11. The Hangman’s Noose

THE HIDDEN FOREST - 11

“Now then, want have we here? Strangers, I’ll warrant, and not a drop of fleeter blood in ‘em,” croaked a voice that managed to find its way into Davey’s head in that minuscule gap between waking from a dead faint and actually slipping into sleep.

Therefore he opened his eyes and saw his trousers folded neatly on the end of the bed he was lying in and became aware that under the cover that had been pulled up to his neck he was bordering on being stark naked. But he sat up anyway. He had owned that skeletal chest long enough to not care about just how skinny it looked.

“How did I get here and I want to get up!” he said in his cynical police-officer voice, a remnant from his old days in the force, a voice that had stood him in good stead more than once when it looked as if he might be facing more danger than he could cope with on his own.

“You tell me that!” croaked the other. “I’m Doctor Zenith and I only care for fleeters. They’re my stock in trade, if you like, and I don’t have anything to do with creatures from the Outside until they become fleeters. So out with it, you rapscallion! Where have you come from?”

“I’m with him,” Davey muttered indicating Paul whose bleary eyes and tendency to yawn gave him the appearance of someone who might be about to go to sleep, “and we got in here because he’s got papers that prove that he is the rightful owner of this old mansion. We didn’t think there were squatters in it when we came!”

“Squatters!” roared Doctor Zenith, “who do you think you’re calling squatters? Of all the cheek! We’ve been here for ages, decades, maybe centuries even, you… you … you rapscallion!”

“If you’re a doctor you’ll be an educated man and you’ll know that cannot be true,” sighed Davey, the police training he’d had years ago and not forgotten coming to the fore. If, he was told, something seems to be untrue then the chances are it is untrue. Logic and common sense, he had been taught, were the backbone of modern policing, and using those tenets he’d managed to incarcerate a good handful of black-hearted felons over the years as well as dozens of regular unfortunates who’d fallen through the gaps in society and landed on the wrong side of a variety of laws.

“What can’t be true?” demanded the doctor.

“This story of giving people a kind of immortality by making time go weird,” he said, “time’s fixed. A minute’s a minute, an hour’s an hour and my neighbour Paul just there is waking up...”

“I haven’t been to sleep,” complained Paul, “I wanted to, I was darned tired, but with all this chattering and noise, a fellow can’t get a moment’s shut-eye, and don’t forget how you woke me up at the crack of dawn this morning, and that seems an age ago. Now who’s this fellow here, and I was listening to what he said and he can explain to me what these fleeters I keep hearing about are, if he doesn’t mind. Look at them, wandering all about my mansion as if they had every right to be here.”

“I’d like to know a bit about those too,” grunted Davey, “don’t peep!” he added as he pulled his trousers back on. “And you get your kecks on too,” he said to Paul, “we can’t have you wandering round this place tackle-out!”

“What about my forty-winks?” demanded Paul peevishly.

“I’ve an idea that if your spend a few minutes dosing off in that bed you risk waking up in 2050, and be all alone in the world,” Davey told him. “You ask what the fleeters are and I reckon this explains it.”

“Meaning?” insisted Paul.

“Meaning that they’ve had their nap in one of these beds and somehow, I don’t know how but it’s happened, they’ve managed to sleep for years instead of minutes. Drugs, probably, putting them in a coma until their minds are so much mush. Try it if you like, and tell me all about it when you wake up. It might be educational. But think on this for a moment. Should something grotesque happen and the world ends, say it gets smashed to smithereens by a passing asteroid, you’ll miss all the fun.”

“I will? How come?” asked a still yawning and befuddled Paul.

“Ask the doctor. I am right, aren’t I? You do something, make them sleep for so long they forget that they’re people and become your fleeters, empty of mind, empty of thoughts, just workers for whatever it is the little gnome in his glass case uses them for.”

“The world needs labour,” sniffed Doctor Zenith, “and the great Blondeau, who never was a gnome despite his glass throne room, would like to be able to afford to pay them but he’s not got unlimited resources. So his solution is to make his workers into volunteers. Even I am a volunteer, but I’m one of the lucky ones whose skills are necessary, so I get, er, different treatment.”

“So what’s the Blondeau person doing then? Why an army of workers? And what are they doing?” asked Paul, pulling his trousers on. “I’ve heard enough. There’s something not right going on here, and I want to get out!”

“It’s a secret,” muttered the Doctor, “but you’ve already found out too much, I’m afraid.”

“This is my damned mansion!” exploded Paul, “I was left it in my great times four grand-daddy’s will, and I have every right to be here with my neighbour and friend, and not be ordered about by the likes of you, calling yourself a doctor and being in charge of treating people like this!”

“Then you’ll never see the benefits,” sighed Doctor Zenith, “and that is a crying shame! You’d like to be a fleeter, you really would: ice cream and jelly whenever you want them! But I’m afraid you’ve seen and heard too much. I blame that vicar, but the great Blondeau believes that moral guidance is essential, even for fleeters, so we have to put up with him and go to church on Sundays. I’m afraid I’m going to have to call the nurse to put you out of your misery.”

“Oh yeah?” jeered Paul, “you and whose army?”

And suddenly, rather than being the pliant Paul he had hitherto given the impression of being, he became a fat and vastly overweight pugilist. He launched his tonnage at the doctor, squashing him against a solid stone wall, using all of his weight. And as if it was made of a delicate puffy cloud the wall gave way and he and the doctor slowly slid into a vastly different place.

“No! Not in here! Please, not in here!” shrieked Zenith, “it’s the execution room!”

Before the wall reformed with Paul on one side and Davey still on the other, he could see exactly why it was called the execution room.

It was a small enough space, and there was a single platform on it, and the only object on that platform was a gibbet, with a rope noose hanging from it.

And rubbing his hands with glee was what could only be the executioner, hooded and grinning under that hood, and licking his lips when he spotted Paul.

© Peter Rogerson