The death of Mr. Clegg

The music was loud and thudded in his chest. Although he had a sensitive ear, he wouldn’t be  able to tell you what kind of music it was. But it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t listening to the  music. 

Not exactly. 

It was a welcome white noise. 

And he wasn’t in a place he would normally be. In a country he had never been to before.  In the American wilderness in the middle of nowhere, sat huggermugger with a bunch of gigantic  bikers in their leathers and cans of beer.  

In his shabby outfit dressed by St Michael of Marks & Spencer back home.  He looked particularly out of water in this place with its garish neon lights that buzzed harshly and  the thick cigarette smoke that lingered like mist around the place.  

The clack of balls on a pool table, bursts of laughter and raised voices. 

A rowdy place. Not in any way where you would expect to find Mr. Clegg.  

Despite this drunken atmosphere, Mr. Clegg felt bizarrely zen, resting in neutral among the folks,  staring into the tumbler in front of him between his pale fine fingers.  

The bar was clearly a place of regular nightlife, a complete ecosystem and one that totally ignored  Mr. Clegg the instant he plopped in among them. 

He loosened the tie around his neck and unbuttoned the collar.  

He rubbed the grey stubble on his cheek, his pale eyes focussed on nothing.  “Another?” Came an American voice sliding through the beats of the music. Clegg didn’t respond at first.  

She tried again. “Another?” And she pinged the lip of the glass with a finger. With a slow bob, Clegg surfaced and looked up at the middle aged woman manning the bar.  He raised his eyebrows and gave a weak smile, she understood and topped up his empty glass. 

The moisture from the fresh cool drink ran down the outside of the tumbler and bled into the little  square napkin it had been placed on. 

The bartender smiled warmly and pulled away to deal with a regular, but kept an eye on the quiet  stranger. 

Clegg’s eyes again seemed to float focused on nothing.

This place, for its stark contrast to the humble life he was used to, actually brought a kind of  comfort, to be able to hide in a totally alien environment, away from the difficult work he had been  brought overseas to undertake. 

And when memories of that business came to him, it was then he would drink, dulling the flash  with his loosening sobriety.  

It was a difficult assignment, something he had very little choice in. 

He wished it would make sense, wished that he could make it make sense. In the very least it could mean he could go home.  

He blinked slowly, he was very tired. His body hadn’t adjusted to the jet lag. He let his eyes close slowly and in the thumping air of the bar, he drifted into a kind of sleep and  slumped a little on his stool, his head drooped.  

In his lucid dreaming state, he pulled up images of home. Of Ruislip. His garden. And his wife.  Angela glowed there, in the living room, or the garden, or on their first dinner date in the distant  past. 

Sometimes, as is the way with dreams, all at once. Instances indistinguishable from each other.  And he smiled gently 

The room went quiet, the clack of the pool table stopped, the air cleared and the music could be  heard properly for the first time as the chatter and laughter ebbed away like thunder. Finally Clegg opened his eyes as he felt a gentle breeze drift across his face. Standing in the open doorway across the bar was a young woman in smart dark clothes, the cold  night air drifting in around her.  

Clegg could feel the woman’s gaze route him out and fix on him and after a moment he turned. They made eye contact, he nodded and finished his drink. 

With effort he then heaved himself from the barstool and was about to leave when he realised he  hadn’t settled his bill and so pulled a knackered leather wallet from a pocket in his tweed jacket. Without thought, he slipped the folded bank note on to the counter next to the empty tumbler and  shuffled out of the bar as the bikers watched in silence. 

The door slapped shut and it was a moment before the rowdy voices returned and soon it was as  if Mr. Clegg had never been there. 

The bartender collected Clegg’s empty tumbler and was about to put the money in the till when  she noticed something. 

She held the note to the harsh light above her. 

There was no familiar face. No Benjamin Franklin. 

But the enigmatic smile of Queen Elizabeth II. 

The bartender smiled too, and instead decided to pin the foreign note to the board behind the till,  and then went back to serving the locals.  

The funny Englishman might come back again, she thought.  

The car was silent for the journey, driving through pitch black landscapes that stretched out to the  sky and became indistinguishable in the night.  

Mr. Clegg sat neatly in the passenger seat and his handler drove without a word. Occasionally a car would streak past and be gone in an instant. Shooting out from the darkness  and disappearing like a phantom behind them. 

For some distance the car drove on, the road ahead illuminated by the beams of the headlights  that glowed in Clegg’s glasses.  

Would he be punished? He wondered. 

The ‘Happy Days’ Motel was as you would expect for a roadside motel. Run down, peeling and  stained. And it was where Mr. Clegg had been put up for his time in the States. 

The black car pulled up in the parking lot. 

Mr. Clegg and his handler sat in silence, he felt like a scolded child. Back in his days when he was  a teacher. 

He thought that maybe he should thank his handler for the drive back to his digs, but what was  the point, and he opened the car door and climbed out with effort as his age and the drink were  catching up with him.

Expecting the car to disappear the instant he slammed the door shut, Mr. Clegg rummaged in his  jacket pocket for his door key. 

He climbed the rusting stairs up to his first floor room and glanced out to the parking lot and saw  the black car still lingering. 

The engine quietly purring away. 

He slotted the key into the lock and turned it, the door creaked and he stepped inside. He looked again to the parking lot. 

The car was still there. 

He had forgotten to turn on the bedside lamp before he left the room that morning, he had  regularly forgotten to do that. The days were long, the nights were filthy black and leaving the  lamp on gave him just the slightest feeling of coming home at the end of such a day. He pulled on the little cord and the light clicked on. 

He stepped back to the window and pulled back the curtain a little. 

The car was still there- but then, when the driver was satisfied, it slowly pulled away and left the  parking lot, vanishing in the dark. 

Clegg watched for a moment as the taillights disappeared into pinpricks and then blinked out all  together. 

He stepped back and closed his eyes with exhaustion. Then shrugged his tired shoulders and  took off his jacket, tossing it to the bed. 

He then sat heavily in the armchair beside the window and hunched to untie his shoelaces- but he  was too tired and slumped back into the chair. 

And there he slept the rest of the night. 

Until a heavy knock on the door woke him some hours later.  

He roused groggily and felt the drink from the night before jangling in his head. His scratchy eyes tried to focus, he looked around and with a shuffle of his feet, found his glasses  that had tumbled to the floor during the night.

As he slotted them on, he scanned around the room, at the tired wallpaper, the chest of draws  with its peeling veneer and his suitcase on top of it which he had been living out of.  And on the bedside table, the single modest photograph of Angela, again smiling, taken on a  holiday to Broadstairs. 

Smiling. Happy days. 

Again, he had forgotten to phone her. He hadn’t got the hang of the time difference. Again the knock on the door.  

He stretched his face, bringing his eyebrows as high as they could go and it relieved his headache  by a degree. 

Some minutes and a fresh shirt later, Mr. Clegg opened the door and saw the usual figure  standing before him.  

A tall strapping young man with his eyes hidden by professional tinted sunglasses. Not a word was said as the officer led Mr. Clegg from his room to the black car waiting in the  parking lot. After Clegg checked that he had left the lamp on for that evening.  

As he walked to the car, Mr. Clegg remembered and pulled from his jacket his official lanyard and  looped it over his head, his identity card slapping against his stomach. 

As he was driven to that morning’s work, Mr. Clegg tried to think how he got to the bar the night  before. He couldn’t drive. Perhaps he had walked. But the drive back to the motel could have  been an hour at least.  

Perhaps he hitchhiked, he reasoned. He’d hitchhiked when he was in his 30s. Across most of the  British Isles. It was how he met Angela. They were going the same way. 

He must have hitchhiked, he decided. 

The harsh sunlight made Clegg wince tightly, and soon the mountains stained orange-white  began to appear around them.

And then the road got thinner, less and less travelled, and then a tall electrified fence approached  like a tide. 

The car crawled to a standstill and a tall young man in uniform stepped forward from the small  booth beside the entrance to the gated facility in the middle of nowhere. 

Clegg heard the rhubarb of their American accents and saw in his periphery identity cards handed  over and examined. Then with a gesture, the gate was opened and the car was given the all clear  to glide through. 

Clegg saw the gate close firmly behind them in the wing mirror. 

The same corridor with off-grey walls and anonymous doors running up and down.  The same quiet hum of the overhead strip lights.  

The same shadowless atmosphere that he had sat in countless mornings. 

And then the same small dark room, ushered in by yet another identity-less officer in uniform. The same anonymous technician setting out the items on the table. 

Who then silently drifted out of the room and let Mr. Clegg settle in the reasonably comfortable  chair. 

When the door closed, the room was totally silent, in the dim darkness Clegg could make out the  foam spikes that covered the walls and the ceiling, every sound softened and dulled. Before him on the table was a pen and a few sheets of blank paper.  

And an unmarked envelope. 

Which he did not touch. He touched nothing. He knew he would be told when. And he sat some moments waiting. He wanted to check his watch but it had been confiscated  before he entered the chamber.  

He traced the room as his eyes adjusted. He spotted the camera once again, discreetly tucked  away in the corner of the room, nestled among the foam. 

What a place, he thought.  

And then a single point of red light silently illuminated and faded out in the wall directly ahead and  that was the cue. 

With a slight adjustment of the chair, Clegg inched forward and picked up the envelope, opening it  and removing the paper inside. 

Printed on the paper was a very complicated length of text that appeared to be an equation, or  something close to coordinates. 

Clegg had seen this quite a few times but he still needed to see it, because after every session,  the text seemed to disappear from his memory. 

Doubt and worry bugged him, but he had to file them away for now. 

And so he scanned the text again and again, taking it in, letting his mind process it.  And then once it had been committed to memory, he folded the paper and slotted it back into the  envelope and pushed it aside, pulling the blank sheet of paper and pen toward him with his other  hand. 

He held the pen ready to write, he calmed his breath and waited once again. His mind as clear as a starless sky. 

Nothing happened, just silence. It was like he was not there at all. 

And then something happened. 

Clegg’s vision blurred a little, flickered like a camera struggling to focus, and then whitened and  then became an almost limitless space stretching out ahead of him. 

But it would take a while. Outside the room, it had been known that these sessions with Mr. Clegg  would take up to seven hours at a time. 

But feel like moments to the man in the room. 

Like advancing fog, the whiteness drifted in, licking around the room like smoke.  Clegg sat unmoved, unfazed by it. He blinked slowly. 

A vast cavernous space now lay in the room, dividing it almost in half, like a room opening out to  a gigantic palatial basilica. 

From distant high points of the expanse pulsed tiny spots of white light, fading in and out like star  fire. 

It was peaceful, quiet, but not silent. 

There was noise here, distant shuffling steps, like a monastery.  

Clegg could see figures drift from here to there far off beyond focus.  

But he wasn’t concerned. 

He had seen them many times before and they had not bothered him. Nor had he bothered them. His hand scribbled, jotting hasty notes on the paper. 

Beyond the room in the observation suite, the session was entering it’s fourth hour. 

Finally Clegg felt a presence draw near to his vision. 

From the mist there seemed to be an approaching form. 

Tall and slender like a supermodel, no discernible legs, just a long gown that met the floor and  billowed slightly with unseen steps. 

Arms that were elongated with long fine fingers. Four on each hand. 

Elegant sleeves cuffed with delicate fringing that seemed to trail off like smoke. 

And on top of an elegant swan neck was a head free of hair that seemed to be in slow constant  movement, oscillating like a flowerhead.  

The details were foggy and he tried to sketch them.  

He had tried before and he knew those efforts weren’t good enough, so Clegg tried even harder to  get something more tangible this time. 

As the figure got closer, so did a hint of clarity as Clegg’s mind pushed harder for more. He gulped. 

Fine high cheekbones reaching up to an ornate brow ridge that kept two small intelligent eyes  hidden in almost darkness. Delicate almost elfin ears coming to a soft point. A slight nose tilted upwards and a wide mouth with thin lips, open slightly, revealing the smallest  glimpse and glint of teeth.

A haughty air, an aura of high intelligence that looked down from this tall vision. An uncanny presence, almost lurid.  

It stood a good few feet taller than the sitting Clegg, he looked up slowly at the figure that at first  seemed to have no interest in him. 

It looked around the room in slow motion, its golden eyes drifting and lingering nowhere. Its skin iridescent like petrol. 

And then with a flick, it looked down to Clegg, who tried his best not to flinch. But he flinched all the same, and the vision flickered ever so slightly.  

The figure tilted its head back, scrutinising Mr. Clegg with superior curiosity.  

The camera went dead. 

The observation suite lost all power for nearly twenty five minutes and no one knew what was  going on. 

There was panic, sirens, people running, a struggle to open the door to the session room but it  had become locked and none of the keys would fit. 

And it resisted whatever object they used to break it in. The axehead shattered, the bullets  ricocheted and the shoulder of the large security guard was severely damaged. 

Inside the session room, Mr. Clegg sat in professional calm as the entity continued to study him. And then, without moving its lips, it spoke. 

It’s words chiming in Clegg’s head.

Clegg’s body was found the following day in his motel bed, the coroners concluded his heart  stopped and that his age was probably the reason. 

He died under the smiling gaze of Angela’s photograph sitting on the bedside table. And by all accounts, Mr. Clegg had a peaceful smile on his face when he was found. 

Clegg’s notes didn’t seem to amount to much. 

They were handed over to the Director of Operations who studied them along with the footage  taken from the camera in the session room before the power loss. 

It showed Clegg sitting at the desk for hours and nothing else of interest. No tall ethereal stranger.  

The death of Mr. Clegg seemed at once to mean nothing at all and more than anyone could  possibly imagine.

Written by James O’Neill

James O’Neill is a London based sculptor and writer. With his sound design partner Paul Freeman he has produced several short form audio plays that explore character and atmosphere. He is inspired by the works of John Le Carré, P.G. Wodehouse and Edward St Aubyn.