Storymania - Omega by Bradley Stoke

Omega (45)
Bradley Stoke

"A commuter returning home," I surmised.

"He seemed to be in an awful hurry!" Beta said, frowning. "You don't think he was running away from something?"

"Why would he be doing that? This is the Suburbs. Nothing ever happens here. If anything happens it's somewhere else. Not here. The most dramatic thing to happen here is when a bus is late or there's a power cut."

Beta nodded. "I'm sure you're right. It seems very quiet, I must admit."

We strolled along, occasionally attracting stares from elderly women twitching lace curtains who had probably never seen anyone dressed like Beta in their streets. A pig in a three piece suit wandered by, carrying a newspaper and umbrella in one trotter, and a briefcase in the other. He stared at Beta from the corner of his eye, trying hard to disguise his curiosity.

Every road seemed much the same as every other, and we were soon lost in a maze of identical streets, cars parked in the drives of semi-detached houses and numbers on the doors, just above the vertical slit of the letter box, for the benefit of the otherwise clueless postmen. It was in one street much the same as others we first saw signs that the Suburbs might not be quite as peaceful as we'd imagined. A few cars had smashed windscreens and the entrails of radios strewn over the seats and onto the pavement where the doors had been wrenched open. Dustbins were lying on their sides, with cereal packets, empty detergent bottles and discarded newspapers spilling out onto the pavement. We stepped over the rubbish, and past the crystal fragments of a car window. A newspaper raised itself up from the ground in a sudden gust, and billowed against a hedge. The pages divided themselves and scattered their separate ways on the herbaceous borders and heathers of a front lawn.

"Help me! Help me!" Cried a voice from an upstairs window in one of the houses. We glanced up to see a child in a school uniform waving at us. "Call the police! Get help!"

"What's wrong?" Shouted Beta, standing by the gate.

"We've been attacked! Robbed! It's horrible! My hands have been tied! I don't where Mummy and Daddy are!"

"We'll help!" said Beta determinedly, pushing open the gate and running up the drive to the front door, which we could see now had been forced open on its hinges. I followed her, and into the hallway where clothes were lying scattered on the ground and a picture of a countryside scene had been violently thrown to the ground and broken across the back. An ugly red patch was smeared on the pale floral newspaper and jagged fragments of a hall mirror were splintered on the floor. I dashed up the stairs to where Beta was opening doors and looking inside. She disappeared into a bedroom marked by a tiny floral name-plate, and I followed. Inside was the child, her hands tied behind her back, a hanky tied loosely around her throat where it had presumably been used as a gag and a fresh red and blue bruise on her cheek which was beginning to swell under her eye. Her face was a mess of tears and her legs were tied together at the ankles and knees by sheets that had been ripped off the bed and torn into strips. The bedroom had all the paraphernalia of childhood - toys, videos, cassettes, clothes and comics - thrown all around the place. The doors of her cupboards were open and boxes of more toys threatened to fall out. A large poster of four young men carrying guitars and signed by each was torn across the middle.

"It was horrid! Beastly!" sobbed the girl as we undid her bindings. "These horrid people burst into the house while I was watching telly..." She pointed at a screen which had been thrown onto the floor, its wires pulled out and the glass shattered. "They hit me. They threw things around. They destroyed my teddy. Then they tied me up."

"Who were they?" Beta asked.

"I don't know! They all wore black leather. One was a horrid black hog with horrible horrible big fangs and a black beret. I don't know where mummy and daddy are. Why didn't they help me? Why didn't they stop them!"

"I'll ring the police!" I announced, doing what I believed was the best thing. I strode out of the bedroom into the hallway, wondering where the telephone might be. I pushed open a door on the opposite side of the landing and looked at another ruined bedroom. I saw a telephone sure enough, but smashed to pieces, the bare wire of its leads stretched across the room. This room was ruined just as much as the other. A wardrobe had been pulled over, framed photographs lay shattered about on the carpet and another television was destroyed. I heard a small moan from behind the bed. I strode round to find a middle-aged woman, half of her clothes ripped off, with bloodstains on her bared breast and a nasty gash across her face. Like her daughter, her hands and arms had been tied together, and her mouth was gagged by a silk scarf stuffed into it and trailing over her chin.

I pulled the scarf out. "Are you all right?" I asked pointlessly, as it was obvious she wasn't. "Is there anything I can do?"

The woman looked through me with a wild stare. "They raped me," She moaned. "They raped me!"

I bent over to pick her up, but with a sudden spasm of violent energy she angrily pushed herself off. She collapsed back onto the side of the bed, a trickle of blood dripping from a reddened mouth. "They raped me. Raped me. Why? Why?"

"Can I help in any way?"

"They raped me. Me! Raped..."

I backed out of the bedroom. The best course of action was clearly to get help. I ran down the stairs to look for another telephone: there must be more than one! And indeed there was. In the living room, but similarly destroyed and by the sprawled body of a man in a cardigan, slippers and polyester trousers, whose face lay in a puddle of blood studded with small white pebbles which I recognised with shock as being his own teeth. He hadn't been tied up like his wife and daughter, as presumably there hadn't been any need. I rushed out of the living room, too frightened to determine whether he was alive, and charged up the staircase to rejoin Beta who was comforting the school-girl.

"What's wrong?" Beta asked as I entered. "You look terribly pale."

I didn't know how to answer. The image of the blood on the pile carpet amidst the smashed ornaments and furniture and loose scraps of paper were too clear in my mind. "The phones have been smashed!" I at last answered. "We'll have to use a public telephone!"

The child nodded her head. "There's one just round the corner."

"We'll go there," I said with some determination. "All of us. Together!"

"Why all of us?" Queried Beta with a frown.

I swallowed the bolus of spittle that was rising in my throat. "It's better if we all go!" I said with conviction. "We'll get the police. And an ambulance. They can sort it out."

"An ambulance? Why? What's happened?" Beta asked.

"We'd better go!" I repeated with urgency. "Now!"

"I don't want to go!" said the child. "I want to stay here! With Mummy and Daddy!"

I felt hopeless in my dilemma, but thankfully Beta assessed the horror of the situation with more clarity than the child. "We'll come back straight away. Don't worry! You'll be alright."

Reluctantly, the child agreed, and so we walked out of the house through the scattered ruin of her family's possessions, past the wreckage of the car and along the road, where we could now see that other houses had been attacked. I felt extremely disorientated. This could not be happening! This was the Suburbs. This was not right.

Inevitably, we found that the telephone box had been vandalised. The telephone had been wrenched off the wall, the glass windows of the red kiosk were smashed and a pool of loose change was scattered along the edge of the pavement. When the child saw the damage she burst into a fresh torrent of tears. "We'll never get the police! Why did they do it? What are they doing? And where's Mummy and Daddy?"

"We'll find another telephone box," said Beta soothingly.

"We won't! They'll all be smashed! It's not fair! I'm going back home! I want my Mummy and Daddy!" She then dashed off, her thin white legs flicking back and forth as she ran.

Beta looked startled. "We ought to chase after her!" She said, staring at me. "She can't be just abandoned!"

I couldn't deny the moral urgency of Beta's assertion, but I wasn't at all sure I knew what we could do. I was frightened of returning into the girl's home where her parents were in such a bloody state. However, I left such thoughts behind me as I dashed after Beta back where we'd come. We ran round the corner of the avenue where her home was, to see her screaming and running off at a tangent down a cul de sac to one side. She was soon out of sight, her sandalled feet pacing along a path between houses, and we saw what had frightened her.

I had never seen such ugly gargoyles before in my life, and certainly not in the Suburbs. And there were so many of them. Cruel faces, with vicious fangs and horns, wings protruding from the backs of some of them, destroying cars, smashing windows and shouting at each other. Most of the gargoyles were no more than three or four feet high, but one particularly ugly specimen, with the face of an eagle and savage long claws towered high above the others, whooping with joy at the destruction meted about him. Beta and I similarly turned about and dashed down the pathway, marked by a sign featuring the silhouette of a walking man.

We ran and ran through a maze of paths running alongside and behind the gardens of deceptively peaceful streets, having lost all sight of the child, and now much more concerned about our own safety and survival. At last the paths emerged into another avenue, much the same as the ones we'd left but thankfully lacking in any evidence of vandalism or violence. We paused by a telephone pole, leaned against a garden wall, and panted in short urgent breaths.

"Who were they?" Beta asked.

I shook my head. "I don't know. They don't come from the Suburbs. They must have come here looking for the Truth."

"They don't look like they were particularly interested in the Truth. Whatever they're here for, it's not to find the Truth. The only thing they seemed interested in was destruction!"

We walked on, unsure which direction to go and in any case totally lost in the grid of streets. It seemed here at least there was nothing to worry about, although when we tried to use a public telephone box to alert the police we found the lines were uncharacteristically dead. I put down the receiver with disgust.

"Surely, they must know what's going on!" Beta remarked. "All that couldn't be going on without the police knowing!"

My Suburban faith in the police persuaded me to agree with her, although I was troubled that an institution which normally cleared away the evidence of car accidents and suicides in the Suburbs with commendable haste and efficiency should be so absent when most needed. I nodded, and walked along with Beta, squeezing her hand tight as much to comfort myself as her.

It was then that we saw the figure of the Artist approach us, unsteadily wandering from side to side along a road that was mysteriously free of traffic. As he came closer we could see a bloody gash disfiguring his chin, caked blood on his upper lip beneath his nostrils and his smock badly ripped and revealing much of his hairless chest. When he saw us, he ran his fingers through his blood-soaked hair, and smiled weakly.

"They set fire to the Art Gallery! They burnt it down! All those masterpieces! All the Biriyanis, Tortellinis and Salamis! Destroyed forever! Unforgivable! Absolutely unforgivable!"

"Are you alright?" Asked Beta with some concern. "We were terribly afraid they might have killed you."

The Artist bent his head down and despairingly clasped his forehead in his paint-splattered fingers. "I'm alright. I think. But the Art Gallery is totally destroyed. Everything! Up in smoke! Never to be seen again. The treasures of the nation. A priceless national heritage! Gone forever. Forever!"

"How did you escape?" I wondered.

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