Episode 1: Wrong House, Wrong Time
Meet Jerry, who only wanted to sleep when he saw his old friend's disaster
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Jerry Hearingmore desperately needed to hear less.
He’d finally drifted to sleep after days of insomnia since the unfortunate surgery that had given him the greatly unwanted lifetime companion of a titanium plate in his head, when an unsettling voice resonated through the metal, tingled his skull, and seeped inside his mind as it said:
Language selected: English.
Welcome to the Intergalactizen’s Guide to Training Earthlings. Though they seem useless at first, now we have even trained pets intelligent enough to domesticate other wild Earthlings.
First, a success story.
At first, Jerry thought it a dream and rolled over, but when the voice continued, he jammed the pillows against his head. He assumed it to be some idiotic bloke driving down the country road with a radio program on too loud. Was it really worth having your life saved if it meant turning your head into a bloody antenna? Before the accident, it was bad enough that he’d already been living with a far greater range of hearing than 98% of the human population. Now thanks to the bastard doctors, his metal skull-plate had amplified his hearing to make it more hyperactively sensitive than a tower tuned to every station within 100 mile radius all at the same damn time.
The solemn voice continued:
It was a magically sunny day in Portchester, England when Declan demolished the wrong house.
Jerry snapped up straight in his bed.
His best Irish mate Declan lived in Portchester.
Where was this voice coming from?
He went to his phone in the corner of the room, but it was still off.
The voice continued on in a pleasant sort of BBC-style narrative fashion, which in any other setting would’ve been comforting, if he had any idea where in the hell it was coming from:
Declan, a typically dull Earthling, nearly left the site without even noticing what he’d done. He’d been so preoccupied sending round after round of unanswered texts to his wife in hopes that she hadn’t actually left for good last night that naturally, he hadn’t noticed a great many things. He’d paid no mind to the unnaturally cheery weather, nor the sunburn reddening the back of his neck. He hadn’t noticed how he’d shattered the silence of the pastoral mobile home neighbourhood as his excavator had crushed those wooden walls into toothpicks. He had not even noticed the puzzled looks his workmates had exchanged when he’d told them all that he’d finish this job alone, all to get more privacy to ring his wife again.
Finally, he did notice something unusual when he bent down to pick up the last pile of rubble for the dumpster, but only because his hard hat fell off his head and landed on what remained of the old house number plate. Number 42.
The number struck him as odd. His first thought was to scold the number plate:
“You’re not 42. No way in hell. The fuck is wrong with you?”
He picked up the work order papers from the cab seat and read the address scheduled for demolition again.
“No, no, no, no, no…it’s not. Oh, Jaysus.”
The number on the paper couldn’t shout back at him, but it didn’t have to. It clearly read “Demolition scheduled for Cornaway Lane number 40.”
Jerry recognised the sound of his friend’s voice clear as day. His thoughts went wild wondering who the fuck was talking about Declan? Why had they recorded him? And why was someone playing the recording now? What if they knew what he and Declan had done together? Was this a set up to scare him into a confession?
Jerry whispered aloud, “A success story, they called it. What kind of– ?”
To see if anyone was outside, Jerry went to the window and peered out from the grand view of his treehouse 20 feet above the ground, all the better to be as far as possible from extraneous noises, but nothing stirred outside. Only trees surrounded him, and there were no cars on the distant road.
The BBC-like voice went on in Jerry’s mind:
Declan glanced back and forth between the house number on the ground and the number on the paper. He recounted his memories of every moment since he’d arrived here and started the job. The number on the front of the home had been 40. He’d seen it himself. Why wouldn’t it be 40? He glanced at the number plate on the home next door. Why it was right next door to number 38 for Christ’s sake, just as it should be like all the other even-numbered homes on this side of the lane. Yet to his left, the house number plate read 40. What kind of blockhead builder would put the unfortunate home 42 between numbers 38 and 40?
Declan tossed the work-order papers onto the cab floor and pulled out his phone again. It was already nearly 1700 hours. He hardly had time to demolish the correct mobile home next door before he was due back, and besides, wouldn’t that look too suspicious to demolish two homes right next to each other?
He glared down at the house number plate, then looked around. No one appeared to be watching him. Yet.
Jerry took a few steps back from the window, and that’s when he felt it, a surge shooting down from the top of his head like he’d been struck by lightning. He crumpled down to the floor, his vision gone, his hearing vanished entirely, and as he gripped his knees to his chest to have something familiar to grab onto, suddenly he felt his body floating as if suspended in a bubble.
And all at once, Jerry found himself floating above his friend Declan, observing the wreckage of the remnants of what was once someone’s home that had been reduced to earth and bits of scattered debris, and Declan whirled around in all directions.
Jerry tried to open his mouth, but couldn’t speak. He could only watch, listen to the birds chirping in the trees surrounding Declan’s world, and the longer he looked at Declan, suddenly he realised he could feel what Declan was feeling. Panic squeezed his chest, and Declan’s thoughts flooded in:
“Perhaps no one will notice. It’s not utterly ridiculous. So what if I’m completely fecked backwards, forwards, and arse-ways all at the same time. I’ll just carry on as if it had never happened.”
Jerry watched as Declan jumped in the cab and pushed on the gas pedal to make the excavator roar forward, and he crunched the house number plate into the ground. Then he drove over it several times for good measure and pushed dirt over it with the bucket digger to bury the evidence.
He drove dutifully away from the site. Driving through the sleepy little village of one-storey homes, hedges, and scattering of trees back toward the demolition and salvage company, Jerry heard Declan’s thoughts in a tone with a tiny bit of self-assurance:
Perhaps I got away with it. Most people whiz through this M27 pit stop between Portsmouth and Southampton so quickly that even tourists hardly noticed this place. Besides, hadn’t they discussed how they’d tear down all the mobile homes and static caravans on this park eventually anyway? I’ve done the owners of that place a favour in taking it down. It had been an unbearable eyesore by anyone’s standards; with its overgrown lawn, muddied walls, and that utterly abandoned mess inside.
Shouting rang out in booming, garbled bursts from a man running after him.
Jerry stared in horror at the red-faced fellow chasing Declan and shaking his fist in the air.
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