A Call in the Night

‘Gregory’s Time Tours’ materialised above Danwich’s High Street. Mr. Gregory took his speakaphone and addressed his clients: “Here we have a typical down town, 21st century town.”

A scaly skinned passenger stood up and shouted, “Can they see us?”

“No”, said Mr Gregory with a smirk. “Anything contained in the Zeta forcefield cannot be seen.”

“Can we interact with the town dwellers?” hissed a furry bear looking character.

“No, no interactions can take place. Didn’t you read the literature we ximmed to you? It is imperative that we not contaminate the present with anything from the future…even your perspiration, Miss Geet, could alter our time as we know it.”

The tour vehicle could be best described as a disc with an open top where Mr Gregory’s passengers sat. Below the disc sat two propulsion units connected into two time dilation/constriction units. (Two in case one malfunctioned, (to be sure, to be sure.))(The inventor was Irish). Food and drink were served to each of the seated customers from a small cabinet that constantly moved among the seats issuing little whispers of: “Can I get you anything?” The required item was synthesised within the talking cabinet in an instant.

One of time travellers had just ordered an ancient foodstuff, roasted cheese on toast. It was duly served and the aroma made his mouth water and drool. Sadly the saliva of a dweller from Planet Gasron is highly corrosive and upon dripping to the floor of the seating area - it burnt right through and in turn, dripped on the housing of one of the time units, (luckily not the active one.) The housing dissolved quickly releasing the unit and allowing it to drop out of invisibility to visibility and hurl down towards the town of Danwich.

The unit landed on Felsham road  and bounced twice before coming to rest in the middle of the road. It resembled, for all intents and purposes, a small top, pointed at either end and with an expanded centre. Innocuous, looking like normal road junk, but with a tremendous potential!

One week previous to the time travellers’ visit, John Baxter, a bank teller who worked in the West and Midlands Bank plc. had been having an interview with his manager, a Mr Clarence Dudby. Mr Dudby wanted John to take over two very important accounts. “You’ll have to watch these clients like a hawk, Baxter,” said Mr Dudby handing over two pink coloured files. “The Inland Revenue have had both of these gentlemen under scrutiny for the past year, but have not found any proof of malpractice, but we better make sure we are not found wanting.”

“No, Mr Dudby,” replied John.  “I will give the two clients my full attention.”

John had been glad when his manager had picked him out for this extra special job, for he had been feeling rather sluggish over the past few days. He blamed it initially on sitting up one night late, to watch the end of a football match. He had been up early the next day, but hadn’t really caught up with his sleep. Tonight would be different, a bath and an early night. His wife Dorothy, would probably stay up and watch some of her recorded sports, but he would sink into oblivion and make up his sleep deficit.

After closing the curtains, John quickly changed into his night clothing, a sweat shirt and shorts. Pulling back the covers he stepped into his bed and lay down, relishing the soft feel of his pillow on his head. He snapped the bedside light off and drifted off to sleep. He didn’t even wake when Dorothy came to bed, even though she lay reading for a bit.

A silence fell over the neighbourhood as light after light went out in bedroom windows. Somewhere far away a fox screamed and a barn owl gave a hoot as it savoured a mouse it had captured. All was quiet, apart from the light soughing of a night breeze. A full moon shone down on the area and some stars twinkled in the vast ceiling of the sky. All was at peace…then suddenly…

The telephone began ringing in the Baxter house. It rang and rang until both John and Dorothy woke up.

“I’ll go,” said John. “It’ll probably be a wrong number. It’s three o’clock!”

Making his way downstairs, John approached the annoying instrument, picked up the receiver and said: “Hello! Who is this please?”

John could hear nothing except a low murmuring. It sounded like a cross connection, what a pain, he thought, but just as he was about to put the receiver down a voice sounding like his own, spoke: “Don’t…don’t…don’t…” then the connection was broken and he was left holding a disconnected call.

Swearing under his breath, John returned to bed and after explaining to his wife that it had been a wrong number, tried to return to sleep. But the more he tried, the more awake he felt and John ended up getting a very poor sleep leaving him even groggier in the morning. As he drank his double espresso coffee at breakfast, he hoped that it would wake him up.

Work at the bank that day was pure purgatory and John forced his way through columns of figures and attempted to get them to add up. Every so often Mr Dudby walked through the office and John tried to look wide awake each time the manager passed. One set of figures just did not add up and John thought a set of gremlins had taken over his calculator. The information had been gleaned from one of the files Mr Dudby had given him the previous day. If the data was to believed, the client, a Mr. Zachariah Amman , had amassed a fortune trading in various cereals, but no import tax had been paid by him. The bill had accrued to a sizeable amount of money and John could see why Inland Revenue would be interested in him.

Returning home that night, John had an early tea with Dorothy and then moving to his study and after shutting the door, spread Mr Zachariah Amman’s file and relevant documents onto his desk and began to scrutinise them closely.

When Dorothy came through an hour later with a cup of tea, she found her husband sound asleep with his head on the desk top. Nudging him awake she made him drink his tea and consider going to bed.

“I would love to, sweetheart, but I have all this work to do,” John explained.

“But, you’re exhausted,” she said. “Surely, you can’t work out anything while you are like this?”

“Five more minutes and I’ll go to bed. I just have to tot up these figures.” But, when Dorothy came through to the study she found John, once again asleep. Not taking ‘no’ for an answer this time she chased him off to bed, where upon pulling the covers up to his chin he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

“Ring! Ring!...” the instrument of torture  blared out and once again John and his wife were wakened. The time was again three o’clock and John made his way unsteadily downstairs to the hall.

“Yes, who is this?” John asked angrily, but as the previous night all he could hear was the electronic murmuring. “Now, come on, speak up!” he shouted and was once again about to put the receiver down when the voice like his own, sounded: “Go near…go near… go near…” Then the line went dead.

The next day John could hardly keep his eyes open and Dorothy flatly refused to let him go to work. “I am going to tell them you are sick!” she said, pulling her husband’s shirt out of his hand. “Now get back to bed!”

Later that day John felt rested enough to come downstairs and work on the two client’s files on the dining room table, the more he checked Mr. Amman’s figures, the more he was convinced that there was something wrong with them. He decided to go into work the following day and report the discrepancies to Mr. Dudby.

That night both John and his wife stayed up late, the morning snooze having refreshed John, as they both put their bedside lights out and kissed each other goodnight, John remarked that he hoped they would have an unbroken night’s sleep.

No such luck! At three o’clock the telephone began to ring and John , upon picking up the receiver, went through the same ritual but the message was different. “Felsham Road…Felsham Road…Felsham Road.” Once again John was left with a dead line. What could it mean, he thought to himself? Felsham Road? Don’t go near Felsham Road? Why would someone sounding like himself be warning him?

The next day upon arriving at the bank, John made an appointment to see Mr. Dudby and upon being allowed instant access to him found himself before his manager’s desk.

“Well, Mr Baxter. I hope you are feeling better now. I understand that you were unwell yesterday?” Mr Dudby said rearranging some papers on his desk fussily. “Do you have anything else to discuss with me?”

“Yes sir,” said John respectfully. “One of the clients, whose file you asked me to look at, is showing discrepancies with regard to import tax.”

“Oh yes, and which one would that be?”

“Mtr Zachariah Amman, sir.”

Mr Dudby picked up his telephone receiver and after dialling a seven figure number, began to speak to someone on the other end of the line. “Mr Sullivan? This is Clarence Dudby at the West and Midland Bank. I think one of my tellers has discovered that Mr Z. Amman has not paid any import duty on his incoming shipments. Yes, I will send the information over to you by courier. No, thank you Mr Sullivan, it was you that alerted us to the fraud.”

Turning to John, Mr Dudby shook his employee’s hand. “Well done Baxter, I knew that I could rely on you. Now, how about the other client I asked you to check out?”

John Baxter looked down at the floor. “Mr Eammon O’Conner just seems to be a potty scientist to me, sir.”

“Potty or otherwise, he has attained a lot of money from somewhere and as I said the I.R.S. are very eager to speak to him about it, but as with Mr. Amman, they have no proof. See what you can dig up, Baxter.”

John spent the rest of the day instituting computer searches into Mr E. O’Connor. He had graduated from Oxford with a First in Physics. He went on to attain a professorship at Cambridge and eventually left there to build his own experimental laboratory twenty miles outside London. There he produced very advanced equipment which allowed oil fields to be charted out from above ground. Among many of his other experimental pieces of the early part of his career, the atomic particle collider was the most successful and had earned him a lot of his current wealth.

As John finished for the evening, he locked up his files and after handing in his office key to the security man, made his way to his car in the employee’s car park. He was just inserting the key into the door lock when he was struck from behind.

When John recovered consciousness, it was dark and he realised that he had been sat on a chair and tied up, a gag covered his mouth.

“I am sorry for this, Mr.Baxter, but I get worried when I am told you have been making computer searches to discover information regarding my colleague, Mr. O’Connor.” A voice spoke from in front of John.

“Who are you?” John spluttered through the gag. “What do you want with me?”

A light suddenly came on and John could see who he was talking to. A large, swarthy looking man dressed in a suit sat behind a desk, facing John.

“I am Mr. Arkand,” said the man, “and I know you are John Baxter. Why have you been taking an interest in Mr. O’Connor?”The man leant over and pulled the gag from John’s mouth.

“I am not at liberty to tell you,” said John.

Mr. Arkand leant over and pressed a button on the desk. A door opened behind John and he was grabbed roughly and bundled out of the office. As the door swung shut, John heard Mr. Arkand mutter, “Then you will stay here until you talk.”

After being pushed down a flight of stairs, John was thrown into a room and the door was locked. As he came to John saw that he was not alone.

“Who are you?” John said to a crouched figure in the corner of the room.

The figure moved and upon raising its head said: “My name is Eammon O’Connor, I used to be in charge round here.

O’Connor untied John’s bonds and then collapsed back into the corner. “There is no hope for you,” he muttered.

After questioning Eammon, John realised that a group of criminals had taken over his business. The tycoon had, due to research into the structure of atomic particles, been able to build a rudimentary time machine utilising a certain type of powder extracted after the atomic collisions. Mr Arkand had initially come in to seek the possibility of a partnership with Eammon, but when turned down, had taken the business over by force. His four associates had provided the strong arm tactics and soon the entire industry was under their command.

“But, what benefit was it to them?” asked John, slightly mystified.

“We have been travelling back in time to harvest gold and silver from ancient times,” said Eammon, unhappily. “But, it’s never enough for Mr. Arkand, he always wants more. He has search engines in his computer which look back over ancient documents to pinpoint caches of treasure and he and two others travel back and steal it.”

“But, how did he find out I was investigating you?”

“He has very sophisticated equipment that trawls the Internet seeking key words and discovering what they are related to. My name was put in as a key word search and, well, your enquiries came to his attention. By the way why were you investigating me?”

“Because your firm’s finances were showing up with unexplained amounts of cash and we at the Inland Revenue were interested to discover where it was coming from.”

“These idiots, when Mr Arkand and his mob had obtained money from selling the metal artefacts, he was banking it in my account, thinking it would be undetectable. What a fool!”

As they chatted John began to yawn and felt his eyes closing.

“You seem sleepy,” said Eammon, “they didn’t drug you, did they?”

Then, as a way to pass the time, John told Eammon about his mysterious, middle of the night telephone calls. “I just don’t know what they mean.”

Eammon was silent for a few minutes and then he began to speak. “You say that the voice warned you to stay off a certain street in town?”

“Yes,” said John. “It was most specific, although only, a couple of words at a time.”

“That is strange, because, as you know we have been experimenting with time travel and in some of our early experiments, we got really bizarre effects. But, one of the strangest was when one of our laboratory staff came in contact with the Atomic Collision Residual Dust.”

“So, what happened?” asked John.

“Well, he vanished and to this day we never discovered where he had gone. The strangest bit was that I began to receive phone calls seemingly from this person. They were all single words, starting with ‘Help’, then ‘me’, followed by ‘I’, ‘don’t’,’ know’, ‘where,’ ‘I’ and ending with ‘am’. After that we heard nothing more, we assumed that his mobile’s battery had given out.”

“And you didn’t report his loss to the police or to his relatives?”

“What could the police have done? And as for his relatives, he was always going missing, something about a broken home and a lot of fostering.”

At that point Mr Arkand opened the door of the room and indicating John, told the four thugs to ‘get rid of him’. John was hustled out and told to climb the stair. John stumbled as he made his way up and the man behind him reached forward to grab his collar, but at that moment John straightened up and caught the man on the nose with the back of his head. The man gave a cry and fell back holding his bleeding nose and knocked the following men down the stairs.

John ran for the front door and pulling it open found himself looking at three cars parked by the road. Quickly, he jumped into one and checking for keys found none. Next he got out of the car and ran to the next one in the line. Hallelujah! The keys were sticking out of the ignition. John turned the key, put the car in gear and zoomed off down the road.

Weaving round parked cars, John drove the car as fast as he could. Pedestrians jumped out of his way and luckily all the traffic lights were green as he passed them.

Mr Arkand and his four men were quickly in pursuit, before long the car John was in loomed up before them. “Quick!” shouted Mr Arkand. “Ram him or do something to stop him!”

John looked desperately ahead, how could he get away from them? He was on Frobisher street which took him into Felsham road. Then, John remembered the night phone calls. ‘Don’t go near Felsham road’ and he looked frantically for a side street.

Bummies Lane came into view and John swung the car into it. It was so narrow that the sides of the car made shrieking noises as metal ran against brickwork, but he was through!

Mr Arkand’s car totally missed Bummies Lane and he told his driver to head up the road and they would cut John’s car off. The end of Frobisher was parked on both sides and Mr Arkand’s car narrowly missed a head on collision with a car coming the other way. “Stupid fool! Watch where you’re going!” Mr Arkand screamed as they flew past.

Into Felsham road and along past the shops went Mr Arkand’s car. They were bound to catch John now, thought Mr Arkand. And he knew what he would do with him. Oh yes, concrete shoes and dropped into the river!

Lying at the side of the road in Felsham road was a small metal object that resembled a child’s spinning top. It had been splashed with water and oil by passing cars, but, it had avoided getting flattened - so far.

Mr Arkand’s car screamed down the road and just at that instant a small boy saw the top shaped object and swinging back his foot he kicked it - right under Mr Arkand’s car. The object flattened and a puff of dust escaped coating the car. It vanished. One minute it was there and the next - it had gone, the small boy’s eyes widened in amazement before turning round and running home to tell his mum.

Well that is where the story ends. The crooks had gone, who knows where. John realising that he was not being pursued any more, returned to free Eammon, who eventually set about returning the stolen riches, the ones he could, to their correct time periods.

When the night calls began, Eammon realised that Mr Arkand and colleagues had gone to an area somewhere in the Universe and were keeping the laboratory assistant company.

Eammon surmised that in another Universe, John had gone down Felsham road and had been transported to where ever instead of Mr Arkand.

Eventually Eammon changed his telephone number and got some sleep!

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29/01/18

Cairniehill

Arbroath

Angus