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Douglas Abernathy's Morning, by Alec Abernathy

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It was 1942, Alec, [said my father] and those were dark days indeed. The war had been going on for three years, and seemed unlikely to end any time soon. I had been seconded from my usual duties to assist at a research laboratory in Scotland, where we were in the process of developing rather unusual methods of combating the German attacks. I remember one suggestion which the top brass took very seriously was the possibility of creating battleships from gigantic blocks of ice. That particular idea came to nothing in the end, but Churchill was keen for us to explore every possible avenue – because he knew that the Germans were doing the same. There were rumours of the Axis powers sending expeditions in search for Atlantis, the Holy Grail, and even for the entrance to Pellucidar!

Our work was usually a little more mundane than that, interesting as it was, and I had ants in my pants. Ever since my teenage years, I had been used to a life of globe-trotting investigation and scientific adventure. It was very difficult to find myself chained to a desk, especially when so many brave men were losing their lives in pitched battles around the world. I saw the sense in it, of course – as one of the finest scientific minds in the country, I would have been wasted on the front lines, but by God I wanted to get out there and fight the Hun myself!

The particular day on which I received the call from the head of the British army began quite inconspicuously. I woke as 5.45 am, as has always been my way, and went quickly to the bathroom, to shave. As you know, son, I hate nothing more than to attend breakfast with a hairy face, and of course, I always eat breakfast at 6.00 am, no exceptions allowed! The shaving went well, with only a few tiny nicks here and there, despite my having to use cold water. It was thanks to my razor, one I had inherited from my father, who inherited it from his father, and so on back to the time of the Jacobite rebellion, during which its blade had been tested upon the neck of many an Englishman! Though that bloodthirsty age was now long gone, and we Scots now worked hand in hand to fight an evil much greater than that of any English king, that ancient blade, now turned to peaceful use, never failed to show its love for the Abernathy hide, in treating it with a delicacy unrefined!

I quickly dressed – perhaps too quickly, as I am so often told by your mother, but the space between 5.45 and 6.00 am allows not of over-nicety in such things. If I left my room with my trousers on, I reached the bottom of the stairs happy.

“Well, hello there, Mr Abernathy,” said Mrs Bottomley, the dear old girl who looked after us so well.

“Hello, Mrs Bottomley,” said I, with what began as a tip of my hat, but became an embarrassed scratch of my head as I found no hat upon it. “Does it look nice out?”

“I am afraid not. You must remember to wear your scarf today! And you must promise to finish all of your hot chocolate before leaving!”

“For every drop of that delicious hot chocolate I leave,” I said, “a drop of my blood will stay to keep it company.”

“No need to go so far,” she replied, with a queer look on her face. “Come into the dining room, and have your breakfast.”

“With pleasure,”  said I.

I followed her into the dining room as I had promised, and sat myself down. None of the other men who took rooms with Mrs Bottomley were up yet, as usual, so I had the whole spread to myself. Hot chocolate, of course, and sausages, bacon, beans and eggs, with toast and crumpets afterward, with strawberry jam of Mrs Bottomley’s own creation.

Once everything had been served, Mrs Bottomley took a seat and poured herself some hot chocolate.

“I hope you have a pleasant day at work today,” she said with a smile. “Although I know you can’t speak of it.”

“Quite right, Mrs Bottomley. As you know, the military takes its secrets very seriously, especially during times of war! Were I to tell you of even the smallest facet of my day, even, for example, whether I would expect to feel the sun upon my face as I worked, you would immediately be suspected of being a Nazi agent. Without the slightest doubt, you would be tortured mercilessly by counter-espionage agents until you confessed everything!”

“My goodness,” said the kind old lady, “don’t tell me a thing, then! Torture does not agree at all with my constitution! Why, I remember one time during my years as a Christian missionary, I fell into the hands of the most dreadful savages, and I confess that I had a small accident at the very thought of being roasted!”

“Was that enough to dissuade them from their intended course of action, Mrs Bottomley?”

“It might well have been,” said the old dear, “were that indeed what they meant to do. It turned out that there was more to fear from their appearance than their appetites. They were an awfully kind bunch, who went out of their way to return me to the nearest town.”

“Did they clean you up first, Mrs Bottomley?”

“Indeed they did, Mr Abernathy, but unfortunately, as they bathed me in the waters of the Amazon river I picked up a terrible case of amoebic dysentery! They carried me all the way to town on a stretcher with a hole in the bottom!”

“Oh, Mrs Bottomley, you and your tall tales!”

“Well, Mr Abernathy, if you will persist in stirring me up!”

Leaving Mrs Bottomley behind to do the dishes, I went into the hallway for my hat and coat, only to be startled by the ringing of the telephone, and this, young Alec, was the call which began the whole adventure of the aardvark attack! Of course, at the time I had no idea, and in fact I thought it more likely to be a call for one of the other gentlemen who shared the comforts of billeting with Mrs Bottomley – a more intriguing bunch of fellows you could never have found!

On the first floor, along with myself, there were two soldiers.

The first of them, Sergeant Gratnassky, whose room stood opposite mine, was a Russian who had fled his homeland during the famous ten days that shook the world, as John Reed described them. An unabashed imperialist, he had come to England ten years ago in search for the (some said legendary) remnant of the Russian royal family, Anastasia, only to find himself swept into the war effort as the Germans began their assault upon Europe. He hoped that in providing intelligence assistance to the British Government – he had a network of contacts across the whole of the continent – he might have cards to play after the war.

The third room on the first floor was taken by Captain Andrew Benswick, an American soldier who left the United States in disgrace – the circumstances of his departure had been clouded in mystery for many months following his arrival at Mrs Bottomley’s, but eventually, my curiosity getting the better of me, using the few clues I had gleaned from the occasional, brief and awkward conversations we had held upon meeting on the landing, I had spent a few hours searching the library of Edinburgh’s archive of American newspapers. I discovered that his immediate superior’s wife had been murdered by a gun-wielding robber, while on a “date” with the unfortunate and obviously rather immoral Captain Benswick.

There were three rooms too on the second floor. One of these was used by Mrs Bottomley herself, her husband having passed away many, many years ago, even before her missionary adventures, themselves a good twenty or thirty years in the past. I had yet to learn how he had died, which led me to surmise that the circumstances must have been either too terrible or too dull to tell, for Mrs Bottomley rarely shied away from telling a tale.

The second room on that floor was taken by a fellow scientist from the research establishment at which I worked, Dr Link Thomas, a Welshman who missed his home and family quite terribly. He never missed an opportunity to show me the photographs in his wallet, of a beautiful cottage, and of an even more beautiful wife. It was no surprise that he missed her, but in wartime, such bonds are often tested. Link Thomas was not the type to give in to his anguish, but he would often wake with the most horrendous screams and moans (occasionally, on Saturday mornings, I would sit in my room reading, and hear his awful awakenings) but he would infallibly put his nightmares to one side by 9.00 am and get on with his day’s business. He was a good man, and one that I never failed to sit with in the local pub if I saw him nursing a lonely pint.

Alec, the third occupant of the second floor was the most astonishing of all. It was a man known only by a number that appeared upon the mail he would collect each morning from Mrs Bottomley’s hallway: 101. I had never seen him speak, and Mrs Bottomley told me that he had never eaten a single speck of her delicious food. My personal suspicion was that he was some kind of Government-approved automaton, since when I spoke of him to my superiors at the establishment, they warned me not to enquire further.

What’s that you say, Alec? You, my own son, asking whether these characters are relevant to my story? Let me tell you something about the way I approach a story – everything is related. Whether these characters return to my narrative or not is irrelevant. Perhaps they will return at key moments, perhaps one or more accompanied me during the adventure to come – but perhaps not! Directly relevant or not to the adventure at hand, everything is this world is related to every other thing; if Dr Link Thomas, for example, did not live in Mrs Bottomley’s establishment during the war, the universe would be a different place from what it was! Perhaps not a big difference, but big enough, in my estimation, for it to be important to draw your attention to his presence there, during that time!

I see, Alec, that you are not convinced. Never mind, this is my tale, and either you will listen, or you will not. In fact, I know that you will, you little scamp, you will follow my meanderings, because, like me, you are willing to go to great lengths to learn the truth! And if that means sitting here on this desk for the next thirty-six hours, you will do it, just as I gave up my precious free time to investigate Captain Andrew Benswick. If there is one thing to be said for the Abernathy blood, thin as it might be at times, it runs thick with curiosity!

 “I’ll get it!” I called to Mrs Bottomley, instantly regretting it as I remembered the men still sleeping upstairs, and then picked up the telephone, putting the receiver to my ear.

“Hello,” I said. “Lodgings of Mrs Bottomley, Douglas Abernathy speaking.”

“Ah, Abernathy!” said a gruff voice on the line. “Just the man I’m after!”

“Er, hello,” I said, a little puzzled. “I’m glad you’ve found me. How can I help?”

“I don’t think we’ve spoken before,” he said, “but I have a feeling that we’ll be speaking quite frequently in the weeks to come. My name is... well, just in case this line is being monitored by enemy agents – they’re everywhere, you know! - I won’t give you my name yet, but let it suffice to say that I am effectively in charge of the British Army.”

“Oh, you must be...”

He cut me off. “No, not him. He has a boss, too, and I don’t mean the King. Such people are too visible, and despite all the protection we can give them, they are perfect targets for the Nazis. So I tend to deal with things above their heads, if you know what I mean, just in case.”

“Right,” I said, completely baffled, and more than half believing it to be a hoax call. “And so why are you phoning me, at 6.24 am? I have yet to brush the breadcrumbs from my shirt!”

“We have a problem, Abernathy, and it’s one we need you to sort out.”

“What kind of problem,” I asked, immediately intrigued.

“Killer ants!” he bellowed.

This is a sample from Alec Abernathy’s unfinished first novel, Aardvark Attack!.