The Invisible Assassin(3)

The security guard hesitated, then scowled and reached inside the hut. He produced the two hard hats, which Jake and Johnson put on. The inside of Jake’s stank of grease, and part of him regretted insisting on being given it, but it was too late to back down now.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Then he and Johnson walked through the gateway and on to the site.

‘Very macho.’ Johnson grinned. ‘I thought you said you weren’t part of the government?’

‘Hmmm,’ said Jake non-commitally, and kept on walking, repeating to himself the mantra the senior press officer had driven into him on his first day: be careful about any comments you make when reporters are around.

The site was alive with activity and noise: huge yellow machines digging, dumper trucks running to and fro laden with dirt and rubble. If there were any fairies here, they’ll be long gone, thought Jake.

A shout above the noise of the machines caught his attention. It came from a hole not far away. Jake headed towards the hole, Johnson tagging along just behind him, notebook and pen at the ready. A huge digger was poised at the edge of the hole, and the driver had withdrawn the equally huge claw-like bucket to the rim. One of the building workers had jumped down into the hole and was scrabbling with his hands at something half-buried in the earth.

Oh, please, God, don’t let it be a body! groaned Jake inwardly, especially with a reporter at the scene.

But no, it appeared to be a parcel of some sort, wrapped in what looked to Jake from this distance like some kind of oiled leather.

Don’t let it be a head, prayed Jake silently. Not even a head from ancient times!

Television news loved pictures of skulls being dug out of the ground. And the bunch of loonies with their placards outside the fence would love it as well; they’d claim it was the head of a fairy king, or some such nonsense. Jake reflected that it was lucky there were no TV cameras here, after all.

But it wasn’t a head. The building worker stood in the hole started to unwrap the worn leather casing, and revealed what looked like some sort of big old book. He began to open it.

Jake heard a gasp of alarm from Johnson.

‘Shouldn’t you stop them?’ she asked. ‘That could be really ancient. He might damage it.’

‘Yes.’ Jake nodded. ‘I was just about to do that.’ Aloud, he called to the worker in the hole, ‘Hey! You shouldn’t have opened that!’

The man glared up at Jake.

‘Why not?’ he said.

‘Because . . .’ began Jake. And then he faltered. Why not? He was sure there was some Act of Parliament or other preventing it, but he couldn’t remember what it was. It was something to do with the Queen. ‘Because . . . all property found on this land is the property of the Queen, and as the representative of Her Majesty’s Government on this site . . .’

Jake never finished. The building worker’s expression suddenly changed from one of contempt to one of fear as he dropped the boook, and then he was shaking his arm as if trying to throw off a creature, like a spider or something.

And then Jake saw the man’s hand began to change, turning from a skin colour to a faint green, and the green began to blossom out, like a plant sprouting leaves at rapid speed, but these weren’t leaves, they were . . . fungus. A kind of green fungus was enveloping the whole of the man’s arm, creeping upwards, spreading out.

As Jake and the others watched in horror, the man ran for the edge of the hole, trying to scramble up the sides, but whatever he was trying to escape from had already got hold of him. Before their eyes, the green fungus spread, covering the man’s chest, spreading rapidly downwards over his thighs, his legs, and upwards to his neck, and his head. The man was screaming in fear, but then his screams were cut off; he had disappeared and been replaced by a mass of writhing green fungus.

The weird shape tried to move, to the left, to the right, struggling, and then it collapsed. The next second everyone was yelling and running away from the scene, desperate to put distance between themselves and the mass of what had once been a human being.

Everyone except Jake, who was rooted to the spot in spite of himself, just staring, goggle-eyed, at what was happening.





Chapter 2




‘He turned into a vegetable right in front of me!’

It was the next morning and Jake was back in his office at Whitehall, relating the astonishing events of the afternoon before to his colleague Paul Evans. Paul was two years older than Jake and had been at the department for over a year, which made him an old press hand in Jake’s eyes.

‘What sort of vegetable?’ asked Paul.

‘What does it matter what sort of vegetable?!’ exploded Jake. ‘It was . . . it was . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Unbelievable! Like something out of a horror movie!’