Harold Pernekins was into his fourth day of fasting when the runny nose began. He noticed it immediately when he woke, the dribble marks cold and wet running down his cheek to his bed. This is only to be expected, he thought, as the toxins clear out of the body, and he quickly recovered a packet of tissues left under the bed in the last flu season. Then he rose and began to consider his day ahead.
By lunchtime the nose had gone from a minor drip to a considerable running, and Pernekins was forced to invest in a box of mansize tissues at the local shop. Instead of a spot of yoga, he found himself arranging an increasingly intricate array of drip-catching tissues, to save himself the bother of continuously blowing his nose. After half an hour he had a semi-circle of tissues stacked beneath him on the table, ready to catch the flow whichever angle he turned his head. It didn’t leave a lot of room for moving the rest of his body, so he contemplated a spot of meditation.
A very uneasy spell of meditation followed. Not only was he unable to breathe through his nose, but the profusion was so pronounced that it was impossible for him to think of anything else. Moreover, as soon as he shut his eyes, he quickly became concerned that the tissues would be unable to soak up all the moisture. The gunk cascaded off his top lip like a very slow waterfall. He blew his nose, and detached a thread. Within moments, the next envoy had crested the upper lip and abseiled over his mouth, with inexorable aplomb.
And, he realised, as he contemplated his limited options, the mucus had become less and less watery, until it met a quite runny honey consistency. Now it dropped from his lip to the table as a long thick bungee cord, and collected on the bed of tissues like a snake readying for sleep. As he detached each instalment, Harold became increasingly concerned that this wasn’t par for the course at all. Without thinking, he got up to go and consult his Daily Mail Guide to Fasting and found himself escorted by several pads of tissues hanging in front of him, like a mobile made by Tracy Emin. Moments later the cords reached the ground and Harold found that if he walked backwards at a fair pace he could keep the tissues in the same place on the ground, whilst the mucus proceeded uninterrupted from his nose.
The Fasters’ Guide had nothing to say about his predicament, as he already knew since he had read it cover to cover on several occasions. He swiftly realised that flicking through was worse than useless, since the flow seemed to be increasing. His nostrils seemed to be expanding to accommodate the increase, and he began to seriously wonder what he was going to do with all this snot. Sitting in the bath seemed the best option, but it was only a short-lived answer, since the mucus refused to get down the plughole and just congregated at the bottom of the bath. Harold lay back and tried to think of all the toxins leaving his body, but instead worried whether lying in them was a good idea.
When he woke again, the bath was half full and extricating himself proved more trouble than it seemed worth, especially as there was no let up in its production. Tissues were worthless now. He considered sitting over the toilet for an hour or two, in the hope that it would pass into the drains, but even though early results seemed promising, there was no really comfortable way of sitting face down towards the toilet, and his resolve really gave out when he saw that instead of continuing into the sewer, the mucus seemed to have blocked up the bottom of the bowl.
Perhaps if I eat something, he thought to himself. This healing event is clearly out of control. There’s no point. I must have got rid of loads of toxins already. And he made haste to his kitchen, across some very sticky floors, but he was too late. There was no way of getting the food past the cords of mucus into his mouth. Whichever way he turned, the bogeys turned with him. There was nothing for it, he realised, he was going to have to sit it out.
After he had been standing in his front room for quite a while he found that he had amassed enough snot to fashion a kind of chair and finding it surprisingly comfortable, if a little sticky, he sat back into it and, as the birds sang outside his window, accepted his fate.
Quite possibly nobody would have noticed Harold’s quietitude for over a week, since he was not particularly neighbourly, and his friends were not particularly friendly, but after a couple of days his upstairs neighbour very sharply noticed a slight unevenness in his newly laid pine floor and began to sense a bulge around the middle of his front room. Quite perplexed but considering that Harold might have had a plant butting up against the ceiling – he was not the sharpest man in the world as we shall see later – or perhaps had installed a pole for pole-dancing, made his way to his neighbour’s front door and hammered several times. Receiving no answer, and being a nosey sort, he quickly tried to peek through the letterbox but could see nothing but the bristles of the letterbox brush. Only then did he notice that the door itself seemed to be bulging ever so slightly outwards from its frame, and that, in turn, the frame seemed to be bulging slightly from the wall. He retreated to his flat for a few hours, to ponder the situation, and only in the evening, when he felt sure that he could clearly see his floor rising up towards the centre, did he phone the landlord and complain.
The landlord, who had infinitely better things to do with his time, involving poker and paid-for ladies, was nevertheless suitably intrigued to pass by on his way out, bang a few times on Harold’s front door, speculate increasingly wildly yet with no greater accuracy with the upstairs man on the possibilities and finally, with ladies in the back of his mind, but the other man’s now practically unlaid pine floor quite in the front, agree to return first thing with a ladder and look into Harold's window. And when he did so, he nearly fell of his ladder into some very finely arranged Azaleas. For there was Harold, apparently suspended at a forty-five degree angle, fast asleep, entombed like a fairy-tale princess at the bottom of a lake, pickled in a vast vat of snot.
The press soon gathered and the TV crews arrived with their million-watt lights and grinding generators which rumbled tea cups off tables as far up as the old lady at number 47. The police cordoned the house off and scientists turned up and briefly threatened to turn the house into a great big white tunnel like in ET, before they remembered that this was not America and there was no need just yet. Two trees obscured the window from the prying hordes until one enterprising newsman turned up with a chainsaw under his jacket and cut away thirty years growth while the police were busy fielding questions from the hacks. Harold could now be clearly seen right across the world, preserved in his reclining position, occasional movement still noticeable from his nostrils. The mucus itself had taken to a slight blue glow, which scientists ascribed variously to a reaction to the arc lights beaming down on it, blue dye leaching from the carpet or the previously unnoticed slight radioactivity of snot. If they had turned the arc lights off, even for a moment, they would have quickly noticed that the glow was intermittent, but nobody considered that for an instant.
Everybody wanted to be there when the next thing happened. “What’s going to happen?” they asked each other.
The police and the scientists had taken off Harold’s front door and found a wall of mucus in front of them. It did not appear to be growing any further out of the door but was quite implacable as too letting anybody in. They pressed it and pushed it, but it merely wobbled like a huge jelly, and didn’t budge in the slightest. Nobody was able to breach the wall of mucus to get a grip on it. They brought out a knife but despite the mucus yielding cooperatively to the blade they found that as soon it had passed through the cut healed up, making it impossible to get any purchase.
“This really is quite strange,” said the lead scientist. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life” said the policeman, who had been wondering all day whether he could launch a murder investigation or not. The scientists had spent the last three hours fruitlessly trying to chop a bit of mucus off, for investigation they said, and now one of them had borrowed a pastry cutter from an old lady down the road, but as soon as they pushed it into the mucus it absorbed it completely and hung there, just out of reach, taunting them.
“What’s our lines of inquiry?” the superintendent asked when he got there. The scientists were quiet, until they realised he was asking them, rather than the policemen. After that they were still quiet as they realised they didn’t have many at the moment.
Outside the press were reporting that the windows were beginning to bow outwards. “Is this thing going to take over the world?” a reporter asked his camera.
In doors the police and scientists were agreed that they needed to shave off the roof of the house in order to get a good look at the mucus from above. “Possibly,” said the scientist, “we can get some of those Mars robots, that collect samples and suchlike. I happen to know they’ve got one up at Bedhill air base.” The police sent someone off to find a carpenter.
The man from upstairs came downstairs upon hearing this and told them bluntly that they was no way they were going to take his flat anywhere. “I’ve got all my rabbits up there and I just laid a new pine floor. Not on your nelly.” PC Briggs told him that if they decided to do it, they’d buy him a new pine floor in his new flat. He was unimpressed.
“Yes, but I’ve got one here already haven’t I?”
“What’s our lines of inquiry?” asked the superintendent again. The scientists were prepared this time.
“We believe that this is a massive alien life form,” the lead scientist said boldly. The police were on their toes in an instant.
“Quieten down man!” said the super. “Do you want a bloody riot on your hands? Alien life form?” he had to repeat it more quietly a second time, “alien life form? Where did it come from then? Where’s its flying saucer?” The scientist shrugged. The super had been a detective for 15 years, and wasn’t in the slightest impressed by a PhD.
“I think that it landed somewhere else, came here and then grew to its present size,” the scientist said quietly.
“Ah,” said the super, “right.” There was a long pause.
“Lets wait until we can examine a bit of it shall we?” said the scientist, “then we’ll be able to tell you what it’s made of.”
The night wore on and the neighbours grew restless. They watched it out of their windows and then went into their back rooms to watch it on the TV. One of them played his stereo particularly loudly then put his ear to his telly to see if he could hear it. He thought he could, but he couldn’t be sure. Another let off a firework and then rushed inside to see it on the screen, and enjoyed it thoroughly, even though a policeman was despatched to warn him not to do it again. After a while important news from Israel took over. The mucus was apparently not even going to smash through the window tonight, and most people turned over and went to bed. The press corps shrunk down to the usual suspects, the stake-outers, who’d rather go hungry and catch hypothermia than miss the development on a long running story like this one. The scientists went off to have a drink while they waited on news of their mars robot. Most of the police went as well, leaving a couple to man the cordon, and one to persuade the chap upstairs to stay somewhere else for the night.
“I’m not going, if they’re going to cut my roof off when I’m gone,” he said, reasonably.
“They’re not going to cut your roof off tonight, Mr Enrique,” said the young constable, “they’ve all gone home to bed.”
“I’m sleeping in the loft,” Enrique decided.
The press continued waiting.
“Why am I here?” Rodney, the journalist asked himself. “What kind of story is this?”
“And who am I to tell it?” There was no answer to his questions. His companion, from a well-to-do rival paper, stood beside him smoking cigarettes and trying to shake the cold out of his feet.
“You know,” said the other man, “that when I was working on the underground, I used to have to stand around for hours bored out of my mind, waiting for nothing to happen. And when I got this job, my mum thought I’d gone so far up in the world. Even I thought, at least they’d be no more of that. Look what its come to. I might start my piece with that. What do you think?”
Rodney said nothing. He didn’t think people should put too much of their own history in their stories. Quite apart from the fact that it was irrelevant, and uninteresting. But he’d only been here three hours, and didn’t see the point of getting up some rookie’s nose. He continued to wonder to himself.
“Who cares about this story?” he thought, remembering journalism school. “Who’s going to want to read it?”
The mucus continued to glow. After all while it began to hum, softly, only to itself. Nobody heard it, even those who were being paid for exactly that kind of thing. A little robin sat up in the tree (the one that had been devastated by the chainsaw and was now looking somewhat rickety) and looked at the glow. Even a bird could see that there was something going on here.
“Why don’t they leave me alone?” the mucus asked the bird.
The bird looked at the glow a little more circumspectly.
“Have they forgotten about me?” the mucus said, as though it was the same question.
The bird looked at the mucus with each eye, several times, considering its response.
“What are you doing?” the bird asked.
The mucus appeared surprised, as though it hadn’t expected a talking bird. It started to hum to itself again.
“That’s why they wont leave you alone,” the bird said, in a tone it had picked up from the owls. “They want to know what you are doing here.”
“I’m not doing anything,” said the mucus. “What are they doing?”
The robin felt this conversation was veering towards philosophy, which had never been a strong subject. “I don’t have a clue,” he said triumphantly, “but I’m not the one asking the questions.”
There was a short pause while the mucus thought about that.
“I sing,” said the robin, “and you hum. And glow. If you stick to that, you’ll be fine. It’s doing other things that get us into trouble.” It felt proud at having such a succinct worldview, and beat its breast for a moment.
The mucus glowered slightly, irritated by the robin’s pride.
The next morning the police decided, inevitably, that they would have to remove the roof and top floor of the house, in order to get at their quarry. There was the slight problem of Mr Enrique, who had sat up all night in preparation for exactly this eventuality. A swat team armed with stun darts were called in, and took position on the stairwell, but a peaceful resolution was assured once Mr Enrique fell asleep, mumbling about his new floor. He was soon bound and gagged and confined to a bed and breakfast where he occupied himself screaming in long-winded, rusty Spanish, about the long reach of Franco.
Work began on the renovation almost immediately, which gave all the journalists something to report. It soon ground to a halt, however, as no scaffolding firm could be found prepared to risk building a frame around such an unpredictable prospect. After a while one of the sergeants remembered that the new-age travellers they’d been harassing the day before owned a huge free-standing metal frame that would do the job and a couple of constables were assigned to go and smooth things over with them.
The roof was finally off and the scientists gathered to look down upon the snot, rather like divers over a swimming pool.
“You can see the wall buckling here and here,” noted Professor Higham, with scant regard for what this would mean for his own safety. “I suspect it is still growing.”
“In fact,” said his colleague, a Mr Granger, slightly worried that the Professor was taking a lead, “it seems almost imprisoned down there.”
“That’s very true,” said the Professor, magnanimously. “Not as imprisoned as our Mr Pernekins down there, though,” he pointed out. They both peered through the gloom at the still evident shape of Harold. “He hasn’t deteriorated in the least.”
“No,” said Granger, “he hasn’t.”
Harold hadn’t featured much in the scientist’s calculations which was a bit foolish really, since he was the key to the whole affair, but they had very early on decided that he was only a conduit for this entity. Nobody had noticed the Daily Mail Guide to Fasting, still open on the kitchen table.
They made their way downstairs.
The snot, which had been feeling incredibly stressed butted up against the framework of the house, decided that now was its moment. With a great, if only figurative, in-breath it pushed its great weight outwards in all directions, along the fault lines it had been working on all night. At first nothing seemed to happen – snot is not, after all, particularly heavy set, and the house was old and well built – but after a few more figurative breaths, the cracks lengthened and the woodwork opened up like a Christmas present. Flushed with the relief from all the bedsores it had acquired, the snot held back momentarily, but then with one huge leap and with Harold Pernekins still ensconced deep within its body, it bound free of the house and made a start down the street.
The journalists couldn’t believe their luck. “Its on the move!” they shouted to one another and all started to ring up their editors. The BBC reporter, who’d been in a few war zones in his time, started recording his piece to camera with the snot in the background but it soon became apparent that, although it had the volume of a 30 square metre flat and the quite high viscosity associated with snot it was a surprisingly quick mover, and covered the front garden and a portion of the avenue in a matter of seconds, in the manner of somebody walking by falling over.
The scientists had mostly been catapulted off their flimsy viewing point by the snot’s escape attempt and were the last to dust themselves down and set off for the chase. The police had been ahead of them but they wanted a car or better still a helicopter and so were now waiting at the front gate watching as the journalists pelted hell for leather after the marching, blue barrel of bogey. Once the scientists passed them though, the police gave up waiting and joined the stampede down the street, shouting hoarsely to locals in front of them to get out of their way and go home, advice which was roundly ignored.
The snot had taken on some strange attributes since it had burst from the house, and the force of its motion, combined with the effect of passing through trees and lamp-posts, had driven it into some odd shapes. It actually looked, to the casual passer-by, of whom there were none, that it had acquired an arm on each side and these arms were propelled by the movement of air into a sort of up-and-down motion. It wasn’t running, by any means, but the illusion of arms, and distortions of light near its top, gave it as human a look as a giant, blue blob of snot will ever be likely to get. So when the army, forewarned by the now asthmatic policemen, took up positions at the end of the street, sturdy weaponry to the fore, several bystanders, and even a soldier or two, wondered aloud whether they should shoot it at all.
The snot maintained its steady progress down the street, its retinue of followers yelping behind it. It observed the line of military might in its path but was unperturbed, largely due to its complete ignorance as to what it was looking at. Its steady, continual approach gave the captain in charge little choice however but to let fly a salvo of bazooka rockets which penetrated the snot’s interior in what looked like a very painful fashion. The snot ground to a sudden halt. Bazooka rockets had lodged in several places and despite the absence of your common-or-garden type of central nervous system, it was still aware that they were less preferable inside than out. It eyed the military line with somewhat more circumspection.
The journalists, scientists, policemen and countless locals slowly caught up and stood winded in the background. The captain, having got the snot’s attention, tried to press home his advantage.
“This is the British Army,” he intoned into a megaphone, “you are under arrest. You are to surrender to us immediately or suffer further fatal gun fire.”
The snot considered its options.
“We will shortly be providing a truck for you, which we would like you to enter. Then we will transport you to an agreed place and discuss further action there. If you agree, please move back 10 metres.”
The snot, feeling that the jig was, if not up then at least pointing in an upwards direction, started to slowly roll backwards. The captain, not in the least surprised at his unlikely success where all others had conspicuously failed, turned to his lieutenant and gave him a sturdy nod. The lieutenant nodded back. The snot checked his retreat and with an almighty but utterly inaudible war cry rolled back towards the army lines with doubled speed. The captain, shocked at this turnaround, was unable at first to issue an order to fire. By the time he did so the snot was upon them, and it rolled over the soldiers like a huge soggy ball of paper-mâché. A few salvos were let off, but they were ineffectual. The snot was up and running, imprisoned bazooka rockets clanging together inside its body. The army, to a man as fit as a fiddle, led the charge after it, the journos, cops and boffins all struggling behind.
But when they reached the river the snot, pressed up against the embankment wall, realised he had nowhere to go. Trapped and noticing, with no little alarm, the army setting up their bazooka rocket again, he faced the rushing waters beneath him and tried to take on a serene countenance. This was not easy, however, since inside he was very worried. But serene or not, it was quite apparent that there was only one thing for it and gathering his body together like an old woman collecting her shopping bags the snot sluiced over the embankment wall and slipped into the water like blue lava. Gratifyingly, at that moment two bazookas flew over head, which more than compensated for the freezing cold of the river.
Oh my god this is disgusting, thought the snot, as two dead pigeons and some other hideous flotsam butted up against his mass. But rotting carcasses and human pollution were the least of his worries. Quite unexpectedly he found the water gently caressing away his firm exterior. The water washed, rubbed and nibbled at his bulk, slowly at first but then, once it had got going, with a rush dissolved away the mass of his body. I’m being massaged to death, he thought to himself ruefully. The blue glow slowly merged with the sludgy brown river water until it was imperceptible.
Those who had been following the chase watched from the river bank with a mixture of frustration, disappointment and mild satisfaction. We may be no better off for this encounter, they reasoned, but at least we are not worse off. And they were starting to drift away when a few metres from the area of the snot’s demise were spotted a few bubbles, a ripple or two and then Harold popped his head from the murky depths and with a burst of unusual sprightliness, swam to the steps of the river bank. The hoards of journos burst out from the local pub and hared back down to the river to greet him.
Harold was, they all agreed, looking radiant. His skin, which had been so patchy and spotty in the photo circulated amongst the media in the past few days, was now flawless and glowing. His eyes were bright and lively and his cheeks flushed a superb scarlet as he placidly observed the attention he had garnered. He looked to all the world a superb advert for the toxin-cleansing virtues of fasting.
Rodney, the journo, was already picturing tomorrow’s front page. Something along the lines of Jonah and the Whale, he thought. He wasn’t sure exactly, but a few more drinks should be enough to nail it. He yelled a question to the Adonis-like Harold Pernekins, now posing for the cameras on the wall over the river.
“What’s it like being in the belly of an alien beast?”
Harold thought about it for a moment.
“Snot bad,” he said, a little sheepishly.
There was a collective groan.
“Well thank god that’s over,” said a soldier to his colleague.