14. A Lost Monk

THROUGH THE GATES OF TIME Part 14

Magga ran to Uggah who was staring, possibly through unseeing eyes, at the entrance to Hellhole, and she flung her arms around him. Surprised, he took a step backwards before understanding wbo had suddenly appeared in his arms.

“Magga back,” she said in archaic grunts, “Magga got stuff to tell...”

And when he saw who it was who was hugging him, he hugged her back, overjoyed to be seeing her and never wanting to let her go.

“Magga seen things,” she said, aware that he probably wouldn’t believe a word she said.

“Hellhole bad place,” he grunted, “keep well away always. Tell folks. Bad.”

“Very bad. Always keep away,” she promised him.

In the entrance to the dreaded cave Roger hissed at his family.

“Quickly,” he said, “go back before anyone else sneaks in with us.”

And he half-dragged May and with the children hand-in-hand with her, back into what Uggah and Magga called the Hellhole. They weren’t watching, so involved were they with each other, or they would have noticed how the twenty-first century family seemed to vanish the moment they were encircled by shadows.

“How do we find our way home, though?” asked May, “this has got to be the weirdest maze I’ve ever been lost in!”

“You’re right there,” he acknowledged, “a maze through time rather than a normal three-dimensional one! I only hope there aren’t too many ways out of here.”

“How on Earth has it happened?” asked May, aware that he wouldn’t know the answer but asking anyway.

“I’ve no idea,” was his logical response, “but come on. Don’t forget what day it as, and we’ve got Christmas dinner to cook and Frodo’s got a PlayStation to fire up.”

He led the way through the cave, and with he remembered what he had used to impress the Georgian middle-class bully, and took out his phone. It could do a lot of stuff, could that phone.

He switched on the torch app, and the cave was suddenly flooded with brilliant light.

It looked, at first glance, to be as dusty and ancient as they had expected, but not far in there was a rocky alcove, and with it a door, set into it, a door so uncharacteristic of the time they had just left, with Magga hugging Uggah, that it just had to be the way back to their own Christmas.

The last time they had ventured into the cave the only light that had guided them had been the small amount leaking in through the cave entrance and they hadn’t really been aware of seeing anything. Yet somehow they had found that door and barged into a Georgian living room and witnessed the attempted seduction of a simple parlour maid by the man of the house.

“I hope this is the right way,” grunted Roger, “I mean, how many gates of time can there be?”

He grasped hold of the door handle, and pushed. With a creak, the door opened and he looked through it.

He didn’t like the look of the ill-lit passage and the parade of monks chanting some kind of anthem in Latin, so he slammed the door shut before anyone had a chance to see him.

“Wrong stop,” he said.

“What was it, dad?” asked Apple, “was it a mammoth? We haven’t seen one of those yet!”

“Thank goodness no!” growled Roger, “but I don’t want to have my Christmas chanted away by a load of overfed monks!”

“What are we going to do?” asked May, despair in her voice. She envisaged being trapped in a lost time for the rest of her life.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again,” was his reply, Roger sounding a great deal more cofident than he felt. “Hold on to your horses, folks, let’s try again.”

For a second time he pushed the door open and this time a well-slippered foot slid into the gap before he could slam it shut again. Then the door was pulled from his grasp and an overweight individual dressed in the habit of a medieval monk, head shaved into a tonsure and smelling of stale perspiration, stood there, scowling at them.

His mouth moved as if he was speaking, in fact the anger in his eyes indicated that he might have been shouting, but the four still inside the cave were assaulted by silence.

“Can’t hear you, old son,” grunted Roger, reaching for the door handle.

But he was too late, and a second overweight individual reached past the first, and grabbed his arm in a vice-like grip.

“Stay back, love,” Roger hissed, and kicked out, catching the first monk on the shin with a blow that almost crippled his own slippered foot and must have hurt the growling fellow. And the yell the man produced was enough to prove that it had.

The second monk let him go as his agonised companion bent double in order to rub his leg, and swift as he could Roger dodged back, pulling the door shut as he did so.

But no quickly enough. A small fellow in a monk’s habit and with hair so thin that a tonsure was barely noticeable dodged in before the door closed.

“Oh no you don’t, fellow!” snapped Roger, gripping the other by one very bony shoulder, making his howl in pain, a howl that was not silent like the voices on the other side of the door had been when it was open.

“Who is it?” asked May.

“A very small monk,” replied Roger tensely

“That’s not a monkey, it’s a man,” put in Frodo, “in fact, it’s a little man.”

“I said monk, not monkey,” almost snapped Roger, “let’s get rid of him before he’s stuck with us.”

He pushed the door open for a third time, and started to propel the little man through the door so that he could rejoin his chanting comrades.

But his comrades, chanting or otherwise, weren’t there. Instead the little monk stumbled into the living room of Number 10 Portland Crescent and into a chair that was usually the favourite of Roger Drinkworth when he was reading his Kindle during moments of solitary peace at the end of the day and there was bnothing on the television.

And to prove it was his chair the television set was facing it, waiting to be switched on.

They were home. But they’d brought an elderly and rather fragile looking monk with them.

© Peter Rogerson, 04.12.20