12
Elsewhere other early recumbents were stirring to the sound of fire-engine bells and the cheers of an assembled throng of spectators. There was a fair amount of noise and chaos, smoke and flame, when the front bedroom floor at twenty-seven Silver Birch Terrace collapsed, bringing with it a hundred-thousand volumes of Poe and an apparently comatose postman of below average height.
When the firemen, who had been amusing themselves by flooding neighbouring front rooms and washing out carefully-laid gardens, finally finished their work upon Small Dave’s house, the ambulance men, who had been grudgingly aroused from their dominoes, moved in to claim the corpse in the interests of medical science. They were more than surprised to find the postman sitting virtually uncharred in the ruins of his living room, legs crossed and bearing a baked sprout in his right hand. He wore a smiling and benign expression upon his elfin face and seemed to be humming something. Shrugging helplessly, they wrapped him up in a red blanket and bundled him into the ambulance.
When the sound of its departing bells had faded, along with those of the appliance, away into the night, the observers of the holocaust drifted away to brew cocoa and prepare for their beds. Eventually just two members of the jolly band remained, one a fellow of Irish extraction and the other a man with a twitching right forefinger.
“What now?” asked John Omally.
“A nocturnal tournament?” Pooley suggested. “One for the road before we turn in, how does double or quits suit you?”
“Very well, I think you owe me something for the evening of embarrassment you have given me. Care to put an extra wager upon the course record?”
Pooley, who considered his sobriety to give him the natural edge, nodded enthusiastically and the two men wandered off towards the allotment. Omally affected the occasional drunken side-step in the hope of adding weight to Pooley’s conviction and causing him to bet a little more recklessly.
It was a clear night. A hunter’s moon swam above in the heavens, edging the corrugated sheds with a priceless silver. The course was illuminated to such a degree that there was no need for the employment of the miner’s helmets Pooley had improvised for late matches.
The allotment gates were barred and bolted. An officious Council lackey had also seen to it that they were now surmounted by a row of murderous looking barbs and a tangle of barbed wire. Exactly why, nobody could guess. Pooley and Omally were obliged to use their own private entrance.
“A nine-holer or the full eighteen, Jim?”
“The night is yet young and I feel more than equal to the task, remembering that you are already deeply in my debt.” Pooley quietly unlocked his shed and withdrew the two sets of hidden clubs.
Omally tossed a coin. “Heads,” he said, as the copper coin spun into the night sky.
Had the falling coin actually struck terra firma, as one might naturally have assumed that it would, it is possible that the events which followed might never have occurred. It is possible, but it is unlikely. The coin tumbled towards the allotment dust, until it reached a point about three inches above it, and then an extraordinary thing occurred. The coin suddenly arrested its downward journey and hovered in the air as if now reluctant to return to the planet of its origin.
The two golfers stared at it in dumb disbelief. “Now that is what I would call a trick,” said Jim, when he eventually found his voice. “You really must teach it to me on some occasion. Wires is it, or magnetism?”
Omally shook his head. “None of my doing,” he said, crossing his heart solemnly, “but it has come up heads so I suggest that you tee off first.”
“Not so fast,” Pooley replied. “The coin has not yet reached the deck, it might have a couple of turns left in it.”
“It has clearly stopped falling,” said John, “and that is good enough for me. Kindly tee off.”
“I think not,” said Jim, shaking his head slowly and firmly. “I am not a man to call cheat, but the coin’s behaviour leads me to believe that something a little phony is going on here. Kindly toss it again.”
“You want the best out of three then?”
“No, the best out of one. I should like the coin, as the biblical seed itself, to fall upon the stony ground!”
Omally shrugged. “I confess my own astonishment at the coin’s anarchistic behaviour, but I feel deeply insulted that you should even hint at duplicity upon my part. Trust being the bond which cements our long friendship, I suggest that we simply let the matter drop, or in this case hover.”
“Toss the coin again,” said Jim Pooley.
“As you will,” said Omally, who had now determined that he would cheat the second toss come what may. He stooped down and reached out a hand towards the hovering coin. He was rewarded almost instantaneously by a crackle of blue flame which scorched his fingertips and sent him reeling backwards into the shadows as if suddenly hit by a speeding locomotive. “Ooh, ouch, damn and blast,” came a voice from the darkness.
Pooley sniggered. “Must be a hotter night than I thought, John,” he said, “Get a touch of static did you?”
Omally gave out with a brief burst of obscenities.
“Tut tut.” Pooley stretched out a tentative boot to nudge the copper coin aside. This, in the light of Omally’s experience, was an ill-considered move upon his part. For his folly he received a similar charge of energy which caught his steel toecap, arched up the back of his leg and hit him squarely in the groin. “Erg,” he said, which was in technical terms basically accurate. Clutching at his privy parts, he sank to his knees, eyes crossed.
Omally crawled over to his gasping companion’s doubled form. “I take the oath that this is none of my doing,” he said, blowing upon his charred finger-ends.
Pooley said, “Erg,” once more, which was at least an encouraging sign that life still remained in him.
“Oh no!” said Omally suddenly. “Not again.” The dust beneath the hovering coin had cleared to reveal the grinning metallic face of yet another runic ideogram. As the two men watched, a faint glow seemed to engulf it; growing steadily, as if somehow charged from beneath, it bathed the symbol in a sharp white light.
But it was no light of Earth. Although the symbol glowed with a dazzling brilliance, the light seemed self- contained and threw no illumination on to the awe-struck faces of the two golfers. Then, with an audible crackle, the light rose in a green column, a clear laser-like shaft, directly into the night sky.
“Erg, erg,” went Jim, gesticulating wildly in many directions. All over the allotments identical columns of light were rising. They soared into the black void of space, and although they dwindled to whitened hairs, there seemed no end to their journeyings.
“Say this isn’t happening,” Omally implored.
Pooley could only offer another “Erg”, which was of no comfort whatever. In fact, as a means of communication the word “Erg” was proving something of a dead loss.
Just then the lights went out. One by one they snapped off, leaving the night as it were untouched, although Pooley and Omally knew very much to the contrary. Pooley at last found a tiny croaking voice which had been hiding at the back of his throat. “What were they, John?”
Omally shook his head. “I think that it is possibly God’s way of telling us to give up golf.”
Pooley found this explanation doubtful to say the least. “God, I think, is generally a little more direct about these things. A great man for a thunderbolt is God. But whatever it was, it was the final straw, the allotment has lost its charm for me.”
“I can sympathize.” Omally struggled to his feet and took to dusting down his tweeds with his one good hand. “With wandering camels, vanishing council spies, symbols and searchlights, there does seem to be an unwonted amount of activity hereabouts of late.”
“I’m for telling the Professor,” said Jim, getting a perfect mental image of a whisky decanter.
Omally had taken to soaking his scorched fingers in a nearby water-butt. “I think,” said he, “that the Professor has pressing business of his own. But, as you see, the coin has now reached the ground.” He pointed towards where the rogue penny now lay upon the exposed symbol. “And even though it is still ‘heads’, in the face of the unfortunate accident which befell you I am willing to concede the toss.”
“Thank you.” Pooley stroked his trouser region gingerly, the old three-piece suite was smarting like a good ’un. “I have quite gone off golf now, I should prefer a glass or two of nerve tonic rather better.”
“Aha!” Omally tapped his nose. “I think there might be a bottle or two of such stuff maturing even now in my hut, would you care to step across?”
“I would indeed, but slowly now, I am not feeling at my best.”
