It Started on a Monday Morning

Chapter One

It was the morning of the first Monday in May, and under a hazy post dawn mist London commuters crept yawning to their work, by the crowded buses and even more crowded trains, cars jamming up the roads also making people as late as on the delayed Underground, and with the mounting heat of the early summer day tempers frayed quickly.

One of the many thousands making the laborious and polluted journey was an accountant, one of hundreds, employed and underpaid by a small firm of lawyers in Lambeth. He was John Doe, and as he staggered off his bus and meandered his way to his train, which was as late again as he was, he expected through the dull fuzz of sleep nothing more than an ordinary day, full of paper and pens and the loud complaints from his Mr Smith over his lack of comprehensible work, or which there was plenty but much was ignored.

Someone bumped into him as swayed, and he almost dropped his battered suitcase, grabbing it back quickly before the metal edges could make a loud din in the sleepy compartment, the midnight dark of the tunnels making the atmosphere even drowsier than it already unbearably was. He yawned widely, unable to help himself, and blearily looked at his fellows in their crisp, straightjacket suits, most a dull grey or funeral black, but with one uptight woman of business mummified in a yellow so garish that it blinded the slumbering eye painfully. He yawned again, and a collective groan was heard from most, if not all, as the train juddered to a halt at Aldgate station, signalling the mass migration of workers into the city for the day, buzzing with an irritated depression akin to bees as the waking streets throbbed in firmer life.

Jolted and shoved, John found soon himself out on the bright street, and exerted more than he liked, drifted over to the park, thinking feebly that as late as he now certainly was, a few more minutes would do little harm.

That so, he collapsed onto a park bench, dropping his case down beside him as he yawned once more, weakly surveying the local area in vagueness, as if unsure where he was, though the whole truth was very opposite, as he looked at the gaping maw of the station, where he first noticed the hooded man, a great monkish cowl pulled over his head, thick robes obscuring his hunched over form. He stood to the side of the great gush of people, quite easy to spot, moving with some mixed motive, like anticipation and anxiety. But, despite this and his funny dress, no one seemed aware of him, and even the most callous and busy should have at least stared in passing at the queer little man, who dithered and was jittery on the London streets in front of everyone. And yet, John saw, he was ignored, as if he was not there and was part of his own plane.

He blinked, confused.

The strange little man was gone.

He stared in disbelief. Amongst the suits and cases the bowed hump was nowhere, as if they had vanished into nothing. It only sought to confuse him more.

The clock on the nearby spire chimed, and John got up, dragging his briefcase along as he stumped to the crowded bus stop to catch his bus, still thinking as he clung on for dearest life about the unusual commuter. His mind refused to dismiss it as a mirage, a trick, screamed that it was something else, an omen, a sign.

He shrugged it off and pushed it to the depths of his mind as he got into work nearly three hours late. He swore, as he stared at the clock that deemed it nearly eleven in the morning, that less time had elapsed than really had. The time slip was forgotten quickly as his boss, a rotund man with a bushy moustache, starting shouting at him, first for lateness and then for laziness. Between such shouts and no tasks, he sat staring out over tall tower blocks and warehouses, seeing a few scrapers here and there. He watched a beetle crawl slowly across the sill, beady black body button shiny. He drank cold coffee and stared dully at an advert that popped onto his screen declaring vividly with flashing lights and lots of noise that he had won a cruise in the Caribbean for a fortnight. Mr Smith shouted at him for causing a disturbance to the already deafening din. He typed, he printed, he copied, he faxed, and then the clock on the wall announced that six o’clock had come. Around him his colleagues left in a sea of tired groans and joyful sighs, leaving messy desks and empty mugs everywhere.

John got up too, packed his papers away, and picked up his case. He stepped away from his tiny, cramped, and walked into the miniature walrus that was his boss. His blotchy face had a violet hue to it, and his eyes were but apocalyptic slits.

In a very loud voice he shouted his final shout.

‘You’re fired! Get out!’

Feeling strangely detached from the scene, he shrugged and said good night and left the building, taking the bus back to the humming and buzzing station. From there he got his crowded train, and then from the terminal another crowded bus, getting off outside the small and grimy Crown Free House, where he sat past sundown over a single stale pint, unaware that the place was full of oily truckers and not suited men with battered cases. Several times the barman shouted at him to go away, and several times John bought peanuts, crunching them as he thought.

‘Closing time!’

‘What?’

Th beefy barman cast a large shadow over him as he leant over his small table in the corner. The ratty looking barmaid stared at him from the bar with a screwed up, blotchy face. The beer glass in her hand was making a horrible squeaking sound from where it was being over-enthusiastically cleaned.

‘Closing time.’ The barman repeated, snatching the half-empty beer glass from the table. ‘Now get going!’

He followed the pointing fat finger despondently to the door it was hinting none too subtly at, and he allowed it to swing shut with a sad creak. He remained standing on the curb in the dark, watching the cars and waiting for the bus, until some pitying passer by told him that it was well past nine. He sighed as the woman disappeared down Mason Drive, not even bothering to curse the bus company for getting rid of their night service the month before.

Quietly resigned for the long walk, John started to wind his way through the streets of Victorian terraces, as ill lit as they had been a century ago. He stumbled once or twice in the gloom, dropped his briefcase in a puddle of something, and walked into a lamppost or three, before he finally turned into the broader street adjacent to his cul-de-sac. He had walked several paces into it until he realised there were no cats or cars to be heard or seen. He noticed that the many tall chimneys about seemed to be smoking or steaming, and that the lights in the windows were all on without the curtains being pulled to. No one moved inside the houses, nothing stirred and there were no noises beyond the far rumble of traffic on the motorway. He only then realised how strange it all was, and that he had an awful ticklish feeling inside of him, as though he had swallowed hairy caterpillars inside of eaten peanuts. It was a chilly sensation, and persistent, and something told him to hide behind the pungent dumpster that squatted like a hulking monster in the alley nearest the where he stood, beside the only working street light.

Never really one to follow strange senses that came over him suddenly, he retrieved his damp case and, screwing up his nose, crept into the alley between two tall homes, seating himself on a squishy cardboard box as he waited for something to happen.

Moments later, precisely where he had been standing, a tall figure in black appeared from nowhere. His robes dragged on the pavement, and his hood was pulled back, though it was no until he turned around that his face became visible. He was old, with grey-white hair that fell to his shoulders. His moustache and goatee was the same colour, but bushier and several inches long in its own right. A long and slightly aquiline nose was surmounted by a beetle brow, under which were eyes unlike any that John had seen before. They were large and glowing a marginally dimmer yellow than the lamppost, which suddenly bent as the old man was thrown onto it by an invisible force which pinned him there.

‘Asmodeus!’ He cried out in a harsh and angry voice as he thrashed unmoveable, his trailing sleeves batting the night like murderous wings.

A horrid cackling like broken glass being shaken in an ice bucket echoed over the ethereal and eerie street, and from nowhere as well, but in the shadows, came a familiar hunched figure.

‘Asmodeus!’ The little man repeated in his own hissy, lisping voice, ‘Asmodeus!’

He cackled again and his hood fell back, revealing something that was not quite a man. His head was nearly spherical, and had no neck as it wobbled on a fat round body atop two, probably very bowed, legs. His short arms were being wrung and held to his chest in a manner much like Igor used in the Dracula films. Long nails like claws tipped them sharply.

‘Asmodeus he cries!’ The monster warbled. His face was taken up almost entirely by a mouth that stretched from one invisible ear to the other, a maw filled with inwards curving black fangs, with large gaps between them for torture. His eyes overtook space as well, round and yellow like headlights, thick black slits in their centre. A bump, squashed between them and the mouth was all there was of a nose. ‘He cries for Asmodeus!’

‘Unhand me, Mamilion!’ The old man struggled vainly. ‘Release me!’

The thing, Mamilion, cackled again.

‘Master says to play,’ he sang, ‘Master says to win.’

‘And where is your Master? Where is Asmodeus?’

‘Master is taking his place. Master is wearing his crown-’

‘The crown is mine!’ The old man was growing grey in the face from his fruitless struggles. ‘It is mine until I die!’

‘Die…’ the grin on the face of the toad like monster grew wider. ‘Die! Die!’

There was a winded grunt and then a load snap, followed by the unnatural cheer of Mamilion, who, from what John could see as he his terrified amongst split and rotting rubbish bags, was skipping down the road in maniac ecstasy, chortling and yipping, his black cloak and robes swishing and dancing with him. With a final happy squeal, he vanished as he came, into nothing, on the edge of the pool of bent light.

With his leaving and the silence of the old man, an oppressive blanket seemed to be lifted, the cold, ticklish feeling dissipated in moments. He stayed though where he was, scared stiff of what he had just witnessed. He shivered with fright, unnerved by the monstrous thing and its voice, he jumping and screaming as a rat squeaked by his foot. Wild with fear he bolted, spraying festering fruit and ancient teabags over the lifeless street, his briefcase forgotten in his terror. It was minutes before his breathing slowed with his heart, and he swore at the games his mind had played, rationality only just starting to kick in for him. With a hand to his throbbing head, he turned, and saw the body lying by the bent streetlight. Common compassion led him over to it, away from the greater gloom.

He retched at the sight when closer. It was the old man, dead, his neck broken backwards, with blood on the crooked pole where his head had struck it. His eyes were still open, grey now, almost clear, as though like a dirty headlights themselves, turned off but in need of a clean, only his were flecked with his age. Shuddering, John closed them, shivering at how cold the skin already was, and closed the gaping mouth too. He straightened, and wondered whether he should run to the nearest house to have the police phoned, and a murder reported. But something nagged at him not to, the same voice that told him to hide. He guessed that it was doubt over the believability of his story.

After all, he reasoned, few would believe that he had met a toady monster on a dark London street.

His head throbbed, and he gained a sudden craving for aspirin. More concerned for himself than a corpse whose owner he had never known, he spun around and fled for the safety of his house in the next street over.

A/N-Pretty bizarre, I guess, but I just had this urge to write, and this is what came of it. Please review it, even if only a few words.