The Hipster Who Leapt Through Time (The Hipster Trilogy Book 2) (16 page)

As if the kitten’s fruit had given them permission, the unsteadiness of the crowd grew.
 

“He’s up,” a female shouted.
 

“Let’s do this,” said another.
 

“Go back
home
, you filthy humo,” said another.

“Forrap Te,” said one of them standing to the side, chasing its tail.

Home? Moomamu thought. But that’s where I want to go!

From the platform he could see the layout of the town clearly. The castle walls extended out around the town, circling a row of houses and the Scrapping Grounds.

Another rotten piece of fruit hit him on his stomach. More followed. Fruit and fishbones and stones. A severed bird’s head landed by his feet, open-mouthed, looking beyond him.

Moomamu tried to make sense of his surroundings. He’d been hung up by his hands on some sort of wooden stage. The crowd were by his feet and they filled the circular cut of grass in front of him. It was a town meeting place. Its borders were shops and houses. Rows of market stalls. A fountain, with yellow water and a broken statue of a cat’s head. To his left — the castle itself. It was huge in comparison to the rest of the town. It loomed over it. A hole and a platform on the top. A viewing place for the royalty and the well-to-dos.
 

He quickly realised that the reason the rotting fruit wasn’t bothering his nostrils too much was because there was something next to him that smelled far worse. The fizz of old meat left outside to moulder in the sun. He turned and saw three more beings strung up. All of them dead. Their corpses shredded and destroyed. Their stomachs on the floor by their feet, flesh falling away in greying strings. Blackbirds on their heads and shoulders, pecking at whatever they could get a hold of. No eyeballs between the three of them.

“Help,” he tried to say again. This time, he found his voice, but it was nothing in comparison to the shouting and the hissing of the cats.
 

“My dear cats of Minu,” a voice said. It was the shouting one, Payton. The same fat moggy from the Scrapping Grounds. Moomamu looked up to the viewing platform and saw the prince with his usual entourage of idiots in their red and white garments. The shouting one, with its long grey fur down its sides, and its red robes draped over its torso. Prince Snuptah, the complete opposite. Slight and wrinkly and only the finest and wiriest of hairs. Hair that reminded Moomamu of his reproductive parts. “Please now, steady your rage for your prince,” the shouting cat continued. “Remember why we’re here and why we have this disgusting human, before you in the centre, on the Minu platform.”

The crowd calmed. Only the younger ones and the outsiders were still hissing, a couple of them still calling Moomamu a “humo”.

“Centuries ago, the humans came through the royal star-door into our kingdom,” Payton bellowed. “When their Pharaohs brought their gifts and their promises. When they told us of their gods. When the so-called great Kufra told us of their ways. Displayed their technology and their kingdoms. The great cats of Minu and Prince Snuptah’s elders welcomed the treacherous humans into our midst and even showed them our sacred ones. The voiceless cats.”

The crowd nodded in agreement. The grey kitten above its dad’s shoulders looked up to Payton with its mouth open giving him a reverence usually reserved for gods.
 

“And after a period of peace and understanding and trading and … shall we say … mixing, the disgusting humans decided to trick and deceive us. They stole some of the voiceless ones and took them through the star-door back to their own kingdom of sand. As such the star-door to Earth was sealed. The humans who remained in Minu were taken to be the prince’s side, servants and whatnot, as the humans had done with our voiceless ones, whom they treated as pets.”

The shouting cat took a few steps back. He went down on all fours and walked back to the prince. Nodded as he gave the prince his ear and then walked back to the edge, standing on his two feet again. From the back of the crowd, there was movement. A narrow splitting down the centre. The crack worked its way through the crowd. He was within spitting distance when his face became clear. It was the alpha, the one-eyed grey. Snuckems. He towered above the others and stared at Moomamu as he walked. His milky white eye scarred down the middle, and his good eye directed at him.

“It is with great sadness I must tell you of a more recent treachery. When the humans were left behind in Minu, we spared their lives. Even though their brethren had committed such heinous crimes, we allowed them to repent and to serve at the prince’s side. You all have seen throughout the years as the human served as the prince’s side, but it was only recently that he and this human we see before us planned to re-open the star-door and to escape back to their sand kingdom. Fortunately, the side was captured and killed before it was allowed to happen. And this human we have here is to set a new law for the humans. A new law that will rid us of this nonsense for all of time.”

The shouting cat waited for Snuckems to make his way up the wooden steps and onto the stage. The crowd began to cheer, low at first, but building.

“Being human,” Payton said, “is now punishable by death.”

As he spoke that last sentence he majestically swung his arm into the air as if conducting an orchestra into a crescendo. The choir of cats in the audience erupted into chaos.

“Snuckems, it is with a great honour that you carry out this human’s sentence.”

The alpha stepped behind Moomamu. The Thinker tried to turn his head, but he couldn’t twist his neck far enough. He could feel Snuckems’s presence, though. He smelt the dirt and the blood in his fur. He smelled of death.

“I’m going to let you in on a secret,” Snuckems whispered, his breath tickling Moomamu’s ear. “I believe you. I don’t think you’re a human at all. I don’t believe you even came through the star-door.”

“Please,” Moomamu said, finding his voice, “let me go.”

“I don’t know
what
you are,” he said. “But I’m going to cut you with my sharpest right claw. Just a small cut, but I’m going to cut you a thousand times. I’m going to cut you so many times that your pale hide gives way and falls to your feet and the red inside you bathes the floorboards.” He walked around to the front of Moomamu and lifted his paw to the sky, brandishing that sharp claw he was referring to and looked up to the viewing platform. The town quietened. Only whispers now. And then the prince nodded his head allowing the crowd to once again erupt. The alpha turned towards Moomamu, purring thunder, and dashed his claw across Moomamu’s ribs.

Moomamu screamed as the cats cheered.

Deanie The Receptionist

“Hahahaha, oh God.” Deanie couldn’t help himself. He placed his hand to his mouth and looked away from the computer screen. “That's the funniest thing I’ve seen all day.” He was referring to a video a friend had posted on his Facebook wall. A video of a black cat leaping onto a cardboard box and falling down a set of stairs. Deanie couldn’t put his finger on what was so funny about it. It had something to do with the initial majestic leap of the cat and then the clumsy tumble down the stairs.
 

“Cats are so stupid sometimes,” he said to himself before clicking the ‘reply’ button on the post and writing those exact words.
 

With a smug little grin, he clicked the send button and shook his head with delight. He took a moment to breathe again without bursting into laughter. Readjusted himself in the chair and looked up and at the reception area.
 

Nothing.

So quiet he could hear the dust hitting the carpet.
 

The red carpet. The cleanest carpet he’d ever seen. Scrubbed every weekend. No footsteps on this bad boy. No, there were no dirty marks on the IPC. The HQ, that is. The London office. From the outside it looked like an average old-as-shit house, renovated for some sort of creative art studio. Like the other hundred or so in central London. If somebody were to walk past, they might expect people inside hooked up to big desktop computers with drawing tablets, talking about the latest pretentious black and white arthouse film he’d never heard of, but the reality was much different. Much, much different.

Where this building lacked in height, it made up for in depth. The IPC created this place just after the millennium to house all of its brainwork. The building itself had nineteen floors. Three above ground level, which were not in use, the reception, and fifteen below that. The only way down was through the elevators behind Deanie and the two on either side of the reception. All of them had doors painted white to match the walls. From a distance, you wouldn’t even see them.

Deanie looked at that red carpet again. The white walls, pristine. The sunlight bouncing in through the window of the front door off the pale off-white.
 

He went back to his computer.
 

Bing. A notification. An invite. Gavin Temple, a friend of his, was having a get-together in Shoreditch that weekend. Gavin’s get-togethers were usually innocent enough. They’d start in the afternoon with a couple of beers and a nice meal and would usually finish at four in the morning, watching the sunrise on a park bench somewhere, drinking the last of the cans, smoking the last of the cigarettes, freshened up from a bit of a tumble in the bushes.

He clicked ‘Maybe’ and looked up again.
 

The red carpet was still there. Empty. As expected. Quiet. The sound of traffic outside. Deanie’d had all the excitement he could expect to have the day before. The woman and her cat. A horrible creature for sure. Cat was kind of cute, though. He had that Thomas O’Malley the Alley Cat vibe. It reminded him of that moggy who used to hang around his mum’s flat in East Ham.

Deanie thought about the day that had set him towards the path that led him all the way to this reception desk. A winding road that started back when he was fifteen. He and his mum were walking through Stratford. He had a bit of fresh bruising from school. His mum promised him some new Converse All-Stars. They were the kind of shoes to make everything better. But in the shopping centre the British Army had set up a recruitment truck. Deanie remembered the two men outside the van, dressed in their green finest. He remembered as one of them looked at Deanie and handed him a flyer. He caught Deanie’s swollen eye and said something along the lines of “There are many kinds of villain in the world, both mental and physical, and joining the army will help prepare you for both.”

That was it. All it took. It didn’t make sense to his mum, but by the time he’d eaten half of his sausage roll he told his mum his plan.

A couple of tours and ten years later and he was back in London. No more hair on his head. A few more wrinkles. And a better perspective on what constitutes evil and ignorance, and how little that difference really was. And working privately for the IPC — who demanded a certain “type” of individual. One with military training. One with—

“Hello there.”

Deanie jumped in his seat and closed the browser window on his computer. He’d somehow managed to find himself on the WTF page of Reddit. He’d clicked on one of the links. One that was labelled NSFW.

“Sorry,” Deanie said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
 

He looked up at the man. A peculiar old thing in a pocketless leather jacket that fell down to his feet. Red glasses that were so tight to his face the rims disappeared into the folds of his brow and cheeks. And his skin: old testicle skin pulled tight around a mannequin.
 

“That’s fine,” said the man. “I did not mean to disturb you. I am simply here to work.”

“We actually don’t have any vacancies right now but—”

“No, my dear friend, I am not interested in seeking any sort of employment of any kind with this establishment or parties herein. No, not at all. I am comfortably employed already. You see, my dear friend, I am here to do the job I was appointed to do. A job in which I will find no satisfaction emotionally, but, like you yourself, greeting humankind from behind your oak desk, are not here for personal goals or motivations, you are simply doing your job.”

Deanie tried to unpack the many strange things about this man and the words he was saying. Maybe he was Dutch? He’d always had a hard time figuring Dutch people out. And that leather jacket? He’d seen something similar when he went to Amsterdam for a stag do and accidentally found himself in the red light district.

“All right Mister Fancy Pants,” Deanie said. “What exactly are you selling? Because let me tell you, we don’t need window cleaners, toilet cleaners, floor cleaners, or even waiters, or servants of any kind. Do you understand me?”

The testicle man’s mouth stirred. The sagging skin that draped over his lips lifted, revealing oddly small teeth below.
 

“I think, dear boy, that it is you who do not understand,” he said. “I believe that somewhere in this building a number of human children reside. I am here to find them and to terminate them. Now, tell me, do you understand?”

Deanie nodded.

“Marvellous,” he said as he lifted his arm and unclipped his coat. The sides of the coat flew outwards, revealing a tight black, single piece of clothing adorned with technology, lights flashing, control panels, and gadgets fixed to his torso. The man reached behind him and revealed a handheld stick. He clicked a button on the side of it and the end sparked with electricity.
 

The man moved with such speed and precision that Deanie didn’t even have time to scream before the spicy end of the stick rammed into his stomach. Shockwaves of pain burst through his body. His hands shook. He felt his head become hot. His skin felt like it was smoking. He could smell his own cooking flesh. A second later and the man removed the stick. Deanie tried to move. His body had seized up. He was still fully conscious, but he couldn’t move any of his limbs.
 

“I’d like to keep the collateral on this one as low as possible, so if you would please cooperate it would be most appreciated.”