The House That Jack Built

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 café'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 café 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.'

'The Rift,' Jack muttered.

'Oh no!' she laughed, the vibrations of her mirth shaking all the tables in the café. 'We barely noticed that until after we'd latched on to your universe. It was you! You light up this continuum like a beacon.'

The shadow passed again, this time flipping across the backs of the vehicles as the unknowable creature that cast it landed on the roof.

'The damage you have done to the time stream is almost incalculable,' she continued. 'Come from the future, steal from the past… I lost count of how many of you we detected in — using your relative year markers — 1941.' She reached out and took his hand. 'You get so involved! The first rule of time travel, my dear, leave the locals alone — if you don't want to attract our attention — ' she smiled and her teeth stretched like clarinet reeds from her gums, long, yellow and eager to cut and chew — 'and believe me you don't. Changing things, people and events, that draws attention. You're a force of nature, Jack, a temporal tsunami, and we tasted you.'

Her tongue fell between the elongated rows of teeth, flopping onto the back of his hand where it curled and licked, enjoying the salt of his skin.

He tried to pull his hand back from her grasp, but she held it tight.

'We found that little house of yours, where, as always, you did so much damage…'

'What damage?'

'So unrepentant! My darling boy, there were two time lines damaged before you'd even had time to let the welcome mat gather dust.'

Jack became aware that there was a couple sitting at the table next to them. He knew it was Miles and Alison without even having to turn. Could tell by the cool drips of river water he heard fall from Alison's slack mouth onto the formica.

'Small fry by your standards, I'll admit,' she continued, dabbing the tip of her tongue on the web of skin between his fingers, 'but the building had such potential. So, we reached for it…' she extended a bony index finger, 'and pushed …' her fingertip disturbed the air around it, sending out ripples, 'forcing ourselves further and further into the universe.'

'Why didn't I notice?' Jack asked, tilting his head as the ripples from the disturbance in the air ricocheted off his brow.

'We've only just started, barely longer than this conversation in your relative time. Our presence echoes all the way along the building's time line, altering things, distorting them… But your position as a time traveller offers you something of a unique perspective. You remember the past the way it was before we started to interfere. Jackson Leaves wasn't always the soup of violence and paradox that it is now; we just made it that way — in less time than the waitress took on your drink, mark you. All the better to feast when we reach inside far enough.'

She bit at the knuckle on his little finger, drawing a drop of blood, before letting go of his hand and withdrawing her tongue back inside a shrinking mouth. Within moments she was just simple Joan Bosher again.

'And we will feast soon,' she added. 'You've time to drink your coffee but not much more than that.' She pushed the mug towards him.

Jack got to his feet and walked towards the door. He yanked it open and swore as he found the road on the other side. Above his head he could hear the sound of whatever dream creature perched on the roof as it tightened the grip of its talons on the guttering. He stepped back into the café.

'Just drink your coffee,' said the thing that looked like Joan Bosher. 'Once feeding has been instigated, there's no turning back.'

'Relax,' suggested the waitress, picking up her dirty cloth and dragging its mouldy fabric over the counter. 'It's only a universe, after all.'

'Take the weight off,' said the more aggressive of the mods, walking towards him.

'Just lie back…' added Miles, looking toward his waterlogged wife.

'…and take it,' Alison gurgled.

Jack thought for a moment before marching over to the mod, picking him up by the lapels of his parka and hurling him through the glass of the door. The glass shattered and the mod winked out of existence, even as the room in Jackson Leaves reappeared on the other side of the fracture.

'Don't lay the table just yet,' warned Jack, stepping through the hole in the door and back into his universe.