Oddjobs 4: Out of Hours Read online

  Table of Contents

  Oddjobs 4 : Out of Hours

  PRESENT DAY (THURSDAY)

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  HELL

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  HELL

  1773

  HELL

  PRESENT DAY

  1773

  HELL

  1773

  HELL

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  HELL

  1773

  HELL

  1773

  HELL

  PRESENT DAY

  HELL

  PRESENT DAY

  HELL

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  1773

  HELL

  1773

  HELL

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  1773

  HELL

  PRESENT DAY

  1773

  HELL

  1773

  HELL

  PRESENT DAY

  1773

  HELL

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  HELL

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  1773

  PRESENT DAY

  Author Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Oddjobs 4: Out of Hours

  Heide Goody & Iain Grant

  Pigeon Park Press

  ‘Oddjobs 4: Out of Hours’ Copyright © Heide Goody and Iain Grant 2020

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except for personal use, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Published by Pigeon Park Press

  Cover art by Mike Watts

  www.pigeonparkpress.com

  [email protected]

  Oddjobs 4 : Out of Hours

  PRESENT DAY (THURSDAY)

  Emergency crews swarmed across Centenary Square. There wasn’t a great deal for them to do. Ten minutes ago, the building site at the centre of the square had been the scene of a titanic fight. In the red corner, weighing at least two thousand pounds: Crippen Ai, a slimy shapeshifting, poison-coated refugee monster from some distant interdimensional Venislarn hell. In the blue corner, weighing in at two hundred and forty pounds: Rod Campbell, former member of the SAS, current employee of the Birmingham consular mission to the Venislarn.

  Rod liked the emergency crews, he liked the sirens. In his experience, it tended to indicate that the moment of utter emergency had already passed and that if he needed to pass out or just have a bit of a sit down and a cup of tea, then that moment was not far away. He had won the fight, a fact that had surprised him more than anyone except perhaps Crippen Ai itself. Several tons of cement powder dropped on top of the slime creature had turned it into a sludgy suffocating mass of wet cement that was now rapidly drying and baking in the centre of the building site.

  As he stood, trying unsuccessfully to brush cement dust from his clothes and admiring his handiwork while he could, his colleague Nina Seth entered the building site and approached the drying and hopefully dying monster. Nina had a frequently lax attitude to clothing in the workplace but her current outfit was something else all together. She looked like she had just come away from a stage audition for the role of Captain Hook (although her frame was more Peter Pan). She was wearing a Georgian greatcoat with big flappy pockets and shiny brass buttons, and on her head was a black tricorn hat.

  “Some of my finest work,” said Rod, coming up behind her.

  Nina turned to see him and then, as though it had been years since she had seen him, rather than the scant few hours since the meeting with Morag, Kathy and Vaughn that morning, she threw herself at him and hugged him fiercely. Cement dust from his suit immediately enveloped her and she broke away, coughing.

  “Ugh! You’re disgusting,” she said.

  “You’re not so pleasant yourself,” he said.

  “It’s a new look,” she said, adjusting her hat.

  “I meant the smell,” he said. She smelled liked she had been sleeping in a ditch and her coat had been used as horse blanket.

  “I practically had to invent the bath,” she said.

  “What?”

  She gave him a smile. “Long story…”

  1773

  Nina would not have considered herself to have wide hips, not until she tried to squeeze them through a metal hoop less than a foot across. Behind her, the collapsing house crunched and snapped. Something smacked hard against her heel. She pictured briefly what it would be like to have her legs crushed in the twenty-first century and her body intact in this other time. She then pictured what might happen if the fall of Soho House squashed the oculus while she was still climbing through it.

  “To hell with this!” she hissed, wriggled, pushed and fell forward.

  She landed shoulder first on hard, tiled floor and rolled. She heard the hole behind her close with a crashing sound suddenly cut off, like a roll of thunder being sucked down a plughole. She stood. The hole and the oculus was gone.

  It was dark. The moon at the window cast the only light there was. Outside was a long garden and a wall. She was standing in the same room she had just vacated in the present day. It was oddly pleasing that the room and the garden looked so familiar.

  “Okay,” she said to herself, picking up her ‘History is Fun!’ notepad. “Find the oculus, open a window to yesterday and save the world.”

  If she remembered the layout of the house well enough then Boulton’s study and the oculus were just along the hallway and, if it was nighttime, there should be no one awake to stop her.

  “Stealth mode.”

  Nina took out her phone, switched it on as a torch and went to the door.

  The door handle was stiff but turned without noise. She crept out into the hallway. The air smelled heavily of waxy furniture polish. She shone her torch cautiously and moved towards the study.

  A shadow flitted across the hallway ahead. She raised her light but it was gone. The eyes could play tricks in the dark but had looked like something had really been there. A human shape. She paused near the study door and pondered what to do.

  No, she told herself. Her actions were clear. Get the oculus that existed in this time, get back to the future, save Morag, stop Rod dying and save the world. Five things, probably in that order.

  She put her hand on the door handle.

  Ahead, deeper in the house there was the smash of breaking glass; a window.

  A second later there were shouts, from upstairs and from rooms behind her. A second after that there was the faintest flicker of light from the stairs.

  “Crap,” she said.

  She dashed into the study and shone her torch around. The place was full of ledger books and various notes. The desktop was invisible beneath a mountain of paper.

  “Oculus, oculus…”

  There were drawings. There were metal items, perhaps from Boulton’s factory. There was a brass and copper thing that looked like a piston. There was one of them geode thingies holding down a stack of paper. There was no oculus.

  Someone in the house was shouting instructions. There were heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  Nina hurriedly pushed items aside. She scattered papers, covered with complex designs and notes made in a Venislarn-style script. She threw the carefully laid out innards of a clock on the floor and opened drawe
rs and what cupboards she could find. There was no oculus.

  “Damn it,” she hissed. It was meant to be easier than this.

  The door flung open. She whirled.

  “What in hell!” declared the tall man, raising his hand as shield against the phone’s torch light.

  Nina panicked and grabbed at the sash window. It didn’t move.

  “Stand still!” barked the man.

  She glanced back, still wrestling with the window.

  “Stand still or you’ll feel the end of my knobstick!”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” she said.

  It turned out that he would.

  PRESENT DAY

  Rod patted more cement dust from his suit. Across the square, Crippen-Ai’s cement smothered throes seemed to have come to a complete stop. From the entrance nearest the Library of Birmingham, the consular mission chief, Vaughn Sitterson, and the mission’s resident tech support / wizard, Professor Sheikh Omar, approached the entombed monster. Rod knew there would be questions and recriminations regarding what had just happened here.

  “They’ve got Morag,” said Nina

  “Who?” said Rod

  “The Maccabees.”

  “Kathy’s lot,” said Rod.

  “Her,” said Nina.

  Nina and Rod’s colleague Kathy, someone who had been briefly more than a colleague to Rod, was apparently a member of a covert organisation who wanted to wage open war on the Venislarn gods. Nina had called them the Maccabees. That was perhaps how they referred to themselves when the organisation first came into existence a couple of hundred years ago. Rod knew they now operated behind the façade of Forward Management, a construction and property management company that had fingers in pies and building projects all over of the city.

  “And Morag’s pregnant,” said Nina.

  “She’s what?” said Rod.

  Nina tried to explain and, as she did, took a ragged notebook from her pocket to show to Rod.

  Rod didn’t understand half of what she said and didn’t like the half he did understand. After she had given him all the really bad headlines, they went over to where Vaughn and Omar stood gazing at the modern sculpture that was Crippen-Ai.

  “The world’s going to end,” said Rod.

  “Twenty-nine,” said Vaughn, fixing him with a very unhappy gaze. This was extraordinary in itself; Vaughn never looked directly at anyone. He almost never spoke directly to anyone. His usual technique as mission chief was to communicate via e-mail, proxies and post-it notes and otherwise hope that his views and instructions were dispersed through the office via some sort of office gossip osmosis. Vaughn was clearly very unhappy indeed.

  “Pardon?” said Rod.

  Vaughn pointed round the square. “I can see twenty-nine windows looking over this site. That’s at least twenty-nine people who saw what just happened her. More if people are prepared to share, people who saw you very publicly bury this thing in concrete.”

  “Cement,” said Rod. “And I did bury it. So that’s a win. Glass half full, you know.”

  “And the world is going to end,” said Nina.

  “It’s always going to end,” said Vaughn witheringly.

  “Aye,” Rod agreed, “but it’s going to end tomorrow because…” He turned to Nina. “Notepad?”

  Nina presented her notepad to Vaughn. It had the words ‘History is fun!’ written on it in an inappropriately jaunty font.

  “These markings,” she said, flicking through, “are from a device called the oculus. It’s a time viewing thing. I’ve seen the day the soulgate closes. It’s tomorrow.”

  “Friday,” added Rod, needlessly. “Also, we’ve been betrayed. Kathy is working for the other side.”

  “The Venislarn?” said Vaughn.

  “The Maccabees,” said Nina.

  “Forward Management,” said Rod.

  “The building people?” said Professor Omar.

  “It’s a front.”

  Vaughn shook his head impatiently. “You’re making very little sense. You might be concussed.”

  “I’m not concussed,” said Rod.

  “Me and twenty-nine or more other people just saw you fight that thing.”

  “And I’m not concussed,” said Nina.

  Vaughn’s expression suggested that she didn’t need to have concussion for him to doubt her sanity or reliability. “I need a full written report on this immediately,” he said. “No, first, you need to get a fresh change of clothes,” he said to Rod and then looked at Nina’s outlandish outfit. “And you need to read the office policy documents on staff clothing expectations.”

  With that, and clearly overwhelmed by the amount of actual human interaction he just had to endure, Vaughn marched off back to the library, face buried in the tablet he carried as his all-purpose people avoidance device.

  Rod turned to the professor. “They’ve got Morag, Omar.”

  “Kathy?” There was light derision in the professor’s voice. There usually was.

  “We know she’s pregnant,” said Nina.

  His glib manner dissolved. He tried to recover it. “What? What do you mean?”

  “She’s gonna give birth to the adn-bhul anti-Christ,” said Nina.

  “For one, I think analogies between the Venislarn Kaatbari and the Biblical anti-Christ are reductive and unhelpful at best –”

  Rod gripped the professor’s arm.

  “Blummin’ heck, man. They’re going to kill her. If they think her baby is going to jump start the end of days then they’ll kill both of them. Who knows what they’re doing with her right now? She’s probably scared out of her wits right now!”

  Morag was angry. She was irritated and more than a little bored but she was mostly angry.

  And pregnant.

  Morag had no experience of pregnancy in her previous life. It wasn’t that she avoided people who were pregnant, just that nobody close to her had ever had cause to explain the mechanics to her. If she’d ever given it any thought, she’d have assumed that when the time came, she’d watch some Youtube videos or something.

  Now she was here, in a perfectly clean hospital-cum-prison room with no access to the internet, or even a sympathetic human, and she was fairly sure that things had taken an unusual turn. Professor Omar and Maurice had been keen for her to embrace the whole shitshow (read the books, knit the booties, do the pelvic floor exercises) but she’d resisted, partly out of denial and then almost certainly out of anger at their sheer impertinence. She sighed and hoped that Maurice’s yellow booties might yet get a chance to be worn.

  She’d never for a moment have imagined that she might even miss the presence of Shala’pinz Syu, the Handmaiden of Prein who’d been assigned as her nanny, but even she would have been better than nothing. Instead, the death of another Handmaiden of Prein was now associated with her. She could expect little sympathy from the ones that remained, although that was probably just bubbling under in the top ten of things that she should worry about.

  The handle of the door turned and Dr Kathy Kaur and Malcolm walked in, both former employees of the consular mission to the Venislarn, both working all the while for an organisation with a completely different agenda.

  “Afternoon, fuckers,” said Morag with cheery malice.

  You said the bad word, said her unborn child, a silent voice in her head. Ever since she’d accidentally made a telephathic link to her foetus with some Venislarn neuro-virtual reality equipment, it had been like carrying an onboard censor in her womb. She ignored it for now.

  “Pissed off any more gods since I last saw you?” she asked Kathy.

  Kathy arched an eyebrow and gave Morag a look that was half-playful, half-reproachful.

  “We can’t stay to chat just now, but I’ve brought you a coffee and a sandwich.” Kathy held up a paper bag before putting it down on the wheeled table.

  “Go to hell,” said Morag.

  “That’s precisely what we’re trying to avoid,” said Kathy. “We’re not the ones wh
o thought it wise to shag the emissary of an evil interdimensional horror.” Her expression softened. “We don’t hate you, Morag.”

  “Funny way of showing it. There’s not even a toilet in this place.”

  Kathy crossed to a thin wardrobe, opened it and dragged out some sort of chair. It looked as if it belonged in a museum of torture.

  “A commode. Because we’re not animals.”

  “Debatable.”

  Malcolm gave a head jiggle to Kathy. “Ask her.”

  Kathy sighed. “Malcolm is concerned about how much our colleagues, Nina and Rod, might know, might think they know about our operation here.”

  “Operation?” said Morag and spread her hands. “I don’t even think you know what’s going on here. You think you can wage war on the Venislarn, the utterly unkillable and unknowable Venislarn. You’re like that king who thought he could command the sea to go back.”

  “Canute,” said Malcolm.

  “You’re a complete pair of Canutes, you are.”

  “There are hundreds of us,” said Kathy.

  Morag held her stomach. “And you’re all going to die when this one’s relatives find out what you’ve done.”

  Are they? said her unborn.

  “Rod and Nina,” Malcolm reminded her.

  Morag opened her mouth but what could she say? The truth? That they probably knew nothing and that she was lost to them for good? Some cock and bull story to wind them up? In the end she settled for, “Fuck you. Fuck you both.”

  Kathy and Malcolm shared a look like they expected nothing less and, without further conversation, left. The key turned in the lock.

  Morag made a mental note to get Steve to check whether the key was still there on the other side. She looked at the commode. It was a primitive ugly thing made from tubular metal, with a seat suspended over a small bucket.

  “Classy,” she growled, but then realised that she really, really needed to use it.

  “Fine. Gonna fill this thing up to the bhul-tamade brim and your head’s going in it when I get hold of you Kathy Kaur.”

  You’re very angry, mother.

  “Yes, I am.” She lay back on the bed. “Steve, are you there?”