SCENE 3. INT. WISTON’S BEDROOM
3AM. The witching hour. He’d heard that description of it once and always suspected that whenever he woke at that time it was no coincidence: it was at best a message, at worst the beginning of his own personal horror movie. This time that fear was compounded by his own memory of the previous evening. He’d killed someone. How he’d slept was a mystery, but now he was wide awake. He’d really killed someone. That was big, in the scheme of things.
The moral stuff hung there like a lead weight, but somehow that’d have to come later. There was more immediate panic: how long before this was traced back to him? The kid’s friends could recognise him, if they’d gone to the police. Would his DNA be on the body? Did anyone see him in the area? He quickly (and slightly reluctantly) deleted the run from his Strava app.
And then there was the knuckle-duster. Where had that even come from? Did this really happen?
If they found that though — the knuckle-duster — he’d be in trouble. It’d have blood on it, and of course it’d almost certainly have his DNA on it. Was it safe in that canal, under that bridge? The water had looked murky, but at other times when running nearby, Wiston was sure the canal ran clear. Would people see it, join the dots, and get the police to retrieve it? There was only one thing for it: he had to go and fetch it. He quickly got dressed, and headed out into the darkness.
He quickly reached the bridge in question, relieved not to have passed anyone en-route. He headed down onto the canal-path: also quiet. Perhaps he was far away enough from the scene-of-the-crime to have avoided any police presence? Perhaps they’d already left the area completely? Either way, he felt confident enough to do what needed to be done.
After one last look up and down the canal path, Wiston bent down and eased himself down into the water, surprised to find the depth was almost shoulder height. Deeper than it looked, and deeper than he had remembered from earlier. He waded towards the centre, where he suspected the weapon would have landed. It felt deeper still there, Wiston having to lift his chin to keep his mouth above water. At the midpoint he stopped, and tried to feel with his feet for anything on the canal-bed that might be the knuckle-duster, but he quickly realised it was a fruitless task. There was so much junk on the floor (those bloody teens!) that he’d never be able to sift through it with his feet. His position imperfect, there was only one thing for it: he’d have to dive down. He’d have more luck using his hands.
Even though it was Summer, and not outrageously cold, he braced himself before springing up and under the water: a needless flourish that suggested deep down Wiston looked up even to ducks.
As he up-ended himself, and kicked down, he couldn’t immediately feel the bottom of the canal as easily as he’d hoped. His buoyancy was pushing back against him perhaps? He kicked harder and with more purpose, arms outstretched, reaching for the bottom of the canal. He couldn’t feel it. It was odd. He resurfaced, upright, his toes resting comfortably on the canal-bed. He wished he’d brought goggles, or something. He took a moment, looking around the banks for any activity, or any witnesses. There was no-one. He composed himself, and dived back down.
Again, it was the same. As he turned upside down, it was like he was instantly disorientated. His eyes were closed, so as not to get some sort of terminal-canal-sickness absorbed through his corneas. He risked a squint, but could see nothing, the water was dark and murky. He kicked down harder, more, fighting whatever it was that was stopping him from the simple task of reaching the bottom. He kicked and kicked. Was he even heading downwards — had he been somehow rotated; was he just swimming downstream? It was getting silly: perhaps he was cursed to live with his crime, and to never find the knuckle-duster. Perhaps physics was in on it too! He carried on kicking hard, the exertion and panic leaving him almost out of breath, when suddenly he felt his buoyancy magnify, and his energy dessert him completely, and he was dragged upwards by the water back to the surface. Only it wasn’t the surface he’d just left.
SCENE 4. INT(?). WEIRD CAVERNOUS PLACE
Wiston blinked back into the world of the open-eyed, and as his sight recalibrated, it became clear he was somehow no longer in the canal, but in a cavern of some sort. A cave if you’d prefer.
The water he’d surfaced in appeared to be a small lake; dimly lit with a faint greenish glow. At the periphery of the darkness ahead of him, Wiston could make out an edge: a stone bank of sorts. He swam towards it, utterly confused, acting on instinct, almost against his own free will.
He climbed up onto this bank, and looked back at the lake behind him. It was 100% not the canal he’d just been in. This was somewhere completely different. How had this happened? Had he swum further than he thought, somehow entering an undiscovered cave system? Just as he was contemplating his next move, he heard a noise from behind him. He swung round away from the lake, facing the back wall of this vast dome-like-cave. It sounded like chirping, but not a pleasant, birdsong-like chirrup. It sounded a little like mocking laughter, or… admonishment? Squinting ahead, Wiston saw that in one of the curves along the back wall in front of him there looked to be a passage, and that’s where the noise was coming from. There was something deeply unpleasant about the sound, but Wiston knew he was never going to get out of the cavern by diving back into the darkness of the water, so he felt he had no other choice than to follow the noise, and to continue down the rabbit hole…
The passageway was short, and lead to another cavernous space. Ahead of him the cave seemed to bank upwards in roughly hewn platforms, boulders and steps.
Wiston approached the towering rock ahead of him cautiously, desperately trying to shake off the feeling that he wasn’t in this room alone. The squeaking noise was louder here, and as Wiston got closer to the rising shelves ahead of him, it suddenly became clear what the source of the racket was.
Up higher on these ledges there was a mass of…. creatures. Wiston had never seen their like before.
He slowly moved closer, strafing slightly towards the left-hand wall as he did so, trying to remain unseen and vaguely protected. He carefully edged up the left hand side of the rocks, trying to get in position to better observe these… things.
Once he’d ascended to a small flat ledge slightly above the creatures, he edged to the edge to peer down at them — to figure out what the hell this was.
These… animals — if you could call them that — they were small, rubbery type things, about the size of a cat, but with a dark-black, almost-shiny “skin” covering their bulbous body. They looked to have the texture of a killer whale, or of a gimp suit, but slightly more… viscous? Like a pallid sweat, or some amphibious gunk. These guys were definitely grotesque, I’ll tell you that for free.
Along their underside, they had tiny little hands and feet like things that barely extended beyond their body, like casters dripping off the bottom of a sofa. From these appendages sprung large, bulbous, webbed fingers; again rubbery in complexion. As ungainly and bloated as these creatures looked, they appeared strangely agile, scuttling around in a whirring blur of fingers and toes, chirping to themselves as they did so. Their movement was disconcerting, like a spider’s, but somehow even worse.
Wiston, a nature-lover as a child, suddenly resented God.
He peered closer into the darkness. The little freaks had baby-esque heads, all weighty and too big for their bodies. Their skulls were dome-like and smooth, covered in the same shiny-like black skin as their bodies. Their visage consisted of two cartoonish eyes, each an oval shock of eggy-white, punctuated with a bold full-stop of black in their centre, and a mouth…
If you had to pick, you’d actually say their main feature was in fact this mouth. And guess what? Yep — you got it: it was grotesque. These fuckers had a massive shock of red lips dominating their ‘face’, somehow more rubbery even than their skin. They looked like a caricature a mean-spirited Daily Mail cartoonist would etch of a reality star’s failed plastic surgery. Hate upon hate upon hate. The lips were strangely rounded at the corners, forming no natural blend to their face, like they’d been clumsily stuck onto a Mr. Potato Head. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m even doing these little bastards justice. They were offensively repulsive.
The final point. I promise this is the final one. But I know what your next question would be: do these little shits have fins of any kind? And yes. Yes they do.
On top of their weird, dead puppy bodies, sat a clumsy dorsal fin. Nothing noble and well-thought-out about it: not like a shark’s fin. It was more one of those flappy, trifle-esque ones; like your basic, bog-standard, cartoon fish. I’m getting angry just typing this. Horrible.
Anyway, what is Wiston thinking of all this? Let’s get back to that.
Wiston surveyed these little mutants with a mix of disgust and fear. He perched agog for a minute, torn between his instinct to turn back and run, and his curiosity to try to compute and amalgamate these beasts into his understanding. This had to be related to the murder right? He was in hell perhaps. Or maybe these little pig-rats were real here, on earth, and they’d… made him do it? Perhaps he was innocent! Perhaps nothing was real!
The more he watched the beasts, the more he actually sensed that they were not necessarily a dangerous force. Despite their ugliness, and the disconcerting way they scuttled about, he sensed they were generally a little weak, and unlikely to pose any physical threat to him. They also seemed utterly disinterested in his arrival.
He decided to proceed. He climbed round the rocky formations to get across and onto the same platform as these Beings, and when he reached it, he was relieved to find that the creatures didn’t register or acknowledge his presence. Were they friends? He ventured forward cautiously until he was amongst them. They remained focussed on their own little projects, scrabbling on the rocky floor, occasionally sucking on some invisible nutrient in the stone beneath them. Wiston continued, walking through them disdainfully. As his confidence grew he felt the vibe of being a hardened but disappointed detective strolling through the wreckage of his nemesis’ latest egregious crime scene.
As he strolled among them, he noticed that the platform they were on seemed to branch off further into the darkness, narrowing into a ridge-like pathway that snaked off round the back-right side on the broad rocky levels he was now half-way up. Ignoring the creatures, he decided once again to follow the path.
[I promise this little chapter is almost done].
As it snaked round, it was as though he was moving round to behind the structure he was on. He left the rubbery little chaps behind him as he followed the path (was he now reflecting on them as cute?), and saw a new vista down before him as he rounded the corner. Looking down, he saw another cavernous type space beneath him. Perhaps even vaster than the two chambers he’d previously been in, it was relatively featureless, apart from a small, raised, rectangular platform Wiston inferred was at the centre of the cave; albeit far enough away into the darkness that he couldn’t see much further beyond it to confirm that placement. The platform looked suspiciously uniform: perfectly rectangular and flat-surfaced.
Squinting, Wiston could see through the haze what looked like a small, circular ceramic structure that looked to be filled with a steaming, bright, luminous liquid. Wiston stepped further along the path, hoping this strange structure would shift into focus. Soon, his sightline became clearer, and the circle shifted more into focus. Was it..? It seemed like a jacuzzi. And there was something in it. Or someone.
Wiston instantly crouched down, and slowed as he edged to the lip of the ridge. He peered down at this strange anomaly, a chill suddenly snaking up through his spine. For all the surrealism of the past ten minutes, this was the first time he suddenly felt fear; like he was seeing something he shouldn’t. Like the horror of his experience wasn’t simply subjectively scarring, but something that would objectively stain his soul…
It was definitely a figure in the tub: a naked hunched body, facing away from Wiston. Pale-skinned, naked, covered in lumpy globules of some sort of lube (?), but still un-mistakingly human. Its ivory skin contrasted violently with the shock of black hair on its head. Before he could control himself, Wiston let out an involuntary shout.
He braced.
The figure turned slowly from whatever it was it was doing. Its face, wide-eyed, looked manic; its mouth covered in blood. Wiston, with a sudden sinking feeling, instantly recognised the face as familiar.
Osborne. It was Osborne.
George Osborne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in this little bath. It was definitely him. The Lord of Austerity. The Master of NeoNeoNeoLiberalism. And he’d spotted Wiston. Osborne’s yes bore into him as his thing lips contorted into a small smile. It was clear from the blood on his face that he’d been feasting on a carcass — a carcass of unknown origin to Wiston.
Just as Wiston was about to turn and run, Osborne’s mouth opened — pin-like fangs where his teeth should be — into a wide shriek. Wiston’s hearing spiked into overdrive at this ungodly sound, and collapsed into white noise; his very consciousness slipping from his mind. It was like his very Being tunnelled straight into the scream, sucked into the vortex of this abyss-like mouth, a dizzying surrender to the madness of the situation, of this place. The last thing Wiston saw being slipping into unconsciousness was Osbornes webbed hand… a bloodied knuckle duster wrapped around it. And then Nothing. A white dot on a black screen. Sleep.
SCENE… 5. INT. WISTON’S BEDROOM
Wiston woke relatively early the next morning, exhausted from the nightmarish visions of the previous night. He got himself ready in a bit of a daze, which was pretty typical actually, as he wasn’t really a morning person. Mornings were for losers: for people who weren’t terrified of the day ahead. Narcs. But yeah — if we’re looking at things dispassionately — he was probably a bit more dazed than usual. Put it this way, if he was in a relationship, and his girlfriend had asked him how he was, and he’d said “I’m fine. Just tired”, it’d probably have played on her mind all day. Perhaps he was annoyed she’d been out for drinks with Jake last night. Even though he knew nothing was happening with Jake. She was allowed friends wasn’t she? And yes. Of course Jake was fun, and if she was single, maybe something could happen. But she purposefully was shutting that idea out of her mind, BECAUSE of Wiston. And now here he was, saying things were fine, when really he was the one getting annoyed with her just for seeing him. Maybe she should do something with Jake. That’d show him. Just let it happen. Maybe that’d give him something to be OK about. How come she’s having to deny herself fun, and attraction, and chemistry, all for him — when he doesn’t respect her anyway, and she has to put up with all this “I’m fine” shit. Why the hell sh-
Wiston kept trying to put thoughts of the previous day out of his mind. Had it happened? Presumably not. Everything seemed too normal for him to be sitting on having committed a murder. But then there was the hazy memory of going to the canal, of trying to retrieve the “murder weapon”. And of… George Osborne. Was he even still a thing? It kind of feels an outdated reference point. That couldn’t have been real. I mean, it felt real, but here he was, in his bathroom, brushing his teeth, getting ready for work. You couldn’t have a hidden Osborne-Dungeon-Creature existing out there in the world, and just be doing your teeth.
As he left the flat, reaching for his work shoes, his hand brushed past his trainers. They felt damp.
Best not to think about it.
On the tube to work things still weren’t really quite right in the ol’ brain. His vision was glazed, his senses numbed, his brain empty of almost all thoughts. Perhaps he’d reached enlightenment. He stared into space, eventually focussing on the open Evening Standard of the commuter he was stood over. The headline was ‘Ancient Quran found may have been written while Muhammad still Alive’. WTF. So first thing’s first, Muhammad was definitely real? I mean, that’s a given in that sentence. Fucking hell. Why aren’t people talking about this? Well — I suppose they are. But is this common knowledge? Amongst his friends? And now this. There’s a Quran found from back then. That sounds like it must be significant, for it to be a story. Like the discovery is proving something. What does the Evening Standard want from us? Wiston felt like he’d spent his adult life defending Islam from racist bigots and/or atheist sceptics, but now he was finding that his defence wasn’t just patronising liberalism, but factually accurate. This was surely big news? He looked again. Page 14. Doesn’t feel like the biggest of deals. Jesus Christ. It’s one thing to spend the past ten years bombarded with scare stories about ISIS, and how scarily abhorrent their ideology and plans for global war were. It’s another to then have to defend these stories against racist bigots who want to use that hyperbole to start their own race war, and accelerate a weird new white supremacist fascism. And THEN you find out you’re wrong anyway, on both counts. Muhammed does exist, and the Quran probably does want to kill you, and ISIS probably do want a Holy War, and they’re going to kill you in it, and rather than them being misguided, it’s going to turn out they were actually right, and you’re going to wake up in Islamic Hell being tortured for all eternity, and you’ll be like “but I didn’t know”, and they’ll be like “we tried to tell you”, and you’ll be like did you, and it’s like yes we were pretty clear, we did 9/11, and then you’ll realise george bush was actually innocent in all this, and
Wiston looked a bit more, squinting at the headline. It shifted in and out of focus, the way a camera does on automatic mode when trying to get a grip of the world. As the piece drew back into focus, the headline cleared into reality: saying “London pollution tested at 500% ‘legally safe’ level”. Wiston breathed a sigh of relief. He’d mis-read it.
He arrived at the office on time.
