He had found his father boring, was all. He had always had the sense that the faintly aggressive man, who lived alone after Billy’s mother’s death, had found Billy the same. It had been several years since he had let contact wither.
“Do you remember Saturday morning television?” he said. He had meant to tell Leon about the man in the jar. “I remember this one time.” Showing his father some cartoon that had enthralled him, Billy had seen the bewilderment on the man’s face. The inability to empathise with his boy’s passion, or pretend to. Years later he reflected that that was the moment-and he no older than ten-Billy started to suspect that the two of them did not have much of a shot of it.
“I’ve still got that cartoon, you know,” he said. “I found it recently, streamed on some website. You want to see it?” A 1936 Harman-Ising production, he had watched it many times. The glass-jar inhabitants of an apothecary’s shelves on an adventure. It was extraordinary, and frightening.
“You know what happens,” Billy said. “Sometimes when I’m preserving something or doing something in the wet labs or whatever, I clock that I’m singing one of the songs from it. “Spirits of amo-o-o-onia…’”
“Billy.” Leon held out a hand. “What’s going on?”
Billy stopped and tried again to say what had happened. He swallowed and worked against his own mouth, as if expelling some glutinous intruder. And with a breath finally he began to speak what he had intended. What he had found in the basement. He told him what the police had offered.
Leon did not smile. “Should you be telling me this?” he said at last. Billy laughed.
“No, but, you know.”
“I mean, it’s literally impossible, what happened,” Leon said.
“I know. I know it is.”
They stared at each other a long time. Leon said, “There are… maybe there are more things in heaven and earth…”
“If you quote Shakespeare at me I will kill you dead. Jesus, Leon, I found a dead man in a jar.”
“This is heavy shit. And they’ve asked you to join? You going to be a cop?”
“A consultant.”
When Leon had visited the squid, months before, he had said wow. Wow like you might wow a dinosaur skeleton, the Crown Jewels, a Turner watercolour. Wow said like the parents and partners who came to the Darwin Centre for someone else. Billy had been disappointed.
“What are you going to do?” Leon said.
“I don’t know.” Billy looked at the mail that Leon had brought from downstairs. Two bills and a card and a heavy package in brown paper, tied up old-style with hairy string. He put on his glasses and cut the string.
“Are you seeing Marginalia later?” he said.
“Yeah, and don’t take that tone when you say her name or I’ll get her to explain it to you,” Leon said. He fiddled with his phone. “She has a whole riff.”
“Please,” said Billy. “Let me guess. ‘The key to the text is not the actual text itself, but…’” He frowned. He did not understand what he was unwrapping. Inside the package was a rectangle of black cotton.
“I’m texting her, she’ll love this,” Leon said.
“Oh Leon, don’t tell her what I’ve been saying,” Billy said. “I’ve already said more than I should…” He prodded the cloth.
The package moved.
“Fuck…”
“What? What? What?”
They were both standing. Billy stared at the package, unmoving on the table where he had dropped it. There was silence. Billy took a pen from his pocket and poked the cotton gently.
The cloth gave. The package opened.
It bloomed. With a gasp of air it concertinaed, expanding, out-flicking and filling out, and what reached from its end was a hand. A man’s arm, in a dark jacket sleeve. The flash of white shirt at its end. The emergent hand grabbed Billy by the neck.
“Jesus-” Leon pulled Billy away, and the package, still gripping, pulled back, braced against nothing.
Billy was held, and the package continued to unfold. Tongues of cotton flap-flapped open, black and blue and shoes now at the end of limbs bulking into presence, as if the matter of them was uncramping. More arms unrolled clumsy as fire hoses and shoved Leon hard away.
Like plants in sped-up motion, emitting grunts of release, a stale sweat-and-fart smell, and a man and a boy stood suddenly on Billy’s table. The boy stared at Leon staggering to rise. The man still gripped Billy’s throat.
“BLOW ME,” THE MAN SAID. HE JUMPED OFF THE TABLE, WITHOUT releasing Billy. The man was wiry, wore old jeans and a dirty jacket. He shook long greying hair. “Shiver me, that was horrible.” He looked at Leon. “Eh?” he shouted, as if wanting sympathy.
The boy stepped slowly onto a chair and then to the floor. He wore a clean, oversized suit: Sunday best. “Come here, lad.” The man licked the fingers of his free hand and pressed down the boy’s mussed hair.
Billy couldn’t breathe. Darkness closed on him. The man threw him against the wall.
“Right then.” The man pointed at Leon, who froze, as if pinned by the gesture. “Watch him, Subby. Watch him like a little night-badger.” He pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at Leon. “He makes a move, give him what-for. Now then.” The boy stared at Leon with too-wide eyes.
“Yeah,” the man said. He sniffed at the doorframe. “She ain’t bad. Good notion, this, if I say so my own self, out of my boy’s head. As because what we do not have here is anything nixing egress. Now we’re in there’s nothing to stop us getting out.” He leaned toward Billy. “I say, there’s nothing to stop us getting out. Didn’t think of that, did you? You ferocious little whatnot.”
Billy made a scratchy sound in his throat. The man put a finger to his lips, glancing expectantly at the boy, who slowly did as he did, and gestured shhhh at Billy, too.
“Goss and Subby do it again,” the man said. He unrolled his tongue and tasted the air. He clamped his hand over Billy’s mouth and Billy sputtered into the cool palm. The man went room to room, tugging Billy, licking floor, walls, light switches. He drew his tongue across the face of the television, leaving a spit-path in the dust.
“What what what specimens have you got here, lepidopterist?” he said to the bookshelves. He pulled out books and dropped them. “Nah,” he said. “I can’t taste not but shit of it.”
Leon was suddenly up and running at him. The man whoops-a-daisy-ed and sent Leon sprawling. “And who might you be?” he said. “One of the young master’s friends, hm? I’m afraid the doctors all agree that the lad needs complete isolation, and while your hijinks I’m sure are a tonic, they’re not what young Mr. Billiam needs. I may have to eat you, you unfortunate young macaroon.”
Leon moved and the boy stepped toward him, all predator-fish eyes. The man wheezed out smoke, though he had no cigarette, had sucked no smoke in.
“No…” Leon said. The man opened his mouth, the mouth kept going, and Leon was gone. The man dabbed the corners of his mouth like a cartoon cat.
“Alright you,” he said to Billy, who gasped and fought the relentless fingers. “Got your jim-jams? Toothbrush packed? Left a message for the milkman? Good then, let’s off. You know what airports are like and little Thomas doesn’t travel well and I don’t want to get stuck in a queue behind a group-booking to Ayia Napa, can you imagine? You promised and promised me a quiet weekend away and it’s time, Billy, it’s really time.” He clasped his hands and raised an eyebrow. “You can hush your noise and all,” he said to the boy. “I don’t know, I really don’t, you two! Onward.”
Tugging him by the neck, the man took Billy out.
PART TWO. UNIVERSAL SLEEPER