7. Fear from a Faucet

THROUGH THE GATES OF TIME, Part 7

“Mum!” came Apple’s voice down the stairs from her room near the bathroom, “what’s all that noise! You’ll wake Fro, and you know how excited he’s got about Santa!”

Uggah started shaking again when he heard the girl’s voice. Being half-pushed and half-dragged up something as alien as a staircase was one thing, but the sound of what must be children’s voices was another. And not just a child’s voice, but a harmonious version of one of the children’s voices he’d left on the Plain of the Dead earlier that day. The sweet little beauty with her black ringlets and sparkling eyes that had been taken from him by the great sickness that had stolen the lives of so many people, old and young alike, in the valley.

He felt Magga’s fingers digging into him. She had heard it too, and half-recognised the sound.

“Go back to bed, sweetheart,” called May, “it’s just a couple of friends who need a shower. There’s nothing to worry about.”

But Apple appeared in her doorway and her eyes opened wide when she took in the two strangers from another time.

“Who..?” she asked, “we don’t know them...”

“Uggah,” grated Uggah, introducing himself with sounds that meant nothing to the girl at the top of the stairs. But now that he saw her he could tell that the voice had provided him with one image and the reality with another. His daughter back home had been a beautiful autumn brown with eyes black as ripe cherries, but this girl had a face white as summer clouds and eyes blue as a summer sky.

But his black-eyed daughter was sleeping on the Plain of the dead and no light would ever shine from her eyes, be they black or blue, and a tear or something like one caught in his throat.

“Are you a caveman dressed in daddy’s pants?” asked Apple.

“Why do you say caveman?” asked Roger, knowing the other man wouldn’t understand the question.

“Well, he looks like one and when he talks he sounds like one,” replied Apple, “I like cavemen. We’ve done them at school and they’re all nice people who haven’t learned very much, like a caveman wouldn’t know his two times table!”

“Uggah,” contributed Uggah.

“What’s going on?” came Frodo’s voice, and Magga’s heart almost stilled at the sound of it. Back home and in the care of the folks next door was the rest of her family, and the boy Sidda was one of them. Sidda the mischievous, Sidda who always had a light in his eyes, Sidda who had escaped the big death that had taken two of her pretty girls. She tensed, and Uggah sensed it.

“Sidda?” he breathed, but she shook her head and indicated the very different child who’s head had appeared in another doorway. Uggah lost his footing on the stairs and discovered what the banister rail was for by grabbing on, so with a strange desperation he snatched at it and pulled himself up. Frodo might have sounded like Sidda, but he was pale like the girl child, with tousled blond hair the like of which neither Uggah nor Magga had seen before.

Magga caught her breath and sighed. When she had heard Frodo for a split second she thought he was her boy, but he wasn’t.

“We need home,” she grunted at Uggah.

“Yes, home: but how?” was his crude reply.

And she could find no answer to that. She looked at him, eyes open, despair on every soiled line on her face.

“Just you two get back into bed,” ordered May, to her two children, “and get to sleep or miss out on Christmas presents!”

“It’s two cavemen,” hissed Apple to Frodo.

“One’s a cave woman ‘cause she’s got bumps on her chest,” replied her brother, proud of his ability to define gender with so little information.

“A cave woman, then,” agreed Apple, and then: “how did you get them, mum?” she asked, “where did they come from? Are they for Christmas? There weren’t any dinosaurs in cavemen days, we know that, we were told at school, but there might have been giant elephants called Mammoths. Do you think they know anything about mammoths? Can I ask them tomorrow?”

May shook her head. “We haven’t said they’re staying the night,” she said, “now you two go back to bed or you’ll not get any presents from Santa!”

“Okay,” muttered Apple, and “See you!” grinned Frodo, and the two children made their way into their own bedrooms.

The interruption had lasted for very little time, but it had made Uggah remember his home and his responsibility. He was the man, the protector of a family, and not only had he taken two of his little darlings to lie for an everlasting sleep on the Plain of the Dead, he had left the other two back home and he wasn’t there to care for them when that is what he should be doing.

“Uggah go!” he snapped in the strange guttural language that was all he knew, “Uggah save little ones!”, and he tried to pull away and return down the stairs.

But Magga saw more sense than her man did, and she tugged him back.

“Not know,” was all she managed to say.

“Locked,” Uggah told her, “Locked.”

She recognised the sound as being what the man had said earlier, but she had no more understanding of its meaning than did Uggah. “Leave,” she grunted at him, “later”, she added.

And the moment had passed so far as Uggah was concerned because Roger was helping him up the stairs, and although he was certainly the stronger of the two living a rough and precarious life in his valley back home as he did, being on stairs, for him, was a precarious thing and he was suddenly afraid of falling. He would be of no use to Magga or his family if they had to drag his lifeless body to the Plain of the Dead.

So a sort of common sense took over and he completed the climb to the top of the stairs and he stumbled, with Magga, into the bathroom.

This small room was a revelation, and the two of them blinked. What nightmare was this, with its shiny white walls and gleaming things? What horrors might await them here? And why had they been brought to such a place?

“We have some nit shampoo that we use for the kids when they catch them at school,” said May, smiling at Magga, aware that although the other woman couldn’t understand her words she might possibly gain a kind of understanding from the tone of her voice.

Uggah looked around him at the white room with its polished silver pipes and taps, and once again a feeling of being out of the world swept over him. He was totally lost, and his mind whirred as he tried to come to terms with the impossible.

“Look,” invited May, and she turned to the sink, “we’ll wash those nasty nits out of your hair,” she said, and turned on the tap on, adjusting it to a comfortable warm temperature.

But she didn’t expect the reaction she got. As soon as she saw steam coming with the water and noticed the way May tested the temperature of the water with her hand, she screamed as though all the devils in Hell were coming out of the tap with it.

This was one impossibility too many.

© Peter Rogerson, 26.11.20