In his dream there was a complete absence of birdsong.
It was the first thing he noticed – usually he could hear the noisy
little bastards outside his bedroom window as they woke him up at some
unearthly hour of the morning with their merry but ultimately annoying singing.
But in his dream he was met with silence.
Paul Langdon sat up in bed, rubbed his sleep-encrusted eyes and reached
over to the bedside table to retrieve his tape measure – but it wasn’t there.
It was an automatic reflex, an obsession so ingrained into his psyche that he
still felt the need to do it even now. If it had been there it would have a
standard white tape measure made from soft plastic with metal triangular tips
at each end. He had a vague notion that it used to belong to his mother’s
sewing kit, but he wasn’t entirely sure.
He heard a bell ringing in the distance and he assumed that it must be
a Sunday, but it couldn’t be. It was impossible. The giant bell of St
Christopher’s church that woke him up on a Sunday, when all the efforts of the
birds had failed, was deep and warm. It was nothing like he was hearing now –
it was absent and in its place was a delicate tinkling, like the sound of the
tiny bell that called rich people to dinner in BBC costume dramas.
He climbed out of bed and walked over to the window. He drew back the
curtains and looked out at the clean, pastel-coloured wooden houses across the
street. It was all so familiar – yet strangely different. Some half-forgotten
memory told him that he should have his tape measure with him – that it meant
something, a link to his past maybe.
He dressed quickly, selecting the clean, strangely starchy clothes from
the dresser that stood in the corner of the room, trying all the time to recall
what had happened to him over the past – but nothing came to mind. He had great
gaps in his memory that he couldn’t explain, much less understand.
As he stepped into the street he noticed than it was cleaner than he
remembered it – the shops across the road looked brighter, more inviting. He
heard his name being called and he looked behind him and saw Amelia and Madge
walking towards him. As he waited for the two women to approach he looked
around at his surroundings – everything was different, not by much, but just
enough to make him feel uncomfortable.
It was as if – somehow in his sleep – the town had undergone a subtle
change without him knowing.
And then Paul Langdon woke up.
***
A few days before his fourteenth birthday Paul Langdon had watched a
black-and-white film on television called The
Incredible Shrinking Man. It was about a man called Scott Carey who was
accidentally exposed to a radioactive cloud whilst on a boating trip. As a
result he started to get smaller, gradually at first, but by the end of the
film he was so small he was able to climb through a wire screen in the basement
and into the outside world, where he shrank away to nothing and became one with
the vastness of the Cosmos. Maybe it was in his genes or maybe he was susceptible
to its ideas, but The Incredible
Shrinking Man had a profound effect on Paul and he had nightmares for weeks
after.
Each morning he would wake up with an insane desire to measure himself
– to make sure he was the same height as he was the day before. Everything was
normal at first, but after a couple of weeks he noticed that he had started to
shrink – not by much, but he was definitely getting shorter as each day passed.
He was terrified, struck dumb with an intense fear that he was – like
Scott Carey – going to shrink away to nothing and become one with the vastness
of the Cosmos. It was one of those irrational fears that all teenagers go
through – fear of the dark or something nasty lurking under the bed; fear of
sitting on the toilet because the devil lived down there (just past the u-bend)
and was waiting to grab his little white bottom and drag him down to hell with
him.
When he was twelve years old, Paul had told his younger brother, John,
about the devil living in the toilet and for weeks his impressionable brother
was afraid to sit down on the seat. It was only after he was discovered by his
grandmother – when she barged into the bathroom because she was desperate for a
wee – that he stopped squatting over the toilet with both feet balanced precariously
on either side of the seat whenever he went for a shit.
“And there he was,” his grandmother would tell people later, “squatting
on the toilet like a bloody Indian.”
On the wall of Paul’s bedroom, next to the door, was a height chart. It
had been a free gift from the dentist after he had been for his last check-up,
when he had to have a tooth removed, and it featured cartoon representations of
molars and incisors up and down its length. Paul wasn’t entirely sure why a dentist would be giving away free height
charts – perhaps, he thought, dental scientists had discovered that teeth had a
mysterious effect on the growth hormones of teenage boys.
Paul measured himself on the first day of every month. He didn’t know
why he did it – the dental height chart didn’t serve any practical purpose with
regards to oral hygiene and so he used it for what it was obviously designed
for. His mother used to measure him standing against the wall in the hallway of
the house and she’d draw a line and write the date next to it with a soft lead pencil
where the top of his head had reached. “Look how big you’ve grown,” she used to
say, before she lost interest in it altogether and turned to alcohol instead.
Paul’s fourteenth birthday was on the first of the month and so, before
he went downstairs to open his cards and presents, he stood in front of his
dental height chart and measured himself. It was with a combination of surprise
and shock that he discovered that he had not grown that usual extra fraction
since his last measurement but had in fact grown shorter – by a whole inch.
Just to make sure he measured himself again.
His mind was buzzing with panic as he walked downstairs, but when he
saw the pile of presents waiting for him on the floor of the lounge the panic
he had initially felt was suddenly replaced by avarice. His birthday was very
much the same as all the other birthdays he could remember – he opened his
presents in the morning, at lunchtime his grandparents came to visits with more
presents and in the afternoon he had a party where his friends brought him even
more presents. The evening was spent sitting lazily in front of the television
watching whatever was being shown on the three channels that were available.
The following morning Paul was up early and was stood in front of the
dental height chart before anyone in the house was up. This was not his usual
routine – it was always the first day
of the month and never on two
consecutive days. But he had to make sure – to confirm to himself that the
height he had recorded the previous morning was a mistake.
It wasn’t.
When he measured himself that morning he was a fraction of an inch
shorter than he had been the day before. He couldn’t understand it – it was impossible. There was no way he could
have been shrinking, no way at all, and there must be some rational explanation
for it. If he was eating the same food, doing the same things, doing the same
physical exercise as his classmates, how
could he be shrinking? But the evidence was there, staring at him from the
bright colours of the dental height chart.
It was the same every day for the whole month. Every day he measured
himself he found that he was a fraction of an inch shorter and he remembered
how Scott Carey had shrunk away to nothing to become one with the vastness of
the Cosmos. Now it was he, Paul Langdon, who was the incredible shrinking man!
“Mum,” he said one day as his mother was loading a pile of his dirty
clothes into the twin-tub washing machine, “can you notice anything different
about me?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know – just something that’s different.”
“Not that I can see.”
“Are you sure? I mean, are you positive?
“Look, what’s this about – can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Do I look smaller? Do I look as if I’ve been shrinking?”
Paul’s mother shook her head and carried on with the loading the
washing machine. “How and why on earth would you be shrinking? Just stop asking
me stupid questions and bugger off and bother someone else!”
Maybe his mother was lying, covering up the truth in order to conceal a
conspiracy against him or maybe he was the victim of a clandestine experiment
and his entire family had been sworn to secrecy – on pain of death. But how had
this happened? Hadn’t Scott Carey been exposed to a radioactive cloud? Paul
tried to recall when was the last time he had been exposed to a radioactive
cloud, but nothing immediately sprang to mind.
And then remembered the dentist!
The dentist had given him gas to knock him out when he had his tooth removed –
gas that had given him the weirdest and most vivid nightmares. He had looked
like a sinister character with his pencil moustache and lazy eye and his array
of gleaming instruments arranged next to a liver beside him. He spoke with a
clipped, foreign – possibly German – accent and he wrote secret notes when Paul
wasn’t looking. “Now senn, I vont you to count town from ze numper zehn ant
soon you vill be asleep,” Paul had heard the dentist say as he held the rubber
mask over his face and turned up the gas. He was probably a mad Nazi scientist
experimenting with gas that shrunk people until they became one with the
vastness of the Cosmos and Paul’s mother had unwittingly delivered her son into
his evil hands. Just before he dropped
off Paul was sure he heard the sound of a pair of heels clicking together and
the dentist saying “Sieg heil, mein Führer!”
It all made sense to a fourteen year-old boy with an overactive
imagination. Why else would a dentist
give out free height charts if his ultimate aim wasn’t world domination?
In the end it wasn’t the dentist with his clipped foreign accent; it
wasn’t the gas that put him to sleep and gave him weird dreams and it wasn’t a
massive conspiracy in which his entire family was involved.
In the end it was just his brother.
Paul discovered the reason for his mysterious shrinking on a wet
afternoon in November. He had been helping his mother with the washing up when
she asked him to get a clean tea towel from the airing cupboard upstairs. While
he was searching in the airing cupboard he heard some movement coming from
behind the door of his bedroom. The door was slightly open and he pressed his
head against the frame so that he could squint inside the room. What he saw
there filled him with an overwhelming sense of anger and relief. Inside the
room, kneeling on the floor was his brother – all twelve cunning, devious years
of him. He had carefully taken Paul’s dental height chart off the wall and was
about to put it back a few millimetres higher than it had been previously. He
was prevented from doing this by Paul bursting into the room and calling him a
little bastard.
“Why did you do this to me?” Paul asked.
“Why did you tell me the devil lived just past the u-bend in our
toilet?” replied his brother.
“Fair enough.”
“Granddad told me how scared you were after you saw that film about the
shrinking man. Was it really that
scary?”
“Yeah – there’s this bit where he has to fight this giant spider, only
it’s not giant, it’s just that he’s so small and . . .”
***
On the morning he discovered what was left of DS Jones, Paul telephoned
his brother. John was working as a games designer for a rising software company
in the city of London and he was earning a
fortune. He earned more in a single month than Paul earned in an entire
year at the Stuart Hotel. Sometimes he wondered if was all worth it. Still, he
loved cooking – even throughout the years he had been working with heavy
machinery, where his ear drums had been damaged beyond repair. Even so he
wished he’d studied a little harder at school and maybe he would have bagged a
high salary job in the city.
John knew it was his brother calling and so he held the receiver as far
away from his ear as he could to allow Paul’s booming voice to be somewhere
approximating a normal speech level. At first he just laughed off what Paul had
to say, but the urgency and pitch of his brother’s voice made him shut up and
listen.
“Come up to London and stay with me, why don’t you,” John suggested. “Get
away from Newtown for a while – it’ll do you some good, don’t you think.”
“ARE YOU SURE?” blasted Paul. “I DON’T WANT TO BE ANY BOTHER.”
“Look, it’s no bother. Just get pack some clothes and get on the first
train out of there.”
“RIGHT. I HAVE TO REPORT THIS TO THE POLICE FIRST – THEN I’LL JUMP ON A
TRAIN.”
“You do that. See you soon, big brother. “
“YEAH.”
Paul threw a few clothes into a suitcase along with his wash kit and a
book to read on the train. He stuffed a pair of yellow Marigold gloves into his
pocket, picked up the black plastic bin bag that contained DS Jones’ discarded
belongings and headed off to the police station.
***
Paul felt a little better after speaking to DCI Smith, although he was somewhat
concerned about what he had got himself involved in. His brother was right
though – he did need a break. The atmosphere in Newtown was beginning to feel
more oppressive to him as each day passed. He knew it had something to do with
Arnold Chemicals but he wasn’t sure how or why. What he did know, however, was
that the people of the town had behaved differently towards him ever since he
had vehemently expressed his opposition to the plans for the location of Arnold
Chemicals.
He tried to put those thoughts out of his mind and focus on the
positive as he headed towards the Railway Station. He was so busy thinking
about seeing his brother after such a long time that he didn’t notice the large
black car with the blacked-out windows pull up beside him. Nor did he notice
the two large men wearing sunglasses and dressed in black suits get out the car
until it was too late. He had already been bundled into the back of the car
before he knew what was happening.
“Well, well, Mr Langdon. Fancy seeing you here,” said the man in the
back seat in his smooth, velvety voice. “I think you’ve been a thorn in my side
for long enough.”
Paul was about to speak but a blow to the side of his head sent him
reeling into unconsciousness.
***
The first face Paul Langdon saw when he regained consciousness was
Clifford Stine’s. He tried to move but found that he couldn’t.
Clifford Stine smiled. “It’s the anaesthetic, Mr Langdon. We don’t want
you going anywhere, do we? Now, I know you’ve been speaking to the police but I
don’t know what you’ve told them.”
“I WOULDN’T TELL YOU ANYWAY,” slurred Paul.
“I figured that much. It doesn’t matter what they know anyway – they’re
far too stupid to find out what we’ve been up to here and what are ultimate
plans are.”
“YOU’LL NEVER GET AWAY WITH IT,” slobbered Paul, “PEOPLE LIKE YOU NEVER DO.”
“Oh, but I already have got away with it, Mr Langdon. And as for people
like me – well, we get away with it all the time. And do you know why? Because
we’re rich and we’re powerful and we’re in control. I’m going to send you on a
little trip – but don’t worry I’m not going to kill you or have done to you what
I ordered to have done to that nice, but nosy, undercover policeman. I have
something far more creative in mind for you – something that you’ve been thinking
about for quite some time now. And guess what – it won’t hurt. The process has
already begun. It’s been in your system for days. All its going take to complete
it is a little prick.”
Paul heard a door behind him open and someone enter the room.
“Ah,” said Clifford Stine. “And here’s the little prick now.”
“Guten abent, Herr Schtein,” said the little prick.
Paul couldn’t move but that didn’t stop his mind whirling around in
perpetual motion. The little prick’s voice had triggered in him a distant
memory from his past. He heard something metallic being dragged towards him and
then the hiss of a gas cylinder being turned on. A shadow fell over him and he
looked up in horror at who he saw before him. He was older now, much older. His
cheeks were hollow and his dark eyes were sunk into their sockets. But he still
had that pencil moustache and the clipped foreign accent.
“Now zen, Herr Lankton,” the dentist said as he moved the black rubber
mask over Paul’s face, “I’m going to giff you some of zis gas to relax you and
zen you vill feel a liddle prick in your arm. It’s nussink to vorry about. It
vill chust make you forget and go to sssssleeeep.”
An automatic reflex made Paul start counting down from ten as the
rubber mask was pressed over his nose and mouth.
10 . . . 9 . . . . 8 . . . . . 7 . . . . . . 6 . . . . . . . 5 . . . . . . . . .4 . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . .
***
He awoke, as if from a dream, on the hillside overlooking the town
where he had a vague notion about picnicking during the summer. He had no shoes
or socks on and he had no recollection of how he got there or how long he had
been there. But it was a nice day – the sun was shining high up in the
cloudless sky, unusual for this time of year. He tried to remember why he had
come to this spot but it was useless. He couldn’t even remember his name.
He looked down at the town and it looked different in the sun – cleaner
somehow, tidier, as if while he’d been asleep someone had gone up and down its
streets with an industrial cleaner. He stood up and the grass too felt
different, springier, and if he hadn’t known any better, artificial. He started
to walk back to the town, down the grassy hill, towards the Railway Station.
It seemed strange walking in the hot sun. The air was quite still and
there were no birds singing. It took him about ten minutes to walk to the
outskirts of the town and he was surprised to see two oldish ladies stood by a
sign that read: NEWTOWN WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS. They were waving at him.
“Coo-ee, luv,” hailed the older of the two. “We were getting worried
about you.”
“Worried? Why?” Paul replied, realising that there was something
different about his voice, softer maybe. He couldn’t really say.
“Well, you’ve been gone for ages.”
“Have I?”
“Yes, absolutely ages,” chipped in the other woman. “What were you
doing up on the hill?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember – and I’ve lost my shoes.”
“Have you had a bump on the head or something?”
“I think I must have – and if I did I can’t remember anything about it.”
“Well, you look a bit pasty to me.”
“I don’t know what . . . have you noticed how quiet it is?”
“Quiet?”
“Yes, quiet. I mean there’s no noise at all. What’s happened to all the
birds?”
“Birds?”
“You know, those little fling things that wake you up in the morning.”
“Flying things? Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll be telling me next you can
travel in space.”
“Well actually you . . . I’m sorry, I’ve . . . excuse me, but who are
you?”
“You must have had a bump on the head,” said the younger of the two. “I’m
Amelia and this is Madge.”
“Right,” Paul said, “look I’m sorry but I can’t remember my name.”
“Good heavens,” said Madge. “I think we’d better take you to casualty.
You must have amnesia or something. Your name – it’s Scott. Scott Carey.”
The cover of The Possum Book of Weird Science, from which this chapter is taken.
