Genie and Other Weird Tales (4 page)

“The paint balling incident?”

“Yes.”

“So he wanted you to go on a shooting spree? To shoot people with paint pellets? Isn’t that what you were meant to be doing?”

“But he had a real gun!”

Roger shook his head. “Honestly Henry, you need to concentrate on reality. The things that are really stressing you out.”

“That's not so easy when you're being stalked by a six foot lizard.”

“Did you contact Julian?”

“Yes, we had a few emails back and forth. He said he'd give the business the once over. Charged me a grand, said it was a massive discount. So I sent him the details of the code repository.”

“And?”

“That was three weeks ago. I haven't heard anything since.”

“Well, he's a busy man. He's got blue chip clients. You're probably not that high up on his agenda. It'll take a while I reckon.”

“But in the meantime I've got to put up with Lachlan.”

“Oh Henry...” Roger shook his head, sipped his ale, and thought for a bit.

Henry looked around the pub, envying the people who jostled, drank and laughed, enjoying their simple, lizard-free lives.

After a minute or so, Roger spoke again. “Lets suppose,” he said, cocking his head slightly, extending his index finger, “that Lachlan, demon Lachlan I mean, has a purpose.”

“Yes?”

“Now I’m no expert on these things, but often in ghost stories the spirits are pacified when they're asked what they want, when their needs are addressed.”

“So you think I should ask Lachlan what he wants?”

“It’s worth a go.”

“But he’ll just say he wants to smash and kill everything.”

Roger shrugged and smiled agreeably. “It’s either that or have you committed and pump you full of anti-psychotics.”

That evening Henry was saved from having to answer a particularly awkward question from Elaine by a phone-call. It was Julian getting back to him about Copyware. He went out to the shed to have the conversation.

“Thank's for getting back to me, Julian, I know you're super-busy.”

“No worries Henry. It's been interesting. I'm going to send you a written report but I just thought it'd be nice to actually have a chat about it.”

“What's the verdict then?”

“Well, I'm not sure it's really my domain. You're in digital marketing aren't you? So, fast turnaround, disposable, novelty, high impact apps?”

Henry shivered. It was much cooler in the shed tonight, he thought. “Er, well, we're hoping to disrupt the advertising industry.”

“Really?” There was a burst of static in Henry's ear, then an escalating series of shrieks. Julian's laugh had evolved from a kookaburra cry to the alarm call of a rhesus monkey.

“So... a verdict?” Henry was finding it difficult to speak, as though his mouth was full of glue.

“I don't know what to say really Henry. I mean, it looks like a lot of different people have had a good go at simulating some sort of AI. I didn't have any trouble getting it to run, but I had a whole heap of trouble figuring out what references what. It's like a mish-mash of those sites that compose random sonnets and limericks. There's a weird standalone class that's heavily commented with some pretentious rubbish about Chomski and structuralism. Then there's an attempt to tie it all in with a machine learning library. It's a heap of spaghetti tangled up with nuggets of bullshit.”

“I see,” he said, although he didn't. It was just more jargon. Alex would be able to counter it with jargon of his own.

“I hope you haven't spent too much money on this, Henry.”

“Er, no, just an experiment really.”

“Fail fast, that's what they say.”

“Sure.” Dry gums, head throb, a sense of Lachlan looming in the dark.

“You could make a great spoof site out of it.”

“Right.”

“Send me the link if you do. It'll be hilarious.”

“Thanks, Julian.”

“Oh and Henry?”

“Yes?”

“Don't worry about the second five hundred, ok?”

“Really?”

“Mates rates. I think you're gonna need it more than me.”

Henry killed the call and sat in the dark. Julian's hideous laugh still rang in his head, and his anger and fear coalesced before his eyes as Lachlan, Lord of Nightmares, Scourge of the Weak. A horrible rattling and wheezing came from the reptile's throat.

“Christ Lachlan, you're the last thing I need right now.”

“I'm the first thing you need right now.”

Henry remembered Roger's advice. “What is it that you want, Lachlan?” he said, trying to look the beast in the eye.

“Go tell Elaine you're skint, the business is worthless and you're not moving to a castle in the country.”

“Ha!” Henry shook his head, then let it sink into his hands. There was awful pressure building in his skull.

“And I want you to stop being spineless.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re pathetic. You swallow your rage.”

“I don’t have any rage,” said Henry to the floor, fighting rising nausea.

“You swallow it. You give your money to lazy Alex, and then when Elaine asks were is it you scuttle out here to play with your matchsticks.”

Henry realised that the pressure and nausea he felt was a reaction to the truth of his situation, and the truth in those words. He relaxed his grip he had on his feelings for a split second, and the lizard's image faded. Then Lachlan was inside him. The rage he'd resisted for so long filled his body, swelling his jaw muscles, his throat, his torso, and scouring scales formed a layer beneath his tender skin. He looked at his hands and was surprised not to see a pair of scaly claws.

“Oh please God, no, make it stop,” he said aloud, but his voice was a guttural rasp. He staggered as his stomach contracted and he vomited forth the evening's shiitake and quinoa fricassee over the leaf blowing machine that lay with the junk at the back of the shed.

“Make it stop,” he said again, his voice a rasping whisper now, the words a reflexive echo. He no longer wanted it to stop. He'd ceased trying to control the unfamiliar energy that had caused him to vomit and he felt it run freely through his veins and form a current that made each nerve and synapse hum with conviction, a delicious feeling of being right and of having been wronged. The last words Elaine had said to him that evening resounded in his head:

“When are you going to stop Alex from pissing our money away?”

He made his way out of the shed, across the garden and into the flat.

The sitting room was quiet, with Ruby curled up by the radiator and Elaine dozing on the sofa. A home improvement magazine resting on her swollen belly, she looked serene and peaceful, as if she was dreaming of herself in the bright and glossy interiors in the magazine rather than the damp and pokey basement.

“You have no right to say that!”

Elaine opened her eyes and winced. She looked around blearily, then looked up at Henry and said, “What?”

She had no appreciation or understanding, Henry told her, of the effort and complexities involved in starting a digital business from scratch. And she was taking his money for granted. She bullied him into long term plans they couldn't afford, and then blamed him when he didn't come up with the goods. She satisfied her ego by doing a low paid worthy job while he had to go out and grapple with the harsh world of business.

Elaine did not take kindly to her usually diffident and evasive husband suddenly confronting her out of the blue, having had a pretty long day at the wellness clinic. They traded bitter narratives for a while, then Elaine burst into tears and left with Ruby, saying that she was going to stay the night with Aunty Sarah, that she'd had enough of Henry’s bullshit, that he really needed to sort himself out.

In the silence that followed the slamming of the front door Henry noticed his anger had left him. In its place was a familiar tension, emptiness and despair. He stood for a while looking around the room, at Elaine’s discarded magazine lying on the coffee table next to a bottle of nail polish, at a cobweb flailing in the air. In the kitchen the fridge hummed and a tap dripped. He could hear cars swooshing by beyond the window.

He noticed a wheezing and a darkness on the periphery of his vision, then a guttural rasp.

“Oh you’ve really done it now!”

He turned and saw Lachlan wearing Elaine’s dressing gown, his twitching yellow eyes brimming with joy. “You fucking loser. She was the best thing you had.”

“I thought you told me to stand up for myself.”

“It’s just you and me now, Hen. We’re gonna have a ball!”

Henry phoned Roger, and told him what had happened.

“I know,” said Roger. “Elaine called me. Said you’d flipped and become obnoxious. She's really upset. What on earth did you say to her?”

“Oh… nothing much. We were just talking about moving and so on.”

Lachlan wandered into the kitchen, shaking his reptilian head. He started looking in all the cupboards, yanking them open and slamming them shut.

“Really?” said Roger.

“It got a bit heated. I… took things out on her.”

Lachlan opened the fridge and looked inside. “Ah!” he rasped. “Meat!”

“Henry... is... is
he
there?”

“You’re not going to have me locked away are you?”

“Er, no… but I think you have to sort yourself out. Things are getting out of hand.”

“They certainly are,” said Henry as he watched Lachlan put a packet of mince on the kitchen counter, claw it open and scoop a handful into his mouth.

“So, what are you going to do about it?”

Henry was silent for a while. He watched Lachlan take a bottle of vodka from the freezer and swallow a third of its contents in one gulp.

“I think I know what I’ve got do do.”

“Really?” Roger didn’t sound convinced. “Do you want me to come round?”

Lachlan winked at Henry and nodded frantically, mouthing “Yes!” His face was smeared with fragments of mince, some of which he licked off with his whiplash tongue.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea at the moment, Roger.”

Lachlan rolled his eyes, then wandered into the living room. “Yummy yummy yummy yummy – meat and vodka in my tummy!” he sang in his deep, guttural rasp.

“Ok, well you know where I am if you want me.”

Henry hung up. Lachlan sat down at the little desk in the corner, in front of Elaine’s laptop. He hit the space bar twice, grunted with satisfaction as the screen flickered into life, entered the password and started to clack the keys and tap the mouse pad with his claws.

“Hey, how do you know the password?”

“I know what you know, retard. Now give me your credit card.”

Henry rubbed his eyes. “How long are you going to be here?”

“Until the sky collapses and the ground yields up the dead.” He clicked around a bit more, and then started to type very fast and rhythmically.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Typing your confession.”

Henry walked over and looked. He recognised his own smiling, grinning Facebook picture, and saw that Lachlan was typing “I am a Spineless Cunt” over and over again into his status bar. He seized the little laptop and snapped it shut, then pulled the plugs out of the wireless router and seized that too. Lachlan made a disappointed grunting sound.

“Too spineless for
honesty,
” he growled, and flicked his eyes around the room looking for a new diversion.

Henry hid the lap-top and the router in a cupboard in the kitchen, and then took the bottle of vodka from the kitchen counter, went into the windowless bathroom, locked the door and sat on the latrine. He looked at the bottle in his hands. It was going to be tricky drinking enough vodka to get to sleep, but not so much that he was still drunk in the morning. In fact, vodka was not the ideal drink for getting to sleep. Red wine was best. With a decent meal. And Elaine’s gentle laughter and impish eyes…

There was something in the bath. Henry looked up and saw a dark shape moving behind the shower curtain. There was a coarse guttural humming, and splashing and squelching and slapping. Henry swore, got up and yanked back the shower curtain, and what he saw made him shriek and gag. Lachlan grinned up at him from a bath full of worms and maggots writhing and crawling in a viscous black liquid. He was wearing Elaine’s shower cap, and brandishing her loofah, which looked as if it had been dipped in crude oil. The smell of rotting meat was overwhelming.

“Lachlan must be clean! Lachlan must be clean!” chanted the lizard.

Henry pulled the curtain back across the bath, and sat back down on the toilet, cradling his head in his hands. “Lachlan this really is too much. I’ve got important stuff I need to do at work tomorrow.”

“I know you have. That’s why I’m here,” croaked Lachlan from behind the curtain.

“What?” Henry looked up with an exasperated frown.

“To stop you from being spineless.”

For the first time in years, Henry started to cry. Not just weeping, but proper convulsive sobbing. “Oh listen to that!” hissed the voice from behind the shower curtain. “Shameful. Pathetic. A spine of pure jelly.”

Henry got up again and went into the kitchen, put the vodka back in the booze cupboard, and opened a bottle of Merlot. He spent the rest of the evening sitting on the sofa in front of the TV, with the remote control and the telephone on his lap. He flicked through all the channels, eventually finding an interesting looking French film. Lachlan sat next to him, applying Elaine’s nail polish to his claws. He kept grabbing the remote, switching over to the Freeview porn channels and chanting “Lively breasts and quivering buttocks!” as though it were a hallowed mantra. Henry frequently had the urge to phone Elaine, but Lachlan would whisper that she thought he was useless and would never return, so he didn't bother. After a second bottle of Merlot, he started to feel drowsy, and it became harder to read the subtitles, so he let Lachlan have the remote. Eventually, he fell asleep.

He was woken by a rhythmic scraping and ringing.

After a few seconds gauging the strength of his hangover and wondering what fresh horrors the day would bring he heaved himself from the sofa and looked around for the source of the sound. Lachlan was standing in the kitchen area, dressed in a light grey suit, a white shirt and a tie. Blotches of black viscous liquid from the bath last night had soaked through the shirt. He was briskly scraping two large knives together. “Morning, sleepy head,” he growled.