Chimpley

By Chris Welsh

In just under 24 hours, Jason gets handed divorce papers, loses his job, loses his home, eats some dry cereal and finds out about an Uncle who recently died and left him a house in his final will and testament. A very interesting house, located in a town called Chimpley, so far past the middle of nowhere that it almost loops back into civilisation.

'Chimpley' is Jason's story. One of madness and despair, all centred around a village full of elderly, generally insane, folk.

Can Jason convince them he owns the house? Can he convince them not to murder him and feed him to the strange bugs that live in the dank tunnels under the village? Can he find out exactly who his mysterious uncle was?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Welsh
• Release date: Mar 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301446810

Chris Welsh

I am a writer from Liverpool, UK. I've written three full novels and a whole bunch of short stories. I try to keep a blog but I'm not very good at it.I like horror, sci fi and absurdist humour. Also, I read a lot of comics.

Book preview

Chapter 0

For any normal person under normal circumstances, inside the bag would be so dark and frightening they would panic. Any normal person would fight to get out and scream for help through a hoarse throat, tearing at the fabric until they either escaped or their fingers wore down to nubs. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t even remember being there. He didn’t know he was in a bag, or what a ‘bag’ was. Babies don't know this stuff, they hardly remember anything. It’s one of their ‘things’, along with perpetual crying and willful incontinence. They forgot things, or don't form the memories in the first place.

Something about the proximity to the act of being dragged naked and screaming from a shrieking woman messes with their brains, leaving them unable to record experiences. Humans need a wide buffer between that grisly slash beautiful act of nature and their first memory to make sure there are no overlaps, perhaps to avoid psychological problems in the future.

No infant will form a lasting friendship in their first few years on Earth. So long as they get food and warmth they’ll get along fine with anyone. The reason they get close with the parents is because, usually, at least one of them sticks around for the first fifteen years or so, usually more. A baby will never buy a drink as a thank-you to someone who changed its nappy because it won’t remember it happened. It might seem ungrateful or even ignorant but that’s just how they are.

The first few years of anyone's life are spent either asleep or hungry. Anything done for their benefit, be it providing warmth or staying awake whilst they screamed through the sprouting of a new tooth, doesn’t interest them. They won’t know the sacrifices made on their behalf. Those memories won't exist in any accessible place.

This newborn in particular wouldn’t remember the crunching vehicle crash or the flaming wreckage a lady in a plain linen dress courageously rescued it from. It wouldn’t remember being carried by her, struggling along with a probable broken leg and severe blood loss from a nasty head wound, to a tiny hamlet she didn’t know the name of. It wouldn’t remember being placed on the first doorstep the lady arrived at, where she promptly dropped to the floor, convulsed a little, then died. It wouldn’t remember the family that took it in and gently heated some milk for it in a saucepan. Not only because it was a baby, but also because it spent almost the entire ordeal snuggled safely inside a brown sack-cloth cocoon it would grow to know, in adult life, as a duffel bag.

It cried a little because it woke up.

Then it stopped crying as it guzzled the milk.

Chapter 1

People have limits. Little invisible lines in their brain that, when crossed, expel the person out of the realm of normality and either into madness, anger or depression. Sometimes all three or even some unique tangent applicable only to them. The only way to know is by crossing the line. The only way to cross the line is by suffering some intensely personal disaster.

When that happens, when they wonder whether some great, hellfire-spewing deity has it in for them, they question everything. They fret and curse even the smallest example of bad luck and demand to know why, oh why the universe hates them so.

The issues are never the big things - never war, famine or drought - those things are routinely glossed over by the average being more concerned with their own unlucky life. To a man sat at a desk in a tall city office building, the more worldly problems are ones that happen to other people. They donate a fraction of a salary to help fix those causes when they can spare it so it’ll all be remedied soon enough, they’re certain.

For that sort of person, it’s the little things that cause a breakdown, a major malfunction in the headspace. The insignificant stations the train of sanity pauses at on its way to madness. The forgettable instances that gnaw at a psyche until the owner is left quivering on the floor in a pool of their own creation, desperately thumbing through old copies of a lifestyle magazine to find an article to make them feel better. They crave empty words about food or celebrities or the joys of sex, something that will cloud over their tiny, meagre problems. They skim an article that champions a film star who eats chips every day yet staves off obesity and oh yes, that feels much better. They fold the magazine, satisfied, and wait patiently for the next mini life implosion.

It could be the drive to work that leaves them three minutes late, exactly, every single day regardless of what time they leave their driveway, or that small piece of red onion that sneaks into a plain, store-bought sandwich and completely ruins lunch. Tripping over the same piece of poorly laid carpet, day in, day out with soul-numbing regularity.

The minuscule irritants that build to a total much larger than the sum of their parts, poking and prodding an expanding ball of spit-inducing fury with no outlet. The things that wear down a person’s will to live like a chisel slowly chipping away at a cell wall. The things a person can obsess over for far too long, throwing time away and turning hopes and dreams into little more than dull, out of focus memories. That unquantifiable feeling that there is something out there so desperate to see them forever ruined and dressed in rags takes over from their dreams, from the car, the house, the career they hoped to one day have. The vendetta they’re certain the neighbour has against them becomes more important than putting the hours in for that promotion or taking that holiday with the wife and kids.

Jason existed on this plane of ridiculous existence. His brain was a ravished war-torn No Man's Land with only the odd outpost and crumbling look-out base doing any job of keeping him from ruination. His solitary defence, the thing that guided him though the self-imposed battlefield, was his ability to not let any of it appear to get him down.

When a person is in such a fractured state of mind, when insanity and apathy clash beneath the surface, it takes just one big-hitter to send them tumbling from their pedestal into the murky depths of their own ruined brain. They need just one sizeable disaster to tip them over the edge into the realm of the truly unhinged.

Three of these such things slapped Jason across his face with big wet fish, as he sat at a desk amid stacks of battered, manilla folders covered in names and dates.

The first came in the form of an answering machine message from his wife. She called seven times but he let them all ring out, trying his best to ignore the phone as it shook impatiently at the side of his keyboard. Her picture flashed up on the screen each time with a forced smile splayed across her face, making him feel a little worse whenever he glanced at it. The phone buzzed again almost a minute after the latest call, signalling the arrival of a fresh voice-mail. Reluctantly he picked it up and listened, holding it tentatively against the side of his head and awaiting the screech from his beloved wife. It came, as he expected it would, but along with the usual torrent of questionable abuse it also brought some unfortunate news.

In typical Daria fashion she started off the message relatively calmly, coldly chastising him for not answering his 'fucking phone' all morning. Soon her tone changed and the decibel level rocketed skywards, switching from collected to raving in a move that took his aching eardrums by surprise. She told him in the loudest, most smugly aggressive voice she could conjure that she intended to leave him forever. She found another, better man, she said, with a better job and a better car with buckets more self respect than Jason would ever scrape together. She also told him she found this man some months ago, despite not having mentioned it and continuing to live in the same house as Jason, sharing the bed they bought together on the nights she managed to get home.

The message ended eloquently with the words ‘world-class fuckwit’. His eyes blurred with a hazy red glow that made his world all fuzzy and out of focus. Somewhere in his mind he heard a song, some generic tune stolen from the elevator of a posh hotel or the hold music of a utilities company. Vague awareness of things happening around him filtered through the mist but his consciousness meandered away to take a look out of the window to see the birds nesting in he trees, a cup of water in one hand and a book in the other. His brain tried to ignore the world whilst his body attempted to destroy it. If he opened his mind’s eye, he would have caught himself in the middle of explosive, blinding anger for perhaps the first time in his adult life.

The brain-cloud cleared of its own accord and his normal vision almost fully returned by the time he stormed through the foyer of his office building. He threw his coat over his back and strode on with head held high, riding a giddy wave of adrenaline back to the shores of composure. By the time he reached the coffee shop at the end of the block a type of serenity scrubbed his nerves clean and his breathing returned to as close to normal as he tended to get. His loud, crashing reaction to the news claimed the life of one fairly expensive computer monitor and a fax machine. The collision between the two sent various components flying through the air. He then beat both with a defenceless wireless keyboard, spraying letters and scraps of plastic across the office. His mobile phone suffered a vicious stomping that left it bleeping pathetically on the floor, unrecognisable as a communications device. A chair took flight at one point and smashed the glass out of a nearby vending machine, giving the woman trying to purchase a nutty breakfast bar cause to scream her lungs out. The whole ordeal turned out to be a disaster, electronics-wise. Toasters and MP3 players would talk of the day for years, passing on stories of the attack until lore formed and Jason became reviled by appliances the world over.

He heard his boss call out to him as he stormed away from the small office, inquisitively at first, followed by angrily and eventually chased with a threatening order to never return. Bellowed promises of bills being sent in the post made it to Jason’s ringing ears as the office door slammed harshly behind him. This was the second thing that went wrong. As the haze cleared and the ramifications of his actions seeped through, Jason’s first thought went to the chocolate bar abandoned in his desk drawer. He now had no job and a wife on the way out, but that thing cost him almost £1.

It took two large coffees to settle him and another shot of espresso to set his brain buzzing again. In the space of an hour his structured, dry little world had been cut up into pieces and thrown out into the woods for wolves to devour. Only a small part of him became concerned whilst the rest struggled to maintain the enthusiasm needed to let it bother him. Even on an objectively good day his life tested him, flipping between routinely terrible and unquestionably dull. The job he tossed away held no interest beyond an excuse to keep him busy from 9:00am to 5:00pm. His temperate married life, once full of fun and cheer, had long since sunk into a pit of gut-churning disappointment.

At home, rather than relaxing and enjoying the life of a comfortable, low-mortgage home-owner, he contended with a furious other half who often made it perfectly clear she despised his very existence. Generally she gave no hint why and as such he struggled to summon the ire to fight back. But it got to him, subtly, all the same.

Her disgust began on a genetic level and worked from there, rather than directing itself at any particular thing about him. It encompassed all, making happiness around her almost impossible.

Daria, a suitably quirky name for his off-kilter wife, hadn't been civil with him in over a year, almost two. He fought back with an emotionless apathy, occasionally apologising as if self-flagellating might fix their problems, a stance he adopted in the interest of ‘getting on with things’. Allowing her to hurl bitter obscenities, to be continuously disappointed by his myriad failings, felt easier than bringing up his concerns or fixing anything. It saved him the effort of keeping her happy in the shadow of an ever-building wall of demands, perilously cemented by hard-boiled expectations. She tended to leave him alone provided he offered up the back of his head as a target to scream at for half an hour each day, like a hairy virgin ritually sacrificed to a pissed-off King Kong.

He would sit quietly and agree, nod and apologise, sip his tea with a tired sigh and acknowledge her astute observations of his floundering character simply because the other options caused him to consider the much more daunting fear of losing her entirely. Then, without fail, she would berate his lack of spine and storm out of the room until round two started later on.

He couldn't bring himself to argue back because he could never win. How could he, when the person he argued with was always one hundred percent correct in everything they said and fuck him if he thought otherwise? It was like tossing china cups at a brick wall and expecting them to bounce back.

The last real conversation they enjoyed regarded the state of their fridge after he accidentally spilled milk and neglected to clean up. It quickly turned stale, as milk is known to do, and created a foul, pungent smell that filled the kitchen. At first Daria had been almost playful with him, cracking a joke about the stench as if she forgot her chosen role in their relationship, but it all came flooding back as soon as Jason admitted fault and the drab conversation quickly fell into disrepair as the ranting and the name-calling ignited and sullied the atmosphere.

Chapter 2

Jason and his betrothed met in their late teens and enjoyed a simplistically happy life with each other for almost seven years. He’d have said they were perfectly happy to spend the rest of their lives together before things turned sour. They fell into an intense, magical brand of love so soon after meeting and made it last for as long as they could, blissfully unaware that they were much better off when kept apart. They both ignored the small problems that cropped up and he began to roll over and admit defeat in most petty arguments, regardless of fault. Subconsciously he let go of everything he expected from life in a bid to allow his lover to flourish. She asserted her dominance whilst he stuffed his head in books and thought happy thoughts.

They married after four years, both approaching mid-twenties, and moved in together despite an expanding vacuum of romance. She quietly panicked about growing old unmarried and took the initiative to propose. She chose Jason out of proximity and sake of ease as opposed to a real desire for his long-term companionship, but the whole notion put him over the moon. Suspicious of her apparently dwindling love, he worried she readied to leave him, plummeting his confidence into the depths of the deepest sea. The proposal invigorated him and proved her love, or so he thought. In truth their flame faded so much that a wholly different flame would be needed to find the first one.

The mind games started not long after they embarked on their supposedly blissful marriage. They were gentle at first, generated by the mutual boredom that fermented between them. Evening after evening trickled past in front of the modest television, watching reruns of shows neither really cared about. Box-sets were devoured and their film collection grew beyond the one set of shelves, appearing in teetering towers around the TV set. Daria complained that Jason neglected tasks she hadn’t asked him to do; he started to slightly move things she put down, enough to implant a small amount of confusion in her mind.

Each invented curious, vindictive little things intended to irritate and passively torment the other, but soon their antics escalated.

He washed the dishes he used but neglected hers; she dipped his toothbrush into the toilet before she flushed it. They adopted tiresome nuances aimed at wearing the other down. Jason went so far as to try and feign obsessive-compulsive disorder in the hope that repeatedly flicking the bedroom light on and off would drive Daria crazy. She invested in an eye mask and wore it whenever he went near the bed, driving another wedge between their intimacies. The love plummeted out of their relationship faster than a lube-covered penguin on a water slide, decaying the foundations laid between them by a deceptively brilliant first three years.

Months flew by and their destructive tendencies grew in tenacity and scope; they both sailed passed the age of twenty five with barely any source of happiness left in their lives. She resorted to the simple joys of screaming and he spent his nights tapping away at a keyboard and arguing on internet forums, shutting out the real world and all of its problems. He all but gave up on his dreams, leaving them festering in his past, rotting at the back of his mind like discarded baskets of fruit in the alley behind a grocery store. Until his fresh release, Jason worked for years in the same job he gained upon leaving university filled with glorious hope for their future. He took it as a stop-gap to raise enough regular income to make ends meet with the house they bought, never truly waking up to the fact that he should move on at some point. Sat in an office churning out paperwork bore no resemblance to his Sports Studies degree and he hadn’t set foot inside a gym since the week before his final exams. Daria left university with a law degree and spent the following years climbing the ranks of a small law firm, earning herself a bulging salary and professional respect along the way. She managed the hostile home-life much better, channelling some of her overflowing rage into bettering her career.

Life took its despicable toll and both individuals became calamitous husks of their former selves, carrying their ageing looks around as false depictions of who they once were. Where they were once compatible, they evolved barriers and shields that only let the badness through. Their seventh year together felt like the fiftieth; twenty-six years of age felt incredibly close to death.

Yet throughout all of the disparaging time they spent together, he never made a life outside of her. There were no friends he could turn to or family to drop in on. His social calendar consisted of blank dates whereas Daria, growing ever more eager to burn her relationship to the ground, filled up her phone book. Her network of friends grew to an army of fiery women, all of whom hated Jason for various reasons, all of whom had male contacts eager to meet the delightful Daria. She felt so desperate to create a new life away from her depressing, useless drudge of a man that she started to accept blind dates with these mutual friends. After the occasional night away from her marital bed and many evenings being wined and dined by potential suitors, her other existence blossomed enough that it detracted further from life at home. Now it poised to destroy it.

Chapter 3

Calmed by coffee intake, Jason arrived home to find Daria’s car missing from the driveway and most of her belongings emptied from the house, leaving his once warm home chilled and bare. A large, abusive note stuck to the front door with tape, littered with expletives and attacks on his manhood. His eyes barely noticed it before his hands ripped it and tossed it into the corner of the hallway. His brain ticked over like nothing happened as he contemplated what he could eat. Reflexively he moved to toss his mobile phone into the bowl near the flowery vase in the hallways before remembering he left the thing in pieces on his office floor. The vase wasn’t there either. He emptied the rest of his pockets, stacking up a handful of coins in size order and dropping his thin wallet next to them. After a second or two of silent contemplation, he slotted the wallet back in his pocket and stomped to the kitchen.

The fridge had been cleaned out besides a few perishing items; a crumbling half of a pepper and some out-of-date butter, along with a carton of foul lumps masquerading as milk. He knew when he left that morning that half a tub of home-made chilli sat on the middle shelf but Daria had claimed it at some point. Odd, he thought, how she managed to empty the house after telling him she’d be at work all day. Part of him regretted ignoring her calls but he brushed it off. Scrounging for food felt like far more effort than he could afford, so he passed on sustenance and went immediately to bed.

The clock he passed on the hallway wall ticked past 3:15 in the afternoon.

He would fix his life in the morning, he thought, as he examined the bedside cabinet that usually held his laptop but no longer did. The small lock had been broken clean off. A small part of him despaired before resuming his stoic stance.

He knew about dating sites from seeing ads for them everywhere, ones that didn’t charge you to knock up a profile. A billboard for one in town guaranteed romantic success and featured images of some stunning models, which seemed promising. Stunning models, after all, often engage in large royal-rumble-style scraps for the chance to meet jobless losers on the rebound.

Playing the field never appealed but now that he’d been thrust unwillingly into the world of the singleton, he thought it time to strap on some boots and give that particular ball a kick. He would ‘get back out there’, spread about a bit.

He could join a gym, he thought, grabbing at his left bicep and finding not much there. Plenty of women visit gyms, he reasoned, and a bit of exercise never did anyone any harm. But oh, he’d need to pay membership fees and buy equipment…a difficult task without a job to routinely inject life into a bank balance. He considered a grovelling crawl back to the office, or at least a trip to the Job Centre with a pocket full of hopes and dreams, but the thought made him feel a little ill.

At least he had the house nearly all paid for, thanks to years of diligent mortgage payments that left him with a disparagingly meagre pile of savings.

In theory.

Chapter 4

After almost fifteen hours of restless and disturbed sleep, Jason woke sharply from a dozing state because of several noises occurring all at once. The familiar thud of Daria's tall heels on the wooden floors rang throughout the house, knocking on the side of his head like a wake up call from an obtrusive neighbour. A scraping noise from somewhere downstairs joined it and, off in the distance, someone appeared to be stomping on a box of very vocal cats.

It took all of Jason’s will and ambition to slide out from under the comforting womb of the duvet and to the window, pulling the curtains apart and blinking as the morning sun cracked at his eyeballs like a leather whip. Staring blankly as his retinas adjusted he made out the shape of a removal van parked across his driveway, with two men in matching overalls carrying his furniture and boxes of his belongings between it and the front door. They were currently struggling with his old antique desk; the one he kept his books in and oddly, they didn’t seem to have emptied it.

One of his wife’s pals screeched orders at them from a spot on the lawn, clapping her hands and supervising the proceedings with a beady eye. Jason didn’t know her name, he never wanted to, but he did know of her severe temper that gave even Daria a run for her money. Her voice explained the apparent feline abuse.

Alarmingly for Jason, the devil-woman stood next to a newly-erected sign, advertising the sale of his house. It mentioned that a quick sale would be preferred, something he’d never before seen on such a sign. After a brief flash of face-melting realisation he became very regretful that he never got around to putting his name on the official ownership documents. He pictured the forms in his head, marked with the lone signature of Daria. He always paid the mortgage money into her account, too. If he had been born a balloon, Jason would have deflated and shot around the room. This was the third thing, the last of the big three things after the dumping and the job loss, that nudged him closer to the edge.

When everything got signed, it hadn’t occurred to him that it might become a problem. They were young and in love and clearly would be forever. He simply hadn’t bothered. The home-owner forms barely acknowledged his existence. The sign in the lawn meant legal problems and long, drawn out arguments over who got what from a sale he probably couldn’t stake a claim in; two things he had no interest in doing, but would be forced to take part in to avoid losing everything, before obviously losing everything anyway. With his beloved involved, he could probably expect to be left penniless and destitute before the end of the month. He foresaw a future involving cold beans and cheap, cheap wine followed by death in an alleyway.

He would have to visit a law firm. Speak to people. Relay his terrible story to the world.

The thought made Jason dizzy and a little nauseous, yet mostly disconnected as if the whole thing was happening to someone else and he was merely a stranger in their body. Like a silent passenger that helped shoulder the great burden of apathy. He felt like a ghost. He could almost sense his poor husk leaving the room, ditching his ethereal spirit behind. Either crippling narcissism had suddenly swooped down and snatched him up or some sort of stress-induced nonchalance boiled inside his brain. Possibly the prelude to the nice, relaxing breakdown surely long overdue.

Proper thought resumed as he reached the lower floor of his fractured abode, shocked back to reality by the lack of items that remained. The house had been thoroughly cleaned to the extent that it surprised him to look up and see bulbs dangling from the fittings.

He paused and sighed in the bare hallway as a nervous delivery man called his wife’s maiden name from outside, waiting on further instruction since the woman