Hullo there! It’s . . . it’s me!’

  The abomination stopped in its tracks, slowly turned its hideous visage towards me, and bellowed in a subhuman growl. The word was distorted and garbled, but undeniably recognizable.

  ‘Brrriiiiiiii-annn?’

  I very slightly wet myself.

  Chapter Three

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

  ‘Ha ha. Yes . . . Honey bunch – it’s me, Brian.’

  A large tendril fell off her and hit the ground with a splat beside me.

  ‘Brrriiiiiiii-annn?’ she/it repeated.

  I glanced round at the horrified faces of the rapt crowd. ‘Yes, uhm . . . Lambikins.’

  A wave of distaste swept through the throng. A small urchin threw a half-sucked gobstopper which struck the back of my head painfully and stuck there. I ignored it with dignity.

  ‘I was wondering if you might – if you feel like it – stop snacking on people’s faces for just one moment and come down from there?’

  The beast let out a pained and angry howl, then turned back to the climb.

  ‘Wait! Virginia! I’ve been thinking – how would you feel about our going steady?’ This stopped the creature briefly, but there were more groans and some rather distasteful insults from the mob. I pressed on desperately: ‘Obviously we wouldn’t want to rush towards a wedding straight away. I mean, at the reception we wouldn’t know what greens to serve with the chicken—’

  ‘ Grunghhnnnuhn! ’ Virginia howled. Somehow, I seemed to have enraged her.

  ‘All right, all right: we’ll get married straight away! We’ll have children together. A boy who takes after me, and a girl who looks like a huge Brussels sprout.’

  ‘ Gnghhnnarhhhgnuhn! ’

  A nun from a silent order suddenly yelled: ‘You’re a bloody awful flirt!’ Then clapped her hand over her mouth and crossed herself.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Troy furiously cranking a handle to elevate the cannon’s glowing barrel. The broccoli creature was almost at the clock face. It was one minute to midnight. I needed to buy just a little more time. Perhaps if I appealed to the person inside the beast.

  ‘Listen – Virginia – I don’t know what’s happened to make you this way, but try to remember you started out as a human being. And you still have that elusive spark of humanity inside you . . . I’m sure there’s a future for you of dignity and mutual respect and peaceful co-habitation . . .’

  She stopped. She turned to me. She exploded.

  Quanderhorn’s strange device had blasted her into thousands of fragments of sloppy green flesh and ribbons of foul-smelling viscera. The crowd shrieked as the ghastly carrion rained down on them.

  There was a small moment of silence. A lurid flatfish-shaped organ splatted onto my shoulder and flapped alarmingly in its death throes. I slapped it to the ground and stamped on it, realising too late I was in my stockinged feet.

  Big Ben began to chime the hour. I looked up from my saturated sock to see Troy’s beaming face.

  ‘Bullseye, eh?’ He winked. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m covered in the green slimy entrails of a respected colleague. How do you think I am?’

  A strange expression clouded Troy’s handsome features. His mouth opened and closed like a fish undergoing a rectal examination. By a crab.

  ‘Never ask Troy to think. You might damage him,’ Dr. Janussen chided. ‘Troy, stop thinking at once.’ This seemed to do the trick.

  The loudhailer barked: ‘Simple common folk – you can all go back to your celebrations. Well done everyone. But mostly me.’

  The midnight chime rang, but it had a curious tone to it – a sort of whooshing reverse echo – and I felt momentarily light-headed. Had I sustained some kind of minor head injury in the mêlée , I wondered?

  There was a small, shuffling pause, then various appalling renditions of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ began to break out among the cheering multitude. Of course! New Year! Scanning the revellers, I spotted some ‘Happy 1952’ banners. Some small part of my brain thought that odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  Troy and Dr. Janussen had started packing the equipment away. I was turning to help them when I felt on my elbow a rather brusque tug, which had enough force to spin me round.

  I was facing an imposingly tall and wide man in improbable sunglasses. ‘Do you know what this is?’ He nodded down to where a large object was tenting the front of his raincoat.

  I licked my dry lips. ‘I’m sincerely hoping it’s a gun.’

  The object jerked to the left threateningly. Gun or not, it seemed prudent to heed its instruction.

  The mysterious figure ushered me down a dark alley. Was this to be the end for Brian Whatever My Second Name was? Shot in a dingy alleyway, for murky reasons I couldn’t even remember? The echo of our footsteps changed in timbre slightly. I looked up to see we were approaching a dead end. This was it, whatever ‘it’ was. In an attempt to appear slightly less cowardly than I actually was, I turned to face my tormentor and casually asked him ‘What now?’ with my eyebrow. Sadly, having raised the eyebrow, I couldn’t get it down again.

  He leant over, I assumed to strangle me, but instead he pressed a protruding brick by my shoulder. The wall behind me slid aside smoothly and, with a reassuringly metallic prod from the overcoat object, I turned again and stepped into the darkness.

  Chapter Four

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

  I was in some kind of office. I glanced around, but the wall had slid back in place, and my escort had vanished as suddenly as he’d appeared.

  As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I picked out, on a large mahogany desk be
fore me, a brandy decanter, a cigar humidor, a whisky decanter, a spare cigar humidor, a rum decanter, another brandy decanter, what appeared to be a vodka decanter, yet another brandy decanter, a barrel of Watney’s Pale and several cases of Veuve Clicquot Brut 1937.

  Behind it all, panting and dribbling, sat an absolutely enormous bulldog in a bow tie. Its cold blue eyes held me for a terrifying moment, then it cleared its throat, leant into the foggy beam of the weak desk lamp and exhaled a plume of blue-grey smoke. Not, in fact, a bulldog at all, but none other than . . .

  ‘Prime Minister Winston Churchill!’

  ‘Agent Penetrator!’

  I looked around for this agent person. There was no one in the room but us.

  ‘Agent who?’

  ‘Blast and damnation!’ the Great Man rumbled. ‘It’s just as we feared: they’ve arranged for you to “forget” the past few months.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘That infernal Quanderhorn and his cronies, of course.’

  ‘Professor Quanderhorn wiped my memory?’

  ‘You’re fortunate it was only your memory: one agent had his entire mind wiped. We had to raise him again as if from birth. You can only imagine the horror of potty training an eighteen stone rugger player with a fondness for vindaloos.’

  ‘So Agent Penetrator is . . . me?’

  ‘That’s right, Nylon.’ (Nylon! Yes – that was my name!) ‘You’re an undercover operative, inserted by Her Majesty’s Government, which is to say myself, into Quanderhorn’s team, along with Agent Cuckoo.’

  ‘There’s another agent?’

  Churchill regarded me rather sadly. ‘You’re wearing her intestines as a cravat.’

  ‘No, that is my cravat . . .’ I felt round my neck to straighten it. It was wet and slimy. I yelled ‘Urghh!’ involuntarily, and hurled it across the room. ‘That thing on the tower – Virginia: she was a Government spy, too?’

  ‘You were both supposed to be rooting out just what the blazes that lunatic Quanderhorn’s up to.’

  ‘Up to? What makes you think he’s up to anything?’

  ‘Pah!’ Mr. Churchill poured himself a snifter and took a generous draught. He dabbed dry his lips and fixed me once again with his bulldog stare. ‘Let me ask you this: what year is it?’

  I cast my mind back to the banners in the crowd. ‘1952, of course.’

  Mr. Churchill’s eyes twinkled impishly. ‘And last year was . . .’

  ‘Well, obviously, last year was . . .’ I suddenly realised what had been troubling me about those banners earlier. Clearly, I had some memory. ‘Great Scott! Last year was also 1952!’

  ‘And it was 1952 the year before that. In fact, by our reckoning, it’s been 1952 for the past sixty-six years.’

  This was quite some rabbit hole I’d tumbled into. The same year over and over again?

  ‘But that’s impossible!’

  ‘That brigand Quanderhorn does the impossible for breakfast. We don’t know how, but he’s got us trapped in some kind of infernal temporal Möbius band, and we can’t escape.’

  ‘But if you’re sure it’s Quanderhorn’s doing, why don’t you stop him?’

  ‘It isn’t so easy! Not the least of our problems is the confounded maniac’s a national hero! He’s saved us from countless Martian invasions, umpteen deadly space rays and three unspeakable outbreaks of reefer madness.’

  Martian invasions? Deadly space rays? My head was whirling.

  ‘But why hasn’t everybody noticed this 1952 thing?’

  ‘You’ll find, Penetrator, that most people notice hardly anything. It’s the basis upon which we’ve run this country for the last three hundred years.’

  ‘Well, we should tell them!’

  ‘Tell them? Good grief, man, there’d be panic in the streets! Society would collapse! There’d be civil war! Riots! Food shortages! Cannibalism! I’d have to resign! Is that what you want, Penetrator? Labour in power? ’

  I don’t know why, but I immediately snapped back, ‘Good God, no!’ I may have had very little memory, but even I knew that was insanity.

  There was a hiss and a slight grating sound behind me. The owner of the overcoat bulge leant in, and gruffled: ‘They’re looking for him,’ then left.

  ‘You’d best be off, Penetrator,’

  ‘Right. But . . .’ I had no idea what on earth was expected of me. And whatever it was, whether I wanted to do it. And there was something else. ‘Um, Prime Minister – I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could have a different code name, is there? Something slightly less . . . aggressive and treacherous?’

  He utterly ignored me. ‘The whole nation is relying upon you, Penetrator. Find out what’s going on, and report back to me.’

  ‘How will I get in touch?’

  ‘I’ll find you, Penetrator, I’ll find you.’

  I turned to leave, then turned back. ‘One more thing, sir: can you possibly tell me who I am?’

  But Mr. Churchill had gone, leaving behind nothing but the faint aroma of Havana cigars, brandy and, for some reason, herring.

  I wandered back up the alley trying to gather my very scattered thoughts. Was I really a spy, or was I really a scientist? It was all devilishly confusing. I found myself back in the celebratory bustle, and fought through the merry, singing, kissing crowd towards Dr. Janussen.

  The van was almost packed. I felt slightly guilty. Troy looked up from hoisting an improbably heavy slab of machinery into the vehicle. ‘There he is! Brian – where’ve you been?’

  ‘Well, I was just. . .’ I began. Cold as the weather was, I found myself suddenly sweating. My tongue seemed to double in size, as if I’d just chewed a wasp. Try as I might, I couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t, quite frankly, even think of a word . ‘. . . muhnamunhah .’

  They stared at me. ‘Brian – you may have forgotten that you’re very, very bad at lying,’ Gemma smiled pityingly.

  ‘I’m not lying,’ I lied. ‘It’s just . . .’ Then, with a merciful inspiration: ‘There isn’t time to explain right now.’

  They seemed satisfied by this, thank heavens, and we packed up in silence.

  That had been a close call. Whoever these people were, I needed to keep them on my side if I was ever to find out what the devil had happened to me.

  Chapter Five

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

  The van had been loaded into the belly of an ex-army cargo plane, and we were en route to the Professor’s lab, which I gathered was ‘somewhere on the road to Carlisle’. Whatever that meant.

  Alarmingly, the pilots’ seats had been removed from the cockpit and replaced with what appeared to be a cannibalised player piano, its bridge pins and hammer flanges connected by an intricate system of levers and wires to various flight controls. It played a complex, silent symphony on the instrument panel as reams of punched paper rolled furiously upwards. Despite its impossibly eccentric nature, the peculiar mechanism did seem to be keeping the bird in trim, at least.

  Quanderhorn himself had clearly seen fit to travel separately by some other, and doubtless superior, means, leaving us wretched minions to fend for ourselves in steerage.

  From an equipment locker in the fuselage, I’d managed to dig out some army surplus trousers to restore my dignity, and a pair of mauve moccasins to instantly remove it again.

  Despite the metallic shuddering and the relentless chopping of the propellers, the others had managed to fall asleep quite easily. Dr. Janussen sprawled elegantly sideways on an unforgiving wooden bench, one foot crooked slightly above the other, slender hands tucked under one lovely cheek as she breathed gently in and out with a sweet, melodic and surprisingly penetrating snore. Troy had wrapped himself, cocoon-like, in some sort of curious white netting he’d found somewhere. He was smiling, mostly, but occasionally he would let out a small high-pitched yelp, and his feet would flail about desperately for a second or two, then he would sink back into his peaceful slumber.


  No sleep for me. My mind raced back and forwards over the patchwork of incomplete facts about myself I’d managed to stitch together rather poorly.

  I worked for this mysterious Professor Quanderhorn, who was being investigated by the Government, in the form of me. Also. I seemed to have some sort of attachment to Dr. Janussen, about which she remained distressingly ambiguous. What had happened to me to make me forget vast swathes of my life? Was it a deliberate act of sabotage? Or was it the result of some kind of scientific experiment gone wrong, as had obviously happened to the wretched Virginia?

  Beyond that, things got considerably murkier.

  Plainly, I could remember certain things. I could speak, for instance, and read and write. I seemed to know London quite well, and I’d recognised the Prime Minister almost immediately. I had, however, no recollection of my past in any way. Not my parents, nor any siblings, certainly not my schooling: nothing at all biographical.

  I was clearly not a Cockney – I didn’t say ‘stone the crows’ or anything like that – but beyond that, I really had no idea about my background. My hands were quite smooth, so I obviously wasn’t a manual labourer, and I had no tattoos, so I’d never been a sailor. I tried saluting, but I didn’t seem very good at it – I wasn’t sure which way round my hand went at the top – so any military career was probably out of the reckoning. Quickly checking the others were still slumbering, I stood up on an impulse and tried tap-dancing. No good at that, either, especially in embarrassing suede moccasins. Thank heavens I wasn’t in show business!

  I found a long stick and made an attempt at drawing the head of a noble horse in the dust at my feet, but it just looked like a slug with a grin. No George Stubbs, I. Ah! But at least I could recall art history. And some algebra! I could decline the Latin noun mensa with consummate ease, but that appeared to be the entire extent of my grip on other languages. On the other hand, I seemed to have a quite startling reservoir of arcane cricket minutiae. I found I instinctively didn’t really trust foreigners, and the thought of a lukewarm suet pudding and thick custard with a rubbery skin filled me with deep yearning.