4. The Naked Visitors

THROUGH THE GATES OF TIME Part 4

“Bloody Hell! It’s a bloke, and he’s not got a stitch on!” exclaimed Roger Drinkworth as Uggah staggered almost drunkenly through a door that had always been locked into the lounge where he and May were sitting.

“Roger? Is this your idea of a Christmas treat?” demanded May, “I knew you had something up your sleeve, but this! It’s horrible!”

“Me?” gasped Roger, “I wouldn’t… it’s no joke … where in the name of goodness has he come from, and how did he get in that closet? We haven’t got a key, for goodness’ sake, and so I’ve never seen what’s in it, and we’ve been living here ten years.”

“Of course. There wasn’t a key,” breathed May.

Meanwhile Uggah was looking around him in total confusion.

Nothing was familiar, not even the two figures relaxing in their chairs before sitting bolt upright to stare at him as if they’d seen a ghost, and he knew he wasn’t one of those. There were plenty of spooky tales of weird figures floating through cave walls back in the valley, but they were all tales told to scare children and had no foot in reality. And there was light everywhere, so much light he thought his eyes might explode.

With a tremendous effort he tore his eyes away from the two figures staring with goggle eyes at him. Where had they come from? He’d not taken above half a dozen steps into Hellhole, and suddenly he was confronted by what? Two spirits from a nether-region that he might have heard mentioned when he had been small enough to believe in such places. And all the light? And the sounds? There was a rectangle, he didn’t know the word rectangle or any grunted equivalent, but he saw what one was at the far end of the space he was in, and it was glimmering, patterns were moving in light on it, and flashes and stuff, and sounds, thumping beats the sort he made sometimes at an autumn fire when someone had to drive evil spirits away and it was his turn. But the lights flashing? The rest of the sounds, melodic, insistent, hellish? What were they and, more importantly, what did they mean?

He felt the total of sensory input overwhelming him, the sounds, the lights, the flashing, the scent of good meat roasting over an open fire when there was no open fire, the eyes of strangers, but what were the strangers? Staring at him, open mouthed, then looking at each other… were they human, like him? They didn’t look like antelope of deer or even giant rabbits? What were they, and why were they so colourful? With skins not dark like a person’s skin, like his?

“Who are you?” asked one of them in a voice deep like his own, but the sounds weren’t words he could be expected to understand, they were musical, had a cadence to them that was almost beautiful, not that his head had any idea of concepts such as cadence… it was just a flash of thought, a hint of concepts yet to be understood.

“And why aren’t you wearing any clothes?” asked the other in a voice that was so musical it reminded him straight away of Magga. Her words, or grunts more like, had about them a memory of this creature talking to him now, but this one was infinitely more musical, was beautiful, was more like a skylark singing when Magga was a rook…

One of the figures stood up and, yes, he looked as is he might be a man, but he was covered in shimmering stuff that gave his body an unnatural colour, or maybe not so unnatural when you remembered the peacock or the kingfisher displaying their own beauty and finery in feathers.

“You need to cover that wedding tackle of yours before May sees it and wants it,” said the man, a long sentence without a sound in it that contained any meaning to Uggah.

“I’ve seen it already,” smirked the other, and she laughed, “don’t worry, Roger, I won’t stare!”

That laugh… that tinkling happy sound filled with amusement and joy and all sorts of things like that… Magga did it quite often… when one of the children did something odd or when the woman in the cave across the river on the other side of the valley slipped over and fell head-first into the raging waters that were still cold from when they were ice on the mountains. Funny things, amusing things, sometimes unkind things.

And that rectangle of light and sound suddenly changed and, no, it wasn’t possible, he must be alive in one of those dreams that twist reality until it’s something very unreal, but there was a man, one like the male in the chair, looking straight out at them.

“It’s starting,” said May, “tell our new friend to sit down and we’ll discuss what he’s here for after Pointless.”

“I don’t think he’s up to understanding me,” confessed Roger, “I haven’t a clue where he came from, but wasn’t there something like this in Dr Who recently? Or maybe not so recently? A man appearing from another dimension?”

“But he’s here and looks solid enough!” protested May, and she stood up.

She had the most beautiful legs Uggah had even seen, not at all hairy and smooth and pale, not like Magga’s, which looked more like the bark on the old tree behind their home... and it was quite a rough old tree, too.

But she didn’t only stand up, she walked towards him. Yes! She took the three or four steps towards him until she was close enough to touch him, and she touched him.

“Yes, he’s solid enough,” she said.

But he didn’t, couldn't understand. What did the sounds mean? It was clear that they meant something, because the man was nodding at her when she spoke, in a way that suggested he knew what she meant when she sang her musical sounds.

“You ought to get dressed,” she said to him.

But that meant nothing to him. The sounds from the colourful noisy rectangle that sounded as if a thousand people had suddenly decided to clap their hands, the sweet look on the strange woman’s face, and he could tell that she was a woman even though her chest was covered by something pretty, and he couldn’t help it. He sunk to his knees, totally and utterly out of control of everything and, worse still, not understanding what he couldn’t control.

And there was an additional nightmare.

A sweetly urgent sound came from another room, some sort of alarm maybe, or a warning, demanding, insistent.

“The doorbell. I’ll go,” said the woman, “you watch our friend here!”

“OK,” Roger replied, “and I’ve a strange feeling you might be in for another shock. But go and see. I can’t be sure.”

May frowned for a moment at him, then smiled. “You are a man of mystery, Roger,” she said, and she left the space they were in.

He heard sounds of voices and other sounds he wouldn’t hope to recognise, a door opening.

“Mrs Drinkworth?” asked the voice, another musical set of syllables, but different from the man’s. A higher pitch? Yes, that was it. Still male, but different.

“Looks like this might be a party, don’t you know?” it said, “here I was, about to ring your bell when this sweetie popped into my arms out of nowhere, and the dear little lass is starkers! Is Mr Drinkworth in? He booked me for an hour, so I’m here with my caveman togs and all...”

© Peter Rogerson, 23.11.20