17: THE WINDOWLESS HOUSE

What had occurred in Brabazon Lodge remained with Glen Mower like the after effects of a big meal. His whole body felt uncomfortably churned up and the hour he felt he would fully digest it seemed a long way into the horizon. Such was this incapacity he was unaware that instead of heading towards the south of Bristol where his colleague had informed him was their ultimate destination, the UN Security Council History War Rooms, they joined the Motorway and headed over the original Severn Bridge to Chepstow. It wasn’t until Diamonde, showing total disregard for any speed limits that Mower now knew was a classic sign of having been De-Peeled, mentioned that first they had to do a detour to acquire details of another strange phenomenon, that he realised.

‘Now Matey, No mention to the homeowner about anything I’ve told you,’ Kai informed him. ‘We are reporters for Strange Phenomena UK, right? Just let me do all the talking.’

They arrived in due course outside a peculiar looking Victorian building that unlike it’s contemporary at Brabazon Lodge was lacking one vital ingredient that would class it as a house. For its architect appeared to have an aversion to windows.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Mower, ‘I know what this is, it’s to do with the window tax from years ago. Householders blocked them up so they would pay less tax.’

‘That was imposed much earlier than when this house was built, Matey.’

‘Of course this house recently had windows!’ exclaimed Mr Nyron Truss under the illumiation of artificial light once the two ‘reporters’ had entered. ‘I bought this place to live in it, not to grow bloody mushrooms!’

They nodded in compliance as Diamonde took photos on his phone.

‘All I know,’ continued the perplexed householder, stretching out his arms as if welcoming an explanation, ‘is that one day we were looking out through triple glazed windows at The River Wye, then the next we were staring at stone walls with no view at all and asking why?’

‘It looks like the brickwork of the original eighteen-ninety construction is continuous,’ Kai observed running his fingers over the cold, grey stones. ‘It’s hard to see where any windows ever existed. It’s like they were never there in the first place.’

‘Well, they bloody were,’ the embattled homeowner countered feeling that the veracity of his story was under question prompting him to reach for some photographs of the afflicted property to prove that it did indeed, until very recently, contain windows.

‘Are you planning on getting windows reinstalled?’ Kai asked while scribbling notes in his pad.

‘Yes, of course I am,’ came the embattled reply. ‘Christ, if this continues for too much longer I will be taking up bloody cave painting!’

The bogus reporter for Strange Phenomena UK then offered the deal of five times the agreed price for the story for it not to appear in the magazine. A deal which was agreed upon after some consternation and a pithy remark from the beneficiary to the effect that he was being kept in the dark so it was apt that the great British public would be too.

‘What was all that about and what does it mean?’ Mower enquired as they got back into the car at the conclusion of their business. ‘And what happens now?’

‘Your questions will be answered very shortly,’ Kai responded with an enigmatic smile and a flip of his blonde fringe as he got the car started and headed back over the bridge.