The House That Jack Built: The House That Jack Built

entering the lounge on the monitor screen beside them.

Rob stood by the arm of the sofa, cradling the mallet in his arms as one would an infant. He looked down at his wife, stroked her forehead with the back of his hand and smiled as she began to come round. Her eyes were glazed with the drug in her system, and when she looked up at him it was first with confusion then with a rather sleepy smile.

'There you are,' she said dreamily.

'You can see me?' he asked.

'Yes,' she said, though her eyelids were drooping.

'I wish I could,' he said, his eyes dampening. 'I was beginning to think I was completely lost.'

Julia was falling asleep.

'Please don't,' Rob said, touching her face again.

'Hello?' she said. 'Tired…'

'Yes,' Rob nodded. 'They poisoned you.' He rubbed away the beginnings of tears. 'We're both poisoned.'

'He talked about drugging us,' Julia murmured. 'Remember? Threatened it… to make us do what he wanted.'

'All poison makes you do what it wants,' Rob replied. 'This house is the same.'

'Need sleep.'

'I know you do… I hope the drug does make you do whatever someone says. If it does… well, that makes this easier.'

'What do you mean?' asked Julia.

'I love you, Julia, OK? Forgive me for what I'm about to do.'

Julia smiled. 'I do.'

Rob sobbed and raised the mallet above his head before bringing it down with all his strength.

As Jack sat up, a stone broke through the glass of the window, bouncing off the wall and rolling into the corner of the room. He didn't notice, getting to his feet in a daze and stepping onto the landing. There were three doors now, rather than two. He stared at the new door, fixed in what could only be an external wall.

Another stone burst through the window next door.

Jack reached out to the brass knob of the impossible door, opened it and stepped out of Jackson Leaves altogether.

NINETEEN

As Jack stepped through the door, a bell rang above his head, its chime mixed with the sharp hiss of a milk steamer, but it wasn't quite loud enough to drown out the sound of Gene Vincent on the radio. He closed the door behind him, and looked out through the dirty glass that had replaced the wood. Outside was the slow, weekday drudgery of work traffic, lorries and vans, moving things from one place to another.

'Morning, my lovely,' said the woman behind the counter. 'What will it be?'

Jack walked carefully between the tables. A group of spotty-looking mods eyed him from the corner. One of them, working hard at looking more than his meagre years, peered from behind the turned-up collar of his Fred Perry shirt and started tapping his fingers on the formica in an attempt to intimidate. It did nothing of the sort; as a man who had once helped Keith Moon get a Cadillac into a hotel swimming pool, Jack would need a little more sign of the young man's credentials before he felt even vaguely daunted.

The woman behind the counter wore her dark roots with the same confidence as the stains on her waitressing uniform. Stitched into her faded Gingham breast was the word 'Durdles', though whether that was her name or the cafe's he couldn't guess. She looked at him through glasses whose bright red rims brought no cheer to her tired eyes.

'Well?' she asked again, patience as thin as her happy veneer.

'Coffee,' Jack said. 'Sweet and milky.'

'I'm not your mother. Sugar's on the counter.'

So it was, though the spoon was chained down in case he had the hots for their cutlery.

She wrestled with the machine as if it was going out of its way not to produce. It roared and hissed like feral cats in a slowed-down piece of film, vapour ejecting from the pipes with the industrial vigour of a power station. She vanquished it eventually, wringing a mug of frothy coffee from out of its guts.

'Thanks,' Jack replied, cracking the crust on the sugar bowl and spooning in a couple of shards.

'You're welcome to join me,' said a woman's voice behind him.

He walked over to her table and wedged himself as comfortably into the orange plastic seat as physics would allow.

'This is all very real,' he said, puffing gently on the white coffee froth to cool it.

'Reality is so subjective, wouldn't you say?'

She was an elderly woman, hair an immaculate grey confection as rigid as a plastic hat. She wore wool in layers: a pullover, a cardigan and a skirt that crackled when she moved, as soft as a scouring pad. Jack recognised her from the reports Gwen had shown him.

'Is there a particular reason why you look like Joan Bosher?' he asked.

'Not really, though we were rather impressed with her — such a strong sense of self, she never snapped, never lost control. Not many of your species could say the same.'

'We're a fiery lot, it's true.'

He took a sip of his coffee. It tasted of wet air, but he couldn't decide if that was proof of this fantasy's strength or weakness, British coffee in the 1960s had been pretty lousy.

'So, you wanted to see me?' he asked.

'We were curious,' she admitted.

'You're not the only one.'

'Oh, we're not so interesting,' she said, brushing imaginary crumbs from the table top.

'Like reality, interest can be subjective.'

She smiled, and for a moment the room seemed to bend with her lips, the walls rising and the tables distorting as the floor formed an upward arc that followed the curve of her good humour. Then her mouth straightened and the room with it, the floor flattening out with a loud bang.

'True,' she said, as if the contortions around her had proved her point. 'We are from …' she inclined her head as if checking for the words, 'a potential dimension. Somewhere outside what you know of reality…' She smiled again, though this time the cafe had the decency to stay still. 'But then so much is. Your view of existence is rather limited.'

'That's humans for you, terribly parochial.'

'We will make considerations. You are only very basic life forms after all.'

'Too kind.'

'Not at all. As a species, we have a… I think you would call it hunger … for temporal damage.'

'You feed off paradoxes?'

She looked up at the ceiling, and Jack tried not to notice the delicate ripples in the pale, wrinkled flesh of her throat. He didn't know whether it was due to a failure in concentration or a deliberate attempt to freak him out, but there was certainly more than blood moving in her veins.

'That's as close to correct as we will manage, I think,' she said finally. 'Forgive me, but it is complicated, like you trying to explain maths to a dog.'

'I'll work hard to keep up.'

The mods in the corner laughed, though whether at him or not he couldn't tell.

A shadow fell across the room as something unseen flew past the front of the building. Nobody paid it any attention.

'We find a point of interest,' she continued, 'somewhere that already has a delicious flaw, a potential.'