The Unhappy Medium, page 8
Newton’s eyes rolled in despair. Other questions followed in a blur and he found himself talking and thinking at the same time, not completely about the same things. He really knew the runaway train was well out of the station and heading for disaster. His nervous attempts to backtrack were barely noticed. They went unreported, all of Newton’s prepared caveats lost beneath the sound-bites and hype in the resulting news stories. Free clean energy ‘within a decade’. Major scientific breakthrough, British science achieves the glittering prize. Not only did Havotech’s share price jump – it leapt. Newton was horrified, and his adversaries, at long last, scented blood.
As other laboratories rushed to duplicate Havotech’s exaggerated findings, the noose tightened around Newton Barlow. The final disastrous moment came in a TV interview where he was asked to speculate on the potential for the world if bubble fusion could be made to work. Newton resisted the angle of questioning repeatedly but with such indigestibly hard science that it was chopped wholesale from the broadcast. Once again, the message came sailing inappropriately out to the waiting audience; free clean energy, an end to oil wars and fuel poverty. The audience lapped it up. Sadly, so did the massed ranks of Newton’s detractors. Inevitably, bemused and dismissive responses came back from the rival laboratories. Newton’s misreported optimism made him the perfect target for a backlash, not just from the science community and his enemies in the mystical world, but also from the business community as Havotech’s inflated share price came in for scrutiny. Now the only bubble generating heat for Newton Barlow was the one bursting around him.
The attacks came thick and fast – accusations of improper business practice, poor scientific safeguards, and even outright fraud. Newton, already a familiar figure and poster boy for scientific reason, was now a sitting target for accusations of hypocrisy. Damning articles appeared in such diverse publications as The Sun , The Economist and Nature . Newton found himself hounded. Rowena, far from standing firm with her embattled husband, departed with their grumpy daughter for her mother’s.
Within Havotech, things moved very, very quickly. Newton’s team vanished within days, their identity cards left hanging in reception while Newton dodged the journalists camped outside the now-empty family house. Returning to Havotech, the atmosphere in the corridors was downright sinister, like a walk to the gallows past a silent mob. Carnatt had seen to it that the door to the lab itself was locked, and Newton was still rattling it pointlessly when Carnatt and a security guard arrived to escort him protesting from the building. Pushed out into the car park, Newton turned to face Carnatt, whose pink striped shirt was now only vaguely visible behind the locked smoked-glass doors.
‘Peter, Peter, for Christ’s sake!’ Newton blurted, wrought with frustration and anger. But Carnatt, his face blank and impassive, simply watched his former colleague raging on the tarmac then silently turned away.
Though near mortally wounded, Havotech was soon on the defensive, heaping blame upon Newton in his enforced absence. Branded internationally as the ‘rogue physicist’, he found events swirling around him faster than protons in an accelerator. Old colleagues distanced Newton en masse and as a final humiliation, the family was evicted from the large rambling house in Cambridge. Rowena, inevitably, asked for a divorce.
CHAPTER 8 – Something wicke d
The curator of the Langton Hadlow village museum returned hastily to his lodgings in the small rooms above The Tugger’s Arms, the strange hooded carving tucked firmly under his arm. It was cold and blustery, and as he hobbled urgently past the looming war memorial, the fresh wind whipped the ivy around on the façade of the old inn, making a near-continuous rustling noise. As the leaves fluttered, they beat a frantic rhythm with the old streetlight as it flickered near the foliage.
The curator let himself in through the warped and darkly aged side door into the pub’s silent interior. Weak daylight from the greasy windows caught whirling motes of dust as they danced in the empty bar. Once, the curator would have been hard pressed to make it across the crowded and boisterous pub without numerous welcoming pints being thrust into his hand by ruddy-faced locals. Now there was no one in the entire building but the old curator himself, and he shivered at the brooding interior as he climbed the rickety staircase to his lodgings.
Once in his modest kitchen, he scrutinised the unpleasant little figure closely under the glare of a rusty old desk lamp. It was hardly a triumph of sensitive carving. The chisel had clearly been used in a frenzy, the wood ripped and torn to reveal the demonic figure, crouched and angry. Clawed hands emerging from the cloak suggested a ferocious defiance that the old curator had never really noticed until now. It had a darkened lacquer-like sheen giving it an almost waxy feel.
Below the crouching presence of the figure lay its secured box, locked with an ancient mechanism for which the curator had no key. He held the carving up to the light and regarded it from different angles. Scratching his hairless scalp, he placed it on the table and opened the cutlery drawer. He rattled the tray of old knives and forks from side to side before finally lifting out an aged little fruit knife. He began, tentatively at first, to poke and pick at the box and its rusted old lock .
Sometimes he seemed to make progress. A small opening on one side of the tiny door would reluctantly open but then, as he prepared to use a spoon to widen the fissure, it would return to its original position making him increasingly frustrated. He took a deep breath to overcome the urge to set about the figure with a meat tenderiser and lifting his fruit knife once more, he wedged its sharp point back into the thin crack beside the crusted lock. Carefully, he applied an increasing pressure, the blade gradually forcing itself deeper into the widening gap as his elbow shook with the effort.
Without warning, the old blade shattered in two as the box finally cracked open. The curator’s hand, still pushing, rushed in a flash down the handle and he let out a high-pitched yelp as the knife took a neat chunk of his hand. Shocked by the sudden pain, he leapt from his seat and began to hop and curse around the room, his bloody hand tucked under his armpit in an instinctive effort to relieve the stabbing agony. After a minute or so he pulled out his hand tentatively to check the damage, and being a sensitive soul, he nearly passed out as he watched the thick dark blood ooze from the ripped flesh, cascading down onto the old lace tablecloth.
‘Oh dear me, oh dear me,’ he muttered anxiously to himself. Leaving the figure where it had fallen next to the sauce bottles, he dashed breathlessly to the bathroom cabinet and struggled to self-medicate with his left hand. Eventually, he emerged from the bathroom with his right hand looking like a red and white boxing glove, his injury throbbing and stinging beneath a mess of lint and sticking plasters.
The curator couldn’t dwell on this too long, however, because when he came back down the corridor from the bathroom he was greeted once again by the weird and peculiar purple light he had seen before in the museum. This time, it was emanating from the kitchen. Peering round the corner, he witnessed the now-intensified light as it pulsated from the crack where the fruit knife had finally shattered the box. As he watched, the light grew still more powerful until, almost imperceptibly at first, it began to reach menacingly out from the artefact, solidifying ribbons of intense purple feeling across the table.
His lined eyes widened. The tendrils caressed and nudged the ketchup bottle, first testing and then, deciding it unrewarding, flicking dismissively away so that the bottle rolled and fell onto the lino with a loud smash. The curator was rooted to the spot as the stream of purple fingers spread relentlessly out across the small kitchen, their focus doorward as they washed purposefully towards him like high-speed film of weed growth. His breath staccato and shallow, he seemed unable to either move or scream as they climbed with dark purpose over his tattered brogues and up his corduroy trousers, individual limbs of purple poking and prising their way into his pockets and his more intimate spaces. At his throat and face, they picked and played with his ageing features, pulling at his loose old skin before prising open his lips to explore his mouth cavity. As though he was a slave in a market, they examined his yellowed false teeth then reared back in perceptible repugnance at his dental failings.
Suddenly, the glowing vines left the curator in an abrupt surge of purple, rearing up before him into a waving ball of rippling glowing spaghetti, one single thick string of light leading back to the cracked carving on the kitchen table. It turned purposefully towards the staircase and to the bar below. Finding himself able to move again, the old curator nervously pursued the strands of magenta and mauve as they separated and washed like treacle down the stairs. He felt drawn to follow, but as he did, he kept his back glued firmly to the walls and the banisters, his curiosity and alarm fighting each other for control of his common sense as he pursued just out of reach.
The entire lounge bar was bathed in the evil purple glow as it assembled itself into near-human form, static electricity and a smell of burning filling the air. Packets of crisps, left when the bar suddenly closed a few years earlier, began popping and jumping off the shelves and the old fruit machine lit up and whirled madly, bells sounding off in the increasing chaos.
Startled, the curator was wondering where all this was going to end. His eyes darted from exit to exit as he planned his escape. The spirit – it was the only suitable word the curator could think of – started testing the doors and windows with intense violet wisps of plasma. But most of the doors and windows of the shuttered pub were locked and secured. Frustrated, it tugged and battered at them, pausing only to smash an old Guinness mirror and fling dirty pint glasses across the bar. The violent barrage came close to hitting the old man, showers of glass erupting around him, but they abated abruptly when, to his horror, the blob of plasma solidified into the hideous figure upon the carving. It gradually turned, menacingly, towards the curator as he stood in a mess of broken glassware on the stairs, his hands locked for dear life to the banister .
‘Oh dear, oh dear me,’ he muttered again to himself, almost as a protective incantation as the unambiguous glowing figure of a 15th-century clergyman began floating towards him over the pool table. The curator closed his eyes, too old to run, timidly awaiting the ghastly finale to his foolish curiosity.
At that very moment, far away in some other place, the holding room of the spectacularly evil Cardinal Balthazar De La Senza was flagged up as matter of concern by a group of alarmed ethereal beings. They pulsed with gold as they frantically tested the perimeters of the old medieval monster’s glowing prison. Clearly the demonic spirit within the cell was highly active again, its purple malevolence flailing against the walls with vile intent. But unlike the occasional, seemingly random assassinations visited upon the inmates of these celestial cells, La Senza was clearly not under attack. Instead, the beings correctly sensed they were witnessing an attempted breakout and it filled them with horror. As his beady spiteful eyes glared with defiance at his jailors, his ectoplasmic radiance pierced new tears and fissures in the translucent walls around him and passed invisibly away into the land of the living.
And so, the councillors of this other place and their ethereal assistants all gathered around the edges of La Senza’s restraining cell, working frantically to cut off the dark Cardinal’s escape before his evil presence could regain a foothold in the human realm. They chanted, they wailed. They used small oily things with lights at the end and they made trumpet-like noises with some sort of trumpet. One particular figure of radiance with bright golden dreadlocks sang a pleasant and not un-danceable song while playing a harp. Bit by bit, the cracks and fissures through which La Senza had sought to escape began to close.
Unaware of these developments, the curator was still very much face to face with the ectoplasmic visage of the demonic Inquisitor La Senza, unbeknown to him, the killer and destroyer of both the living and the dead. Cardinal Balthazar De La Senza, the self-proclaimed judge of heaven and earth, reared cobra-like before him.
‘Oh my goodness!’ muttered the curator, somewhat understating the horror of the moment.
The monster seemed initially reluctant to possess the clapped out arthritic body of the curator with his feeble teeth and anything but 20-20 vision; it seemed to hesitate. But this was La Senza’s only hope of striking out from The Tugger’s Arms into the wider community of Langton Hadlow, and beyond it, the world.
‘Any port in a storm,’ hissed the apparition, just inches from the old man, and it then pulled back to begin releasing many new probing tendrils that crept with demonic purpose towards the curator’s hairy ears.
However, just as the curator was about to become lost forever to the evil Inquisitor, the entity widened its glowing violet eyes. Belatedly, La Senza sensed the threat from his cell on the other side and he pulled back instantly in alarm. All around the curator, the evil wisps began to recede as the frantic incantations back in this strange other world sucked the Inquisitor savagely toward his nasty little box just as if someone had switched on an extractor fan. Like noodles down a kitchen sink, the box drew La Senza back towards Purgatory, his apparition fruitlessly attempting to grab both the staircase and the curator’s lapels in a desperate bid to stave off the inevitable. Appalled yet fascinated, the curator followed the spirit of the Cardinal up the staircase as he was pulled relentlessly back into the kitchen. The shrinking human form broke up once again into a seething mass of glowing tree roots, each making last frantic attempts to resist before flipping back into the box like spaghetti into the mouth of a small child. The salt, pepper and sauces scattered with a clatter as the last wisps reached out desperately for purchase on the table, but in a chaos of glass and seasoning, the last tendrils were gone and the purple light extinguished.
Back in his cell, La Senza wailed and screamed in fury and frustration. His bitterness welled up into foul blobs of jellyfish-like plasmas; welts popped and sizzled all around his thrashing cloaked form. To add to his indignity, an open bottle of HP sauce was rotating about him, its brown contents smearing him with each revolution.
‘Oh my,’ said the curator. Dazed, he looked at the mess in the kitchen for a while before finally fetching a dustpan and brush.
Somewhere else entirely, benign beings with good hearts were breathing long sighs of relief and spinning long lazy cartwheels of self-satisfaction in the air as La Senza, menacingly silent now, brooded and schemed in his bonds.
CHAPTER 9 – Viv123 4
After his fall from scientific and public grace, interest in Dr Newton Barlow waned almost as fast as his career and lifestyle. It felt long enough at the time, though. It may have been a year, maybe even two; he’d stopped counting the more he explored the pleasures of increasingly cheap whisky. In fact, Newton had been out in the dark cold for near to three long years, the butt of anyone out for a cheap shot. The parodies, the incessant mocking media enquiries and the awkward or hostile encounters with the general public had been an almighty kick to the last shreds of his dignity.
In retrospect those awful, humiliating reality TV invitations were a symptom that the trauma was entering its final, lurid phase. Gradually, thankfully, public recognition began to fade, helped in part by Newton’s abandonment of his trademark image. The rockabilly quiff was gone, so too the leather jacket and pointy shoes. Now he passed unnoticed by the population in the blandest of supermarket jeans and jumpers, thankful for the anonymity that was enveloping him. The mocking stares were getting rarer, just the odd science graduate in the wine shop chancing a second glance or an old acquaintance thinking better of saying hello on a crowded tube train.
Nonetheless, Newton had to finally face the challenge of making something close to a living out of the wreckage of his once-glittering career. There could be no question of a return to academia. To any self-respecting university, Newton Barlow was the very definition of soiled goods, his mere presence on campus likely to undermine the international standing of the establishment, his pariah status ensuring that he’d bring doubt and excessive scrutiny to any project before it had even begun. With ruthless efficiency, Havotech had seen to it that they’d escaped the worst of the whole bubble fiasco by wantonly sacrificing Newton’s reputation. Though Newton had played with the idea of taking legal action, it was clear very quickly that Carnatt and his paymasters would have run rings around the out-gunned and weary Dr Barlow.
So Newton had opted to lay low. Bucking the trend of his collapsing fortunes, at least he’d been lucky over the apartment back in London. It had been rented out when he and Rowena moved to Cambridge and he was able to slip back into the old place with minimal outlay, rather important now that his wife had systematically cleaned out every single account that Newton had his name on. As he languished in London, she’d stayed in Cambridge with Gabriella, buying a picturesque terraced house outright. The divorce had been fast and furious, and Newton, utterly drained in every sense of the word, couldn’t muster a defence from financial evisceration in any meaningful sense whatsoever. Contact with his ex-wife was now sparse, Antarctically cold and centred solely on occasional contacts with his daughter, usually timed, Newton suspected, to coincide with Rowena’s blossoming social engagements. Visiting her pristine new house, he was invariably confronted by Rowena’s decorative girlfriends, a phalanx of haughty disapproving looks greeting him from the kitchen table as he waited awkwardly in the hallway. He’d stand there silently, rebuked en masse, waiting for a reluctant daughter to slouch out to the rapidly degrading Citroën. The classic old French car was the one thing Rowena had not felt the urge to prise off him. Pleased as Newton was to still have any form of transport, no matter how eccentric, it was becoming something of a battle to keep the museum piece on the road.
Income, once of little meaning, became Newton’s greatest daily concern. The Barlow family, though never filthy rich upon their academic triumphs, had never been short of a bob or two either, so Newton’s experience of edge-of-the-seat economics was patchy to say the least. It took an age before he adjusted to stretching his meagre resources and doing without. Even then he was woefully bad at taking care of himself. For some of his wilderness years he’d resembled a mad wino, rambling bitter mumblings in one of his five languages amidst the empty cans and bottles. He’d bounced back to some extent, but he was still far from on the ball when after years of self-pity he started allowing a few select old pals to know where he was. So when Newton was offered some freelance editorial work for Living Physics magazine, he felt obliged to jump weakly forward.
