Hellogon Read online

  HELLOGON

  by

  John Booth

  Published by Night Publishing, Smashwords edition

  Copyright 2010, John Booth

  ISBN 978-1-4523-9559-3

  Thank you for downloading this e-book. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.

  All characters are fictional, and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is accidental.

  To discover other books by John Booth, please go to http://www.nightpublishing.com/id47.html.

  THE ESTABLISHMENT

  Prime Rules for Engagement with the Enemy

  Rule 1

  Never Gamble Unless You Have No Choice

  Rule 2

  Always Make Sure

  Rule 3

  Discover The Local Politics

  Rule 4

  Make Friends And Use Them

  Rule 5

  Trust No One

  Chapter One

  Doorways

  Peter Craig followed his mother through the busy city streets carrying the large rucksack containing all his worldly possessions. Shoppers packed the streets despite the seedy nature of this part of the city.

  The air smelt of melting tarmac, diesel fumes and fast food, blended together into a fetid smorgasbord by the hot sun beating down on the streets. Peter’s mother, Melinda Craig, Mel to everyone, carried a large suitcase that had seen better days. Only one of its clasps worked and the only thing holding it together was a ragged leather strap, the last nine inches of which dragged along the pavement. Mel checked the ‘A to Z’ of the city in her right hand as she tried to navigate them to their new home.

  Less than an hour ago, they stepped down from a coach into the central bus station. At first the bustle of city life lifted Peter’s spirits, now it wore him down with each step they took and he longed to be back in the house in the country that had been his home his entire life.

  “It’s just down this road, Peter. It won’t be long now!”

  Mel tried desperately to create feelings of adventure and enthusiasm in her son. Peter recognised the falsehood in his mother’s voice despite her skill in hiding it. After all, part of his training was to recognise lies, but he felt he needed to pretend too, if only for her sake. This whole mess was hardly her fault.

  “Can’t wait, Mum. City life’s going to be so much more exciting than being in the country.” Peter spoke with as much false enthusiasm as he could muster, given how hot, tired and dirty he felt. His large winter coat wouldn’t fit into his rucksack so he wore it instead. It might take it days to dry out from the sweat he had poured into it over the last half hour.

  Drivers honked their horns at each other for no apparent reason as Peter and Mel made their way down the street. It was long with three story red-brick buildings on each side and only the narrowest of alleyways leading off between the buildings. The street contained the kind of shops desperate people use to buy or sell their few possessions. They passed a pawnbroker specialising in electronic and electrical gear.

  A display of televisions that had seen better days stood stacked on top of each other, all switched on with speakers blaring. The faces on the screens varied from far too red to a sort of witch green. In the shop window, behind a set of iron bars Peter spotted a few electric guitars and amplifiers. He realised this was a shop of failed dreams and aspirations when it came down to it. You can buy someone else’s dream and watch it fail for you, he thought cynically as the weight of his possessions sat heavily across his shoulders.

  The next shop on their side of the street had the name Solly’s Furniture Emporium stencilled in big letters above its plate glass window. The large unprotected window revealed old chairs, tables and sofas piled up higgledy-piggledy inside.

  How customers were supposed to get close enough to examine any of it defeated Peter. It looked more like a wrecker’s yard for scrapped furniture than a working shop. A small fat bald man in sweat shirt and jeans watched them pass from just inside the shop door. Peter and the man’s eyes met; the man nodded at him as if they knew each other. It shocked Peter enough to stop him dead in his tracks, resulting in the two people behind running into him. They came close to knocking him over and pushed past him muttering crude Anglo Saxon words.

  “Come on Peter. We’re just about there,” Mel called out from somewhere ahead and Peter started walking again. The man in the shop had vanished from sight while Peter had been trying to stay upright.

  Mel found the address they were looking for in the next block. They passed a narrow alleyway, just wide enough for a small van to drive down, before coming to a Chinese fish and chip shop. A recessed door was set in the wall beyond the chip shop frontage. Three dimly lit bell push buttons adorned the recess. Mel pushed the top button and waited. They couldn’t hear whether a bell rang over the noise in the street. After a couple of minutes of waiting in vain, Mel pushed the button again and the door swung inwards violently as if connected to a giant spring.

  A middle aged woman with a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth and sour lines over her face stared accusingly at them, “Wadya want?” she asked, as if daring them to have a legitimate answer.

  “My name’s Melinda Craig, Mel to my friends, and this is my son Peter. I arranged to rent a bed-sit here a couple of days ago.”

  “Whydinyusayso,” the woman snapped at them and turned back into the corridor, leaving the door open for them to come through. Melinda dragged her suitcase across the threshold and Peter followed reluctantly. Inside, a short hallway stopped at a set of steep narrow stairs. As Peter closed the door and shut the city outside, he felt staggered by how quiet it became. The hallway stank of old cigarettes, stale beer and a sweet smell that seemed to be a cross between vomit and urine.

  An old greyish carpet gave way underfoot as though the floor boards beneath were rotten. The carpet had once possessed a pattern of which a few traces remained, but the pattern was impossible to distinguish. The worst thing about the carpet was that it was sticky. Every step Peter took required him to pull the soles of his shoe clear before he could move on. It felt like walking over a thin layer of wet chewing gum.

  The woman disappeared up the stairs and around the corner before Mel managed to get her suitcase up onto the second step. “I’ll do it, Mum,” Peter offered, moving in front of her to drag the suitcase up the stairs.

  “Be careful, Peter. The steps are very narrow.” Mel cautioned as she pushed him upwards by his backpack. Somehow they managed to make it to the top of the stairs in one piece.

  At the top of the flight they found a long landing going back in the direction they’d come. At the far end they saw another flight of stairs. The woman waited impatiently for them at the foot of the stairs.

  Halfway along the landing Peter saw a dark red door with 27A stencilled on it, a door otherwise bare except for a spy hole and a Yale lock. There wasn’t a handle on the door, just a bent out metal plate on the Yale lock.

  “We are in 27B.” Mel told Peter cheerfully as she took back her suitcase and stumbled along the landing. The thought of reaching their new home gave Mel a second wind. She scurried up the stairs after the woman before Peter managed to reach the first step. He felt so tired and depressed it took him a full minute to get to the top of the flight and felt as if he was about to faint when he finally reached the top.

  The second floor landing was deserted. Peter walked forward a little warily wondering where his mother was. Another dark red door waited along the landing, identical to the one on the floor below except for the stencilling, which read 27B. Peter approached the door and found it ajar. He pushed the door open and walked into the dark interior.

  The door open
ed into a pitch black short hallway. Doors led off to the right and left and a small amount of light showed from the gap underneath the door. The little hallway was oppressive and Peter felt as though he had walked into an old box because the air was so stale. The door to his right opened, flooding the hall with daylight and blinding him.

  Mel chattered excitedly as he stood blinking. “Come on, Peter. I though I’d lost you. Shut the outside door, will you, love? Not that I think we’ll have to worry about burglars.” Mel pulled her son into the room.

  The room was twenty feet long and fourteen feet wide, about halfway the room narrowed on the right to ten feet. That end constituted the kitchen with a stove and sink along the wall. Above the sink, a large old fashioned iron-framed set of windows covered most of the wall. The window consisted of four panes of glass with a pair of panes sitting above the pair below. All the window panels could be opened on hinges.

  As Peter walked into the kitchen area, he saw the windows looked out onto the back of the shops. Leaning over the sink to look down he saw a corrugated roof where the shop below had been extended back on the ground floor. A large steel chimney spewed out chip fat fumes at one end of the corrugated roof. Peter didn’t think they would be leaving the windows open very often.

  A door opened to the right where the room narrowed. Peter thought this must lead to a bedroom. He was about to investigate when he realised the woman stood impatiently, waiting for his mother to do something.

  “Four weeks rent in advance,” the woman snarled and Mel fumbled in her purse to find the appropriate money. Peter sat on one of the kitchen table’s tubular steel chairs and waited for the landlady to go.

  When the landlady had gone, Peter and his mother explored their flat. The door did lead to a small bedroom. Peter found its window overlooked the alleyway between the buildings. The bed ran along the outside wall and when he knelt on it, he could see the furniture shop’s wall on the other side. There were signs of bricked up window in the wall opposite. Peter saw its outline in the different coloured red bricks.

  The other door in the hallway led to a larger bedroom and a bathroom fitted with an old enamel bath and an even older looking toilet. The larger bedroom looked out onto the main street and it was very noisy when they opened its window. The bathroom had a crazed window with an air vent at the top. The vent had rusted solid in the open position and the room echoed with the sound of cars from the street below.

  The furniture in the flat must have been at least twenty years old and had seen a lot of wear. Someone must have spent time repairing the furniture and while the repairs were effective they made the place feel tatty.

  Mel decided to take the bigger bedroom, which was fine with Peter. The small bedroom, with its window looking out onto a brick wall suited Peter’s mood. After they ate the sandwiches Mel had prepared at their old house and drank some tea, both of them wanted to have a quick bath and go to bed. Peter would have preferred to take a shower but that wasn’t an option, so he settled for a quick cold bath. It had to be cold because neither of them could figure out how to light the boiler. The instructions stuck to its side had faded into illegibility.

  Peter put on his pyjamas and tried to get to sleep on the lumpy bed. He soon realised that despite being tired, he had too much adrenaline running through his veins to sleep. He decided to kneel on his bed and stare out of his window instead.

  By sitting up, he discovered he could observe the alley below, though it was too dark to see very much. At ground level of the furniture store he spotted a bricked up door. When a van drove through the alley he got a good look at it in the glare of its headlights.

  Peter spotted a Goth girl standing in the shadows just beyond the door. She could have been any age from fourteen to her mid-twenties because she wore so much make-up it was impossible to tell. She had jet black hair, eyes that mascara had turned into black rings like a panda and she wore dark blue lipstick. She wore a loose black blouse, black micro skirt covering black leggings and stiletto heeled black shoes. She fascinated Peter.

  The alley became so dark the wall on the other side disappeared from view and the girl vanished in the gloom. Only a limited amount of light from the neon orange street lights in the main street penetrated into it.

  Peter opened his window as wide as it would go so he could look down and listen for any noises. The alley lit up as a door opened below Peter’s window. It was the mirror of the filled-in doorway and the projected light created the illusion of another door in the wall. Peter saw the shadow of a man wearing a long coat go through the door. The door closed and the alley was once again plunged into darkness.

  Over the next hour, the door opened and closed many times. Peter discovered that the Goth girl was still hanging around. Every time the door opened, she inched closer to the filled-in doorway while staying on the far side of the alley. Peter wondered if she was a prostitute, but he noticed she hid from the men.

  He had his suspicions about where the door downstairs led to because he heard female giggles and once what sounded like a shriek when the door was open. Nobody spoke though, which struck Peter as odd. The door opened to let people out while visitors gave a single knock to gain entry.

  The strains of the day were getting to Peter and he yawned loudly as the door opened for the fiftieth time. The Goth girl ran across to where the light from the door created the illusion of a door in the brickwork. She looked up towards Peter’s window.

  The girl looked terrified, but it didn’t stop her turning to the lit wall, opening the brickwork as though the light was a door and stepping through it into darkness. The wall became a wall again, as the other door closed and the alley returned to darkness.

  Chapter Two

  Morning

  Peter awoke sure that what he saw the night before was simply a vivid dream. Walls do not open as though they are doors and girls do not walk through solid brickwork.

  There was nothing to eat for breakfast and Mel needed to go out and buy some suitable clothes for her new job. The last thing Peter wanted to do was to spend the day clothes shopping with his mother. She would have to go in every shop she could find at least twice before she could make up her mind about anything. Worse, there were probably a large number of clothes stores in the city centre.

  “I’m going to go out and have a look around,” he told his mother when she asked him what he planned to do.

  “Here’s a fiver.” Mel fished a crumpled five pound note out of her handbag. “You won’t be able to buy much with it, Peter, but it’s all I can afford right now. We’re going to have to be careful with money, at least until I get my first wages from the new job and that won’t be until the end of the month. You can buy fish and chips if you want.”

  Peter laughed. “Mum, fish and chips for breakfast isn’t a great idea. I need to get a part time job, at least until I start at college. Assuming you can find a college that’ll take me.”

  Mel looked downcast. “You shouldn’t need to find a job, Peter. I feel so guilty.”

  “It’ll be good for me, Mum. And since I don’t expect you to finish your shopping until tonight, it’ll give me something to do.”

  Mel looked a little annoyed at her son’s assessment of the time it would take her to shop, but then she smiled and gave him a kiss on his forehead. “Don’t forget your key and don’t lose it. It opens the outside door as well so you won’t need to disturb Mrs May to get in. Have a good day!” Mel picked up her handbag and headed for the door.

  “You have a good day too!” Peter called after her as she rushed out of the flat, slamming the door behind her.

  * * *

  Peter drank his tea before leaving the flat. Even though he didn’t believe his memories from last night, there was a wall he wanted to examine very carefully. He hadn’t wanted to go there too early, as he knew people tended to get suspicious of teenagers hanging around early in the morning.

  He left the front door of the building into blinding white sunlight. The High Stre
et ran north-south and the sun rose between the shops across the road. A gap between buildings allowed the sun to shine directly onto Peter’s face. He moved into the alley to escape the glare. Standing in the shade, he could feel the tingling chill of the morning air for the first time. He was sure it would soon fade as the sun rose high enough to warm the streets.

  The alley looked particularly seedy in the crisp morning light. Fish and chip papers lay scattered across the pavement in front of the shop and down into the alley. The greasy smell of cold chip fat is never very appetising and, in this case, there was also the fetid aroma of vomit and alcohol coming from a couple of yellowish puddles at the edge of the alley. There was enough of another familiar scent to convince Peter this alley was a convenient urinal for the local drunks.

  The alley was about ten feet wide and cobbled with grey stones. Double yellow lines had been painted over the cobbles while a sign instructed there was to be no parking at any time. It was too narrow to have a pavement and the buildings rose up fifty or sixty feet on both sides, giving the place a claustrophobic feel.

  The alley was surprisingly free of graffiti, with only a few faded signatures and gang signs sprayed along its walls. The signs gave Peter the impression they were warnings, rather than the posturing of young men compensating for the size of their sexual organs. Peter had very clear and negative views on people who messed up where they lived.