'Hm,' I said.
'Don't 'њHm'ќ me, you little shit.'
'Did I say Hm? I meant, of course, Yeah, right!'
'The bag has been held in safe keeping by my family for four generations. We are its guardians.'
'But I thought you said it was only a copy.'
'Look, it's the only copy, all right! Just look upon it as something precious that's been lost.'
'Stolen, surely?' I said. 'I mean you didn't just mislay this precious object, did you?'
'It's gone missing, that's all. A policeman called Inspector Kirby came to see me about Billy's disappearance, and he got involved with the handbag and then the handbag went missing.'
'The policeman nicked it?'
'No, he didn't. It's just gone missing, OK?'
'If you say so, but I really don't understand any of this.'
Mrs Barnes made little sighing sounds. 'All right,' she said. 'I'll tell you everything. But it's a tale of terror. Of gruesome deeds and eldritch horror. Once you know the full story you will understand why the handbag must be returned to my family. And you will know things that few living men know and fewer still wish to know.'
'I'm all ears,' I said.
'Then I must whisper.' And she whispered.
And I listened.
And then she whispered some more. And I listened some more.
And then she did a bit more whispering. And I threw up all over the floor.
'That's a nasty bit, isn't it?' she said. And I agreed that it was.
And then she whispered a whole lot more. And then she finished.
'And that's it,' she said.
'And I'm very glad to hear it,' I replied.
And then she made me solemnly swear that I would not mention a word of anything she'd told me to anyone else.
'Trust me,' I said. 'I won't mention it to another living soul.'
And I have, of course, remained true to my promise.
Maladroit Mal
6
The quality of weirdness has always been high.
BOB RICKARD
A True History of Billy Barnes
The child that is truly different rarely ever looks that way. It has always been instinctive in the herd to drive off the 'different one', no doubt to ensure the purity of the species. This is definitely the case with mankind. Children learn early to mock the fatty, or the thin kid, or the one with the ginger hair, but they're not taught to, it's instinctive, they can't help themselves. They just do it. But the child that is truly different, the individual who will one day grow up and change society, alter the direction of the herd, this child often has a defensive camouflage. This child looks like all the rest.
But he's not.
Billy Barnes looked like all the rest. He looked a bit like Dave Rodway, with those dark eyebrows. And a bit like Norman Crook, with that snubby nose. And he had Peter Lord's shoulders, and Neil Christian's knees and Peter Grey's feet and so on and so forth. In fact he looked pretty much like everybody other than himself.
Which made him quite hard to describe, really.
But he was different.
And the difference was all on the inside.
Billy Barnes was a regular boffin. He was, quite simply, the brightest kid in the class. In the school, probably. But he kept it mostly to himself. Once in a while it bubbled right up, as in the notorious 'man walks into the desert' affair, which earned him considerable contempt and cut him right out from the herd for a while. But he was soon back, strictly low-profile, blending in with the rest and not looking out of place.
He was a subtle manipulator, Billy. Always up to something, but no-one knew quite what.
He was different, you see.
And he always had 'business elsewhere'.
There are now well over one hundred Billy Barnes web sites. These range from the official World Leader corporate pages that list Billy's business interests as resource management, social engineering and off-world development, to the Unofficial Conspiracy pages that have Billy down as the sole cause of all the world's ills.
Today the face of Billy Barnes is the best-known face on the planet, but you'd still find it hard to pick it out from an identity parade.
Exactly how Billy rose to his exalted position of ultimate controller has never been satisfactorily explained or fully chronicled before. Rumour has it that an unofficial biography, exposing Billy as an arch criminal, depraved pornographer and all-round bad egg, was withdrawn before publication and destroyed in the great Health Purge of 2001, along with all other books, newspapers and printed material. But that is only a rumour and the man who spread it is long dead, cut down cruelly in a freak accident involving handcuffs and an electric drill.
So what do we really know about Billy?
Well, not a lot.
We do know that at the age of twenty-three he went missing and that ten years later, at the age of thirty-three (which may or may not be a significant age), he reappeared and swiftly took control of just about everything.
But there's an awful lot of unanswered questions. It is interesting that those who knew him at school remember him only as the boy who answered the 'man walks into the desert' question and for very little else. It is to be noted that all the great prophets have their missing years, and that each of them walked into a desert. Entering as a man, but returning as a son of God.
So what went on with Billy?
Well, let's go back and see.
If you enter the village of Bramfield from the end where the common is, turn right at the mini-roundabout that everyone drives straight across, pass the restaurant that is always changing hands, the off-licence run by the fat bloke with the earring, and the newsagent's where they sell the dreary greetings cards, you will come to the war memorial.
It's only a very small war memorial, because it was built by public subscription and the public weren't too giving, but it's there all right if you're prepared to look hard enough. And if you do look hard enough and you take the left where you find it, you'll find yourself in the lane where Billy lived.
There is no road sign on this lane. The elders of Bramfield felt that the name of this lane was not in the best possible taste, so they had the road sign taken down. The name of this lane is Colin Regis Lane.
As you may know, the word Regis is tacked onto the name of a town to signify that some old king or queen of times past slept there and liked it very much, as in Lyme Regis or Bognor Regis. Exactly who Cohn was is now anyone's guess, but he was obviously someone who caught the royal fancy.