The Unexpected Occurrence of Thaddeus Hobble (12 page)

* * *

Oxygen has a flavour, a taste, and it filled my scabbed mouth as it tried to work further down into my lungs. I cannot describe the sensation, or compare it to any other taste, yet I knew at once that I was breathing again. My eyelids, sealed shut with dryness, fought hard to fight off the pinkish glow they were now presented with after so long with only blackness to deal with. I felt something take hold of my hand.

‘Amazing,' a withered old voice whispered. The first sound I had heard in forever. ‘You live.' My hand was let go of and it dropped back to my side. ‘I apologise for wakening you from your rest, but I must guarantee my own immortality – my end nears.' This was the last voice I'd heard and was now the first. Suddenly he sobbed uncontrollably. ‘I don't want to be frozen like Hobble! I want to be reborn in a new body, just like you Peter.' My eyes slowly opened of their own accord and I saw above me an emancipated old man. His hair, black but greying, and spiky stubble on his cheeks; he let a speck of dribble drop from his chapped lips onto my forehead. Moisture. I was desperate for moisture. I wanted to drown.

‘Hitler,' was a word which found its way out of my mouth.

‘Open your mind to The Space,' a voice encouraged – not Hitler's, but my own. There I now stood, another me, next to the evil mass murderer above me. ‘Everything is nothing. No order, no lies. Deny your anchor, scape the goats.' I couldn't understand myself.

‘Now that the cat is out of the bag,' a voice whispered in my mind. It was an altogether new voice, hitherto unheard by anyone ever. I knew this, and also knew who the voice belonged to. It was mine and it was everyone else's too – the voice of the entire Great Collective rolled into one, the voice of all our hate, anger and resentment at what we had seen, done and had done to us. ‘You must reap what you have sown,' the voice explained. I looked back at myself and Hitler above me.

‘Why?'

‘Reaping is collecting, gathering – a collective of great vastness worthy of personal veneration. It is all you have left to gain, to achieve.'

‘Reaping what?'

‘Revenge, destruction. I am Reaping Icon and the crops are crying out for rain.'

At once I realised the natural conclusion of The Space's gift to humanity, of any gift to humanity – a reaping of ultimate evil. I knew exactly what The Space was – I'd always known. To block It was my only option.

My strength renewed, I threw my being into myself above, leaving the drained shell in the coffin behind. I sealed my old self back in and thrashed Hitler to the floor.

‘I beg of you,' he wept.

‘Oh boo hoo you bastard!'

My hands found themselves around his neck and I squeezed as hard as I possibly could. His own hands were too weak, too feeble, to do anything but hang like a doll's by his side and shake as my assault grew in ferocity. Soon his shaking stopped and his life left this awful place. I dropped him, straightening my back and looking down at what I had done. I felt rather worthless and cruel – and all the more human. Yet, it simply was not a true occurrence – he remained alive above me and I in my casket as a banging sounded in the distance. ‘They are rounding up my escaped subordinates.' He paused, then laughed. ‘I died many years ago, just like you Peter Smith – that is the official
story
. They will never capture me.' The banging intensified and yelling sounded in a foreign tongue. I could not make out their words, but anger and jubilance was definitely the tone. Hitler turned to look in the direction of the noise – laughing again, hysterically, cackling: ‘Mossad! I created Israel, gave the Jews a homeland. My legacy, eternal unrest!'

‘Lies!' one of the voices shouted, this time in English. ‘Our journey home began long before you ever existed.'

‘I want to live again, forever, to witness with my own eyes what I have done,' Hitler cried at me, ignoring their words.

I smelt a gust of wind – delicious, stale wind – move across the room above me as shots fired all around and Hitler ducked out of view. A bullet passed through my own shoulder and my side as I summoned up the desire to feel it – it was not forthcoming. Almost at once I was slamming face-first onto the floor, tipped over and left like a beached jellyfish as more shots fired around and into me. Ahead of me I saw Hitler struggling as one end of a rope was tied around his neck whilst the other was thrown over a rafter above his head.

‘Ein reich,' he yelled as the men around him jeered and drowned him out, ‘ein volk,' he choked out as they hauled him into the air by his neck. His head swelled and his tongue shot out as his body hung there like a caught fish. He was dry, scaly and looked very sad to have had his end brought to him as his side-parting fell over his eyes. He could no longer comb it back.

Now the men turned back to me, but before anything could occur another group burst in and bullets were exchanged. I was picked up and tossed around by the separate gangs as bullets and screams reigned supreme – a cacophony of wasp shrieks. Before I knew it I had a grey hessian sack thrust over my head and my hands bound tightly behind me as I was swiftly moved along and thrown into some kind of vehicle with the engine already running. Soon enough my captors and I were on the move.

It was cold, icily so, and the thought of my senses returning at first gave rise to a euphoria within me before being replaced by utter terror. Where had I been, where was I being taken – and by whom? In a way I just didn't care – I had spent an infinity suffocating in my own coffin only to be let loose and confined once more. Humans were the vilest of the lot, a trumped up beast bent on being an eternal tosser. My anger began to swell and I wriggled in contempt – this landed me an almighty blow to the head.

* * *

The sun woke me up. At least, it felt and looked like the sun. It had been such an age since I'd experienced it that I instantly doubted my self and my senses. I was lying in a huge bed with light brown sheets, almost cream, and could feel every single ache and pain brought down upon me. My head was splitting, my chest was crushing and my wrists were cut and sore. Nevertheless I could move, and move I did. I leapt out of the bed, only to come crashing down straight away. My legs were boney and weak, and I was completely naked. Looking around the room at the high yellow walls, I spotted a black chest of drawers near a door. Pulling myself up and struggling over to it, I opened the top drawer and found the underwear and shirt I needed to conceal my modesty. Once dressed I moved over to a wardrobe against another wall and found in it a single smart brown suit hanging up and a pair of brown shoes to match. I put them on and tried the handle of the door – open. I gently closed it again, staying in the room and walking over to the window. I could see nothing outside but a bright spotlight shining in. There seemed nothing beyond it, either nothing there or nothing worth looking at. I turned back to the door and approached it again, hesitant as to what further pains awaited me outside. At least in here I was alone and it was quiet and trouble-free. For now. Trouble was never far away.

Opening the door wide, I looked out down a long yellow corridor with dozens of doors running along both walls. My options were seemingly limitless and I could not choose which to go through. I carried on walking, right to the end, and now faced the final door – the opposite one to that which I'd exited – turning to look down the long corridor I'd just come down. In a way it felt I'd come up it and not down, though I couldn't decide either way and now chose to open the door I'd reached. It was locked. I waited a moment before knocking on it. Before long I heard a key turning and it opened. Facing me was a man wearing a mask of my face. He was identical in build to me, wearing the same suit.

‘Hello,' he said in a foreign accent, outstretching his hand. Instinctively I shook it, and he pulled me into the room, locking the door behind us. The room was identical to the one I'd just come from and my host sat himself down on the bed. I stayed standing, restless, wondering where my life would lead me next. ‘You cannot know who I am, but I can help you get home.'

‘Home? I have no home,' was my reply. I did not have a home, not one I could remember.

‘Back to your home country, to your family home. You have loved ones waiting for your return,' he said encouragingly.

‘And why do you want to help me get back there?' I questioned suspiciously, unable to fully engage with a mask of my face. The eyes were cut out so that he could see from behind it, but the holes were too small to allow me to actually see
his
eyes. I didn't want to see them – suddenly I wanted what he offered me, a home and a family to return to. There was somebody, somewhere, waiting for me to come home. My cheeks felt moist, so I rubbed them. There were tears coming from my eyes. How strange. What a peculiar thing for me to do.

‘You have suffered enough at the hands of a monstrous man, you must retire to a life of home comforts and relaxation.'

‘Wouldn't the human instinct be to keep me hidden here from the world? Hitler said the world thought he was dead long before he actually was; if that's true, I know too much. I am better off dead.'

‘Trust me,' the man laughed, ‘we have tried to kill you, but you simply recover. You are the indestructible man. We fear you and your powers.'

I narrowed my eyes, rubbing at my stiff neck. I could feel a scar just below my right ear and I followed its course across my neck with my fingers right up to my left ear. Nor had I died in my sealed tomb, where no oxygen could penetrate. I was surely immortal.

‘Who slit my throat?' I growled at the man, suddenly feeling that anger was justified.

‘One of our men,' he answered casually. ‘I put four bullets in the back of your head.'

I charged at him, pulling him up off the bed. ‘By the time I've finished with you, you'll regret every single breath you've ever drawn into your sorry little lungs,' I shouted as I threw him against the wardrobe. The force broke the doors and sent him inside it momentarily, before he came tumbling back out with a thud.

‘The fact you'll finish is victory for me – an end, finitude,' he said calmly back. The mask of my face had slipped off, revealing the very pale, haggard face of a man in his fifties who had obviously worked hard beyond his years. He looked resigned to whatever fate was forthcoming, and I now controlled that fate. I paused my assault, staring down as he looked back up and forced a smile. ‘They threatened to murder my wife and child, so I joined their cause. They murdered them anyway. I grew accustomed to the brutality, accepted the atrocities around me and became a part of them.'

‘You shot me.'

‘You were unconscious, an easy target. I didn't know who you were, and I still don't, but you survived. I have shot many people before, but you are the first to live. That has wakened me up to the crimes I have committed.' His smile had vanished, and his face had turned ashen. ‘I was told it was in the name of my country, in the name of defeating our enemies. Here you are before me, a real person – you are a human being.'

‘Yet I cannot die?'

‘We will never stamp out our enemies, because in reality we have no enemies – we humans just have each other.' I outstretched my hand to his and helped him to his feet. ‘You will return to your country and have your life,' he finished.

* * *

There had been no family waiting for me – they were all dead. There was nothing, save for perhaps everything – a beginning. I could start anew, have my life over. It was now 1961 and I was only thirty-six. I could put aside my past and move on, making a life for myself in the long future ahead. But, did I really want to?

I'd never been used to having friends and, quite frankly, didn't really want any. They were a burden and a tie, leeching off any potential good nature within me. Truthfully, there wasn't much good nature – the horrors Hitler had subjected me to had seen off any sympathy I may have possessed for the human race. I now viewed what I was living as an apathetic sentience; knowing how low humanity sinks on a daily basis but having no ability, or want, to alter it. I felt I outgrew people, moved on from them and onto the next. Oh how self-indulgent to feel myself standing away from the crowd and being an individual – something all of them felt they were doing too. There's nothing different about me, nothing different about any of us. We're all the same, all here just existing and thinking that we're thinking. All that, of course, went out the window somewhat when I met Gary and Sarah Noose. I felt an overwhelming pulse of purity permeating through their being – they were as one unit entirely; completely devoted to each other and beholden of a clean aura. It is difficult to explain fully, but when I looked at, or even just thought about them, I could see a clarity so transparently that it shot me in the stomach. The pain was a drug, a yearning for all of humanity to be the way they were.

It was entirely by chance that our paths crossed. I would often walk alone in Myrtle Forest, vague moments of déjà vu taking me back to some lost childhood centuries ago as Mother pursued me playfully through the long grassy growth. It seemed rubbish and the truth in equal measure, especially when I came across a water well right in the middle of the forest – quite a queer place for one – and there, crouching the other side of it, were Gary and Sarah. Had I seen them at a distance I'd have scarpered in the opposite direction, but now that I was so close I had to interact.

‘Good day,' I said to them, looking down the well. I could see myself jumping in. It was the perfect method of dashing away from this place. They'd probably fish me out.

‘Hello there,' the man replied, getting up. ‘I'm Gary Noose, and this is my wife Sarah.' He held out his hand to shake mine. I obliged. His was a firm workers hand, wrought with rough yet moist skin. He looked about my age, mid thirties – perhaps a little younger, and his black hair was thinning on top. He stood tall and slim, a very smart man, with a healthy complexion.