Raising the dead might be impossible, but if there was even a small chance of it happening, Robert wanted in on it.
After all, the Lazarus Engine, if it worked, could be used to resurrect more than the dead.
It could be used to resurrect Robert’s ailing career.
CHAPTER FOUR
Henderson opened his eyes and looked around his garden. All was well with the world. His only problem was that he’d slept for far longer than he’d intended, but he still felt tired. As he had nothing pressing to do, he yawned and stretched, and shut his eyes, and drifted off again.
CHAPTER FIVE
Robert was about to turn into his street when curiosity got the better of him.
He decided that however far-fetched it might seem that his uncle’s ideas could bear fruit, he had to investigate the possibility. He drove past the turning he normally took and proceeded further along the A232 towards Sutton, the district of Croydon his uncle lived in. He didn’t bother calling ahead to check whether his uncle would be at home, because he was always at home. Uncle Ted never went out, except to the local shops to buy food and toilet paper. His larder was always bulging and he had a cupboard under the stairs which was jam-packed with Andrex, but still he insisted on venturing out and buying more. Occasionally he hinted that he was preparing for some kind of apocalypse and Robert should do the same. Anyway, he was seldom gone for more than half-an-hour. Ted didn’t like to be parted from his precious work for long.
The sky was a cloudless powder-blue, which somehow made Robert feel optimistic, although, as he would have been the first to admit, he had little reason to be.
The engine in his rusting Ford Focus spluttered now and again because the car needed a service. Robert had been putting that off for months because of the expense. He dared not hope that his uncle’s discovery would be of any use, but if it was, he told himself, he’d be able to afford more than a service. He’d be able to afford a brand new car, and a bloody good one at that.
He allowed himself the luxury of a few fantasies about being promoted over his arch-rival Freddy Barnes and his tyrannical boss Geoff, and making their lives miserable, then buying an Aston Martin with his pay rise and parking it ostentatiously in the company car park between Freddy’s and Geoff’s cars. He pictured himself rising to become the Managing Director of FRTV, and, on the back of that, landing a new job as the Head of BBC or Sky. The televisual world would be his oyster, he thought, if he could just get those old Floyd Rampant cookery shows to pull in the viewers. It wouldn’t be long before the networks would be fighting over him and he’d be able to name his own terms.
By the time that Robert had reached the road that his uncle lived on, he’d worked himself up into such a lather of excitement with his fantasies about being promoted over Freddy Barnes and his Boss Geoff that he pulled into his uncle’s drive at number forty-one Acacia Avenue a little too quickly, and he veered onto the half of the drive that belonged to his uncle’s neighbour who lived at number forty-three.
CHAPTER SIX
Henderson was old and had gone a bit deaf, so he didn’t hear the danger coming. He saw it only at the last instant when he opened his eyes, and by then it was too late to do anything about it, far too late even for him to cry out in alarm.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Robert had no idea that there was a ginger tomcat sprawled across the drive of number forty-three, right in the path of his car. If he had known about it, he would have been horrified and would have put his foot on the brake far sooner than he did. As it was, he only became aware of the cat because of the soggy bump he felt as his onside front wheel ran over it, accompanied by a wet squelching sound which was audible even above the spluttering of his car’s pathetic one litre engine. At that point, he had no idea what he might have run over, but he was aware that he must have run over something. He put on the handbrake and pulled his key from the ignition and got out to investigate.
What Robert saw on the drive made him feel quite ill. It was a ginger cat which had a smug expression on its face, in spite of the fact that everything between its front legs and its hind legs had been squashed completely flat. There were the tell-tale tread-marks of Grip- Performer tyres running across the plate-like middle portion of the cat. Grip-Performers were the cheap brand of tyre which Robert always bought. A red pool was slowly forming beneath the body of Robert’s feline victim. The pool was circular and about two feet in diameter, and it was steadily getting bigger.
Robert felt guilty, almost as if he was now a murderer. He desperately wondered how he might be able to hide the evidence of his slaying of someone’s beloved pet. He noticed a privet hedge running along the side of his uncle’s half of the drive. Because Robert’s uncle was somewhat other-worldly, it seldom got trimmed and had become somewhat overgrown. Robert realised that he could conceal the cat beneath the privet hedge for the time being, and he thought that he might perhaps find a better way of dealing with the situation later, when he’d had more time to think.
He looked around to make sure that no-one could see what he was doing, and then he bent down to pick the cat up. He hesitated, because he didn’t like the thought of touching Henderson and possibly getting blood on his only suit. He straightened up and decided on a different approach.
Robert had been a promising winger when he’d played football at school. He now put his old footballing skills to good use. He quickly dribbled what remained of Henderson up the drive, and with a deft flick of his left foot, he booted Henderson under the privet hedge, where the dead cat was concealed beneath a patchwork of leaves, branches and shadows.
There was a zig-zag trail of blood pointing towards Henderson’s temporary resting place, but Robert reasoned that the blood would soon dry out in the evening sun, and would become almost invisible against the black tarmac of the drive.
Robert wiped his shoes clean on his uncle’s overgrown lawn and went up to the front door of the Victorian semi that his uncle lived in. He rang the bell and waited. He rang the bell again. He waited some more. He wasn’t worried by the length of time that his uncle was taking to come to the door. It was always like this. Uncle Ted found it so difficult to tear himself away from his projects that Robert sometimes had to pound on the windows and even telephone his uncle before he’d be let in. As it happened, on this occasion uncle Ted appeared at the door after only the fourth ringing of the bell.
When he saw Robert, he grinned and embraced him.
“Robert, my dear boy,” he said. “How delightful it is to see you. Do please come in.”
Robert followed his uncle into the gloomy hallway of the house. It smelled of damp, and, so far as Robert knew, it had never been decorated, at least not by his uncle. Everything in the house that wasn’t an item of technical equipment looked old and shabby, except for the basement, which his uncle had converted into a laboratory. That, at least, always looked freshly painted and was kept spotlessly clean.
“I got your text message, Uncle Ted,” Robert said. “It sounded like exciting news, so I thought I better come and see for myself what you’ve been up to.”