I offered no comment on this. And my brother tucked away his tools and offered, in return, no explanation.
Now, houses look all different in the darkness, don’t they? They lose all their colour, of course, and the everyday becomes untoward and the mundane outré and suchlike. I had to take off my sunglasses because I couldn’t really see very much.
I had brought a torch (or flashlight, as our colonial cousins like to call it) and I now switched this on and flashed its beam all about. ‘Weren’t there portraits on these walls?’ I whispered to Andy.
‘All down the hall,’ he replied. ‘We are in the right house, aren’t we?’
I tippy-toed along the tiled floor. I felt certain that it had been carpeted earlier.
I flashed the torch up stairs.
‘Those stairs look different, too,’ said Andy. ‘We are in the wrong house.’
‘We’re not. It’s the same. But it’s changed, somehow, that’s all.’
‘Changed its staircase?’
I shrugged and followed Andy, who was now heading upstairs.
The stairs didn’t creak, which surprised me, and no lights flashed on to reveal some fellow in a nightshirt with a blunderbuss in his hands. But then, perhaps the nightshirt-wearing blunderbuss-toter was now a thing of the past.
I followed Andy along a pleasantly furnished hallway and up another flight of steps. And so we eventually found ourselves on the top floor in a corridor of fair-to-middling widthness, before a door marked Pongo’s Lab. Keep Out.
‘Do your stuff,’ I whispered to Andy. And he took out his tool roll.
And after some minutes of twiddling about, he sprang the door’s lock and together we entered Pongo’s Lab. And with the door closed behind us I switched on the light and we, together, beheld.
And Andy whistled. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’
The room, though still circular, was otherwise thoroughly unlike the one we had entered but a few short hours before. There was no evidence at all of any alchemical involvement. No cross-threaded nurdlers or electric toggle-flangers or even a bit of litmus paper. Here was only a comfy bedsitting room kind of affair, with a bed and a chair to sit upon, and a table to sit at it with, and a sink to wash your hands in when you’d tired of sitting.
Andy raised his palms and said, ‘Where did everything go?’
‘I don’t believe it was ever here,’ I said. ‘I believe that we saw what we were intended to see, but not what was really there to be seen.’
‘Oh,’ said Andy. ‘Really?’ said Andy. ‘So what does that mean?’ said Andy. ‘And why?’
‘All a charade,’ I said, ‘designed for one purpose.’
‘And that purpose might be…?’
‘I intend to find out,’ I said. And I sat myself down on the bed. ‘I suggest we switch off the light and settle ourselves down to await the return of the room’s occupant.’
‘And why would we want to do that?’
‘Well, it might be instructive to find out who he really is.’
Andy gave me the queerest of looks. ‘You think you know what’s going on here, don’t you, Tyler?’
‘I do, Andy. I do.’
‘And would you care to share this with me?’
‘What, and ruin the surprise?’
And then we both heard sounds from outside the door.
And Andy switched off the light.
And we waited there, crouched in the darkness.
Waiting for something to happen.
And suddenly something did.
But, I have to confess, it wasn’t quite the something I had been expecting.
25
It is a fact well known to those who know it well that very bright lights presage trouble. The arrival of aliens and booger men and bogey-beasts from the bottomless pit. Those ghostly things that come out of the television set. And dawn raids by the police.
Bright lights mean trouble, they do. Very bright lights, much trouble.
And this light was a bright’n. It wasn’t helicopters, although it came from above, and it wasn’t flying saucers either. Although it might well have been, because it did come to the accompaniment of some stonking great chords of the Albert Hall organ persuasion.
Which might have had this bright light down as a celestial light, a Holy Light, a light sent by God and delivered by favourite angels. And this, I suppose, was the effect it was intended to create here.
Big bright light and stonking great chords.
Andy and I took to shielding our eyes and our ears as well as we could.
I sank down to my knees and assumed the foetal position. Andy, I think, just rocked backwards and forwards on the bed, but as I was now in no shape to either hear or see things clearly, I couldn’t say for sure.
And then the light went super-flash and died away and the stonking chords crashed to an end in the Key of La.
And I did blinkings and peered up from beneath the shelter of my fedora’s brim. And there was a beautiful lady.
She wore a long twinkly robe that reached right down to her naked feet. Pre-Raphaelite hair tumbled over her shoulders and a silver headband encircled this hair, and this had a crescent moon on the front that glittered prettily. As for her features, they were soft and delicate, her eyes large, nose small and mouth very wide indeed. And she held in her right hand a great big flower. And nothing at all in her left.
I peeped up at this beautiful vision, for vision indeed was she. She had materialised, it appeared, right out of the empty air and there she stood, her feet touching the floor, but touching only, not supporting her, for she was hovering just a little. Wafting gently.
Captain Lynch had told me all about angels and how they used to come and visit a lot, back in the good old biblical days, but how eventually they lost patience with Man and so didn’t come to visit any more. Which was one of the reasons why the New Testament just suddenly ends and there were no further New Testaments, such as New Testament Two: The Sequel.
I climbed slowly to my feet, dusted myself down, took off my fedora and bowed my head. My brother, I noticed, was sitting and staring, which I thought rather rude.
‘Why are you here?’ asked the vision, her voice as sweet as a cuddly kitten peering out of a handbag. ‘Why have you violated the sanctum?’
‘Ah,’ I said. And, ‘Um.’
‘ “Ah” and “um”,’ said the vision. ‘Most articulate.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how to address you. What is the correct form? Should I call you madam, or holy one, or Angel of the Lord, or should I just shut up?’
‘Just shut up,’ counselled the vision, and she waved her flower about and little flecks of fairy-dust shimmered in the air.
So I stood with my hat in my hands and said nothing.
The vision drifted towards the bed and then sat down upon it next to my brother. Who shifted along rather rapidly.
‘Don’t fuss yourself, dear,’ said the vision. And then to me she said, ‘You have an oily about yourself, do you?’
‘An oily?’ I queried. ‘A what?’
‘An oily-rag – a fag.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t. I never really got around to smoking. I had a cigar once, but I wasn’t very impressed.’
‘So,’ said the vision. And she plucked a petal or two from her flower and let them flutter to the floor. ‘This is a ripe old kettle of fish, this, ain’t it? A right how-d’ya-do and no mistake.’
‘Are you a cockney?’ I asked the vision. ‘Only I’ve read about cockneys, but I’ve never actually met one. I thought they were extinct.’
‘They are, luvvy. They’ve all rolled out the barrel and gorn up the apples to the big Pearly Kingdom in the sky, where every boy’s a barrow boy and joins in a knees-up at the drop of a second-hand top hat, as worn by the Artful Dodger. Gawd stripe me pink if I’m telling you a porkie, guv’nor.’