AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the previous episode, Samantha Panther, star reporter, travels through curvaceous Luxembourg. Meanwhile, perhaps, Wolfcastle and the fatal Librarian find themselves at Ddwwchllyff’s abode.

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 35

At first glance it certainly looked like Ddwwchyllff. The long, slicked back black hair and sideburns were there. The pool of blood wasn’t typical of him but…

Yet all wasn’t quite as it seemed. For example, Wolfcastle knew of his friend’s mimic mimicry but even he was aware that Ddwwchyllff didn’t actually pass his days in a heavily jeweled white satin jump suit, with matching red silk scarf and wide gem encrusted belt. He also knew that his friend wasn’t especially keen on lying motionlessly, face-down on a gravel driveway. To Wolfcastle’s trained eye this clearly wasn’t Ddwwchyllff. Even to his other, untrained eye such a fact was obvious.

As a man Wolfcastle had only a few regrets in life at any one time. As a dog he imagined he wouldn’t have hardly any regrets at all. As a -- But that was idle speculation and thoughts of past or future lives weren’t important just now. Not for him at least. Of the few regrets he possessed right now he was mostly regretting bringing the overly inquisitive Librarian with him on his return trip to the luxurious house of his friend.

But after the whole scene in her city centre apartment he couldn’t really refuse. Whatever had possessed him to turn and follow her, to go to her front door and knock her knocker?

Wolfcastle stepped forward to get a closer look at the seemingly lifeless corpse.

‘Is he dead?’ she asked. She knew the look of a dead body better than most, but she had to maintain the front in front of the stunned looking Wolfcastle in front of her.

‘Well…’ he began, only to step into full sarcasm mode and continue, ‘… I don’t think he’s taking a nap…do you?’

‘Alright! There’s no need for that’, she snarled back at him. ‘Do you know him?’

‘I thought I did.’ Came Wolfcastle’s cryptic reply. What did that mean? Did he know him or not? It was a simple question. She tried another approach.

‘Who is he?’ she asked. By now Wolfcastle had bent over the body and managed to turn it over to take a look at his face…or at least what remained of it after the impact.

‘Him? I’m not sure. I thought he was an old friend of mine but…it all looks a bit fishy to me.’ Suddenly he stopped rolling the body over and froze, letting it fall back to the gravel. ‘Did you hear that?’ he enquired in a questioning tone.

‘What?’

‘Just then…’

‘I didn’t hear anything’ the Librarian replied.

‘It sounded like a dog barking,’ Wolfcastle elaborated.

‘Well was it a dog barking or was it like a dog barking?’

‘What?’ he was perplexed. ‘What difference does it make? Did you hear it or not?’

‘I heard both, if you must know. A barking like a dog and a dog barking.’

Wolfcastle leapt on the discrepancy and galloped away. After two laps round the perfectly majestic house with its sweeping outside exterior walls he trotted back, dismounted and sent the brute running off into the night it had come from, like a wild ticketed stallion racing for the Salisbury Plane. He picked up an inconsistency glinting in the ambient light. ‘You just said you didn’t hear anything.’ he growled.

‘I didn’t mean never. I meant just then.’ She held up a belaying hand to ward off the objections she could see forming on his lips. ‘Prior to that, I also didn’t ‘hear’ anything in the sense that you meant, as a rumour or news item as in, ‘Did you hear that it sounded like a dog barking?’ When I say ‘heard’ I mean it figuratively.’

‘What the hell have you done with the barking sounds?’ He grabbed her shoulders and shook her roughly. ‘Did you process them?’ He pushed her from him in disgust. Why was he wasting all this dialog on this maddening woman?

‘I read them. I’m a lip reader.’

‘You read dog lips?’ Wolfcastle shuddered. ‘If I were a girl,’ he thought to himself, ‘I’d say ‘blech!’’ But he was man: he snorted ‘I can do that too’ and wondered how to change the subject quickly.

The Librarian looked at him with new eyes, ones as narrow as a margin of error and as suspicious as sunglasses on a duck. She sure hoped this bastard was lying, for his sake. She didn’t want any competition. There wasn’t any, but this guy might want to start one up –’Let’s have a contest’ he’d urge, ‘We’ll invite lipreaders from all over Cardiff. There’ll be prizes and everything.’

‘I don’t need any competition’ It might have sounded menacing but it was meant as a death-threat.

Wolfcastle was relieved. ‘Fine. I understand. But you know of course it would have been no contest.’

The Librarian was struck by the simplicity of it. There would be no prizes then either. They were still talking over the concept as they approached the street level door two flights down. Wolfcastle did something with his hand at the edge of the door. And stepped back and just stood there. After a moment he repeated the process. A longer moment. A third time. And stood there some more.

‘Just knock on the bloody door Mister Damiou!’ and making deeds of words, she hammered her tiny fists on the planks. ‘What’s this? There’s something sticky on the -’ she squinted at her fists where they’d pummeled. ‘It looks like ketchup.’ She licked it off her fists. It wasn’t ketchup. She stopped licking her fists and began licking the door.

Wolfcastle was taken by this naïve reaction to Ddwwchlyff’s bloody red herring door. The real door was a Sliding doorË. Another of his inventive inventor friend’s inventions, it was rarely used, instead it was always kept brand new. It was still expensive to operate, requiring constant replacement panes. These days, Ddwwchlyff and his guests usually came and went through the third floor Revolving window™. When had that started? It seemed like only last summer they’d used the second floor window…Pondering this, Wolfcastle walked over to what appeared to be the mouth of a large inward upward slanting chute. ‘Which is exactly what it is, but no one would ever guess.’ He released what he knew was properly called a ‘mechanism’ and was rewarded with a swooshing clatter as a door came gliding down the slope, hitting him in the gut at about two miles per hour. Luckily he was in Wales, if he’d been on the European mainland it may have hit him at over three kilometers an hour instead.

Lying beneath the lead-lined object, Wolfcastle gasped, ‘The door. Help. Move it.’

A plethora of minor clauses; what could it all mean? The Librarian opted to ignore them and heaved the Sliding doorË.. to one side, so it was more directly on top of him. ‘Is that better?’ she asked solicitously.

He mouthed something the Librarian couldn’t hear. ‘I am not!’ she screamed at him indignantly. She snatched up the door and flung it to one side shattering a window as she did so. ‘Arrange your stupid door yourself!’

She stalked off into the house through the shards of glass. Wolfcastle shook his head dumbfounded. Entirely by accident the stupid woman had discovered how to work the Sliding doorË…

He followed her inside.