Beige Goo Splat - (part 2)

 

There was no point asking for help from my landlady, she didn’t care about my dog and was difficult to get any sense out of at the best of times. Nobody cared about Monty as much as me, that was the problem but that little dog was my life and it was unfathomable that he could have vanished from a locked room.

 

I went out onto the street and walked up and down, shouting his name but I felt a sense of hopelessness deep inside me. It was like, I somehow knew that he was unharmed but also out of my reach. Perhaps he had been stolen by somebody, somebody who had a key, a previous tenant maybe, somebody who’d seen me around town and liked the look of my dog, well he was very handsome.

 

I returned to the kitchen, trying to formulate a plan in my head. Mrs King was seated at the table doing a jigsaw puzzle of Princess Anne on a horse. ‘Don’t disturb me, I’m doing the medals on her blazer,’

 

‘Sorry Mrs King, I just need to ask you something.’

 

‘What?’ She looked up in disdain.

 

‘Does anybody else have a key to the property, I mean apart from Keith and Marie?’

 

Keith and Marie rented the whole of the floor below me and had done so for several years. They were a quiet couple who used to own a dance school and needed the space to store all their old costumes. These days they ran a Monday lunch club for pensioners in town and went away on regular cruises, in fact I hadn’t seen them that week and assumed they’d gone on another one. 

 

Mrs King shook her head. ‘I don’t think so..unless they know about the one I keep in the garden, you know,  under the stone mushroom.’

 

‘Really, there’s a key just left in the garden for anyone to find?’

 

‘Yes…in case we’re locked out. That’s if it’s still there. Won’t have your room key on it though, it’s just for the front door.’

 

I rushed out and checked under the mushroom, there was a small colony of woodlice but no key, that didn’t worry me though. Somehow it just didn’t fit with Monty’s disappearance. There was more to it, something mysterious, I could feel it. I put a post on Facebook with a photo of Monty, explaining that he’d gone missing but after five minutes I thought better of it and deleted it. I was certain that people would criticise me, quiz me about details I couldn’t provide and accuse me of being a neglectful owner which I most definitely wasn’t.

 

I went back to my room and checked everything again, then parked myself up by the window and looked down onto the town for a while, searching for movement, a small brown four legged mammal but I saw nothing and felt empty inside. I dropped down onto Monty’s bed and sniffed his bedding. My insides throbbed with grief. Where was he?

 

There was no way I could eat dinner, instead I had a strong cup of coffee to stay awake, alert to any signs, clues to his whereabouts. I ate a flapjack and walked round and round our small town, up and down the park, poked my head inside the pub but not enough for people to see me. It started raining and grew dark. I cried a little, then lay in bed with the curtains parted, the window slightly ajar and my eyes wide open.

 

Something was different. Now that the panic had settled a little and I could think more rationally I noticed that something had changed. There was a strong smell of butterscotch and in the moonlight I reckoned that the beige goo splat’s shape had altered slightly. There was a dent in the centre which I could swear didn’t exist the day before. It looked like somebody had poked their finger into it, then their hand and then it had sucked the rest of them in too.

 

I gasped as I imagined with worrying ease, Monty getting curious about the splat, getting too close with his rough little face and dark whiskers. My mind’s eye played out a scenario of his little barrel-like body being sucked in, disappearing from my room into the abyss.

 

My heart was racing now as I turned on the table-lamp. The time was eleven minutes past ten. The house was silent, Mrs King went to bed at half past nine and began snoring almost instantly, I always heard it if I ventured into the kitchen for a night time snack. My stomach was in fact rumbling now and partly to satisfy my hunger pangs and partly to put off what I knew I had to do, I put on my fleece and went downstairs.

 

The kitchen was silent except for the sound of Mrs King snoring and the usual humming from the fridge. I ate some Swiss cheese and then became distracted by the jigsaw puzzle on the table. Mrs King had completed most of it. Princess Anne’s bouffant was hiding beneath a stupid Napoleonic hat, probably in shame, after all, she refused to answer her phone whenever the sixties called to ask for their hairstyle back. I removed the piece which depicted Princess Anne’s hat. I thought about her hair bounded underneath and it annoyed me so much that I pushed the piece through a gap between the floorboards.

 

Somehow this reckless act gave me a sense of power. I felt I had the upper hand over Mrs King now and perhaps even the beige goo splat itself. 

I went back upstairs into my room and stared at the beige goo splat, taking in several deep breaths to centre myself in the moment. For a second I thought I could hear voices speaking from inside but surely that was impossible. There was nothing on the other side of the wall except a gap between our roof and the next door neighbour’s.

 

Holding my breath, I placed my ear as close as possible to the splat without touching it and listened very carefully. Yes, there were definitely voices, faint chattering and something else, a whining and it sounded like Monty. Consumed now by a desperate urge to find my pet, I decided there was nothing else for it, I was going in.

 

‘Daddy’s coming!’ I said as I closed my eyes and placed the fingertips of both hands in a prayer-like position in the middle of the splat, stiffening my arms, I began to push myself into the goo. To my astonishment it gave way very easily and felt warm, even comfortable inside. It was like diving into a chocolate fondant, something I once ate with the dramatic woman at a fancy restaurant.

 

My hands searched for something to grip onto and just a few feet in, I felt something like the leaves of a hedge and small which I used to pull the rest of the body through into the other side. The first thing I felt was the bristly wet muzzle of my little dog, licking my face all over.

 

‘Monty, what happened? Did you get lonely and curious? I’m so sorry I left you for so long.’

 

I looked up. It was dark just like at home, so I decided it must be the very same time. There were street lights on but it was very quiet. I was disorientated and had to try and gather myself and check that I wasn’t dreaming. It didn’t feel like a dream but the street was very similar to the high street in town, only softer around the edges, a bit blurry perhaps and there were no cars. There was a pub along the road with lights on inside and people chattering.

 

I went up to the window and looked in. There were familiar faces inside, people I had seen in the other pub at home, including the barmaid, only not for a while. Strangely, I had assumed that people couldn’t see me but I was suddenly alarmed when the barmaid looked straight at me, gave me a huge smile and waved. I stepped back out of sight.

 

‘Where do we go Monty? What do we do here in this place?’

 

He wagged his tail and began to trot down the street, looking back at me as if encouraging me to follow him. There was nothing else for it, he’d been in the place for several hours before my arrival, I had to let him take the lead. He took me to a street almost identical to the one we lived in and right up to the front door but it was locked and I had no key.

 

On a whim, I remembered the spare key Mrs King had told me about, under the mushroom in the garden. We walked around the back, struggling to see properly with only the moonlight to guide us. To my amazement, there was a key there, a small silver one glistening but no woodlice.

 

 

‘Look Monty, I’ve got the key!’

 

I was feeling very tired now, exhausted from all the stress and confusion of the evening, as well as a long day at work. We unlocked the door and went inside. It smelled like my house, the kitchen door was shut and it was very quiet but as we climbed the stairs I could just about hear Keith and Marie’s swing music playing faintly on the first floor.

 

Our bedroom door was unlocked. I switched on the light and scanned the room. The walls were painted in a soft pink colour and there was no splat on the wall, nothing, just an old mirror. The view out of the window was similar in that the contours of the land were the same but it was less built up. I drew the curtains shut and searched for Monty’s bed but he didn’t have one.

 

There was a king-sized bed though, room for two so we both settled down under the covers and despite feeling baffled by the course of the evening we were both quickly consumed by sleep.