Bukkakeworld Page 11

  “So, how do I know Jeff Pepper? Wait a minute, he’s that guy on TV. Of course, Jeff Pepper. He’s the guy who runs the PRODIGY show. I’ve only seen it once or twice, in my teens,” you tell Marianne, like just about every living soul in Bukkakeworld doesn’t know about the PRODIGY show already, you jerk.

  Jeff Pepper was the planet’s most successful businessman. His well-marketed rags-to-riches success story was based on several original patent technologies that were credited to him or his companies or their subsidiaries. That and his ruthless boardroom manner. Maybe Marianne was one of his PRODIGIES, one of those hapless children he’d taken under his corporate wing.

  He’d gather his children about him from all the slums of the world, for in those slums the scumbags and rejects and social derelicts bore the most naturally lethal combination of hunger and need.

  You want a decent army—starve them and tell them the enemy is the one who stole all their food. All too soon, you have an army fit to kill the world. Or rather that’s what Jeff Pepper got. An army of young entrepreneurs who were brain-washed by his promises of corporate wealth.

  His show, the Jeff Pepper’s PRODIGY Show, ran night after night for nearly ten years. Jeff’d set the young corporate wannabes these salesman/marketing tasks, you know, organise a celebrity dinner do at Harrods, put together a charity exhibition of sports stars’ underwear, make and sell your own nuclear arms to needy foreign terrorist agencies, that sorta shit. It was a very popular show that pandered to the common denominator.

  If only the networks knew what a total sleep-eating child-fucker he was, they’d have never let him get as popular as he did. That dream-stealing fuck and his Glimpser gang.

  “Not a cloud in sight,” sighs Marianne, her voice full of glee. She pops you down in the dewy grass at the side of the road and eventually hails a passing TaxiKrab, all the WalKars having fled in the great cum-quake-tsunami that... hey, hey, hey.

  You see now, wasn’t it always so clear to everyone but you, what Marianne’s connection is to this whole world.

  “You’re a Glimpser just like them,” you say to her from your lowly pitch.

  “Man, tell it to someone who fucking cares.” She glimpses over her shoulder at you.

  The TaxiKrab pulls over to your side of the road. It does that sideways parking thing that always makes the hairs on the back of your neck jump to attention.

  “You weren’t sent to save the five parts of your shadow. That was a cum bucket of fool’s gold. You were sent to bring together the only five Glimpsers on this planet who’d sworn an oath never to reveal Jeff Pepper’s deepest, darkest secret. That he’d not only carved himself some Memory Meat (You) but he’d secreted it somewhere in the corporate sector, unable ever to find it, like it was cloaked from him, or some trick of the mind prevented him from finding himself, or whatever he was that he’d locked away in you, as I did with Kitten.

  “You liked my Kitten, didn’t you? It worked a charm. I chose well.” Marianne’s smile is warmth this time, unburdened by studied ruthlessness, just a lovely glowing warmth.

  “That’s exactly what’ll happen to you when Jeff Pepper dies, if some clever halfwit like you can be conned into bringing together the only five people you’ve been coded with. Because they’re all a big bag of corporate fucks, there’s every chance that they’ll actually end up at some convention on coffee grounds or pork bellies at some point, but there’s no telling whether they could work it out among themselves that they, and only they, had the power to resurrect the Corporate Frankenstein’s Monster (You, again). While Jeff Pepper could simply be rotting in some Glimpser graveyard on this planet or some other, what better idea than to have you find a way to break his code.

  “Hell, that would be the media story of THE DECADE. Jeff Pepper back from the dead. No-one would expect that sorta shit...” Marianne helps you into the TaxiKrab while the vaguely Korean looking driver gives you daggers and tries to look pressed for time.

  “Stupid, cute little Kitten found a way to bring Mommy back to life, now didn’t it?” Marianne hands the TaxiKrab driver a meishi card that seems to be cut from a slab of marble and he shuts the fuck up real fast and accelerates away.

  “I’m sure a clever memory like you can find a way to regurgitate the old man, lick some source of Glimpser reality and BOOM, here’s Johnny.”

  “You say the old man...” You’re slowly working through it.

  “Well, he’s my old man, you dumb-ass, my dad. What, you were thinking I was one of his kids, one of his business PRODIGIES?” She laughs now and the driver tries not to watch what’s going on in his rear view mirror. Rarely does he get to carry fares like these. He’s nearly wetting himself with curiosity.

  “Jeff Pepper is your real dad?”

  “Why not?” Marianne asks. “Oh, is it my surname that fooled you? Well, I chose that. It’s my killing name. My assassin name. Marianne Buckman. Cute, huh?”

  A flash of horror from the TaxiKrab driver’s eyes.

  “And you’re trying to kill your dad because…?” It’s an obvious question that needs asking at this point.

  “Shhh... we’re nearly there.” Marianne leans forward and whispers some code to the driver, who pulls up at the side of some non-descript industrial unit seemingly made entirely of grey corrugated metal. A burnished finish. No company logo. A single door on this side of the building. Security panel beside the door.

  Marianne helps you down from the TaxiKrab and pushes your face up against the security panel. There’s a blue-flash of light and a sound like a crushed mouse. Suddenly, the single door unlocks and swings open a crack. Marianne nods at you. She enters the building, leaving you stood there, outside, watching the TaxiKrab scuttle away.

  Curiosity killed the cat. That’s the only thing you tell yourself as you look around, licking at your dry lips, and enter the building.

  It’s a Glimpser building. Remember that, a building conceived of, financed and constructed from the stolen dreams of boys and girls. It’s very important that you remember that fact when considering that it’s also bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside.

  In fact, the inside of this small grey industrial unit is so much bigger, it’s like you’ve walked onto another planet.

  It’s the view from the top of a glacial hillside, overlooking a small northern town—it’s not much of a town, the rows of flat buildings look far too regulated. Not regular like terraced houses, but regulated, in rows, blocks. Snow has fallen in the night and there’s still a chill in the air. The sky is totally cloud free. The sun burns low in the east. A small herd of strange beasts, deer with humanlike faces, gallops away in the mid-distance, heading for the shelter of a nearby copse. Birds scatter. One day they’ll rule this planet.

  You look back over your shoulder and see the door you just came through, the door that leads back to Bukkakeworld, slowly closing. Clunk, the door goes. An outline where the door used to be seals in like neon lighting then vanishes. You’ve never felt so alone in your life.

  Stood beside you on the hill in the cooling breeze are Marianne Buckman and the small group of friends who greeted her at the old white house, home of her father, Jeff Pepper. Everybody’s congratulating themselves and looking generally smug and self-important.

  “That’s never happened before,” Marianne says. “We got access to this dusty place a few months back. Nothing ever happened. Nothing to see, just the inside of a disused industrial unit in a derelict part of town. What a genius Dad was?” A question?

  She’s already referring to her dad in the past tense. An ominous sign that this little corporate terrorist aims to carry out her usurping of the Glimpser universe. Claim all the brain-damaged terror of tortured children for her own despotic usage.

  Even before you descend to the town below, you and Marianne and her three friends, you know that this is the place where Jeff Pepper’s astronomic career began. As you descend you wonder if one of your party has noted the location of the door that brought you
all here. You look back and see footsteps leading to nowhere. Suddenly, you realise that this might be a suicide mission you’re not expected to return from.

  This is all

  too familiar.

  * * *

  The most shocking aspect of this nameless northern town in the middle of nowhere is the barbed wire fencing all round it, like those old walled towns of yesteryear, but it’s like something is being kept in. You hear the dogs barking. Nothing wrong with that. All towns have dogs that bark, right?

  Throughout the duration of your thigh-punishing descent, you’re not sure you believe it, until, three hours later, you exit a clearing in the woods that populate the lower half of the slope, and there is the wooden gate.

  The leather-clad Authorities up in the wooden watch towers shine floodlights down on you, even in the middle of the day. Scan your hastily forged papers. Gruffly let you pass through the gates. As you enter, you see a second row of electrified fencing. Here and there a charred bird hangs in perpetual mid-flight. You hear muffled sniggers from high in the watch towers.

  It takes a while to get to the town proper, wandering down country lanes that allow only one car at a time. You don’t see any cars. There are still no cars when you finally make it to the town centre. There’s no town square, no communal centre, just street after street of these what can only be described as communal living blocks.

  But the place is full of people who are a bland and grey colour. Their skin hangs off them and they’re none of them all that fat. You could call it a town of supermodels if you like. But you’d be wrong—there’s no fashion industry here. The garments look like they’re from another era, made of animal fibres that have long since fallen out of fashion or been duplicated in a lab somewhere on the coast.

  The people are lovely, though, right friendly in a way proper northerners are renowned for. It’s like when the Allies liberated Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald or Auschwitz. Happy smiling faces. Cloth caps doffed. ‘Ey-up?’s and ‘How-do?’s liberally proffered. One little boy adopts your group and starts to tell you all about his cloistered little life. He goes on about the hard labour and the lack of sanitation and the smell from the bakers’ ovens and the food being saltier and saltier every year and you wonder why these people don’t see it. Nobody, to a man, woman or child, nobody mentions the barbed wire fence or the guards.

  All the time, Marianne and her trio of assassins have on their thousand-yard stare, ready at all times to take down the enemy, annihilate Jeff Pepper.

  The little boy tells you about the mound of bodies he and his friends play on. He’s ever so happy to tell you how he feels like he can swim through these suppurating hills of human decay like a dolphin. He does the action, thrusting his hips back and forth like a dolphin in water might, and his friends giggle. He holds up a crumbling photograph of one of the body mounds he’s taken with his dad’s Polaroid camera—you struggle not to puke but continue on into the town, past row after row of swollen barracks.

  Is this a reassignment station then, a concentration camp, a Nazi death camp?

  Your little adoptee calls his gaggle of skinny friends over to regale you with other stories that you would consider, in your blinkered Bukkakeworld viewpoint, human atrocities. All the kids show the needle marks where poisons and other test chemicals have been poured into them by the Authorities. One of the runts shows you where his fist rotted and ate its way up his forearm, leaving only a purple-ended stump. Another shows you the six surgery scars across his swollen belly, and you wonder what’s inside. Another has no thumbs, no teeth and no eyes, but friends help him find his way.

  So, where’s the war of which these cheery helpful folk are prisoners?

  Marianne tells the kids they’re looking for the house of Mr Jeff Pepper. And one of the kids tells you you’ll want the big white house at the far end of town near the big road. They can take you there if you want. A sudden smell wafts through the entire town, like chicken cooking, sprouts and potatoes. Your mouth waters involuntarily.

  Mothers appear and one by one your child group diminishes. You don’t even keep count until only you and Marianne are left behind. The three friends she brought with her are nowhere to be seen. You don’t even remember what they looked like.

  Worse still, think of Hansel and Gretel. Yes, you’re both children, too. You didn’t even feel your testicles suck back into your scrotal cavity. Marianne didn’t even feel her breasts consume their own mammary fat. Your wind-blown faces are freckled and your hair tousled, unkempt even. You hear children’s laughter from inside these dank wooden barracks as family games are played, bedtime stories told.

  You find the big white house near the big wide road—you wonder where that big wide road leads to. You push Marianne and run off towards the big white house, giggling and shrieking with joy. Everyone is having a fine time here.

  A knock on the door and a nervous wait, in which you and Marianne goof around like the kids you’ve become, like brother and sister.

  A sound of footsteps on a wooden floor, old slow footsteps. You hear a large iron key rattle inside a rusty lock and an iron hinge that creaks as the thin white door opens ever so slowly. A sudden flash frame of a face pressed hard against the wood on the other side, a Glimpser face. Marianne shrieks—she’s seen it too. And that scares you so much, you shriek too, you idiot. The door comes open.

  “Granny Pepper?” gasps Marianne—what’s her game? Granny Pepper, as she calls her, is a lovely looking lady, strong bones, firm muscles, fine high cheekbones and lovely full head of jet-black hair. In her left ear is a single gold ear ring in the shape of a scarab beetle. She’s not hunched over like you might imagine a witch to be. You’re not even sure she is a witch, but you never know.

  “Oh, joy of joys, we have visitors to share our Sunday lunch. We so rarely get visitors this early in the season.” She clasps her fingers together and chews her gums. You have no idea what she’s going on about—so early in what season? Somewhere off in the density of communal barracks an accordion and a violin accompany a female singing voice. Hands clap in rhythm. Cheers ring out.

  “Come in, come in,” she ushers you in, “and take off those oily coats and bloody boots. You’ve been diving in the body mounds again, haven’t you? Don’t deny it. Children, you can’t keep them clean for a minute.” She locks the door behind her, immediately.

  You both stand there in her chintz hallway, looking down at your oily boots. You both examine each other’s blood-stained coats.

  “Did you not hear me?” She opens a small door there, under the stairs. “Give me your coats and boots. Go on into the kitchen and wash for lunch. Your dad’s coming home any minute.”

  Granny Pepper takes your coats and boots and you both make your way into the kitchen, passing a doorway that gives a perfect view of a living room. The furniture is crumbling as you look at it. Time seems insanely over-clocked in that room, like no limit has been applied to the natural decaying process. You see woodworm scurrying through the wood of the wardrobe like ants through their nest. A fire burns in the hearth. You see a human hand.

  Granny Pepper enters the kitchen, where you and your sister Marianne are washing your hands with iron-coloured water that sputters out of a barking faucet. Granny Pepper goes over to the pantry door and takes out a label-stripped tin of meat. She opens the can using one those hand-cranked opening machines affixed to the bare brick wall someone has white washed. She peels back the can top and slices her old finger. Hissing, then sucking on the blood, she slops out the contents of the can onto a small saucer. Watching the pair of you like it was your fault she sliced her finger.

  “Jeffrey’ll be along in a wee while,” she explains. “We so rarely get visitors for Sunday lunch. He’ll love this. I’ll set another couple of places. Puss, puss, puss,” she calls a great overweight tortoise-shell cat to the small dining table, where she places the saucer of cat meat. The cat purrs sonorously as it gobbles up the cat meat. You’re thinking to yourself, is this Jeff
Pepper?

  Don’t be a total idiot—cats can’t create parallel worlds smeared in cum.

  None of this feels right, does it? It’s because there’s a powerful force at work in this place, this fenced-in town, this haunted white house. Yes, that’s it, the house is haunted. But haunted by what? You don’t even believe in ghosts. Ghosts are things to keep children in bed, under trembling covers. Ghosts are not real.

  You both do it. You both whip around and look at the pantry door. You both see it, don’t you fucking deny it. The face. Like a face drowning under an ice lake. A screaming silent face forever trapped on the wrong side of existence. You both see that face pressed hard against the other side of the pantry door.

  “Let him out!” Marianne suddenly screams. “Let him out, Granny Pepper!” Marianne shouts, her eyes like lanterns. She reaches for a knife and takes a defensive stance. Is she going to do it right here and now, as soon as he comes out, as she seems convinced he will? Is Marianne going to try to kill Jeff Pepper with a blunt mottled silver-plate knife in the kitchen, with the tortoise-shell cat and the granny watching helplessly?

  But nobody is in the pantry...

  It’s the

  après ski

  that’s important.

  * * *

  Granny Pepper comes up to Marianne and gives her a big old hug. Cat resumes eating. Even at the distance you are, you can smell a very strange scent coming off Granny Pepper. Whose granny is she? Marianne’s or Jeff’s? Both? Neither?

  Granny Pepper sets the table with professional aplomb. First she lays a red-n-white checker pattern plastic table cloth over then the cutlery then the plates then the salt, then the pepper. She remembers something and rushes off to find two more chairs for you and Marianne to use. That’s four chairs equally spaced around the small dining table and still only three ready to eat.