You'll Never Believe A Man Can Fly: Chapter Two by Lee Barnett

Chapter Two

The Guardian, 12th November 2003
We gave the impression that Beverley Baxter was a woman in Curtain up, G2, page 17, yesterday. Sir Beverley was a Tory MP from 1935-64 and editor of the Daily Express from 1929-33

Davies wasn’t sure where to look first. The smoke arising from the remains of the two vehicles that were burning, the human shaped lumps of mess on the ground in front of the vehicles, or his suit. But since the suit was the thing that most personally affected him, he chose the latter.

At that moment, the primary thought running through his head was that living in a city made one incredibly selfish. At any other time, his first thoughts would have been those of concern and pity for those who had obviously just died. Did they have families? Were there people who would mourn them?

And yet, instead, what consumed his thoughts was the simple thought of “Shit – I’m going to have to get a new suit”, convinced that the goop covering him would never wash out. However, to his total astonishment, as he looked at it, the condensed mist covering his suit seemed to dissolve and evaporate. A second later though, such thoughts vanished (almost as quickly as the mess covering him did) and in its place was a feeling of worry. The liquid wasn’t vanishing as he had first thought. It was disappearing through the suit and the rest of his clothes. He could feel his skin grown cold as the liquid hit it and then, equally surprisingly, a feeling of great warmth ran through his body and he realised that the liquid had vanished entirely.

Quickly, he took off his jacket, and looked at it. There were no stains, well, none that hadn’t been there before, at least. That small grease spot on the lapel that four different dry cleaners had been unable to shift was still there, as was the equally small ink stain on the elbow, caused last week when he’d absent-mindedly leaned on his open fountain pen. But no other stains. He lifted the jacket to his nose and smelled. No, no residue of any sort that he could detect.

He rolled up his sleeve and looked at his right hand. In a sudden flash of memory, he remembered once just touching something in high school chemistry that had turned his finger tips yellow. For a couple of days afterwards he’d had to convince his parents that he hadn’t taken up smoking. His right hand, and indeed arm, were refreshingly normal coloured, a healthy pink look to them.

In fact, now he examined his arm, he realised with a shock that it looked just a tad too monotonously healthy. The scar was gone. He’d had a scar on his wrist for fifteen years, ever since a dart had rebounded badly from the dartboard in The Rose and Crown and had torn a lump of skin from his forearm. It had healed but had always left a jagged scar in the epidermis, about an inch long. But it wasn’t there now.

Now that was just plain weird. Hurriedly, he checked for other marks and blemishes that he knew were there. There was no mirror handy, so he had to guess, but he felt over his chin for the shaving cut from earlier. It wasn’t there. Nor was the spot on his nose that had plagued him for two days and had been responsible, he was convinced, for Tracey Andrews turning him down for a date. For a brief moment, he wondered exactly what was in the stuff that had briefly covered him, but for no more than that. If what it had done was to clear up his skin and get rid of a few scars, then he could live with that.

He shook his head to clear it and walked on towards the bank, now hardly glancing at the throng of police cars that had turned up in the last couple of minutes and were surrounding the burning vehicles. As he walked past the bank, sirens made him look up and he saw the familiar red of two fire engines as they entered the street, looks of determination upon the fire officers.

Davies turned away from them and continued his walk to work, knowing at least that now he had both a good reason for being late and a cracking story to tell his colleagues. He enjoyed his job, which was unfortunate, because when he lost it, less than 48 hours later, it would have been nice if he’d have gleaned some comfort from doing so.

One would have thought that the people most concerned about the liquid that had escaped from the vehicle would have been the police and other emergency services on the scene. Failing that, possibly one would have supposed that Ian Davies would have been the best guess as to who was very worried.

Well, one would have been spectacularly wrong, since the person who was most concerned was a woman by the name of Betty Grable (no relation). Or, to be precise, and to give her her full name and title, Dr Betty Grable (no relation). It was she who was responsible for deciding that the package should be sent by East End Deliveries and it was she who had considered that there was no material risk in doing so.

It was also she who was, currently, running down a corridor in Dance-Oliver Medical Research as if the devil himself was after her.

She flung open the doors to her lab and ran inside. Since the lab was only about twenty feet by ten feet, this might have seemed to some people a slight over-reaction, but she didn’t care. ‘Some’ people didn’t have a clue as to what was in that package. Though, as she admitted to herself wryly, that only made them part of a growing crowd, including Dr Betty Grable herself.

She stopped in front of a large door, eight feet tall and six feet wide. Upon it were the stencilled words “Do Not Enter”. Some more words, in a faded black marker that no one had bothered to clean off since 1932 when they were added, were written “Abandon every hope, ye that enter”.

Way too late, thought Grable, as she had thought a hundred times before, and she punched into the code pad that week’s password. With a slight puff of air that indicated the release of the airtight seal, the door moved outwards and then, with surprising gentleness given the size, swung open. A click as the door reached the full length of the arc indicated that the magnetic lock had engaged. Grable stepped through the space and immediately turned and punched in another set of numerals to the code pad. The lock disengaged and moved, smoothly again, and shut. There was a brief movement of air around Grable and a light situated next to the number pad turned from red to green, letting her know that she was sealed in.

She moved quickly through the door at the back of the room to a shower area, stripped off and showered, sniffing at the smell of the water from habit. The day that she didn’t do this, she knew, was the day to worry about, since it would show that she’d grown careless. When she walked out of the cubicle, she stepped into another cubicle; this one detected her presence and warm air dried her body.

Grable grabbed one of the paper uniforms hanging by the side and put it on. It was pretty meaningless as protection, but the paper had been soaked in a chemical that would react to radiation, and in the event of a tear in the heavy and bulky suit she was now putting on, it would identify (once the suit was later removed) where the breach had occurred.

All of these safety mechanisms could protect against was radiation and infection. And who they could protect was the person wearing the suit. And the theory was that this would protect the wearer against anything that they were likely to encounter in the secure area. Unfortunately, the creators of the suits, when designing them, had neglected to build in protection against the sheer, unfettered fury that was a boss who had discovered that you’d screwed something up. Grable’s sole remaining hope was that the suits they were both wearing would blunt both the attack from her boss and the reaction of her body to it.

It was, of course, a forlorn hope, one that died on the vine as soon as her immediate superior saw her enter the secure area.

“Dr Grable,” her boss said, turning to look at her as if inspecting a particularly loathsome virus on a slide. And, Grable acknowledged to herself, that was a pretty fair description of her, as far as Dr Mark Toster was concerned. As well as having no sense of proportion, no sense of humour and an attitude to his employment that would make the most jobsworthy lending officer at a bank seem like a spendthrift fool, Mark Toster was, simply, an unpleasant man. It was purely natural, no talent involved, but Toster was someone who relished his unpleasant reputation. It was rumoured among those who didn’t know him well that he lived his life according to Charles Colson’s dictum: when you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

Grable, who’d been in Toster’s office many times, and knew the man well, also knew that was a fallacy. Toster thought Colson was a wimp.

The meeting lasted a lot shorter time period than she’d expected, but how long did it take to receive the dressing down of your life? She didn’t even get the chance to explain herself before he’d ordered her out of the secure area with instructions to pull her notes on the material and report to him that afternoon, at four o’clock, where she would explain herself, and the resulting situation in full.

As she left the area, she wondered whether her job would last much longer. But that wasn’t her prime worry. Until she reviewed her notes, she was slightly more concerned about whether or not life on this planet would last much longer than her job.

A few hours after Dr Betty Grable (no relation) was contemplating the potential survivability of both her career and the human race, Ian Davies was sitting in a meeting, being bored out of his skull. If the two of them had known about each other’s predicament, they might have been tempted to swap.

He’d almost completely written off the events on the way to work, and was in fact more concerned about that bus, by now convinced that if he’d have stayed on the bus he’d have made it to work faster. It didn’t matter a huge amount if he was officially half an hour late for work. Some of his colleagues often didn’t get in until eleven, but Davies hated to be late for anything. Especially this morning, since he’d known that he had this meeting to prepare for. All through the morning, and into the early afternoon, he’d had a slight headache, but not bad enough to take painkillers for. The slight dizziness that had assailed him as he took the stairs to the third floor meeting room three at a time for his meeting at two had gone just as quickly as it arrived. He felt fine when he got to the room, although he had a suspicion that he was putting on a bit of weight, since his trousers seemed a tad tight. Though, and he gave it no serious thought, it seemed to be about his legs rather than his waist that they were tight.

There were six of them in the room, including three of his colleagues and a director of the agency. The five people from the agency were sitting around the magnificent sixteenth century mahogany desk that was a family heirloom of the senior director. Six inches thick, it had needed a crane to lift it into the building through the large glass double doors leading to the balcony. It sat twenty people. Not comfortably, but it sat them. But five around a table was more than comfortable.

The sixth man was standing and was currently speaking. And it was he that was the cause of the ennui that had settled over everyone else.

Davies tried to pay attention to the man talking. It wasn’t easy. The monotonous tone emanating from the man’s mouth would have had a good chance at putting any man who’d been on ever increasing uppers for six hours to sleep. As it was, only the chance that the speaker might actually say something important kept Davies even semi-conscious. It wasn’t only that the speaker was boring, it was that he appeared to revel in his boringness.

However, it was an important meeting, to discuss taking on a new client and how that client might best be served by the PR firm of Doncaster and Monkton, known in the industry as “Donkey and Monkey”. The speaker was the media buyer for Allied Cosmetics, a big account and one that, if Doncaster and Monkton gained the contract, would secure large bonuses for all. And Davies, like any other PR man, liked bonuses. He liked them a lot. They even occasionally made up for having to sit through meetings like this.

Davies kept his eyes on the image being projected on the wall. Three faces of women, supposedly the same woman at three different ages: twenty, fifty and eighty. Davies knew that there were professional models who were in fact grandmother, mother and daughter. There were even computer applications that could, with a modicum of talent from the operator, show what someone would look like in thirty years time. He had even heard rumours that there were women who kept photographs of themselves of what they looked like when they were younger. None of which answered the single question: why the hell did none of the women look like they belonged to the same species as each other, let alone the same family? He leaned forward, and made some notes on his scratch pad, filling the remainder of the fifth page, and then starting a sixth.

And the meeting had only been going on for two hours.

Above his head were four things, none of which Davies paid any attention to. The lights were, as one might expect, lit, and were securely locked in place, performing their usual function. The discreet and almost hidden cameras and microphones were similarly unmoving, and were, for the moment turned off, since the room wasn’t being used for focus groups or other meetings that required later documentation.

It would have been helpful later if they had been turned on, since the Christmas blooper reel would have been substantially more interesting than it turned out to be. (As it was, the most entertaining bit was when someone in a focus group, while tasting a new product, swallowed twice and then promptly threw up over the rest of the product range.)

The fourth object above Davies was a spider. It wasn’t a special spider. In fact, as spiders go, it was fairly typical of the species. Relatively small body, eight legs, spins webs. The usual. The only point of note was its position, directly above Davies. The spider lowered itself down on a thin strand of web-line and without knowing why, carried on going down… down… down, until it was almost at the large pink thing that everyone else in the room would have called a “finger”. The spider continued towards its target, not knowing why, but convinced (as much as a spider could be) that it was destiny. Slowly it continued, almost tracking its prey.

In a moment of sheer desperation, while attempting to stay awake, Davies stretched his neck muscles and arms, knocking the spider completely off its web, where it fell onto the table, rather puzzled. The puzzlement didn’t last though, as Davies, surprised and with a hitherto unknown dislike of spiders slammed his hand down on the tiny arachnid.

Whatever anyone was expecting to be the result, what happened wasn’t it. Davies’ hand moved through the air so fast that it set off a small sonic boom in its path and it hit the table with the force of a steam metal press. It was so contained that a six-inch thick hand-sized piece of mahogany was neatly excised from the table and hit the ground, burying itself three inches into the carpet.

Davies lifted his hand in shock. Very, very slowly.

This week's Artist: Sam Hart
Born in Britain, bred in Brazil, Sam spent a couple of years (95-97) in the UK, drawing Power Rangers and VR Troopers, but decided to return to the sunny tropical beaches and now draws a steady diet of goblins, hobgoblins, samurai, medieval warriors, spaceguys with big guns blasting galactic beetles, WWI aces, and other such amenities.