Submitted for the January 2026 prompt: Auld Acquaintance

I was dining at my club in St. James’s and happened upon a half-column piece in the Times recounting a recent episode in Basutoland.

 

The correspondent’s story of ‘shadow forces crossing wholly unseen in their approach across open short-turf grasslands and overwhelming a two-hundred-strong Boer encampment’ was undoubtedly somewhat fanciful. But I immediately saw that there could be substance to the tale. If the essence of the descriptions given were true, it meant that the Professor was alive and well, and had ultimately succeeded in his endeavours!

 

* * *

 

When I first went down to attend to my Aunt Constance’s affairs in Brampton, I took only the clothes I wore and such things as I could pack into a Gladstone. The rest of my belongings were shipped in my old steamer trunk, and I made arrangements for this to follow me down.

 

It made its way to Brampton the next week and, for the sake of expediency, I took my aunt’s two-seater gig to the railway station to collect it myself.

 

As the porter and I carried it out from the luggage office, hefted it up, and secured it to the backboard, the station-master came over and hovered alongside.

 

“I was just wondering, sir,” he said a little hesitantly, “if you might also take a package that’s come for Professor Potts. I do appreciate that you’re new to these parts and won’t yet have made his acquaintance. But he’s a nice old soul — if a mite eccentric — and he lives only a stone’s throw from you, down at the end of the lane, in Rose Cottage.”

 

They had evidently sent word for the Professor to come and collect the package, but with no result.

 

“It’s just that it seems to contain animals of some sort,” the station master explained. “They’ve already been sat there in the office since yesterday morning, so we’re a bit bothered as to their welfare if they’re not collected and attended to soon.”

 

I had no wish to seem aloof, so I agreed to make the delivery and took the package onto the passenger seat beside me.

 

* * *

 

Later, when I pulled up outside Rose Cottage, I alighted, went to the front door, rang the chain bell a couple of times, and waited. When no one came, I tried the handle and happily found the door unlocked.

 

I duly returned to the gig, took up the package, carried it inside, and set it down on a small mahogany side table.

 

I then set about to find a pen and paper to leave a note, but stopped short when I heard a voice coming from another room further into the house.

 

I proceeded out and down the hallway to seek the owner and, in the process, had to negotiate my way past waist-high stacks of glass aquaria, several sacks of potatoes, innumerable jars of prunes, and various sizes of bell jars containing viscous and odd-smelling liquids.

 

When I emerged into what was clearly the kitchen, I was surprised to discover a roll-top bath in the corner, and utterly taken aback when I heard a disembodied voice offer up a cheery “Good day to you, sir!”

 

I turned toward the sound and seconds later observed what I perceived as a rent in the fabric of the air, which ultimately revealed, at a height of some five and a half feet, a bearded man’s head connected only to a neck, and otherwise unsupported.

 

There then came a more prolonged ripping noise, as of someone stripping skin from a carcass, and the rest of the man’s body was revealed.

 

After stepping out from whatever was previously covering him, he held it aloft and stood proudly naked before me, wholly unabashed, and looking pleased as Punch. “So, what do you think?” he asked — with me standing open-mouthed and embarrassed as hell.

 

“It’s a material of my own invention,” he said. “Not yet quite perfected, I’m afraid, but very close.”

 

“It’s quite remarkab—” I began, but he paid me no heed and continued his narrative regardless.

 

“The base material is prepared from simple potato starch,” he explained, “to which you add prune sugars to make it transparent and deformable. You then warm the mixture gently and stir in the sensing cells, micro-crystallites, and interconnecting fibres got from the skins of Arabian veiled chameleons.”

 

He paused to raise a leg onto the side of the bath, took up his pipe from the soap rack and, with his elbow rested on his flexed knee, proceeded to tamp and light it. After contentedly puffing out an aromatic cloud, he then continued.

 

“Sticks like the very devil to any kind of fabric and then turns bright red, unfortunately, so one can’t wear the material over clothing.”

 

“To make this,” he said, pointing to the covering he’d just removed, “I had to lie fully immersed in the warm solution,” and he gestured then to the bathtub, “… with my eyes and mouth tight-closed, and rubber tubing inserted into my nostrils so that I might breathe. As the liquid then gradually cooled, it formed into a second skin all about me, to a thickness of about one eighth of an inch.”

 

“Produces an amazingly effective camouflage, Professor,” I told him.

 

But he dismissed my appraisal and began shouting.

 

“Who the devil are you, sir?” he demanded. “This is none of your business! Get out, be damned! Get out this instant!”

 

Whereupon, he threw down his pipe and chased me outside.

 

* * *

 

Some days later, I learned from the landlord of the Swan that the Professor had upped sticks and left the village.

 

“Two city gents and a couple of military types in a Daimler car stopped and asked me for directions to his cottage,” he said.

 

“And after that, we never saw him again.”