Red Tape (Book 3 of White Rabbit)

Red Tape

By Stuart Oldfield

Copyright 2022 Stuart Oldfield

Smashwords Edition

The four books of the White Rabbit series

1. The One Who Is Two

2. Friends and Enemies

3. Red Tape

4. The Woman Who Looks Both Ways

Table of Contents

Preface—the story so far...

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Preface—the story so far...

A stranger in the strange land, our hero is now beginning to get his bearings. In particular, he is starting to discover who is on his side and who is not, who are his friends and who are his enemies.

Miss Leggett and the sinister Company are clearly not friends—after all, it was they that engineered the confrontation with his doppelgänger that so nearly resulted in their mutual destruction.

Conversely, it does seem that the various representatives of the government that he encounters—including the beautiful girl in white—are on his side, despite being deeply exasperating to deal with and despite the snippets of information that they provide being more confusing than clarifying. Throughout Friends and Enemies (the second book of the series) these officials maintain their incessant urging of him to search for the mysterious Woman Who Looks Both Ways. Most prominently in this part of the story, it is the self-styled Emergent Propensity who expands Loofah's knowledge base for his great Quest, albeit in the infuriatingly fragmentary way that seems to be the accepted modus operandi of the government employee over here. In a series of meetings, this amiable yet aggravating little creature not only confirms that it is the double woman who will somehow enable Loofah to return to his own world, but that the Secretariat will be assisting with his Quest every step of the way. At their very last meeting Loofah expresses his frustration with the incomplete and incoherent briefing that he has been receiving. The Propensity seems to empathise with Loofah's complaints—but after giving the matter some thought the little creature's less than helpful response is to advise him to find his heart of darkness… by looking within.

One additional item of information that the Propensity does impart is that—in some unexplained way—Loofah's lookalike may also be involved in the search for The Woman Who Looks Both Ways. At the time this possibility utterly horrifies Loofah, his doppelgänger being a creature of unalloyed evil, the very concept of whom is utterly loathsome and terrifying to him. As his adventure progresses, however, Loofah comes to realises that perhaps this strange being, whilst being disconcerting to contemplate, may not be the monster of iniquity that Loofah has hitherto believed him to be. Here, then, is one bitter enemy who—even if he has not become a fully-fledged friend—has at least metamorphosed into something distinctly less threatening.

And finally, of course, there is the young Frenchman that Loofah encounters soon after his near-fatal encounter with the lookalike. Is the handsome and charming Norbert Dentressangle a friend or is he an enemy? He certainly saved Loofah's life on two separate occasions, first from a monstrous infant-devouring termite queen, and then from a homicidal public toilet. Claiming to be part of the Secretariat, Dentressangle is especially keen to assist Loofah in his search for The Woman Who Looks Both Ways. And according to the Frenchman there is more to this Quest than simply getting Loofah back to where he came from. It seems that travel to Loofah's homeland would bestow some sort of power on the voyager, which would pose a potential threat to the baleful Mr Stobart, Miss Leggett's line manager and Chief Executive of the Company, who apparently runs his affairs from over there.

According to the Frenchman, Loofah and his doppelgänger are the only ones who can find The Woman Who Looks Both Ways and that it is the chance of acquiring this travel-linked power that is motivating unspecified enemies to work with Loofah's lookalike in his own efforts to find her. Indeed Dentressangle claims that it was these enemies that brought the 'evil' twin here in the first place, with Loofah coming at the same time as an unwanted—but unavoidable—by-product. Dentressangle also tells him that it is the threat of a challenge to Mr Stobart's powerbase that is behind the efforts of Miss Leggett and her cohorts to prevent anyone from finding the double woman—even if this means that Loofah loses his life.

But what is motivating Dentressangle himself? For, although he claims to be a government official, there is something not quite straight about the young Frenchman. In the closing chapters of Friends and Enemies, Loofah encounters a seductive female friend of the Gallic charmer. Not only does this lady seem to be very well informed about his mission—including the Emergent Propensity's advice about the next steps in his Quest—but she is also the same woman whom he saw in the company of his own doppelgänger, the alleged tool of these unspecified evil enemies, soon after his arrival. The beautiful Frenchwoman first tries to seduce Loofah and then—after he has been sent to hospital by Dentressangle himself—subjects him to a nightmare of torture by surgery. And so it seems that the charming Frenchman is on the side of darkness after all, that he is no more a friend that than the malevolent Under Manager herself.

Later, lying in his bed of pain in the hospital, the last remnants of Loofah’s life seem to be ebbing away. But as he readies himself for that last journey into the eternal night, the girl in white appears and spirits him away to safety.

Chapter 1

Soft blackness: warm and womb-like, cuddling and calming. Rest, rejuvenation, sleep. He snuggles down into the blackness, pulling it around himself like a duvet, drifting in its warm liquidity.

Drifting, dreaming images emerge from the blackness: first strange lights and coloured rabbits, then the two happy spaniels, skipping beside him. He sees that they are wearing cream bridesmaids dresses with bluebells woven into their floppy ears. There is also the little animal, emerging from an opened Bible with a white dog-collar round its neck.

'Dearly beloved…' squeaks the Propensity, with uncharacteristic solemnity.

Light of a thousand spectra splinters through the darkness, showering him with petals of colour.

'…gathered here today…'

The soaring song of an organ swoops under the vaulting like an albatross on the wide Antarctic wind.

'…this man and this…'

A hand squeezes his and he turns. His nymph is standing beside him at the altar, white veiled and pure; she smiles sunshine into his soul.

'…and if any man knoweth of any lawful impediment…'

But then the sunshine chills; there is a strange coldness behind him, a presence.

'…let him speak now…'

With the infinite slowness of dreams, he turns.

'…or forever hold his peace.'

At the back of the church, bathed in the coloured splinters of light, stands a woman, flanked by two children. They neither move nor speak, but just watch him with cold and silent reproach.

An icicle slips between his ribs like a dagger and he turns back to his bride. And she turns to him, raising her veil. As the gossamer netting lifts, he recognises the face smiling up at him—it is not his nymph. With inviting eyes glittering coldly, she pulls a silver scalpel from her posy—as she lifts the blade to strike, he turns to flee.

Moving with all the velocity of an ant suspended in syrup, he can already feel the sharp stab between his shoulder blades. He screams silently and suddenly his arms are seized by two sepulchral figures, tall and black, that appear from nowhere. They push him down into a box, a hard, cold box, and before he knows what is happening, the lid is sealed over him, trapping him in the darkness.

Loofah woke suddenly, bursting out of the black chrysalis of his dream. His eyes snapped open and in flooded—more blackness. But though he could see nothing, against his arms and back he could feel the hard sides of his grave-buried coffin. A white bolt of cold fear shot down his spine and, as a bellow tore from his throat, he hurled himself against the lid, battering against the ungiving wood. Suddenly, through his terror, he felt his weight evaporate and he knew he was falling, plummeting into the open pit of hell.

There was a short era of giddy tumbling in the black void of space, then light and noise crashed in and a jolting hardness shook his bones like dice in a horn.

For a moment he knew nothing but the reverberations of the fall that were echoing through his body. Then, as awareness gradually returned, he felt a cold hard roughness under his cheek and hands. He opened his eyes—a plain of concrete, rough and broken, stretched away to infinity and in the V of his sprawled out arms were the steel-capped toes of a pair vast working boots, twin Ayers Rocks rising out of the landscape.

'What the bluddy 'ell are you doin' in my wheelie bin?' asked the caretaker, in a gruff Halifax accent.

Hot sweetness slid down Loofah's throat: tea, the very nectar of heaven. He was sitting on a pile of stained linen laundry bags, drinking from a plastic thermos cup. On the other side of the courtyard, the caretaker picked up the fallen wheelie bin and pushed it back into line with its colleagues.

A sudden spasm of panic gripped him and, for the umpteenth time since tumbling out of the bin, he grasped at his calves and thighs and prodded at his belly, still only half-convinced that everything really was back as it should be. An old style telephone sounded behind a glass panelled door in the opposite wall and, grumbling to himself, the caretaker ambled over to answer it.

Loofah was in some sort of service courtyard, with laundry bags waiting for collection, rows of rubbish bins, and various items of abandoned equipment: metal trolleys, two wheelchairs, a broken iron-framed bedstead. He sipped his tea and gazed up at the cliff-faces of dirt-blackened Victorian brickwork that enclosed the courtyard, each crisscrossed by networks of cast-iron drain pipes and galvanised boiler flues, and pierced by a random scattering of tiny frosted glass windows.

The caretaker returned from the telephone and began breaking up cardboard boxes, stacking them into one of the bins. Yet again Loofah palpated his face and lifted his tee-shirt, checking his belly for non-existent scars. Then, reassured once more, he filled his lungs with the laundry-stale air and let the warm comfort of the caretaker's tea flood through his veins.

'Thank so much,' said Loofah, when the tea was finished, 'I'd best be off now—I don't want to impose on your hospitality any longer.'

The old man pushed the box he was holding into the bin and then turned to face him, picking the smouldering shred of a roll-up from his lower lip with gnarled yellow fingers.

'I wouldn't be going just yet if I were you, my lad,' he said.

'It's OK, I feel perfectly fine now. That tea of yours has worked wonders.'

'Aye, that's as maybe. But you'd best hang on a bit longer.'

'Really?' said Loofah, with a tingle of suspicion, 'Why's that?'

The caretaker eyed him gruffly. 'Because yer mate'll be here soon,' he said, 'That's why.'

The tingle became an itch. 'My—mate?'

'Aye. 'Appen that were 'im on't blower.'

'A gentleman with a—slight French accent?' asked Loofah quietly, hardly daring to let the ominous syllables fall from his lips.

The old man crushed another box under a steel-capped foot, but did not respond.

'But I don't understand. How did he know I was here?'

''Ow did he know you were 'ere?' repeated the caretaker.

'Yes—how?'

'Simple as pie,' said the old man, then grasped the lapels of his overalls and, with a popping of press-studs, pulled open the front to reveal—a low-cut satin top in electric blue. He then took hold of the ragged turkey skin of his old neck and dragged it upwards, his old face crumpling and sliding up over his head. Loofah's jaw swung open like a broken gate and the colour drained from his face.

'Aren't you pleased to see me?' asked the caretaker, with a playful grin.

'G—G—Georgette,' stammered Loofah.

And at that very moment, a door slammed open on the other side of the courtyard and brisk footsteps slapped across the concrete. Loofah spun round.

'N—N—Norbert,' he stammered.

'My friend,' said Dentressangle, arms wide in welcome, 'Are you not pleased to be seeing me?'

For a whole minute Loofah just looked from one to the other—the grinning girl and her joyfully smiling master—utterly stunned by their barefaced effrontery.

'But my friend,' protested the Frenchman, after Loofah had tried to explain why he wasn't at all pleased to see either of them, 'I know nothing about your visiting à l'hôpital. In fact, I did not know even that you had been malade. Tell me, are you feeling now the betterness?'

'Don't be ridiculous, Norbert,' snarled Loofah, 'Do you take me for a complete idiot?'

Dentressangle shrugged, a gesture of injured innocence. 'There is some mistaking here,' he said, 'I am not knowing what I am supposed to have done, but I am sure that I have not been doing it.'

'Norbert, it was you that called that hideous doctor, it was you that sent me away in the ambulance. You can't possibly deny it.'

'I can possibly deny it,' snapped Dentressangle, now with an edge of indignance, 'I have not be doing of these things.'

Loofah rolled his eyes in exasperation. 'Of course you did. Just admit it.'

'I am knowing not of what you speak.'

'Norbert, this is just plain silly. How can you—?'

'Sacre bleu!' cried Dentressangle, stamping an elegantly shod foot on the rough concrete, 'I tell you I have called no docteur and I am knowing rien about any ambulance. But what I am knowing is this: that I have spent all of the day long in worriness about what has happened to you and that when I am at last finding you, I am being accused of strange crimes against you—I, Norbert Dentressangle, who has saved your ham plus fois than can be counted.' The Frenchman tossed back his head in haughty disdain. 'And I am also knowing this: that if you had waited beside the boîte de poste as we were arranging then you would have not got into these illness troubles in the first place.'

He finished with a pout of theatrical accusation and the girl, still wearing her old man's shabby overalls, glared angrily in support. For a moment Loofah hesitated, abashed by the outburst of righteous indignation. But his memory—for once—was clear.

'Norbert, what on earth are you talking about?' he said, 'You know that I waited for you at the pillar box—you met me there.'

'I have met you?' Dentressangle shook his head vigorously. 'No, no, no, your brain is playing the funny tricks. When I got to the place of the meeting, you were déjà gone. It is not moi that you have met; you must be thinking of some person…'

The Frenchman stopped suddenly, his eyes losing focus and his face filling with a strange emptiness.

'Autre,' he whispered, no more than a breath.

'Et le docteur, he has used mon nom?'

Loofah nodded. Dentressangle's face contorted with hollow agony and, wringing his hands, he turned away to continue his anguished pacing around the courtyard, watched by an anxious Georgette.

Loofah shook his head—what he was managing to piece together from the Frenchman's less than coherent outbursts stretched credibility beyond even the most generous limits. And yet what actor could fake the ethereal loathing that glowed in those eyes, or the blank terror that had turned that face into a drained and twisted mask?

'Let me try to get this straight, Norbert. You say that the man at the pillar box was not you, but—.'

'Not man! Not man!' screamed the Frenchman, spinning round in a blaze of fury, 'I am the homme—it is a mockery of a man, un monstre from the arm-pit of hell, a creature of—.'

'And he is the enemy you've told me about?' interrupted Loofah, quickly forestalling yet another venomous tirade, 'The one who brought us here, me and the one like me?'

Dentressangle wiped the flecks of saliva-foam from his lips with the back of his hand, nodded, and then returned to his pacing. But he had covered no more than four strides when he stopped suddenly and turned to face Loofah, his features tautened even further by some fresh alarm.

'Les pantalons—chinos, you say?'

'I think so,' said Loofah, 'Sort of pale yellow, matching his shoes.'

'Ai-ee!' screamed the Frenchman, clutching his face in pain, 'Ordures de bourgeoisie!—and from a catalogue, I know it.' He looked up anxiously. 'And the shirt was red? You are making the joking, I know you are—even it would not wear la rouge avec the yellow.'

Georgette squealed, a hand on each cheek in a caricature of horror.

'Well it wasn't really a bright red, Norbert: more like…' began Loofah, about to make a comparison with Dentressangle's own terracotta linen jacket.

'But how could you be thinking that this—thing was me? How could you be thinking that I, Norbert Dentressangle, would be wearing of this—this—' the Frenchman paused, groping for words '—this leisure-wear for the bank clerks?' he finally spat, throwing his arms in the air. Then he spun away with a grunt of contempt, while the girl shook her head in disbelief.

As Dentressangle stormed about the courtyard, gesticulating and muttering imprecations to himself, Loofah wrestled with the cascade of increasingly bizarre facts that now coiled around in his skull like a nest of adolescent boa constrictors, threatening to crush his tired brain to a bloody pulp. Was it really possible that, like himself, the Frenchman had a double?

As Loofah pondered, an image emerged out of the writhing confusion. It certainly looked like Dentressangle, but the clothes weren't right. No, this one was dressed like a knitting pattern model—well-groomed but bland and cosy.

Then another figure appeared: a woman this time, a woman he knew well. She now wore the military jet-black of the Waffen SS, with the familiar double lightning stripes on each lapel of her immaculately cut jacket. A row of scalpels and dental forceps glittered in her breast pocket and her face spoke of pain, of pain inflicted without a flicker of hesitation, of pain inflicted with pleasure even, a cold metallic pleasure. As she drifted across the mental firmament towards the male figure, the M&S style-slave snapped the heels of his suede Hush Puppies together and saluted, a crisp raising of his right arm. It was then that Loofah noted the discrete badge on the front of his cardigan: a gold swastika. Both figures then turned to face Loofah—the evil twin and his baleful female ally.

The woman smiled a glittering smile and, as a cold shiver slid over Loofah's skin, she pulled open her jacket. Underneath she was naked: a hard body of polished white marble nestling against the black mink lining of the jacket, breasts like a pair of artillery shells, diamond tipped, with the dark shadow at the base of her belly trimmed neatly into a death's head. Would he have avoided the torture at the hospital if he had submitted to her advances by the pillar box—or would submitting to her advances have been worse than the torture?

As Loofah looked from one to the other of the two figures, he felt an uneasy sense that something was missing, that there was another piece to this hideous jigsaw. Then a third figure joined the grim pair—and the final piece of the puzzle