209: Jimmying

At the top of the story, rain is falling onto the open skylight, small streams gathering at the edges of the glass, welling up at the bottom and dripping into the attic room, where it collects in small pools on the bare, untreated floorboards, eventually trickling towards the misplaced hatch.

At the front door a group of six stands in motionless hesitancy. They’re here for the last of the un-redirected mail but have noticed one of the living-room windows is open ajar and is rocking gently on its creaking hinges, as if the big empty building were breathing its last. Weird. Possibly, they’d been a bit lax about security since the house had been completely emptied. Without reaching consensus as to whether it was opened by the wind, an animal, or something with a bit more agency, they unlock the door and cautiously tiptoe into the hallway. At the top of the stairs they see a sliver of light coming from the far end of the landing. Strange. This couldn’t be electric light, as the electricity had gone months ago. Perhaps it was the evening sunlight reflected from one of the opposing buildings back into the house, which was not unusual at this hour, but had never been observed to escape this far from the study. They proceed cagily up the stairs. In situations like this across swathes of dramatised history and cliched literature, it is the patriarch who breaks the silence and activates the heroism the story requires, and in this case it is no different. Hello? The gruff word floats clumsily in the air. Like a birthday balloon long after the party. Is anybody there? Following these unmet words, they edge their way down the dusty landing towards the doorway and its crack of light, which flickers as they approach and is swallowed suddenly into the room’s secrecy as a gust of wind slams the door shut, plunging them into darkness.

The sound momentarily pricks the ears of the black cats on the scaffold boards outside, who pay it a disinterested pause, before settling their attention back on the crows gamboling obliviously in the dirt below.

But spare a thought now for those now stuck at the top of the Big Drop, that hexagonal ring of seated thrill seekers that would in less exceptional times be cranked up to the top of its shaft and then plunged back down at break neck speeds, but, times being what they are, has now stopped dead, the riders strapped into their seats on that lofty platform at the top of that ricketty old tower packed together shivering and afraid in those icy starless heights, whipped by the winds and lashed by the rains of the cruel night’s passing, unable to communicate with anyone at ground level, their fevered shrieks and wails notwithstanding – the omission of any kind of radio link with the control booth an oversight in the engineering – and the thrillseekers’ phones shut away in the small lockers at the base, the hunks of padded steel harnesses clamped firm and steadfast over their shoulders and chests, the latches at the hip, operable by some special key, unable to be jimmied or forced open despite the best and frantic efforts of the bloodied & blistered fingers seeking out a weakness in the mechanism, and then there were the hours when various attempts to activate some kind of override – through the hurling of shoes, wristwatches, spectacles, lanyards, hearing-aids – basically anything that had escaped the loose items locker – a futile attempt to engage some kind of switch or get someone’s attention that might have somehow survived down there, though of course it didn’t look good, the last twitchings of the scattered bodies had been several hours, even days, back, the more resilient ones managing to crawl to the base of some structure or other and pull themselves a rung or two up a maintanence ladder or support girder, only to drop back a minute or two later ino the shallows of that grey-green swamp that had apparently flash flooded the low-lying plains upon which the Magrigalls had built the Magrigalls’ Infamous Turbomechanical Thrill-Yard this year – last year’s site having been buried under three feet of volcanic ash carried across from the neighbouring island on unexpectedly strong winds after the eruption of Old Claggy on that otherwise nameless waste of rock, all this happening just weeks before the planned build, meaning the alternative site was rushed through the planning committee with all the haste of a desperate shoplifter, without even the most cursory checks regarding its elevation, its proximity to local hazardous bio-chemical storage facilities, nor the ability of the structures of the latter to withstand three days of subsonics from the steady 4/4 of a eurohouse kick drum.

Nor what would happen when all this stops.

Months before the blackout, during our move, I was tasked with putting the loft’s access flap back in place. I could not get it to fit, it kept falling back through the hatch. The step ladder, being too short to allow me a good reach of the aperture, meant I had to fling the hatch plank up into the hole obliquely, hoping it would hold. Which it did not. Eventually, in frustration, I violently launched it with all my might through the hole, where it disappeared into the loft’s darkness without any conclusive sound of arrival. This irked my cohabitants, as now the precious heat in the house was sure to be lost through the hatch, and as this would surely come out of our deposit, I was goaded on to go up there and find it. So I violently launched myself up through the hole too. Didn't quite know I had the strength, but I hopped to the top of the stepladder, grabbed the edges of the hatch and hurled myself through it. I twisted and spun into the darkness, immediately shrieking to ward off any ghosts that might be up there. But, not only was It not creepy and haunted (or not on first appearance anyway) but it was actually modestly furnished. An early millennial iMac was set up at a desk in a far corner, the white screen flashing with some kind of symbol. And after I peeling myself away from the loft insulation, I walked over to the desk to examine the screen.

A simple graphic of an egg. A crack creeping down it from top to bottom in three frames before looping. I wiggle the mouse and a scene flickers into view.

A woman pulls herself, rung by rung, up a ladder on the side of a crane, with the strength of her arms only, legs apparently out of action. With her bowie knife clutched between her teeth, she’s already scaled 200 feet. Rain lashes down, clouding her vision, the wind doing its best to unsettle her course. She does not once look back over her shoulder at her boyfriend in pursuit, who is Spider Man. Not even when he slips and falls pathetically, bouncing and spinning a few times against the edge of the crane before finally crunching down into the thin layer of snow below. As a sweeping courtesy, the camera follows him down shortly afterwards, settling on the back of his head. We hear a final strained whimper emitting from his gurgling mouth and the camera pans to a single red rose still clutched in his right hand, the arm of which is now bent impossibly back and pointing the rose head in a spasming gesture towards Spider Man's anus, which emits a deafening rasp in the last death throes of gasses eager to escape the dying body before the credits roll.

While striking the set, the crew discovered the egg. It’d been buried under the ground, seemingly for several decades in the frozen soils and now it was finally dug up and cleaned off. It had been wrapped very tightly in thick polyethylene. On the surface of the shell, inky blotches of bluish black resembling bruises were observed under the plastic. As if by exposure to the dim morning light, these patches grew and shifted across the surface of the egg. After a while, small pulsations were detected on the surface of the shell, as if something were writhing inside. Looks like it’s going to hatch. Just as the word ‘hatch’ was reported, its final consonants were doubled by the cracking sound, slightly muted by the plastic but still brittle enough to drown out the diphthong. What emerged was something like a palm size pterodactyl that stumbled about pecking at the wings wrapped around its body, before these unravelled and flapped awkwardly, the creature seeming to double in size, before taking a few jittery steps and launching into the air. It flew a few laps around the leisure pond before making its hungry way to the Big Drop tower.

He emerges from the haunted house and opens the loose items locker. The severed heads are still screaming inside. He waits for their last gurgling croaks to settle and then he yanks them all out by the hair, except for the bold one, which he stuffs his fingers into the nostrils and holds aloft like a bowling ball. Then he flings all six into the leisure pond, where they sink to join the remains of the others at the bottom, criss-crossed by majestically sweeping carp gliding under the surface as they sink. He walks back to the Haunted House.

The water from the top has been flowing down its three levels this whole time and has now almost completely filled the basement at the bottom of the story.