Looking for Jake (6 page)

URGENT:
Report of a Sighting.

Principal witness:
FR.

 

 

Secondary:
EN.

 

 

On Thursday 11th February 1988, so far as it is possible to tell between 3:00 a.m. and 5:17 a.m., a little way south of Plumstead High Street SE18, Varmin Way occurred.

 

Even somewhat foreshortened from its last known appearance (Battersea 1983 — see the VF Concordance), Varmin Way is in a buckled configuration due to the constraints of space. One end adjoins Purrett Road between numbers 44 and 46, approximately forty feet north of Saunders Road: Varmin Way then appears to describe a tight S-curve, emerging halfway up Rippolson Road between numbers 30 and 32 (see attached map). [
There is no map.
]

Two previously terraced dwellings on each of the intersected streets have now been separated by Varmin Way. One on Rippolson is deserted: surreptitious enquiries have been made of inhabitants of each of the others, but none have remarked with anything other than indifference to the newcomer. Eg: in response to FR's query of one man if he knew the name of ‘that alley', he glanced at the street now abutting his house, shrugged and told her he was ‘buggered if he knew'. This response is of course typical of VF occurrence-environs (See B. Harman, ‘On the Non-Noticing', BWVF Working Papers no. 5).

A partial exception is one thirty-five-year-old Purrett Road man, resident in the brick dwelling newly on Varmin Way's north bank. Observed on his way toward Saunders Road, crossing Varmin Way, he tripped on the new kerb. He looked down at the asphalt and up at brick corners of the junction, paced back and forward five times with a quizzical expression, peering down the street's length, without entering it, before continuing on his journey, looking back twice.

 

[
This is the end of the middle page of the leaflet. Folded and inserted inside is a handwritten letter. I have therefore decided to reproduce it here in the middle of the leaflet text. It reads:

 

Charles,

 

In haste. So sorry I could not reach you sooner — obviously phone not an option. I
told
you I could work this out: Fiona was only on-site because of me, but I modestly listed her as principal for politics' sake. Charles, we're about to go in and I'm telling you even from where I'm standing I can see the evidence, this is the real thing. Next time, next time. Or get down here! I'm sending this first class (of course!) so when you get it rush down here. But you know Varmin Way's reputation — it's restless, will probably be gone. But come find me! I'll be here at least.

 

Edgar

 

At the end of this note is appended, in the same handwriting as that of the package's introductory note:

 

What a bastard! I take it this was when you and he stopped seeing eye to eye? Why did he cut you out like that, and why so coyly?

 

The leaflet then continues:
]

 

Initial investigation shows that the new Varmin Way–overlooking walls of the houses now separated on Purrett Road are flat concrete. Those of Rippolson Road, though, are of similar brick to their fronts, bearing the usual sigil of the VF's identity, and are broken by small windows at the very top, through the net curtains of which nothing can be seen. (See ‘On Neomural Variety', by H. Burke, WBVF Working Papers no. 8)

Those innards of Varmin Way which can be seen from its adjoining streets bear all the usual signs of VF morphology (are, in other words, apparently unremarkable), and are in accordance with earlier documented descriptions of the subject. In this occurrence, it being short, FR and EN were able to conduct the Bowery Resonance Experiment, stationing themselves at either end of the VF and shouting to each other down its lengths (until forced to stop by externalities). [
Here in Edgar's hand has been inserted
‘Some local thuggee threatening to do me in if I didn't shut up!'] Each could clearly hear the other, past the kinks in this configuration of Varmin Way.

More experiments are to follow.

 

 

[
When I reached this point I was trembling. I had to stop, leave the room, drink some water, force myself to breathe slowly. I'm tempted to add more about this, about the sudden and threatened speculations these documents raised in me, but I think I should stay out of it.

 

Immediately after the report of the sighting was another, similarly produced pamphlet.
]

URGENT:
Report of an Aborted Investigation.

Present: FR, EN, BH.

[
Added here is another new comment in Charles's nameless contact's hand. It reads:
‘Dread to think how gutted you were to be replaced by Bryn as new favourite. What exactly did you
do
to get Edgar so pissed off
?'
]

 

At 11:20 p.m. on Saturday 13 February 1988, from its end on Rippolson Road, an initial examination was made of Varmin Way. Photographs were taken establishing the VF's identity (figure 1). [
Figure 1 is a surprisingly good-quality reproduction of a shot, showing a street sign by a wall, standing at leg-height on two little metal or wooden posts. The image is at a peculiar angle, which I think is the result of the photograph not being taken straight on, but from Rippolson Road, beyond. In an unusual old serif font, the sign reads
Varmin Way.]

As the party prepared for the expedition, certain events took place or were insinuated which led to a postponement and quick regrouping at a late-night café on Plumstead High Street. [
What were those ‘certain events'? The pointed imprecision suggested to me something deliberately not committed to paper, something that the readers of this report, or perhaps a subgroup of them, would understand. These writings are a strange mix of the scientifically exact and the imprecise — even the failure to specify the café is surprising. But it is the baleful vagueness of the certain events that will not stop worrying at me.
] When the group returned to Rippolson Road at 11:53 p.m., to their great frustration, Varmin Way had unoccurred.

 

 

[
Two monochrome pictures end the piece. They have no explanatory notes or legend. They are both taken in daylight. On the left is a photograph of two houses, on either side of a small street of low century-old houses which curves sharply to the right, it looks like, quickly unclear with distance. The right-hand picture is the two facades again, but this time the houses — recognisably the same from a window's crack, from a smear of paint below a sash, from the scrawny front gardens and the distinct unkempt buddleia bush — are closed up together. They are no longer semidetached. There is no street between them.
]

 

 

[
So.

 

I stopped for a bit. I had to stop. And then I had to read on again.

 

A single sheet of paper. Typewritten again apart from the name, now on an electronic machine.
]

 

Could you see it, Charles? The damage, halfway down Varmin Way? It's there, it's visible in the picture in that report. [
This must mean the picture on the left. I stared at it hard, with the naked eye and through a magnifying glass. I couldn't make out anything
.
] It's like the slates from Scry Pass, the ones I showed you in the collection.
You
could see it in the striae and the marks, even if none of the bloody curators did. Varmin Way wasn't just passing through, it was
resting
, it was
recovering
, it had been attacked. I am right.

 

Edgar

 

 

[
I kept reading.

 

Though it's not signed, judging by the font, what follows are a couple of pages of another typed letter from Edgar.
]

 

earliest occurrence I can find of it is in the early 1700s (you'll hear 1790 or '91 or something — nonsense, that's just the official position based on the archives — this one isn't verified but believe me it's correct). Only a handful of years after the Glorious Revolution we find Antonia Chesterfield referring in her diaries to ‘a right rat of a street, ascamper betwixt Waterloo and the Mall, a veritable Vermin, in name as well as kind. Beware — Touch a rat and he will bite, as others have found, of our own and of the Vermin's vagrant tribe'. That's a reference to Varmin Way — Mrs Chesterfield was in the Brotherhood's precursor (and you'd not have heard her complaining about that name either — Fiona take note!).

  You see what she's getting at, and I think she was the first. I don't know, Charles, correlation is so terribly hard, but look at some of the other candidates. Shuck Road; Caul Street; Stang Street; Teratologue Avenue (this last I think is fairly voracious); et al. So far as I can work it out, Varmin Way and Stang Street were highly antagonistic at that stage, but now they're almost certainly noncombative. No surprise: Sole Den Road is the big enemy these days — remember 1987?

  (Incidentally, talking of that first Varmin occurrence, did you ever read all the early cryptolit I sent you?

 

  The Clerk entered into a Snickelway

  That then was gone again by close of day

 

  Fourteenth century, imagine. I'll bet you a pound there are letters from disgruntled Britannic procurators complaining about errant alleyways around the Temple of Mithras. But there's not much discussion of the hostilities until Mrs Chesterfield.)

  Anyway, you see my point. It's the only way one can make sense of it all, of all this that I've been going on about for so long. The Viae are fighting, and I think they always have.

  And there's no idiot nationalism here either, as

 

[
And here is the end of the page. And there is another message added, clearly referring to this letter, from CM's nameless interlocutor.
‘I believe it',
he says, or she says, but I think of it as a man's handwriting though that's a problematic assumption.
‘It took me a while, but I believe Edgar's bellum theory. But I know you, Charles, “pure research” be buggered as far as you're concerned. I know what Edgar's doing, but I cannot see where
you
are going with this.']