The Machine That Goes Ping
Part 3
The rain’s stopped.
I’ve been working for DOX for a week now, and I’m not really any closer
to an answer on the whole “Why” question. Apart from the reality bulge,
we know very little. But I’m getting ahead of myself, I was going document
the exposition I got last week, the reason I was hired for this gig.
When the rain started, there was panic, and DOX was briefed to deal with
the event, after the Home Office discovered how far out of its league the
entire debarcle was going. They collected, analysed and watched the rains.
Datum after datum filtered though HQ and lead to… nothing. The rain,
once it had infected the thing it fell upon, became perfectly ordinary
rain. The effect of this was to slightly disolve the recently confectionaried
object, thus giving the results we were looking for. Since every container
and material we attempted to catch the rain in before it hit the ground was
always infected, it was impossible to get a clean sample of whatever it
was that was doing all of this. It had to be scientific and logical, after
all.
Doctor Blecker was a mother. She still is a mother, although she’s now a
somewhat distraught mother of one healthy baby daughter and an ever-
decreasing amount of gingerbread where her son used to be. Attempting
to convince a child not to eat itself, esspecially when itself is now
tasty gingerbread, appears to be impossible. Sedating the child was
equally ineffective (How do you pacify a biscuit?). Blecker is on
indefinate leave as of a week or two ago (I’ve never met her, this
is all hearsay and office rumour). Doctor Blecker was one of the team
assigned to research the scientific makeup of the rain phenomenon.
One night, after leaving work early to spend some time with her kids,
she was reading fairytales to her daughter. Specifically, she was
attempting to read the story of…
The pages were blank. There was a man whose wife died leaving him
with two children, then he remarried, and the kids and step-mother
didn’t get on (They never do) and then they just lived. Eventually
he died, happy and alone with his wife. That was it. No Hansel, no
Grettle, and certainly no evil witch. Blecker thought it was a joke
at first, but since it was the same book, handed down from her
grandmother, as she had read from hundreds of times before, there was
no way. The story was gone, blank, rewritten as if Hansel and Grettle
had vanished. Almost as if the inital plan to make them disappear had
worked and they had never…
… they had never found the gingerbread cottage. Synapses flared in
Blecker’s brain. Impossible, obviously. The idea was stupid and
ludicrus. Except the story had vanished from every fairytale book in
the house. From the tellings on the Internet. Eventually, they discovered,
from every scientist’s house, from every library, from every book.
Hansel and Grettle had disappeared from everywhere outside peoples’ heads.
Time to call an expert.
That, apparently, was me. The worlds only secret agent folklorist. Or
the closest one, at any rate.
I am, quite obviously, at a loss. The only thing I can think of is to
go to the place where the rains first fell, where the next stage
of this attack has begun, where my single remaining lead – an anonymous
phonecall to the DOX switchboard – leads.
It’s time to take this show to Cambridge.
Where the fairies are.
The content of this site is © Nicholas Avenell 2001-2006 (With a couple of exceptions, read the page)
Aquarion