THE ANON MADE ME DO IT
here's some of my original writing, if any of you like that sort of thing. it's...odd, to say the least.
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away...
She hears noises in the walls every night. The gurgle of water to and fro, the creak of wooden supports, the groan of bricks and mortar. The midnight music of the house helps her sleep. When she first moved in, she was four years old and she fell into the cellar on her first day. Her mother pulled her back by the hair and she scrabbled on the steps, trying not to slip into the cellar (it smelled of dirt and mice and old furniture). The splintering wood scratched her cheek, and she had to get a tetanus injection. She remembers watching the blood bead around the tip of the needle, until her mother caught her eye and gave the look that meant she was being A Bit Odd, so she stared at the Powerpuff Girls poster on the wall instead. Now she’s twelve. The walls don’t scare her and she is the first to volunteer to fix the fuse in the cellar.
The noise that wakes her isn’t one of the wall-noises, though. It is a crash, in the kitchen. Or, if it isn’t in the kitchen, then someone has moved ceramic things into another room and dropped them, but she doesn’t think that’s what’s happened, unless her dad is sleepwalking again. She listens for a little while longer, not breathing, but she hears both sets of adult lungs next door. Her parents are fast asleep tonight. Somebody in the house is awake at half past midnight, and it isn’t her.
Weird.
She throws off the covers, which rustle a warning, telling her this is a bad idea. She shushes them. Now isn’t the time for her clothes to start lecturing her, and they will if the coverlet wakes them up. The wardrobe door is open, because the jeans don’t like feeling lonely. The chest of drawers is shut though: underwear tends to appreciate some privacy. She pads across the floorboards, pressing her toes pensively into the cracks, wondering how many lost hamsters are nesting beneath her. Her brother likes to set them free. He says they tell him they dream of living under the floor. She believes him: the socks say the same.
By the time she’s snuck downstairs, her footsteps are no longer thoughtful. She is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a stranger in the house, and they are wearing a vintage leather coat. She creeps into the kitchen. The stranger is very tall, taller even than the top cupboards, and he’s helped in that by a Very Stylish Hat. She likes it. It has good manners.
She clears her throat.
The stranger whirls, and she sees he’s holding a broken mug in his hands, shockingly white against his black leather gloves, which creak ominously when he moves. He glances down on at his hands, and back at her. She can’t see his face.
“Sorry,” he says awkwardly.
She shrugs. “It happens. Just put it on the side for now.”
The stranger gingerly places the halves of mug on the worktop, then hesitates before pushing them up against the wall.
“Don’t want it to fall,” he explains.
She nods. That makes sense.
There is a long silence, during which she interrogates the tea towels. They say the stranger came in through the window, or they assume so. The window is behind them. The oven gloves beg to differ, but they’ve gone a bit wonky since mum burned them by accident last month.
He coughs politely, and she breaks off her argument with the oven gloves, who insist he appeared from nowhere.
“Sorry,” she says, and thinks for a moment. “Would you like something to drink? I’m not allowed to use the kettle, before you ask. Well, if my sister’s here I am. It listens to her.”
“That’s alright,” the stranger replies politely. “I was going to ask for orange juice anyway.”
“That I can do,” she confirms, and pours him a glass.
He sips it for a while. She studies him. His clothes are very polite, but not very talkative, especially his gloves. They don’t like her at all. His hat is flattered when she tells it how stylish it is, but regrettably informs her it’s really not meant to be talking to anyone. She understands.
As a last resort, she addresses the stranger directly.
“This isn’t a social visit, is it?”
“I’m afraid not,” the stranger finishes his orange juice with a satisfied sigh. “Could I maybe talk to your dad?”
She shakes her head with an apologetic smile. “He needs his sleep.”
“Your mum?”
“Her too.”
The stranger shifts his weight to the left. “That’s a shame, it really is.”
“I can get my sister?” she offers. “She’s the oldest. She’ll probably know what to do. Plus, she’s allowed to wake our parents if there’s a Serious Emergency.”
“She your blood sister?” the stranger asks, raising a sceptical eyebrow.
“No. Is that a problem?”
“It’s fine. Do you mind if I have more juice?”
She shakes her head. “Help yourself.”
She turns and heads for her sister’s room as the stranger opens the fridge, bathing the kitchen in white light that bounces off the tiles. She runs up the stairs on both hands and feet, since it’s faster. She doesn’t bother knocking on her sister’s door: she just picks the lock with a clothes hanger their parents hid behind the radiator so they can break into Ally’s room in a Serious Emergency. They’ve only had a Serious Emergency once, and that was because Del set the house on fire. It wasn’t really an accident, but they all pretend it was. Del is only five. He’s not above the legal age of responsibility, so the government say that he’s allowed to do whatever he wants.
She leaps like a ladybird onto her sister’s bed, bashing an elbow into her hipbone. Ally is curled around her laptop, as usual. It sings her to sleep most nights. Ally groans, and tries to throw her off. She clings around her sister’s middle, nuzzling at her shoulder. Ally knocks her head aside, but she tries again.
“Ally,” she hisses into the girl’s ear. “There’s a stranger in the kitchen. He broke a mug.”
“We’ll fix it in the morning,” Ally mumbles into the pillow. The laptop thrums, warm and comforting against her belly. It murmurs the snatches of Beatles songs it remembers to her, lulling her back into sleep.
“He wants to talk to you,” her sister whispers insistently from where she is kneeling on her ribs, pressing the air out of her lungs. Reluctantly, Ally rolls away from her laptop, which questions her decision sleepily. She mutters a tired apology, and pushes her sister off her so she can sit up. Bea allows her to shove her back onto the floor, but doesn’t stop talking.
“He likes orange juice, he has a very stylish hat and the oven gloves think he came from nowhere,” her sister babbles, not blinking.
Ally rubs at her eyes and yawns. “I thought you said the oven gloves had gone round the bend.”
“They have, a bit. Mum should be more careful. She lost one of my socks the other week and its pair keeps crying when it thinks I’m not listening.”
“I’ll ask her about it,” Ally promises, pulling a on a hoodie and soft boots. “Go back to bed, Bea. I’ll go downstairs and have a chat with this stranger of yours.”
“Take your gloves,” Bea advises as she slips silently out of Ally’s room. “His are quite bad-tempered, but they might be happier to have some like them to talk to. Then again, they’re leather gloves. Leather just thinks it’s better than everyone else.”
“Even silk?” Ally asks, slipping her own thick woollen gloves on.
“Especially silk. It thinks silk gets ideas above its station.”
Ally smiles fondly at her little sister. “Go to bed. Try to sleep.”
Bea shrugs. “No promises.”
Ally is about to follow the younger girl out of the room, when she pauses. Laying a palm on her laptop, she says a silent goodbye, and pockets her mobile phone, straps on her watch, and slips a portable antique radio into the big front pocket of her hoodie. It’s nice to have friends, when there’s a stranger in the kitchen.
She checks in on her siblings on the way down. Bea is sitting upright in her bed, and guiltily tucks a scarf behind her back as Ally catches her eye through the gap between door and wall. Ally shakes her head in exasperation as she shuts her little sister’s door behind her. The scarf is newly-bought and dates back to the 1920s, and she has no doubt Bea is lapping up the stories it has to tell. On the next floor down, she pokes her head around Gamma’s door, but the boy is fast asleep. He sleeps better than Bea or Del or herself, but then, since he released his ant farm, he doesn’t have nearly so many distractions keeping him awake. Del’s room is far too warm for her, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He gives her a cheery wave as she goes past. She gives him a stern look, and he extinguishes the little flames on his fingertips, but otherwise pays her no heed.
Sighing, Ally pads into the kitchen. Little brothers are the most difficult of all, especially when they insist on setting fire to things.
The stranger is drinking a glass of orange juice when she comes in. Ally stares at him. His top hat conceals most of his face, and she can see why Bea liked it so much. It is quite stylish, or would be, for a Victorian gentleman. The stranger is a good head taller than her, is wearing a black leather trench coat, black leather gloves, and black leather boots. She recalls what Bea said about leather and smiles to herself. The same could probably be said about people who insist on wearing so much of it. She acknowledges the watch on his wrist (a silver-tongued Rolex, they’re always smarmy bastards), the phone in his pocket, which is out of battery, the gun concealed at the small of his back.
“This is my third glass,” the stranger informs her, the glass in question clinking as he sets it down on the counter behind him.
“Leave some for my brother in the morning,” Ally warns. “He likes to put it in his cereal.”
“Aren’t you meant to have milk with cereal?”
Ally gives a one-shouldered shrug. It isn’t her responsibility to control Gamma’s eating habits. That’s their parents’ job.
The stranger keeps talking, but Ally gets distracted by chatting with the gun in his waistband. It has a Southern twang to its voice.
He’s taken you a long way, hasn’t he? she asks in her head.
Sure has. Bought me off a man in South Carolina in ninety-two, kept me with him since. The gun sounds almost wistful.
He’s good to you, I hope? She’s pretty sure guns have to be cleaned, taken care of, that kind of thing.
Oh, sure. He’s a good enough man, if you like that kind of thing. I get regular using, tell you that much. Yessir, he likes his shooting. Trigger-happy, if you ask me, but that’s not my place and anyhow, I ain’t complaining. Better’n being kept in a box for decades.
Ally nods. The stranger notices, and clears his throat. Ally looks up at him, slightly embarrassed. Though, really, it’s not her fault that objects are so much more interesting than their owners. And that they tell the truth so much more effectively.
“I’m from the government,” he warns. He has less of an accent than his gun, Ally notes. He’s still American, though. Bea could’ve mentioned that, she thinks irritably. She always neglects important details. ‘The building’s on fire’. ‘Your tights have a ladder in them’. ‘The stranger in the kitchen is an American’.
“I think you think that statement is a lot more scary than it actually is,” she tells the stranger.
“What?”
Ally sighs. “You’re American, so I don’t think you really understand but... The scariest thing the government does here is create a rental bike system. Plus, you’re not even with the government.”
“Oh,” the stranger says. Then, “I didn’t think you’d work that out so quickly.”
Ally shrugs. “I didn’t. Your gun kind of told me. Why are you wearing a top hat?”
The stranger reaches up and brushes the brim of the hat tenderly with the tips of his fingers. “I thought your sister might like it.”
Ally smiles despite herself. “She did. Thanks.”
“No problem. Now, are you going to come with me or not?”
Ally frowns, slightly shocked. “I feel like I might have missed something earlier in this conversation.”
“Nothing important,” the stranger assures her. “There were a lot of empty assurances of your safety. And some cryptic clues. Which I’m actually quite proud of. Should I repeat them?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
She can’t tell if the stranger is disappointed or not.
“Anyway,” the stranger continues. “You’d better come with me. You need to get out of here, trust me.”
Ally shakes her head. “No.”
The stranger sighs. “I was hoping to avoid this.”
As he sweeps aside his coat to reach for his gun, Ally says, Hey, sorry to ask this of you, but would you mind jamming, or misfiring? I’d really prefer not to get shot. And I don’t want to force you. It might damage your mechanics.
She feels the gun consider as the stranger takes aim. She doesn’t move.
Well, since you’ve been so polite... the gun mutters.
The stranger pulls the trigger, and nothing happens. He tries again, and Ally gives the gun a relieved smile. Thanks.
Anytime, the gun responds. I hardly get to talk to anybody these days. I hope you stick around.
I might, Ally lies. She doesn’t want to be rude, after all.
“God dammit,” the stranger spits, shoving his uncooperative gun back in his waistband. “Should’ve known that would happen.”
“You really should’ve,” Ally comments.
“And you’re really not going to come of your own volition?”
“If ‘volition’ means free will, then no.”
“It does. Oh well.”
The stranger shrugs, and Ally begins to back away. She doesn’t think the stranger is just going to leave her alone now, but neither is there any real reason to continue the conversation. She is proven right when the stranger springs at her. Sort of. One moment, he is lounging against the counter, and the next his bicep is bulging into her neck, he is behind her, and a sweet-smelling cloth is in her mouth. She holds her breath and kicks at his kneecaps, but even as he curses and the top hat slips from his head, she can’t free herself. The stranger finally pinches her nose hard, and though she bites at the heel of his hand, her teeth are muffled by the cloth. Eventually, she breathes. She’s almost grateful for his strength as her muscles turn to water and her feet slip out from under her.
***
She wakes up with a pounding headache. In fact, even before she quite wakes up, she’s aware of the pressure on her skull, and she burrows down against her bed. Except, it’s not her bed. Her head bumps against something soft, but firm, and her knee has slipped into a gap. She blinks, hard, and her vision is filled with red corduroy. Taken by surprise, she jerks her head back, which is a mistake. Her vision swims, her eyes fill with tears, and she lets out an involuntary groan.
“Careful,” the stranger’s voice warns from somewhere behind her.
Very slowly, Ally rolls over on what she has concluded is a particularly ugly sofa. The stranger is reading a newspaper, cross-legged on the floor next to a coffee table. He has a steaming mug of something at his left elbow. His top hat is on the floor beside him.
In the morning sunlight, he is older than she thought he was. She says so.
He snorts. “Charming.”
Ally keeps perfectly still, trying to keep her headache at bay. “I meant it in a good way,” she assures him. “You look...distinguished.”
“Really?” he raises one salt-and-pepper eyebrow.
Ally nods. “Ow,” she mutters, rubbing her temple.
“Don’t try to sit up,” the stranger advises her, turning a page of his newspaper. “In fact, it might be best if you tried to sleep it off. The house is empty, I checked.”
“Okay,” Ally says, and closes her eyes.
First though, she asks her phone to wake her if the stranger makes any kind of move to harm her, or if anybody leaves the house. The phone doesn’t mind. It likes people watching, and it has internet access if it gets bored out of sleep mode.
***
Ally can’t tell how long she’s been sleeping when her phone buzzes against her thigh. He got up to open the door, it tells her in its smooth voice. The older phones have more of a beeping tone to their voice, but smartphones have all the cultured timbre of a computer. I think more people have arrived.
Ally sits up. Her headache has all but vanished, and the sun is low in the sky when she looks through the window. She shrugs off the crocheted blanket, and stands. Her vision tunnels, and she feels like a tree swaying in the breeze for a few moments, but she recovers. Her body doesn’t appreciate the kind of sleep schedule she’s subjecting it to. After years of insomnia, a few hours forced sleep has thrown her brain out. It’s not a nice feeling. She feels groggy and half-cocked.
Still, she has to explore. She finds an adjoining bathroom, where she splashes cold water on her face and examines herself critically in the cracked mirror. Her hair, short and dark, is sticking up everywhere. The grey hoodie is too big for her, slips down over her knuckles and slumps forwards over her chest. She pulls the hood up experimentally, but she looks even more like a starving convict when she does. Instead, she rolls the sleeves up over her bruised and burned arms. Her nails are bitten to the quick, there is a cut on the side of her neck.
Knuckles rap on the bathroom door, and she starts, hand clattering against the sink.
“I’m coming!” she says, panicking as she rights the glass of toothbrushes she knocked in her surprise.
The stranger laughs loud enough to hear through the door. “Don’t worry. Come out when you’re ready.”
She’s tempted to stay in there and do something (anything) about her appearance, but she doesn’t need to give the stranger any ammunition against her, not when she’s already been drugged by him. She opens the door carefully, one hand bunched in a fist.
He laughs when he notices.
“Planning on taking me out?” he asks, but she can’t see if his eyebrow is raised. His top hat is back on.
Hello, she greets the gun in his waistband.
Hey there, the gun says happily. So you did stick around! You can call me Jed, by the by.
Ally, she replies, mentally shaking hands. Thanks for yesterday.
Not at all.
She smiles at him -guns are more often female, but Jed is male to the core - and the stranger tilts his head to one side like a confused Labrador.
“His name is Jed.”
The stranger looks surprised. “I’ve been calling him Tommy for years.”
“He hates it.” Ally makes an educated noise, and hears a grunt of agreement from the stranger’s hip.
“He never seemed to mind.”
Ally shrugs. “He has excellent manners.”
As Jed preens, Ally ducks around the stranger, back into the threadbare room with the red corduroy sofa, now fully stocked with its quota of people. Ally almost turns to a phantasmic Bea at her elbow to ask about their clothes. She is more interested in their weaponry. A righteously angry AK47. A pristine, snobbish Dillinger. A hunting gun, cracked over her owner’s arm like a broken-backed cat. They mutter rebelliously, uncomfortable safe and indoors. Ally tries a smile. The Dillinger gives a kind of polite acknowledgement, the AK47 ignores her completely, the hunter’s gun smiles like an old friend. Ally doesn’t know much about guns. Sometimes they tell her their names, and sometimes their names are Browning LA91 and sometimes their names are Jed. She’s never thought on why this is.
There are other things too. A smartphone purrs a greeting (God she loves them), an Extremely Practical Watch graciously gives her the time when she asks. Somebody has a kind of ebook reader whose voice and manner reminds her vaguely of Julian Assange: bookish, modern, powerful. An old Nokia burbles a cheerful hello. There is a phone missing: she wonders who doesn’t have one. She thinks it’s probably the one with the working watch. Otherwise how would she tell the time? Wait, she was wrong: there’s a Bluetooth earpiece in the hunter’s left ear. It buzzes at her distractedly. These small pieces of technology, they have so much crammed inside of them they barely have time to talk. The hunter’s gun, though, is a smiling lioness. Her watch is practical, firm, and reminds Ally of her father.
A dandy man is the owner of the Dillinger, the smartphone, and the ebook reader. She doesn’t know what to make of him, because she doesn’t like his gun but she loves smartphones to a degree almost unhealthy. She strokes a finger along the back of her own, lovingly. It laughs at her, a rumbling chuckle that brings a smile to her lips.
The final component, a soldier, is very different. He wears a battered, world-weary digital watch that no longer really works, and his AK47 is just as sad. His Nokia is singing quietly to itself, a cheerful little ditty inaudible to the rest of the room. Ally giggles. The Nokia is the happiest phone she has ever met.
The soldier addresses his questions to the stranger. “What’s she laughing at?”
He’s suspicious.
Stranger, though, is very genial. “I’m sure she can answer that for herself, Captain. If you ask her.”
Ally narrows her eyes at this Captain. She doesn’t know about the eyes being the window to the soul, but a person’s gadgetry always says so much more than their face.
“Your phone,” she tells him. “Your phone is...very pleased with itself.”
Captain whirls on the stranger with a disgusted look on his face. “You promised me a clockworker, Peabody. Not just some nut you picked up off the street.”
The stranger, Peabody, is silent, but rocks on his heels. Ally bristles.
Been anywhere interesting lately? she asks the AK47.
Why? it scoffs. So some clockworker can make a point? Fuck off.
The Congo, the watch mutters, voice grinding over its crushed innards. We’ve been to the Democratic Republic of Congo. That’s a bit of a misnomer, by the way.
“How was the Congo?” Ally asks the Captain, whose eyes widen. “Your watch told me. He’s civil at least. Your gun is a bit of a dick. Reminds me of somebody actually-”
“Now now,” Peabody says hurriedly, sliding neatly in between them. “There’s no need to squabble. Ally, this is Captain Iota.”
“That sounds like a superhero name.”
Peabody is probably raising his eyebrow under the shadow of his hat. “It’s not, believe me.”
He goes on to introduce others. The dandy is Mortimer Umber. The hunter is just Rho. Nothing else.
Then he invites Ally to have a seat. She sits on the floor where she is, as the sofa is taken. Rho snorts and flashes her a grin that reminds Ally of her gun.
“I really like your gun. She’s great.” Ally wishes she could think of a better word than great, but then she’d probably need a better word than that.
“Does she have a name?” Rho asks her. She’s American too. Ally asks anyway, since its only polite.
“She likes Jezebel fine,” Ally shrugs. “It suits her.”
“Dear God,” the Captain mutters, rolling his eyes skyward. “Are we actually doing this? This kid is quite clearly cracked already. Throw her back. We’ll grab one of the younger ones.”
Ally smiles up at him from her place on the dusty floorboards, her best polite smile, practised for hours in the mirror.
“If you touch my siblings,” she says pleasantly, “I’ll kill you.”
The Captain laughs outright. “With what, kid?” he asks her scornfully. “You don’t even have a gun. You think I didn’t notice?”
Ally cracks her neck to the side, hard. It’s been stiff since the morning, and the dull pain helps to sharpen her focus. The crunch of her joints is accompanied by the sound of four guns cocking, from Jed to the Dillinger and Jezebel to the AK47.
“Correction: ”, Ally continues in the same pleasant voice her mother had told her was the only appropriate tone for an argument. “I have four.”
Her mouth twitches into a slightly nastier smile for a moment as the Captain swallows carefully. The swell of pain in her skull is almost worth the satisfaction. Peabody’s hand comes crashing down on her shoulder, gripping hard behind the collarbone.
“Let them go, Ally,” he hisses in her ear, crouching behind her. Ally bites her lip. This is about the only leverage she will have against the Captain for a while, she can tell. But the AK47 is bucking under her control. Ally huffs and lets go, and the guns return to their previous state. Peabody releases a breath and ruffles her hair up into unruly curls. “Good girl,” he mutters. “There’s the good girl I’ve been looking for.”
Ally flattens her hair with her palms, and glares up at him.
There is a flare of silence, broken by Mortimer Umber.
“Well, I for one like this one already. Shall we begin?”
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away...
She hears noises in the walls every night. The gurgle of water to and fro, the creak of wooden supports, the groan of bricks and mortar. The midnight music of the house helps her sleep. When she first moved in, she was four years old and she fell into the cellar on her first day. Her mother pulled her back by the hair and she scrabbled on the steps, trying not to slip into the cellar (it smelled of dirt and mice and old furniture). The splintering wood scratched her cheek, and she had to get a tetanus injection. She remembers watching the blood bead around the tip of the needle, until her mother caught her eye and gave the look that meant she was being A Bit Odd, so she stared at the Powerpuff Girls poster on the wall instead. Now she’s twelve. The walls don’t scare her and she is the first to volunteer to fix the fuse in the cellar.
The noise that wakes her isn’t one of the wall-noises, though. It is a crash, in the kitchen. Or, if it isn’t in the kitchen, then someone has moved ceramic things into another room and dropped them, but she doesn’t think that’s what’s happened, unless her dad is sleepwalking again. She listens for a little while longer, not breathing, but she hears both sets of adult lungs next door. Her parents are fast asleep tonight. Somebody in the house is awake at half past midnight, and it isn’t her.
Weird.
She throws off the covers, which rustle a warning, telling her this is a bad idea. She shushes them. Now isn’t the time for her clothes to start lecturing her, and they will if the coverlet wakes them up. The wardrobe door is open, because the jeans don’t like feeling lonely. The chest of drawers is shut though: underwear tends to appreciate some privacy. She pads across the floorboards, pressing her toes pensively into the cracks, wondering how many lost hamsters are nesting beneath her. Her brother likes to set them free. He says they tell him they dream of living under the floor. She believes him: the socks say the same.
By the time she’s snuck downstairs, her footsteps are no longer thoughtful. She is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a stranger in the house, and they are wearing a vintage leather coat. She creeps into the kitchen. The stranger is very tall, taller even than the top cupboards, and he’s helped in that by a Very Stylish Hat. She likes it. It has good manners.
She clears her throat.
The stranger whirls, and she sees he’s holding a broken mug in his hands, shockingly white against his black leather gloves, which creak ominously when he moves. He glances down on at his hands, and back at her. She can’t see his face.
“Sorry,” he says awkwardly.
She shrugs. “It happens. Just put it on the side for now.”
The stranger gingerly places the halves of mug on the worktop, then hesitates before pushing them up against the wall.
“Don’t want it to fall,” he explains.
She nods. That makes sense.
There is a long silence, during which she interrogates the tea towels. They say the stranger came in through the window, or they assume so. The window is behind them. The oven gloves beg to differ, but they’ve gone a bit wonky since mum burned them by accident last month.
He coughs politely, and she breaks off her argument with the oven gloves, who insist he appeared from nowhere.
“Sorry,” she says, and thinks for a moment. “Would you like something to drink? I’m not allowed to use the kettle, before you ask. Well, if my sister’s here I am. It listens to her.”
“That’s alright,” the stranger replies politely. “I was going to ask for orange juice anyway.”
“That I can do,” she confirms, and pours him a glass.
He sips it for a while. She studies him. His clothes are very polite, but not very talkative, especially his gloves. They don’t like her at all. His hat is flattered when she tells it how stylish it is, but regrettably informs her it’s really not meant to be talking to anyone. She understands.
As a last resort, she addresses the stranger directly.
“This isn’t a social visit, is it?”
“I’m afraid not,” the stranger finishes his orange juice with a satisfied sigh. “Could I maybe talk to your dad?”
She shakes her head with an apologetic smile. “He needs his sleep.”
“Your mum?”
“Her too.”
The stranger shifts his weight to the left. “That’s a shame, it really is.”
“I can get my sister?” she offers. “She’s the oldest. She’ll probably know what to do. Plus, she’s allowed to wake our parents if there’s a Serious Emergency.”
“She your blood sister?” the stranger asks, raising a sceptical eyebrow.
“No. Is that a problem?”
“It’s fine. Do you mind if I have more juice?”
She shakes her head. “Help yourself.”
She turns and heads for her sister’s room as the stranger opens the fridge, bathing the kitchen in white light that bounces off the tiles. She runs up the stairs on both hands and feet, since it’s faster. She doesn’t bother knocking on her sister’s door: she just picks the lock with a clothes hanger their parents hid behind the radiator so they can break into Ally’s room in a Serious Emergency. They’ve only had a Serious Emergency once, and that was because Del set the house on fire. It wasn’t really an accident, but they all pretend it was. Del is only five. He’s not above the legal age of responsibility, so the government say that he’s allowed to do whatever he wants.
She leaps like a ladybird onto her sister’s bed, bashing an elbow into her hipbone. Ally is curled around her laptop, as usual. It sings her to sleep most nights. Ally groans, and tries to throw her off. She clings around her sister’s middle, nuzzling at her shoulder. Ally knocks her head aside, but she tries again.
“Ally,” she hisses into the girl’s ear. “There’s a stranger in the kitchen. He broke a mug.”
“We’ll fix it in the morning,” Ally mumbles into the pillow. The laptop thrums, warm and comforting against her belly. It murmurs the snatches of Beatles songs it remembers to her, lulling her back into sleep.
“He wants to talk to you,” her sister whispers insistently from where she is kneeling on her ribs, pressing the air out of her lungs. Reluctantly, Ally rolls away from her laptop, which questions her decision sleepily. She mutters a tired apology, and pushes her sister off her so she can sit up. Bea allows her to shove her back onto the floor, but doesn’t stop talking.
“He likes orange juice, he has a very stylish hat and the oven gloves think he came from nowhere,” her sister babbles, not blinking.
Ally rubs at her eyes and yawns. “I thought you said the oven gloves had gone round the bend.”
“They have, a bit. Mum should be more careful. She lost one of my socks the other week and its pair keeps crying when it thinks I’m not listening.”
“I’ll ask her about it,” Ally promises, pulling a on a hoodie and soft boots. “Go back to bed, Bea. I’ll go downstairs and have a chat with this stranger of yours.”
“Take your gloves,” Bea advises as she slips silently out of Ally’s room. “His are quite bad-tempered, but they might be happier to have some like them to talk to. Then again, they’re leather gloves. Leather just thinks it’s better than everyone else.”
“Even silk?” Ally asks, slipping her own thick woollen gloves on.
“Especially silk. It thinks silk gets ideas above its station.”
Ally smiles fondly at her little sister. “Go to bed. Try to sleep.”
Bea shrugs. “No promises.”
Ally is about to follow the younger girl out of the room, when she pauses. Laying a palm on her laptop, she says a silent goodbye, and pockets her mobile phone, straps on her watch, and slips a portable antique radio into the big front pocket of her hoodie. It’s nice to have friends, when there’s a stranger in the kitchen.
She checks in on her siblings on the way down. Bea is sitting upright in her bed, and guiltily tucks a scarf behind her back as Ally catches her eye through the gap between door and wall. Ally shakes her head in exasperation as she shuts her little sister’s door behind her. The scarf is newly-bought and dates back to the 1920s, and she has no doubt Bea is lapping up the stories it has to tell. On the next floor down, she pokes her head around Gamma’s door, but the boy is fast asleep. He sleeps better than Bea or Del or herself, but then, since he released his ant farm, he doesn’t have nearly so many distractions keeping him awake. Del’s room is far too warm for her, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He gives her a cheery wave as she goes past. She gives him a stern look, and he extinguishes the little flames on his fingertips, but otherwise pays her no heed.
Sighing, Ally pads into the kitchen. Little brothers are the most difficult of all, especially when they insist on setting fire to things.
The stranger is drinking a glass of orange juice when she comes in. Ally stares at him. His top hat conceals most of his face, and she can see why Bea liked it so much. It is quite stylish, or would be, for a Victorian gentleman. The stranger is a good head taller than her, is wearing a black leather trench coat, black leather gloves, and black leather boots. She recalls what Bea said about leather and smiles to herself. The same could probably be said about people who insist on wearing so much of it. She acknowledges the watch on his wrist (a silver-tongued Rolex, they’re always smarmy bastards), the phone in his pocket, which is out of battery, the gun concealed at the small of his back.
“This is my third glass,” the stranger informs her, the glass in question clinking as he sets it down on the counter behind him.
“Leave some for my brother in the morning,” Ally warns. “He likes to put it in his cereal.”
“Aren’t you meant to have milk with cereal?”
Ally gives a one-shouldered shrug. It isn’t her responsibility to control Gamma’s eating habits. That’s their parents’ job.
The stranger keeps talking, but Ally gets distracted by chatting with the gun in his waistband. It has a Southern twang to its voice.
He’s taken you a long way, hasn’t he? she asks in her head.
Sure has. Bought me off a man in South Carolina in ninety-two, kept me with him since. The gun sounds almost wistful.
He’s good to you, I hope? She’s pretty sure guns have to be cleaned, taken care of, that kind of thing.
Oh, sure. He’s a good enough man, if you like that kind of thing. I get regular using, tell you that much. Yessir, he likes his shooting. Trigger-happy, if you ask me, but that’s not my place and anyhow, I ain’t complaining. Better’n being kept in a box for decades.
Ally nods. The stranger notices, and clears his throat. Ally looks up at him, slightly embarrassed. Though, really, it’s not her fault that objects are so much more interesting than their owners. And that they tell the truth so much more effectively.
“I’m from the government,” he warns. He has less of an accent than his gun, Ally notes. He’s still American, though. Bea could’ve mentioned that, she thinks irritably. She always neglects important details. ‘The building’s on fire’. ‘Your tights have a ladder in them’. ‘The stranger in the kitchen is an American’.
“I think you think that statement is a lot more scary than it actually is,” she tells the stranger.
“What?”
Ally sighs. “You’re American, so I don’t think you really understand but... The scariest thing the government does here is create a rental bike system. Plus, you’re not even with the government.”
“Oh,” the stranger says. Then, “I didn’t think you’d work that out so quickly.”
Ally shrugs. “I didn’t. Your gun kind of told me. Why are you wearing a top hat?”
The stranger reaches up and brushes the brim of the hat tenderly with the tips of his fingers. “I thought your sister might like it.”
Ally smiles despite herself. “She did. Thanks.”
“No problem. Now, are you going to come with me or not?”
Ally frowns, slightly shocked. “I feel like I might have missed something earlier in this conversation.”
“Nothing important,” the stranger assures her. “There were a lot of empty assurances of your safety. And some cryptic clues. Which I’m actually quite proud of. Should I repeat them?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
She can’t tell if the stranger is disappointed or not.
“Anyway,” the stranger continues. “You’d better come with me. You need to get out of here, trust me.”
Ally shakes her head. “No.”
The stranger sighs. “I was hoping to avoid this.”
As he sweeps aside his coat to reach for his gun, Ally says, Hey, sorry to ask this of you, but would you mind jamming, or misfiring? I’d really prefer not to get shot. And I don’t want to force you. It might damage your mechanics.
She feels the gun consider as the stranger takes aim. She doesn’t move.
Well, since you’ve been so polite... the gun mutters.
The stranger pulls the trigger, and nothing happens. He tries again, and Ally gives the gun a relieved smile. Thanks.
Anytime, the gun responds. I hardly get to talk to anybody these days. I hope you stick around.
I might, Ally lies. She doesn’t want to be rude, after all.
“God dammit,” the stranger spits, shoving his uncooperative gun back in his waistband. “Should’ve known that would happen.”
“You really should’ve,” Ally comments.
“And you’re really not going to come of your own volition?”
“If ‘volition’ means free will, then no.”
“It does. Oh well.”
The stranger shrugs, and Ally begins to back away. She doesn’t think the stranger is just going to leave her alone now, but neither is there any real reason to continue the conversation. She is proven right when the stranger springs at her. Sort of. One moment, he is lounging against the counter, and the next his bicep is bulging into her neck, he is behind her, and a sweet-smelling cloth is in her mouth. She holds her breath and kicks at his kneecaps, but even as he curses and the top hat slips from his head, she can’t free herself. The stranger finally pinches her nose hard, and though she bites at the heel of his hand, her teeth are muffled by the cloth. Eventually, she breathes. She’s almost grateful for his strength as her muscles turn to water and her feet slip out from under her.
***
She wakes up with a pounding headache. In fact, even before she quite wakes up, she’s aware of the pressure on her skull, and she burrows down against her bed. Except, it’s not her bed. Her head bumps against something soft, but firm, and her knee has slipped into a gap. She blinks, hard, and her vision is filled with red corduroy. Taken by surprise, she jerks her head back, which is a mistake. Her vision swims, her eyes fill with tears, and she lets out an involuntary groan.
“Careful,” the stranger’s voice warns from somewhere behind her.
Very slowly, Ally rolls over on what she has concluded is a particularly ugly sofa. The stranger is reading a newspaper, cross-legged on the floor next to a coffee table. He has a steaming mug of something at his left elbow. His top hat is on the floor beside him.
In the morning sunlight, he is older than she thought he was. She says so.
He snorts. “Charming.”
Ally keeps perfectly still, trying to keep her headache at bay. “I meant it in a good way,” she assures him. “You look...distinguished.”
“Really?” he raises one salt-and-pepper eyebrow.
Ally nods. “Ow,” she mutters, rubbing her temple.
“Don’t try to sit up,” the stranger advises her, turning a page of his newspaper. “In fact, it might be best if you tried to sleep it off. The house is empty, I checked.”
“Okay,” Ally says, and closes her eyes.
First though, she asks her phone to wake her if the stranger makes any kind of move to harm her, or if anybody leaves the house. The phone doesn’t mind. It likes people watching, and it has internet access if it gets bored out of sleep mode.
***
Ally can’t tell how long she’s been sleeping when her phone buzzes against her thigh. He got up to open the door, it tells her in its smooth voice. The older phones have more of a beeping tone to their voice, but smartphones have all the cultured timbre of a computer. I think more people have arrived.
Ally sits up. Her headache has all but vanished, and the sun is low in the sky when she looks through the window. She shrugs off the crocheted blanket, and stands. Her vision tunnels, and she feels like a tree swaying in the breeze for a few moments, but she recovers. Her body doesn’t appreciate the kind of sleep schedule she’s subjecting it to. After years of insomnia, a few hours forced sleep has thrown her brain out. It’s not a nice feeling. She feels groggy and half-cocked.
Still, she has to explore. She finds an adjoining bathroom, where she splashes cold water on her face and examines herself critically in the cracked mirror. Her hair, short and dark, is sticking up everywhere. The grey hoodie is too big for her, slips down over her knuckles and slumps forwards over her chest. She pulls the hood up experimentally, but she looks even more like a starving convict when she does. Instead, she rolls the sleeves up over her bruised and burned arms. Her nails are bitten to the quick, there is a cut on the side of her neck.
Knuckles rap on the bathroom door, and she starts, hand clattering against the sink.
“I’m coming!” she says, panicking as she rights the glass of toothbrushes she knocked in her surprise.
The stranger laughs loud enough to hear through the door. “Don’t worry. Come out when you’re ready.”
She’s tempted to stay in there and do something (anything) about her appearance, but she doesn’t need to give the stranger any ammunition against her, not when she’s already been drugged by him. She opens the door carefully, one hand bunched in a fist.
He laughs when he notices.
“Planning on taking me out?” he asks, but she can’t see if his eyebrow is raised. His top hat is back on.
Hello, she greets the gun in his waistband.
Hey there, the gun says happily. So you did stick around! You can call me Jed, by the by.
Ally, she replies, mentally shaking hands. Thanks for yesterday.
Not at all.
She smiles at him -guns are more often female, but Jed is male to the core - and the stranger tilts his head to one side like a confused Labrador.
“His name is Jed.”
The stranger looks surprised. “I’ve been calling him Tommy for years.”
“He hates it.” Ally makes an educated noise, and hears a grunt of agreement from the stranger’s hip.
“He never seemed to mind.”
Ally shrugs. “He has excellent manners.”
As Jed preens, Ally ducks around the stranger, back into the threadbare room with the red corduroy sofa, now fully stocked with its quota of people. Ally almost turns to a phantasmic Bea at her elbow to ask about their clothes. She is more interested in their weaponry. A righteously angry AK47. A pristine, snobbish Dillinger. A hunting gun, cracked over her owner’s arm like a broken-backed cat. They mutter rebelliously, uncomfortable safe and indoors. Ally tries a smile. The Dillinger gives a kind of polite acknowledgement, the AK47 ignores her completely, the hunter’s gun smiles like an old friend. Ally doesn’t know much about guns. Sometimes they tell her their names, and sometimes their names are Browning LA91 and sometimes their names are Jed. She’s never thought on why this is.
There are other things too. A smartphone purrs a greeting (God she loves them), an Extremely Practical Watch graciously gives her the time when she asks. Somebody has a kind of ebook reader whose voice and manner reminds her vaguely of Julian Assange: bookish, modern, powerful. An old Nokia burbles a cheerful hello. There is a phone missing: she wonders who doesn’t have one. She thinks it’s probably the one with the working watch. Otherwise how would she tell the time? Wait, she was wrong: there’s a Bluetooth earpiece in the hunter’s left ear. It buzzes at her distractedly. These small pieces of technology, they have so much crammed inside of them they barely have time to talk. The hunter’s gun, though, is a smiling lioness. Her watch is practical, firm, and reminds Ally of her father.
A dandy man is the owner of the Dillinger, the smartphone, and the ebook reader. She doesn’t know what to make of him, because she doesn’t like his gun but she loves smartphones to a degree almost unhealthy. She strokes a finger along the back of her own, lovingly. It laughs at her, a rumbling chuckle that brings a smile to her lips.
The final component, a soldier, is very different. He wears a battered, world-weary digital watch that no longer really works, and his AK47 is just as sad. His Nokia is singing quietly to itself, a cheerful little ditty inaudible to the rest of the room. Ally giggles. The Nokia is the happiest phone she has ever met.
The soldier addresses his questions to the stranger. “What’s she laughing at?”
He’s suspicious.
Stranger, though, is very genial. “I’m sure she can answer that for herself, Captain. If you ask her.”
Ally narrows her eyes at this Captain. She doesn’t know about the eyes being the window to the soul, but a person’s gadgetry always says so much more than their face.
“Your phone,” she tells him. “Your phone is...very pleased with itself.”
Captain whirls on the stranger with a disgusted look on his face. “You promised me a clockworker, Peabody. Not just some nut you picked up off the street.”
The stranger, Peabody, is silent, but rocks on his heels. Ally bristles.
Been anywhere interesting lately? she asks the AK47.
Why? it scoffs. So some clockworker can make a point? Fuck off.
The Congo, the watch mutters, voice grinding over its crushed innards. We’ve been to the Democratic Republic of Congo. That’s a bit of a misnomer, by the way.
“How was the Congo?” Ally asks the Captain, whose eyes widen. “Your watch told me. He’s civil at least. Your gun is a bit of a dick. Reminds me of somebody actually-”
“Now now,” Peabody says hurriedly, sliding neatly in between them. “There’s no need to squabble. Ally, this is Captain Iota.”
“That sounds like a superhero name.”
Peabody is probably raising his eyebrow under the shadow of his hat. “It’s not, believe me.”
He goes on to introduce others. The dandy is Mortimer Umber. The hunter is just Rho. Nothing else.
Then he invites Ally to have a seat. She sits on the floor where she is, as the sofa is taken. Rho snorts and flashes her a grin that reminds Ally of her gun.
“I really like your gun. She’s great.” Ally wishes she could think of a better word than great, but then she’d probably need a better word than that.
“Does she have a name?” Rho asks her. She’s American too. Ally asks anyway, since its only polite.
“She likes Jezebel fine,” Ally shrugs. “It suits her.”
“Dear God,” the Captain mutters, rolling his eyes skyward. “Are we actually doing this? This kid is quite clearly cracked already. Throw her back. We’ll grab one of the younger ones.”
Ally smiles up at him from her place on the dusty floorboards, her best polite smile, practised for hours in the mirror.
“If you touch my siblings,” she says pleasantly, “I’ll kill you.”
The Captain laughs outright. “With what, kid?” he asks her scornfully. “You don’t even have a gun. You think I didn’t notice?”
Ally cracks her neck to the side, hard. It’s been stiff since the morning, and the dull pain helps to sharpen her focus. The crunch of her joints is accompanied by the sound of four guns cocking, from Jed to the Dillinger and Jezebel to the AK47.
“Correction: ”, Ally continues in the same pleasant voice her mother had told her was the only appropriate tone for an argument. “I have four.”
Her mouth twitches into a slightly nastier smile for a moment as the Captain swallows carefully. The swell of pain in her skull is almost worth the satisfaction. Peabody’s hand comes crashing down on her shoulder, gripping hard behind the collarbone.
“Let them go, Ally,” he hisses in her ear, crouching behind her. Ally bites her lip. This is about the only leverage she will have against the Captain for a while, she can tell. But the AK47 is bucking under her control. Ally huffs and lets go, and the guns return to their previous state. Peabody releases a breath and ruffles her hair up into unruly curls. “Good girl,” he mutters. “There’s the good girl I’ve been looking for.”
Ally flattens her hair with her palms, and glares up at him.
There is a flare of silence, broken by Mortimer Umber.
“Well, I for one like this one already. Shall we begin?”