EGGS
When the Land Rover
broke down it was greeted with a kind of weary acceptance.
The truth was it had been feeling sluggish
in its acceleration for the better part of an hour and he’d pushed it because,
you know, there were only fifty-two miles to go so when it finally stuttered,
slowed, then stopped, it came as no real surprise.
Jenny stayed quiet.
She
had been warning him that the engine was getting temperamental for a few weeks,
but he'd been too busy to give it the headspace, let alone the calendar space, and
had neglected to book it in, and, well, effect followed cause and it died.
In
the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Or
Huntingdonshire, as the sign called it.
They
were on a long, straight section of road with dykes on either side of it. He
didn’t even want to think about where they were.
Malcolm
checked under the bonnet.
His
car mechanical prowess was pretty much limited to checking the oil, filling up
the screen wash and, occasionally flipping open the fuse box to see if there
was anything obviously blown there (there never was), so his cursory visual
inspection was doomed to immediate failure. Still, appearances demanded he make
the token effort. The plume of steam - no, he corrected himself, the plume of water
vapour, steam was invisible – showed him that he was already out of his
depth.
‘It’s
blown.’ He said, not knowing what the ‘it’ referred to, or whether there had,
indeed, been any blowing. ‘I’ll call roadside assistance.’
Jenny
was standing by the passenger door looking around her. She’d dressed for the
country – although it was posh country, he’d told her – in Joules and
Barbour and Hunter boots. She looked more suited for their present predicament than
he. He was in a suit, and his one concession to rurality was that he’d put the
tie in his pocket.
Malcolm
followed her general gaze and saw the flatlands of the Huntingdonshire fens
stretching out underneath a massive blue sky. Fields and fields and fields. Occasional
trees projected from the ground, all leaning in the same direction. At the same
angle. He could see for miles, and in no direction did he see a sign of human
habitation except a rusting barn, and a ruined and abandoned cattle shed. There
wasn’t even any other traffic on the roads.
He
got his phone out and swiped through until he found the app he needed. He
opened it up, and there was no mobile data. No 5g, 4g, 3g, just a circle with a
line through it diagonally. So he pressed the ‘call’ button from within the app
and put the phone to his ear.
Nothing
but a few strange clicking sounds, then silence.
He
looked at the display and saw a ‘SIM CARD NOT REGISTERED ON NETWORK’ message. He
had no idea how that could be true. The SIM had been registered on the
network when he’d last checked his phone less than an hour ago. And on every time
he’d checked it previous to that. It had been registered since the first time
he booted it for the first time. It couldn’t just unregister itself,
could it?
He
tried again. Got the same result. To prove he wasn’t mad he did not repeat the action,
instead opting to turn off the phone and turn it on again. The result, however,
turned out to be the same.
Nothing.
Again.
Jenny
was looking at him now, and he knew what she was thinking. She had quickly
realised that his phone wasn’t doing what he wanted – no, what he needed
– it to do, and she was providing a silent judgement on some of the decisions he’d
made recently. Not just the car, but the phone thing, too.
Well,
that had been her fault.
Texting
her couple of friends was just about fine, he supposed, but when a man’s name
started cropping up in her list of messages … well, that was just unacceptable.
They’d seemed harmless enough, on the surface, but then they would. You’d make
things seem innocent, wouldn’t you? Especially if your husband was one of the
few who was responsible enough to check his wife’s phone.
Anyway,
the long, tall and short of it was: he’d taken her phone off her. Just for a
few weeks, mind, he wasn’t that kind of husband, but just long enough to
make his point.
Could
have done with it now, though.
Still,
a point was a point, and it needed making. Sometimes it needed making a lot,
and if it made difficulties in the here and now then it was worth it for the
future. Punishment was an investment. So he couldn’t use her phone now, but
later the lesson would be learned.
The
lesson was always learned.
Eventually.
So
he gave her a shrug.
‘No
signal.’ He said, and was that the faintest trace of a smile passing across her
lips? It was so slight it was hard to tell. He certainly hoped not. But far
from being any kind of moral victory a smile would say she perceived it to be,
this was actually proof that it was her fault. If he hadn’t needed
to deprive her of her smartphone privileges, then they would have another phone
in their possession to use to call for help.
He
wanted to check his phone again, but Jenny was looking at him and so he just
looked at his feet, hoping it didn’t make him look sheepish, but rather that he
was thinking things through. By the side of the road he saw a bird’s egg,
mottled and bluish, cracked and leaking something that didn’t look like yolk or
albumen, but something redder.
He
winced, went to the front of the car, and opened up the bonnet again. Nothing
had changed under there, and he hadn’t suddenly gained knowledge of car
mechanics, he just wanted to do something.
Anything.
While
he was hidden under the bonnet, he checked his phone again.
Nothing.
Great.
It was twenty minutes
before they saw another vehicle, far off and moving in no particular hurry.
Slowly it got closer and closer. Painfully slowly.
There was a moment when it stopped at a
crossroads and seemed to be making up its mind whether to turn off or not, and
Malcolm found himself willing it to carry on straight, towards them.
It did.
Within minutes it was pulling up beside
them, a red pick-up truck with its cargo area covered with a tarpaulin.
The
driver was an old man with a uniquely wrinkled face, as if his brow reflected
the man’s ploughed fields – for Malcolm was in no doubt that the man was a farmer.
‘Afternoon.’ The man said, touching the
peak of a green cap from which grey straggles of hair were determined to
escape. ‘’Avin’ a spot of trouble, eh?’
‘Yes.’ Malcolm said. ‘And thank you for
stopping. You don’t have a mobile phone I could use, do you? I need to call for
recovery …’
The man pulled a face that suggested he had
just bitten down on something incredibly bitter.
‘Mobiles ain’t much of a use ‘roun’ these
parts.’ He said, removing the cap from his head, inspecting the area inside the
cap, and then replacing it. ‘I can take you to the next village. They ‘ave
phones there. A car mechanic too, which I’m guessing is the kind of pond you’d
like to be fishin’ in right about now.’
He made the word ‘now’ sound like it had a
few more vowels smuggled in around the ‘o’.
Malcolm shook his head.
‘I should stay with the car.’
‘Suits yersel’.’ The man said. ‘But good
luck to you with that. You-all seen any other cars aroun’?’
‘Well, no …’
‘That’s cause this ain’t what you’d call a busy
stretch ‘o’ road, young man. A busy day might see me go and then come back.
Might be a long ol’ wait, is all I’m sayin’. Might want to confer with your little
lady there, and see how she feels about standin’ nexta this road ‘til I come by
again tomorrow …’
‘Tomorrow?’ Jenny said, and the word came
out half-question and half-gasp. It looked like she was about to start crying.
Malcolm suppressed the urge to smile.
He was thinking that maybe a lift to the
next village was the best idea on offer here, and now he could do it without
having to give up an inch of pride because Jenny there had given him the
perfect excuse for changing his mind.
He flashed the farmer a knowing version of
the smile he’d suppressed.
‘Sounds like maybe that lift would be
gratefully received.’ He said, rolling his eyes over at Jenny to show that she
was the reason – the only reason – for accepting the offer.
‘Don’t matter each way to me.’ The farmer
said. ‘Hope you-all don’t mind much sittin’ on that flatbed back here, the
front seats are all tooken up.’
The
guy peeled back some of the tarpaulin, got them up onto the flatbed, closed the
tailgate, and made his way to the front. He sat down in the driver’s seat and
reached onto the dashboard and came up with something that looked like a walkie
talkie or CB handset, if they still existed. He spoke into the device and as he
did he glanced back over his shoulder to look at his passengers. It looked like
a kind of unconscious action, as if he were looking over at them because he was
talking about them. Malcolm saw the man’s lips move. He was no lipreader, and
there was enough distance between them that he could have been mistaken, but to
Malcolm it looked like the man had said: got another one.
The pick-up started up and soon they were
driving, but he didn’t feel comforted by the fact.
He didn’t feel comforted at all.
The village sign read
‘Near’, which was about as strange a village name as Malcolm could remember
seeing. It looked quaint but dull, with a few thatched cottages punctuating a
more modern style High Street. Although by modern, he meant state of the architectural
art before cars existed, judging by the bumps in the road that jostled the
vehicle as they drove.
The man dropped them outside a village shop.
‘You’ll find yourself a telephone inside.’
He said, waved, refastened the tarpaulin, got back in his truck, and drove
away.
‘That was kind of him.’ Lizzie offered.
‘Kind would have been towing the car here,
too.’ Malcolm corrected.
He walked up to the shop door, pushed down
on the handle.
Met resistance.
Pushed harder.
The door did not open.
‘Closed for Lunch’ according to the scrawl
on a piece of card blu-tacked to the inside of the door’s glass.
‘Great.’ Malcolm kicked the bottom of the
door in frustration. ‘I mean this is just about bloody perfect, isn’t it?’
There was no indication of just how long
‘for lunch’ might be.
He pressed his face to the glass but could
see no signs of life inside. They’d have heard him kicking the door anyway.
‘I didn’t see a phone box on our way in.’
He said. ‘Did you?’
Jenny shook her head.
‘Maybe we should just keep walking further
into the village. Might be one there.’
She pointed, half-heartedly, down the road,
probably thinking he’d just shoot down her idea because … well, because it was her
idea, and that gave him a flash of anger. Damn her. Thinking she could ever
know him like that. He’d show her.
He gave her a pretty accurate
representation of a smile.
‘That’s a great idea.’ He told her, making
his voice sound like she’d just solved Fermat’s last theorem for him, the
solution that was just too long to fit in the margins of Arithmetica. The
reply and tone were so unexpected that Jenny looked visibly shaken by it. More
so than if he’d backhanded her across the face for her impudence.
So they walked.
It reminded Malcolm of the villages he
remembered from when he was growing up, the ones they’d visited on holidays, or
during the long country walks his parents had pretended to enjoy. Walking
through it felt like walking through a museum exhibit where the 1970s was
treated as a subject worthy of preservation.
It wasn’t worthy of such attention.
But then he’d hated his childhood, and he
hated the places associated with it. He thought the countryside was an
anachronism, and preferred the rigid certainty of the city. You knew where
everything was, and what it was for, in the city. Here … not so much.
He was still thinking about the functional
pointlessness of the village when Jenny’s voice cut in.
‘What do you think THAT is?’
They were walking past a row of terraced
houses and she had stopped outside one of them and was pointing at its wall.
Malcolm was in no mood for dawdling – they had a telephone to find – but Jenny
wasn’t following so he stopped too.
He followed her gaze.
The outside walls of the houses had been
plastered with a uniform render, then overpainted a creamy yellow colour. The finish
had a slight sandy texture, as if ice cream had melted on a beach. About
halfway up between the house’s ground and upper floor windows there was an odd
bulge in the wall, an ovoid form emerging from the wall but still covered by render
and paint. It was perhaps a foot-and-a-half from top to bottom.
‘It’s an egg.’ He said, flippantly, but felt
uncomfortable with the thought as his mind flashed back to the egg by the side
of the road near the car. But it did look like an egg, or half an egg,
cut longitudinally and fixed to the wall on its flat surface, letting the shell
bulge outwards. It didn’t look accidental. It was too precise for that.
‘Don’t you think it’s a little weird?’
Jenny asked, but Malcolm just grunted. Truth was he didn’t care. Okay, it was
a little strange, but maybe it was just some quirky, local craftsman had
provided a stylistic curlicue to the wall, no more remarkable than the straw
finials you saw on thatched rooves, those animals that the thatcher used to
sign his work.
It was hardly worth a bloody conversation.
Now, of all times. When what they needed was a phone. A phone to get them out
of this tedious little village …
‘There’s another one.’ Jenny’s voice went
up an octave. He followed her pointing finger and there, indeed, was another
one. On the next house in line. Smaller and lower down, and less raised up from
the surface, but still clearly visible. His eyes scanned the rest of the terrace
and – now that he knew what he was looking for – he saw more of them.
Egg-shaped structures, bulging from each house. Most of them smaller than the
first, and harder to spot. But once seen, obvious.
It made the houses’ facades look … well, unpleasant,
he thought. Aesthetically it was an odd choice. The ovoid bumps made the
exteriors look like they’d all become infected with some kind of rot underneath
the render, and it was bubbling away from the wall. Okay, the precision of the
shapes made that unlikely, but the fact that there was no consistency in their
positioning or size took away the – slight though it was – positive collective
effect that might have achieved.
Deep down, the egg shapes unsettled him.
A lot.
Though the shapes of the design suggested
birds’ eggs, it wasn’t little chicks he was suddenly imagining emerging from
them, but rather something a whole lot less cute. For some reason his mind
fixated not on the avian, but rather the arachnid; and his skin bristled
with the sudden image of the shells bursting open and disgorging hundreds –
maybe thousands – of baby spiders down the walls of each building, all
moist-from-birth legs and new-born, primal hunger.
Nonsense, of course, but his skin didn’t
lie and it was telling him that it did not like those bumps on the walls. It
did not like them at all.
He
felt Jenny tense and pull away from a vice-tight grip on her upper arm that he
couldn’t for the life of him remember applying. Her eyes flashed with a mixture
of pain and fear, which she quickly sublimated, perhaps aware that their existence
would only inflame him more. But even that flicker of emotion, no matter
how quickly suppressed, made him feel a corresponding jolt of rage, made more
acute by the fact that his grabbing her had been instinctive, performed completely
involuntarily.
It
had been bad enough in the days when she’d still felt able to criticise or
chastise him for things that he’d done deliberately, but how the hell could she
dare to blame him, now, for things he’d been unaware of? That wasn’t
fair.
Not
fair at all.
Still,
the moment passed quickly, and her eyes had lost their rebellious sheen, so he
started walking and after a few moments she followed.
The houses on either
side started looking older, less modern, more … ramshackle was the word
that occurred to him. Not ramshackle as in falling down, but rather that the
techniques that went into their creation started looking cruder, less geometrically
precise, and the overriding impression was of journeying further back in time
with each few yards they walked.
The egg motifs played out on all the
buildings, it seemed, but the older they got, the cruder they got. More
jagged, the curves less true. It was actually a relief. Although there had been
no real doubt in his mind that the things were artefacts, that they had
been meant by a human creator, that horrible spider image had been haunting
him, somewhere below the conscious level, but making him uneasy all the same. Now
he could see that they were just a stylistic choice – however ill-advised – he was
free to just hate them for what they were, not what they might be.
Cruder they might be, but another thing
they were was more numerous. Some buildings’ facades were almost covered with
them. So maybe it was some odd rural tradition that was waning over time, with
the newer houses just having a single, token egg, enough to continue the
tradition, but not enough to make them look quite as horrible as the older
houses.
Because ‘horrible’ was really the only word
for the multi-egg houses. Singly they had been odd, but in groups they were
really quite distasteful. Where earlier he had thought of rot, bubbling up
through plaster, now his imagination was overwhelmed with images of disease. Bruises.
Swollen glands. Buboes. Tumours.
The
houses looked sick.
They
were just passing by a particularly diseased looking cottage when a thought he’d
been avoiding suddenly broke through and demanded that he address it.
The
thought that had been obvious ever since the farmer had dropped them off outside
the village shop.
The
observation that he’d thought would be disproved by the simple act of walking
further down the street.
Here
are the houses, the thought
went, but where are the people?
The
village was deserted.
Apart
from the houses there was not a single sign of life.
No
people going about their daily business. No cats sunning themselves in front
gardens or in porches. No birds sang.
Houses
aside, the only actual evidence of human presence had been that ‘Closed
for Lunch’ sign in the shop window, and thinking about it now, that could have
been in the window for hours. Or days, weeks, months, or even years. They’d
seen it when it was feasibly lunchtime and had assumed that it meant the shop would
be opening soon, but even a ‘Closed for Lunch’ sign left on a shop
window would seem accurate once a day.
The
broken clock effect.
Still,
the village didn’t feel deserted. The houses – horrible bumps
notwithstanding – seemed cared for and none were falling into any kind of disrepair.
Malcolm didn’t know if he was being fanciful but he had the sense that
somewhere, perhaps in a window of one of those houses, someone was
watching their progress through the village.
He’d
always believed that there was something to that feeling, of being observed,
and thought that even if there was no scientific mechanism that could explain
how such a sense would work, surely there was a strong evolutionary advantage
to be gained from knowing when a predator might have its gaze directed at you.
But
were they being watched?
If
so, by whom?
And
why were there no people about?
The
farmer had obviously expected the shop to be open, that was – after all – why he’d
dropped them there, so maybe everyone in the village had just decamped to a
pub, or a community centre, or – worse – a church. Maybe there was a village
meeting. Or a fucking jumble sale. Who knew with country types? They chose to
live in isolated communities, who could actually tell what those communities
ending up doing in their spare time?
Continuing
with the walk seemed like the best way to proceed. He toyed with the idea of
knocking on every door they passed, trying to get access to a phone that way, but
something stopped him from actually applying his knuckles to the doors. A need
for caution that he couldn’t explain, but neither could he bring himself to
violate its directives.
No.
He
was just letting the unnatural stillness of the village get to him now. Letting
paranoia overtake reason. Yes, he was well out of his comfort zone, but who
wouldn’t be? The car had broken down and he’d had to leave it – against his
wishes – and he’d come to this odd village and its seeming lack of people and
those weird – and let’s face it unpleasant – egg-like bulges on their
walls and his mind was just running stupidly, but explicably, wild.
They
weren’t being watched.
The
people of the village were somewhere playing Bingo, or singing Kumbaya, or
being lectured by a policeman on the necessity of locking their doors at night.
The
shop really was closed for lunch.
Everything
was fine.
Odd,
but fine.
The
farmer would never have dropped them here if …
‘What
is it?’ Jenny asked, breaking through the dark thought that just bubbled up and
burst within his mind. The dark thought whose arrival she had read off his
face, hence the question.
‘It’s
nothing.’ He lied. ‘Just getting frustrat4ed, that’s all.’
He
had no idea if she believed him, and honestly, he didn’t care. Because the
thought was a like a trap door that had opened beneath the surface of the
everyday world, and had dropped him into a darker place, one that he was only
just beginning to understand the geography of.
The
farmer.
What
he’d thought he saw him say into the walkie talkie.
got
another one
Another
broken down car? How common could that be? And he’d looked over at the flat bed,
at him and Jenny as he spoke. Didn’t that mean he was referring to them?
got
another one
But.
There. Were. Two. Of. Them.
Him
and Jenny.
So,
not got another person then.
Another
man?
Another
woman?
Or
had he just completely failed in his lip-reading?
Was
he really trying to tell himself that the farmer had brought them here
deliberately, having warned … someone that he’d got another one?
He
needed to snap out of it.
Jenny
was looking at him with puzzlement now, but she had seen all the things he had,
had all the information at her fingertips that he did, so why wasn’t she asking
the kinds of questions that he was asking of himself? Maybe she was completely
oblivious to the oddities at play here, in which case, she didn’t deserve his
insight.
Looking
at her now, he realised something he hadn’t allowed himself to really consider
before. He had spent so much of their relationship shaping her into the person
she was today. He’d won her over, made her dependent upon him, he’d isolated
her from the majority of her friends, he’d broken her wild spirit, he’d taken
away her financial independence, he’d taken away her phone, he chose what she
bought, what she wore, where she went, with whom, and when all was said and
done he had fashioned her into this meek, passive, subservient creature who was
afraid of his every change of facial expression. The truth was he hated what
she had become, no, what she had allowed herself to become.
It
was that moment of disgust that made him turn away from her and continue up the
road.
He
did not check to see if she was following him.
The village had lost
the need for terraces and had segued into something a little more pleasant.
Thatched cottages with lawns. The bulbous deformities of render were still
present, and in greater numbers, but at least there were other elements of the
houses to draw his attention away from the hideous architectural blight that
had infected the buildings. Trellises and arches, winding paths, creeping
sprawls of Wisteria, sprinklings of trees and neatly-tended flower beds.
Still no people though.
The
whole afternoon was starting to seem like some particularly surreal dream that
the subconscious occasionally scooped up and served to the sleeping mind. The
more he thought that, the more dream-like it all seemed.
Architectural
bulges, for Christ’s sake?
The
Freudian analysis would be worth a listen.
Problem
was, of course, that he wasn’t dreaming.
He
carried on walking.
He was just starting
to wonder how long the road was planning to go on for when he came across the
start of a rolling stretch of grass. A village green.
And
on the far side of the green?
Underneath
an ancient looking tree?
A good
old park bench.
And
sitting on the bench?
People.
Two of them.
Both
women, by the look of it.
He
hurried across the green towards them, feeling such a surge of relief that it
highlighted just how disturbed he’d been by the experience.
The
green had been mowed recently and the heavy scent tried to send him off into
memories but this wasn’t the time for that.
There
were people.
An
old woman, he could see now, in some austere black smock dress thing, seventy-years-old
if she was a day, and a younger woman, maybe half that, in a floral-patterned
skirt, and mustard yellow blouse. He looked around for Jenny, to tell her that
they were saved, and realised that she wasn’t beside him. He turned a full one-eighty
to see how far she had fallen behind.
There
was no sign of her.
Typical,
he thought, stupid bloody
woman! Where had she got to?
He
tried to remember the last time he’d been aware of her near him and realised
that it was when he turned and walked off. Maybe she was tired. Or angry. Maybe
he shouldn’t have stormed off like that, but grow a spine woman!
Something
brushed against his arm and his heart lurched in his chest, and he jerked
around ready to defend himself.
From
what, he did not know.
It
was just the older woman from the bench.
She
narrowed her eyes and examined his face.
‘Are
you lost, my dearie?’ She asked. Her face was lined and her jowls sagging, but
there was an intensity to her eyes that suggested the physical ravages of time
had not lessened her mental capacities.
‘I
… I’m looking for a telephone.’ He said, feeling like an idiot, blurting it out
like that without any context.
‘You
haven’t one of those mobile ones?’ Her tone was incredulous.
‘Yes.
I mean, of course. But there’s no signal. Look, my car broke down …’
‘Ah.’
The woman nodded. ‘No signal.’
Malcolm
realised that she wasn’t nodding at him, but at somewhere off to his other
side. The younger woman was there, and he had no idea how he hadn’t noticed her
approaching. The old woman had caught him unawares because he’d been thinking
about Jenny, but now he was boxed in on both sides and he hadn’t seen or heard either
of them approach.
‘Signal
is like that, around here.’ The younger woman said. ‘To be honest, we like it
that way. Don’t we, Shirley?’
The
old woman, Shirley, nodded.
‘We
do.’ She said, ‘Used to be no one worried about signals and likes and
baking competitions were judged by the WI rather than broadcast live on
television …’
Malcolm
felt impatient. He just wanted out of this bloody village. Now. He didn’t want to
hear a lecture on the wonders of the past. When he was sufficiently distant
from it in time and space then maybe he’d look back on it with a smile and a
shake of the head, but now it was annoying.
‘I’m
looking for a phone box…’ He interrupted.
The
younger woman laughed.
‘Not
many of those around these days. People tend to have smartphones…’
‘But,
as we’ve already ascertained, no signal. Do either of you have a landline I
could use. I’ll pay, of course …’
‘You
seen ‘em yet?’ Shirley asked, a non-sequitur that wrong-footed Malcolm and
found him struggling to finish his train of thought.
‘Seen
what?’
‘The
eggs.’
Malcolm
felt flustered. He wanted to be talking about a phone, but the woman had
managed to come up with the one thing that could distract him from that goal
for now.
‘Yes,
yes I have. What’s the story behind them?’
‘Story?’
‘Yes,
by which I mean what are they?’
The
woman chuckled.
‘Eggs
is eggs, young man.’ She said, still chuckling. ‘Why, what else would they be?’
‘But
what are they for? Why are they there? On the walls?’
It
was the younger woman who answered.
‘Did
you know that many of the world’s religions viewed the egg as particularly important?’
She asked, not waiting for a reply. ‘The Greeks, the Egyptians, the Hindus, the
Chinese and many more all had creation stories revolving around the idea of a cosmic
egg that hatched and gave us the universe, the world, the gods, a particular
god, delete where not applicable. Metaphors? Maybe. But a pervasive one, don’t
you think?’
Malcolm
didn’t know what to think. Short of ‘shut up!’ he couldn’t think of any
way to respond to the woman.
‘I
can see you’re not impressed. That’s fine. But if you think about it, the Big
Bang hypothesis is nothing more than a variation of the myth of the hatching of
the cosmic egg, isn’t it? Why I like the idea of the egg as a metaphor for
creation is quite simple: it’s ours. Female, you know? Eggs are ours. Creation
is ours. You chip in, sure, but there aren’t any cosmic tadpole myths. Are you
here on your own?’
Again
with the non-sequitur.
‘No.’
He said. ‘Jenny … that is my wife, Jenny, is here with me…’
Both
of the women made a pantomime of looking around.
‘Can’t
see her.’ The younger woman said.
‘Where
is she?’ The one called Shirley asked.
‘Back
there.’ Malcolm gestured. ‘Look, do you have a phone or not?’
Neither
of them answered him. They both just stared at him.
‘A
phone?’ He persisted.
‘Eggs
is eggs.’ Shirley said, and then both women started walking away from him,
heading in the direction he’d pointed.
‘HEY!’
He called after them.
The
women ignored him.
He
could not believe it.
He
felt his face going red, and a sudden kick of adrenaline forced his hands into
fists and blasted his mouth and throat bone dry.
‘HEY!’
He shouted after them. ‘A PHONE?’
The
women kept walking, and they kept ignoring him. They didn’t even look back.
He
strode after them, enraged. How dare they ignore him like this? It was unacceptable!
‘EXCUSE
ME…’ He yelled, feeling utter, unrestrained rage boiling up within him.
He’d
almost caught up with them when the younger one stopped next to one of the
houses and reached out her hands to touch the wall. Shirley turned round and
faced him.
‘Eggs
is eggs.’ She said, putting her hands on the wall next to the other woman’s. ‘But
what they really are is ours.’
Four
hands caressed the wall and as he watched in mute horror as one of the
egg-shaped bumps started moving down the wall towards them. The younger woman
started to speak, but it was in a language he did not recognise. The older
woman began to make odd clicking sounds with her tongue in counterpoint to the
other’s peculiar guttural sounds and Malcolm not only couldn’t recognise a single
syllable she was uttering, he could not even begin to understand how she
could be making those sounds.
More
clicking sounds came from all around him and he saw doors opening on all the
houses on the street, with women emerging into the light, all staring straight
at him, eyes wide, faces hostile.
The
clicking got louder and louder, perfectly synchronised, and the younger woman’s
voice rose to compete. Those senseless, impossible words in which he could discern
neither vowels nor consonants, but that seemed to hit him at some deep, primal
level, rising in pitch and volume and blending with the now staccato clicks of
a hundred women’s tongues.
His
mind rebelled. This … it couldn’t be happening. He’d lost his mind back at the
car, and this was all a psychotic delusion. Or he’d never made this journey and
he was at home, in bed, sweating his way through a horrible – but finite! – dream.
It
had to be a dream.
Because
the women were standing on either side of the road, all the way back to the
shop, probably, dual lines of women clicking their tongues as the egg-like
bulges on the buildings started to pulse in time with the sounds, inflating and
deflating as if breathing along with the clicks and nonsense words …
Which
was madness.
It
just was.
No
other explanation.
An
overactive imagination, magnified through the lens of the day’s stresses, was
playing fuck you tricks upon him.
There
was no way –NO FUCKING WAY AT ALL – that those eggs were moving through the
surfaces of the houses, no way, no way, no way, no way no way no way …
They
weren’t shrinking and swelling, shrinking and swelling, shrinking and swelling
like lungs deflating then inflating.
They
CERTAINLY weren’t moving down the walls of the buildings.
They
weren’t.
They.
Just. Weren’t.
Pushing
through brick and plaster, making ripples that spread out as they moved, making
ripples in solid matter as if it was water.
And
neither were they all reaching the bottom of their respective walls at exactly
the same moment. Because that would mean that they were acting together. And
that would be absurd. That would be impossible. That would be too much for his
mind to bear.
The
impossible words, made of sounds that surely no human mouth was ever supposed
to make, weren’t making the eggs move. Because the eggs weren’t moving. They weren’t.
They weren’t detaching themselves from their respective walls and becoming pavement
eggs, now made of concrete, but still pulsating.
THEY
WEREN’T.
They
weren’t moving through the pavements, and they certainly, 100 percent
definitely, weren’t heading towards him.
So
why, he wondered, was he running?
Running
away?
From
pavements that weren’t bulging? Rippling? From bulges that forced their blind,
impossible way towards him?
Because
if any of that was true, then surely everything he thought he knew about the
way the world worked had suddenly been made obsolete. The earth, as Shakespeare
had once observed, had bubbles, and these were of them.
Too
many bubbles.
And.
All.
Of.
Them.
Heading.
Towards.
Him.
Perhaps
the last thread of his reason unravelled then, because his earlier thought of
arachnid birth hunger came back to him, and no matter how fast he ran, he could
not escape. Every house on his route had added more of those loathsome
excrescences to the army of them homing in on him.
His
entire life had been based upon the principle of imposing his will, his
control, over everything that existed within its orbit. It wasn’t – and hadn’t
ever been – a conscious choice he made, but rather an impulse that had driven
him for his whole life, constructing rigid order within a life that had, from
his childhood, seemed chaotic and out of control.
Now
he knew that he had never seen out of control, he had just lived through
a flimsy simulation of it.
This
was what out of control meant.
This
was out of control in all of its terrible glory.
There
was no way to avoid the eggs. It really was a numbers game. He could see them
forcing their way through concrete, through asphalt, forms that moved through
solid matter like it was water. There were hundreds of them, and it was not ego
that told him that it was he that they wanted.
It
was a plain observation.
Still
he ran. Ran through a waking nightmare. Watched on each side by the rows of
women who were all contributing to the terrifying soundtrack of clicks and
senseless words. He could see no mercy in their watchful faces. He dodged and
feinted in an effort to stay out of the way of those impossible bumps.
He
thought he might see a path through them and then one of the eggs flowed under the
heel of his right foot just as he was bringing it down, and he felt the thing give
slightly beneath his weight, like it wasn’t wholly solid, and then he was
falling.
He
wheeled his arms in a desperate attempt to maintain his balance, but it was
futile.
He
hit the road, hard, and pain erupted in his knee, his chest, his cheek. Winded
and disoriented, he flailed around, and when he looked up there was one of the
eggs a couple of feet away from his face. Next to it, another one. Another.
Another.
From
ground-level, eggs were all he could see. They moved so fast, closing in from
all directions, encircling him so quickly that by the time he had recovered
enough to pull himself up into a sitting position there was no way through
them.
Bumps
in the road, he thought,
hysterically, but even that stupid idea was dispelled as soon as it was formed,
because those half-egg lumps were no longer the colour of the asphalt that they
had moved through to reach him. They were no longer half-eggs. They were pushing
up, out of the road, revealing themselves, showing him what had been underneath
the houses’ render, the concrete paths, the asphalt road.
Semi-translucent
grey bulges, like the skins of thick sacs, through which a murky, milky liquid
could be discerned. The liquid made the black shapes writhing at the centre of
each egg very difficult to make out clearly, which – he thought – was a mercy,
at least.
The
clicking sounds he could hear coming from within each egg made him even more
glad that he could not see what was making them.
He
felt tears streaming down his cheeks and he knew that he was done. Whatever
this was, it ended with his death. There couldn’t be any other way. This was
it. It wasn’t right. It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t make any sense at all.
He hit his forehead with his fist trying to clear his mind, and he screamed
out, as loud as he could, so loud if hurt:
“WHY?’
The
question seemed to hang in the air for a while, but the clicking and nonsense
sounds stopped, so it seemed that his scream of enquiry had bought him, if not
an answer, then at least some peace.
This
wasn’t fair. Any of it.
Not
fair at all.
He
sensed the change before he saw the change. Something in the
pulsations of those noisome sacs drew his attention, and then, as he watched,
the ring around him began to widen at a single point, opening out, and the
ranks of eggs behind moved to help form what looked like a kind of avenue,
leading back towards where the route he’d taken into the heart of the village,
an egg-lined avenue and he didn’t know if they expected him to follow the path
they’d laid out for him, but they had another thing coming, he wasn’t going to
do anything they wanted him to, he refused, he would not play their game …
Down
the road two figures moved. Towards him.
Jenny!
Jenny
and that bloody farmer from earlier, the one who’d brought them here in the
first place and then driven off.
Still,
better late than never, and the eggs did seem afraid of him. They’d parted to
let him through. As rescues went, this one might just work.
‘JENNY!’
He called out, and discovered that he was crying again, this time with relief.
She didn’t acknowledge him, but maybe that was part of the plan she and the
farmer had formulated. He didn’t know, didn’t care, just as long as they got
him out of this madness.
When
they reached him, Malcolm was shocked by the expression on Jenny’s face. It
wasn’t fear – no, he knew that look well – but something harder, colder.
The
farmer looked down at him.
‘Doesn’t
look like it’s going so well for you.’ He said, and there were none of the rural
mangling of the English language he’d been guilty of earlier, indeed his voice
was almost aristocratic in comparison.
‘Please.’
Malcolm sobbed. ‘Please help me.’
The
man seemed to consider it for a moment, then shrugged.
‘Sorry,
doesn’t work for me.’ He said. ‘I’m interested though, in what you think is
going on here.’
Malcolm
could only shake his head by way of reply. He didn’t know. He just wanted it to
stop.
The
man hunkered down on his heels to put his face close to Malcolm’s.
‘My
name is Roland Marcase,’ He said. ‘And I am a professor of Anthropology, with a
keen interest in British folklore. I’m telling you this because I think it is
important that you understand what is happening to you here, but also because I’m
sure the assumptions you made about me when we first met, just on the strength
of my use of dialect, were not particularly flattering.’
He
smiled and showed Malcolm a set of perfect teeth.
‘This
village, Near, is a remarkable place to study folklore at very close quarters. Usually,
in my field, you deal with stories handed down over hundreds – sometimes thousands
– of years. Have you ever played that parlour game, where a phrase is whispered
to one person, who whispers it to another and on and on down a line? Quite
often a folklorist is that last person in line, hearing a corrupted version of
the original message and trying to write an academic paper on a mishearing of a
mishearing of a mishearing.
‘Sometimes,
and this is the really interesting part, the mishearings are deliberate.
Distortion is a pretty good way to cover up an inconvenient or, let’s face it,
just fucking terrifying truth. Case in point: Near. There are so many names for
the things you see before you. Fairies. Fae Folk. Elves. The Hidden People.
Faerie folk. See what we did was we took something primal, dark, strange and very,
very dangerous and we anthropomorphised it into something cute and beguiling,
basically something the Victorians could tell their kids about.
‘The
truth is that these creatures – we call them Chthons, if you’re interested –
predate humanity by … well, aeons. And seeing as we’re the new kids on the
block they … they watch over us. Well, some of us. The ones of us who need their
help.
‘Near
used to be a pretty ordinary fenland village. It had witches, of course, and it
still has. But they’re not like you think. They’re just women who use the powers
of the earth to get men like you to fuck off out of their affairs. They’re tired of
your bullshit, rather like poor Jenny here.’
Malcolm
turned his gaze to his wife, but she was just nodding in agreement. Her face
was grave. It was then that he realised that this wasn’t a rescue.
‘Eggs.’
Marcase continued. ‘That’s what the Chthons look like here, and it’s not an
accident. Eggs are a very feminine symbol. And every woman who lives in Near
has allied themselves with a very female kind of power. They’ve had to. Idiots
like you have blighted their lives. So they seek this place out, or the place
draws them here, it depends how you choose to look at it. And something very
like … well, this …’ he spread his hands expansively, ‘has happened. Again and
again and again.
‘Female
power makes all this possible, sure, but the Chthons here still need males,
male energy.’
Marcase
got back to his feet, went over to Jenny and put his arm around her shoulders.
It seemed quite a fatherly gesture.
‘Eggs
is eggs.’ He said, then led Jenny away, back up the avenue of Chthons. ‘And
everything needs to eat.’
The
ring of eggs closed the circle, and then closed in around him.
Now
that they were excited, the milkiness of their internal liquids turned clear
and he could see just what the black things inside the sacs looked like.
He
screamed, but not for long.
