Mr Snatch really didn’t cut much of a dash any more as
he stood all alone amongst the wreckage of civilisation without even any shoes
or socks to call his own. He knew that his expensive suit trousers would never be
the same again and he’d never before been as happy that he’d listened to his
mother’s advice to always wear a vest as he had been during that long night
spent out in the cold.
Happily, as he scrambled about in the dust, he came
upon a couple of discarded (or perhaps lost) boots of dubious pedigree which
almost fitted him, despite the fact that they were not a pair, and were both
made for left feet, and neither was without its fair share of holes.
Nevertheless they were enough to protect his feet from
the harsh points and shattered rubble that lay amongst this landscape and they
would have to do until he was able to find something better to replace them,
and his feet, which for a long time had been clad in little other than the
finest bespoke hand-stitched and beautifully crafted leather which tended to
fit like a glove, were grateful of any kind of protection as he began his long
trudge towards the only visible sign of life he had so far seen in this
god-forsaken place.
What troubled him most was that, once again, he had
been brought to somewhere cold, almost as if somebody somewhere was trying to
make some kind of colossal point about something, but as he shivered at the
sharpness of the biting wind, he realised that a vest, some Italian silk and a
non-matching pair of borrowed boots was not going to keep him warm enough, and
getting nearer to that distant fire was already becoming his main immediate
aim, and hopefully he would be getting there before that weak sun dipped below
the horizon.
He had plenty of time to think as he made that long
trek through the wasteland. After all, he wasn’t really certain whether he was
actually here or not. Yes, he had been able to interact with Olive, however
uselessly, and yes, Mr Snipe’s daughter had been able to hand him a glass of
warm punch and hang up his sodden clothes, and, of course, his footprints had
appeared in the snow so that those hounds would have been able to track him
down.
If it hadn’t been for that one act of kindness shown
by Mr Snipe himself in taking pity on a stranger, he trembled to think about
what might have happened, but he still didn’t seem to be making any difference
to anything, and whenever he got too close to being able to be an effective
force for change, he got whisked away and shown something else instead which
also, inevitably, seemed to be his fault in some small way.
Would the strange powers that were constantly shifting
him around actually have allowed him to die in one of these places? Would they
be that cruel? Or were they just showing him the consequences of his actions,
or even the actions of his ancestors, in the hope that he might emerge from the
experience a “better” and not a bitter man in some way…? There was much to
ponder on, and he was grateful of the distraction as it stopped him from
thinking about how cold it was getting.
Thankfully, as the last fingers of daylight caressed
the night sky before bidding adieu, he arrived at the base of the twisted mess
of iron and steel which formed the ivory tower, and was not at all surprised
that it appeared to resemble his own tower back at home, wherever that was. It
was almost as if someone had picked it up and shaken it so that most of the
insides were now on the outside, and it might almost be said to be an inversion
or perhaps an explosion of the tower which part of him still believed that he
was perhaps still sleeping within.
Tentatively he entered what appeared to be currently
acting as a doorway, and shouted a feeble “Hello…?” before following it with a
louder, more confident variation.
“HELLO!!?”
But no response came out of the darkness, even though
it did appear that somebody was living here. He stepped further and further
into the familiar yet unfamiliar lobby and headed for the glimmer of light
which seemed to indicate signs of life coming from upstairs, and tripped over
an old trunk, spilling its contents all over the floor.
He was rather grateful to find that the trunk
contained some almost perfectly and most definitely carefully preserved
clothing and he threw on an overcoat which seemed to fit him terribly well and
resembled the one which he had hung in his own office on that very last morning
before the party.
It even still had his own invitation in an inside
pocket, and he opened it up to find that the dancing blue cube still seemed to
be working, even after everything else that had happened. He reached into the
other pockets, but didn’t find anything else that was useful, but then he
remembered that he usually had a pen on him somewhere and he fished into his own
soggy trouser pockets and did indeed find one tucked into one of them,
alongside, bizarrely, that strange triple (and more) sided card bearing
Marley’s message that had been on his desk and which he was sure that he had
thrown away.
Typically, he still didn’t actually read what was
written upon it, which caused the watching Marley to roll his eyes in utter
frustration at the idiocy of the man he was dealing with, but instead scribbled
a quick note of introduction to whomsoever it was who turned out to be living
here.
Then he tucked both into a pocket of his overcoat and
headed upstairs towards the light, where he thought he could hear a familiar
sounding noise, a noise that seemed so bizarrely out of context that he almost
couldn’t believe his ears.
Was that an episode “The Good Life” that he could hear
blaring out from a TV set somewhere…?
No comments:
Post a Comment