Oddjobs Page 31

  Richard looked at the pair of them and the bent stick in Ingrid’s hand and the enormous splatter of gore and crustacean armour that coated half the room.

  “Was there some sort of accident?”

  “We’re going upstairs,” said Ingrid.

  “Your aunt just cleaned this place,” said Richard.

  “Not important right now,” said Morag. “This woman is dangerous, Richard.”

  “Why is she holding a stick?”

  “It’s a wand.”

  “Okay,” said Richard.

  “Upstairs,” instructed Ingrid, “or the lumberjack gets it.”

  “Lumberjack?” said Richard.

  Morag took him by the arm and led him to the stairs.

  “You do know you’re covered in chocolate,” he said.

  “It’s been one of those days,” she told him. “Just keep your head down, do what she says and, if you hear screams, start running.”

  Ingrid grunted with effort and she hauled her injured frame up the stairs. The door to flat three was ever so slightly ajar. Lamplight shone through the gap.

  “You go in,” Ingrid told Morag. “Junior stays out here with me.”

  “Go in and what?” said Morag.

  “Wake it,” said Ingrid. “The Nadirian can be contained, commanded even, once it has eaten.”

  “I see,” said Morag. “It’s like that.” Richard looked at her blankly. “Run if you can,” she said.

  “No one’s running,” said Ingrid.

  “Hide,” said Morag.

  Richard nodded.

  Morag opened the flat door, stepped inside and then closed it behind her. A cat meowed in a dark corner. The thing in the armchair in front of her shifted and snorted.

  “I must have dozed off,” it said to itself.

  “Yo-Nadirian yos’kherrign bis-ghu!” shouted Ingrid from behind the door, urging the Nadirian to consume what was before it.

  Morag looked at the outline of the old woman in the chair and tried to force her mind to only think of it as an old woman. It was an old woman, not a creature from another space and time, not a thing of claws and tentacles, of wound-like orifices and misshapen limbs…

  “No,” she said and screwed her eyes shut.

  “Yo-Nadirian, treghhu shan-shan prui!” Ingrid shouted. It was the linguistic equivalent of prodding a wasps’ nest, needling a response from the Venislarn.

  Morag felt a subtle but definite change in the atmosphere, a prickling of her skin, an electric tang in the air.

  “What is that noise?” said the old woman-shaped thing.

  “Got an image in your mind, Morag?” called Ingrid. “What’s the most horrific thing you’ve seen? What monsters can you dredge up from your subconscious?”

  “Shut up, Ingrid,” said Morag.

  The figure in the chair pushed itself forward, leaning heavily on the wooden walking stick. “Who are you?” she said. “Who let you in?”

  Her accent was heavy or maybe her speech had become lazy with age. She wobbled forward in clumping orthopaedic shoes.

  “Yo-Nadirian, yos’kherrign zhul prui!”

  The static charge in the air rose exponentially. The air fairly buzzed with Venislarn magic.

  The woman cocked her round head. Her unrealistic mound of grey hair quivered.

  “Who is that?” she said.

  “Mrs Atraxas, there’s no call to be alarmed…” said Morag and then stopped herself.

  There could be no reasoning with the Nadirian. This old woman wasn’t the Nadirian. It was the shell it wore, its projected form into this world. If she pictured it with a handmaiden’s claws or samakha gills, Croyi-Takk wings or a presz’ling anus-mouth then that would be the form of the Nadirian projection. But it would still just be the cloak the Nadirian wore.

  An ornithologist using a bird-shaped glove as a parent proxy to rear orphan chicks had no idea what it was like to be that bird they imitated. The glove might emulate genuine animal communication but there was no actual communication. There was no comprehension, no more than an owl butterfly, mimicking an owl, knew what it was like to be an owl…

  “Oh, hell,” she said in sudden understanding. She tried to open the flat door but something held it firmly shut on the other side. Morag hammered.

  “Open the door!”

  “It’ll be over soon,” said Ingrid.

  Morag slammed her fists on the door.

  “Yes, but you’re on the wrong side of the door!”

  “What?”

  Morag laid her head against the door. She wasn’t sure how she could feel sorry for the woman who had wanted to kill her, but she did.

  “You must be strong,” Morag had told Richard on Tuesday morning.

  “I must be,” he had replied.

  “I need to make it up to you,” she had said.

  “You must,” he had replied.

  “You’ve been very calm and understanding,” she had said.

  “That’s the kind of guy I am,” he had replied.

  She had told Richard to ‘bust some moves’ on anyone who broke into his flat and he did just that, even though that person was her.

  “You’re like some kind of ninja,” she had told him on Thursday.

  “Yes, I am,” he had agreed.

  “You play an instrument?” she’d said.

  “Absolutely,” he’d replied.

  “Bagpipes?”

  He clicked his fingers.

  “Got it in one.”

  And Morag had hit onto the bigger truth without realising it when she had said to him, “You’re going to think it’s bizarre but, this morning when you said you played the bagpipes, for a moment I just thought you said it because I suggested it, that you’ve got some kind of uncontrollable need to agree with people.”

  “Richard is the Nadirian,” Morag said softly but, by that point, Ingrid had already started screaming.

  Morag felt the energy build up in the room – and it wasn’t electricity and it wasn’t magic because they were simple words for human concepts and neither applied here – she felt it flow out through the door, through her, drawn in by the shape-shifting Nadirian. She found herself wondering how powerful an imagination Ingrid had. How many nightmares had that woman seen close up and stored in her memory? Morag concluded that the answer was probably ‘lots’ before she clamped down on that line of thought.

  The screaming transformed into a pained and terrified cry for help and then the word ‘no’ repeated over and over and over again with increasing pitch and intensity. And then it became a wet bubbling sound that faded to silence but not quickly enough, not quickly enough at all.

  “I have no mouth,” Morag whispered to the door.

  “What is that?” said Mrs Atraxas.

  Morag turned to the little old lady, who really was just a little old lady. “It’s nothing.”

  “Is it on the television or something?”

  “Yes,” said Morag. “Let’s say that it was.” She smiled. “I’m Morag. I’m your new neighbour.”

  Mrs Atraxas regarded her sceptically.

  “I do coffee,” she said eventually. “I do not do tea. I do not understand it.”

  “Life is full of mysteries, isn’t it?”

  When Morag had finished her coffee – ‘finished’ meaning that she had sat down and stared at the tar in her cup (and let a tortoiseshell cat wearing a knitted waistcoat savage her ankle) for as long as seemed polite before putting it down – she said her goodbyes and ventured out the flat door.

  There was no Richard. There was no amorphous Venislarn horror. There was no Ingrid. There wasn’t even any blood.

  She padded downstairs, past her own flat where the exploded carcass of an August Handmaiden of Prein remained, and to the front door of flat one on the ground floor. She knocked nervously. Richard opened the door instantly as though he had been standing there, waiting. It was just Richard, the same bushy beard, the same body, stocky but veering dangerously close to fat.

&nb
sp; “So, what happens now?” he said.

  Morag didn’t have a box woven from ivy in which to bind him.

  “It’s the weekend tomorrow,” she said. “You get weekends off?”

  “I do,” he said.

  “And what do you like to do at weekends?”

  He mulled it over, shaking his head.

  “Maybe,” she suggested, “you like to take your neighbour out for breakfast and then help her clean up the mess in her flat.”

  “I do like to do that,” he agreed earnestly.

  “Then it’s a date,” she said.

  “It’s not a date,” he said.

  “No, it’s not a date,” she agreed.

  Saturday

  “The train derailment, believed to be caused by an improperly loaded container, led to structural damage in surrounding buildings. Several homes and businesses were evacuated while investigations and repairs take place. West Midlands Police say the matter is unrelated to a terror alert at Birmingham New Street station earlier that evening.”

  Maurice closed the news app and put the tablet down.

  “And Miss Murray?” asked Sheikh Omar.

  “Alive and well. You still think she is essential to our future plans?”

  “I don’t travel to the wild untamed lands to the north on a whim. She has, as our forebears might have said, spunk. She will fight the good fight when the time comes.”

  Maurice made a non-committal noise.

  Omar finished buttering his toast. “It seems that our precautionary and personal evacuation to Barry Island this weekend was not entirely necessary,” he said. “Still, better safe than sorry.”

  Maurice looked out of the guesthouse window. Rain drummed ceaselessly on the seafront promenade. “I don’t like Barry,” he said. “I never have.”

  “You can be deliberately cruel sometimes,” said Omar blithely. “Now, be a dear and pass the jam.”

  Authors’ Notes

  YES, the Library of Birmingham is the largest public lending library in Europe. This is a good thing. It was indeed opened with great fanfare and then, less than two years later, had its opening hours decimated in a cost-cutting exercise. This is a bad thing.

  NO, the Library of Birmingham is not home to a shadowy organisation that monitors alien-god behaviour in the city.

  YES, the lower ground floor of the Library of Birmingham does run underneath the width of Centenary Square.

  NO, the Library of Birmingham does not contain a secret vault full of forbidden treasures.

  YES, Birmingham surrealist, Conroy Maddox, had several of his paintings confiscated by Scotland Yard during World War Two, because they suspected he was a fifth columnist and was sending coded messages to the Nazis through his paintings.

  YES, the National Sea Life Centre is in Birmingham, over 100 miles from the sea.

  YES, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital contains the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine for the treatment of people injured in military conflicts.

  YES, there is an overlapping series of canal, road and rail tunnels beneath Snow Hill station.

  YES, there is a rooftop garden café in Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

  YES, the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter has the highest concentration of jewellery-related businesses in Europe and, in that 1 km2, produces over a third of all UK jewellery.

  NO, none of the sex shops in Digbeth are fronts for dodgy fish-porn film studios. We checked.

  YES, Bournville is a dry village. When the Quaker Cadbury family built their factory and village in the late nineteenth century, they decreed that no alcohol could be sold within its boundaries. That decree is still in effect today.

  YES, there was a tornado in Birmingham on 28th July 2005 with wind speeds up to 130 mph. It uprooted 1,000 trees, removed house roofs, threw cars around and effectively destroyed Christ Church in Sparkbrook.

  YES, the Cube’s shaped cladding is meant to represent the city’s industrial heritage and the glass interior the city’s jewellery-making past.

  NO, the Cube does not have any horrors from beyond living in the top two floors.

  YES, the ‘Birmingham Qur’an’ was discovered in 2015 in Birmingham University’s Mingana Collection (having been previously misidentified and catalogued with newer manuscripts). It is around 1400 years old and therefore is a contender for the world’s oldest Qur’an.

  NO, there is no department of Practical Theology at Birmingham University or Department of Intertextual Exegesis and they don’t employ a Professor Sheikh Omar.

  YES, there is a magician/spiritualist/wizard called Sheikh Omar currently living and working in Birmingham. He promises to “remove evil spell and bad luck” and success is “100% guaranteed.” One of the authors has his calling card pinned to the kitchen noticeboard but has had no reason to call him yet.

  NO, the freight handling terminal in Nechells is not a secret operation for the transportation and handling of occult materials.

  YES, the Balti triangle is a real thing.

  YES, the Balti was invented in Birmingham and first served at Adil’s restaurant on Stoney Lane in 1977.

  NO, there is no Karakoram restaurant in the Balti triangle and certainly no restaurants in the area would treat their food or their customers in that way.

  NO, Birmingham taxi drivers are not in the thrall of an imprisoned god.

  YES, Birmingham’s St Philip’s cathedral is the third smallest cathedral in the country but it does have some lovely Burne-Jones stained glass windows.

  YES, Mike Edwards, cellist with Birmingham band ELO, was killed when a 1,300 lb hay bale rolled down a hillside and hit his van.

  YES, Brummies do not say ‘mum’, ‘bald’ or ‘tooth’ but ‘mom’, ‘bold’ and ‘tuth’ instead.

  NO, Nina is incorrect in thinking the original New Street building was built in the Dark Ages and modelled on a Nazi bunker. It was completed in 1967 and was instantly despised as ugly, brutal and not fit for purpose. The station was completely renovated and reopened in 2015.

  YES, railsimulator.com does have documents to teach you how to drive a Class 66 diesel-electric freight locomotive. We do not recommend you try it.

  Many, many thanks for reading this book.

  Readers are the reason that we do this, and we appreciate each and every one of you.

  If you'd be kind enough to leave a review, we'd be very grateful for the feedback.

  About the authors

  Heide and Iain are married, but not to each other.

  Heide lives in North Warwickshire with her husband and children.

  Iain lives in south Birmingham with his wife and two daughters.

  Oddjobs 2: this time it's personnel by Heide Goody and Iain Grant

  The Venislarn. Vastly intelligent aliens from another dimension or dribbling insane gods from a distant realm? It’s impossible to tell. What’s certain is that they’re here and they’re going to destroy our world.

  But, hey, there’s no mileage to be gained from telling the kiddywinks that monsters are real…

  The consular mission to the Venislarn are the god appeasers and the end of life carers for an oblivious planet. It may be the end of the world as we know it but there are procedures and policies in place and everything should go according to plan.

  But, in the city, someone’s buying souls door to door, dealing the kind of magical drugs that guarantee a really, really bad trip and, if something isn’t done about it, the end of the world might just happen a lot sooner than planned.

  Sequel to the hilarious ‘Oddjobs’, this is a workplace comedy like no other, featuring face-eating grannies, telepathic spiders, bloodthirsty school kids, murder on the dancefloor, sex-crazed pondlife, and actual stockbrokers from hell.

  The weekend can’t come soon enough (if it comes at all).

  US: https://www.amazon.com/Oddjobs-This-time-its-Personnel-ebook/dp/B072MZJCZ5/

  UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B072MZJCZ5

  Clovenhoof by Heide Goody & Iain Gran
t

  Charged with gross incompetence, Satan is fired from his job as Prince of Hell and exiled to that most terrible of places: English suburbia. Forced to live as a human under the name of Jeremy Clovenhoof, the dark lord not only has to contend with the fact that no one recognises him or gives him the credit he deserves but also has to put up with the bookish wargamer next door and the voracious man-eater upstairs.

  Heaven, Hell and the city of Birmingham collide in a story that features murder, heavy metal, cannibalism, armed robbers, devious old ladies, Satanists who live with their mums, gentlemen of limited stature, dead vicars, petty archangels, flamethrowers, sex dolls, a blood-soaked school assembly and way too much alcohol.

  Clovenhoof is outrageous and irreverent (and laugh out loud funny!) but it is also filled with huge warmth and humanity. Written by first-time collaborators Heide Goody and Iain Grant, Clovenhoof will have you rooting for the bad guy like never before.

  F. Paul Wilson: "Clovenhoof is a delight. A funny, often hilarious romp with a dethroned Satan as he tries to adjust to modern suburbia. The breezy, ironic prose sets a perfect tone. If you need some laughs, here's the remedy."

  US: http://www.amazon.com/Clovenhoof-ebook/dp/B008PYLULG/

  UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Clovenhoof-ebook/dp/B008PYLULG/

  Disenchanted by Heide Goody & Iain Grant

  Ella Hannaford has a small business to run, an overworked father to look after and a future stepmother who wants a perfect wedding.

  Can she avoid a girly night out with her clueless stepsister? Can she side-step lovesick suitors at every turn? Not if it’s up to that team of foul-mouthed dwarfs who want to forcibly drag her into her happily ever after.

  Gingerbread cottages, dodgy European gangsters, gun-toting grannies, wisecracking wolves, stubborn fairy godmothers, ogres, beanstalks and flying carpets abound in a tale about what happens when you refuse to accept your Happy Ending.