Continued from Part One http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-tag-1-part-1.html
As before, paragraphs in blue are my own and the ones in black belong to my fellow author, the notorious blogger, akh who writes
http://akh-wonderfullife.blogspot.co.uk/
The story continues:-
The water tasted good, washing away the soot and sand; that had been one hell of a fall. It’d taken him a while to coax the girl out from under the table because at first he hadn’t realised that he’d had another involuntary shift. No wonder she’d looked so terrified. Just why he’d i-shifted into a gruesome gargoyle this time was a total mystery. Those damned i-shifts were always like that, you could end up as literally anything. They were really beginning to be a problem. At first it was one, maybe two a year, but now… well, he’d had three in the last month, or was it four? And then there were the things he’d started to i-shift into. The last time he’d had what he'd begun to refer to as a wobble, he'd reformed as one of Frankie’s damned tulpa creatures. That had been nasty; they stank like a barrel of rotting offal and seemed to have a permanent erection that they insisted on rubbing whenever the opportunity arose – which was practically all of the time. Still, once he’d shifted back to good old Max and explained that no, her mother hadn’t sent him from hell to gobble her up, and no, he wasn’t her latest uncle, and yes, he was an angel (well kind of anyway), she’d scrambled out from under the table and gone to stand with her brother. He looked around the room, it was a mess; dishes and cups littered the floor, every surface was covered in plaster dust with the occasional brick thrown in for good measure and a huge piece of wood (a roof joist?) lay at an angle across that very nice (probably early American homestead) oak table. Yes, that had been one hell of a fall. No sign of Tamara though, no sign at all - not so much as a fluttering eyelash. This was definitely the right place though, so it must be simply the wrong time. He looked at his watch. Mickey Mouse’s white gloved hands were telling him that it was ten off four. Even a nanosecond out and Tamara would be in another here, parallel and filling the same space, here but not here and not really somewhere else, but not here and somewhere else all at the same time. Yes-sir-ee, time really was such a bitch. Oh well, there was only one thing for it. He needed a portal and he needed it now. Smiling, he reached out to the girl standing nervously by the dusty stove: “Hey sweetheart. Come over here, I want to show you something. Come on now, don’t be shy, I’m not going to bite you.” But he knew that he would; perhaps her mother had sent him after all.
“Damn!” he recoiled, “Damn! Damn! Damn and Blast!” It was such a long time, of course, that he’d completely forgotten, and it took him a moment to work out what had happened. After all, in his line of, well, he supposed that it was really “work” of a sort, you just didn’t get to meet them any more, and so he’d just not expected to find any actual genuine innocents living in the world. Not in this day and age. Damn them and their penetrating baby blue eyes! Oh, they might not look like the typical All-American cute kids that Disney used to churn out on his secret production lines back in the day, all gap-teeth and freckles and “Jeepers! Gee Whizz!” charm, with “Made in Stepford” stamped on their backsides, but, nevertheless, innocents they were. He paused for a moment to ponder whether, if he rubbed off all of the soot and the grime, a sea of freckles would be staring beseechingly back at him, but he thought better of it. It had seemed to take forever to recover from his fireball escape from the ship of fools and the subsequent saltwater-taffy effect of his dunking, so the last thing he wanted was a belly full of buckshot from some brat who’d been told not to talk to strangers and might not take too kindly to one offering to wash down his little sister. His teeth were aching anyway from being thrown back across the room, and he crawled into a corner and thought about what he should do next. For whatever reason, he didn’t seem able to control his physical form for very long at the moment, and the portals all seemed to have slammed shut. He had started to believe that someone other than the great puppet-master was playing with reality until he discovered that the rules of the game were still in play when he’d tried to restore some energy by taking the girl. There was much to think about, much to consider. Across the debris-strewn remains of their home, the boy and the girl were staring at him, not knowing quite what to make of this bizarre shape-shifting demon who had come calling upon them just after the world had seemed to explode, opening up - although they didn’t know it yet - a huge crater ten miles away. They seemed confused that he had politely asked for a drink and then thrown himself backwards across the room as soon as either of them went near him. Sometimes a man, sometimes a monster. Oh, if only they understood that one day they would be like that themselves, but not yet. Right now they were completely untouchable because the world hadn’t yet reached into them and damned them. Suddenly it struck him. There was something in the way they were looking at him. They were looking up to him. They thought that he was the adult come to rescue them, they were somehow depending on him to tell them what to do. He closed his eyes and tried to shift again, to get away from those imploring, birthday card eyes, but when he opened them, they were still there, begging and beseeching him to help them. He managed to clamber to his feet and did his best to regain some dignity, brushing the dust from the remains of his dinner jacket. He coughed slightly, as if he was about to make a short speech. “Look...” he began, but anything else he had to say would have to wait. There was a loud screeching of metal on the outside of the house, like someone running steel fingernails down the blackboard of eternity. Then, just for a moment there was a ghastly silence, fully loaded with anticipation, and then the silence was snapped as a huge booming voice, that finally caused the chimney stack to topple, bellowed “The children are mine, Max! Bring them to me!”
“Mothers, eh?” thought Max. It didn’t matter how much they screwed up their short little lives for them, it was nearly always their mothers they called out for when it came to the crunch. As the chimney stack had started to fall, Max had been on the brink of gathering all three of them together and trying to make one last, desperate attempt to vanish the hell out of there when he’d looked up and found both of them bolting out of the door bellowing “Mommy! Mommy!” at the top of their young lungs. He started to shout after them that he thought it really wasn’t a good idea to go out there, especially after what they’d just been hearing, but before he could form the thought, they had burst out into the hot, bright evening light of the desert. He knew now that the children were important somehow, significant to some complex web of intrigue that was far above what these Americans might like to think of as his “pay grade” so, deciding for a moment that discretion was the better part of valour, he bolted after them just late enough for the stack of masonry to miss him in a way that would have made a perfect death-defying moment for an action hero in an American movie, but for him just felt far too close for comfort. “It might look good in the trailer, though” he mused as the clouds of dust engulfed him and he ran blindly onwards, tripping over the door frame and sailing in a perfect arc to get another mouthful of sand. As the dust started to clear, he looked up just in time to see a figure flicker into view in the distant heat haze. The children continued running towards her and then all three were gone, swallowed up by a gap in reality. He paused for a second to try and take it in. He’d accidentally stumbled upon a couple of golden trump cards in the great game he seemed to have found himself playing, only to lose them in the blink of an eye. He pounded his fists on the hot sand in frustration and was on the brink of bellowing with rage when the whole world went black and that hated voice bellowed “Where are they, Max? What have you done with them? They are mine!” causing the freshly formed black glass at the base of a recently created crater not so very far away to crack and shatter into atoms, leaving just a memory of the shape of a woman that had been punched into its surface to float away on the warm dusk breeze.
Tamara knew immediately that she was in the wrong place, and Frenchman Flat, Nevada, was a very wrong place. Well, well – it had been a while. Back in the early fifties she’d been a regular visitor. Of course Johnny had only been a senator back then. She remembered how he’d hated the way they were always siding with the French. What was it he’d said? "We’ve allied ourselves to the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to remnants of an empire." Well, it was something like that. Only it wasn’t back then at all, it was now and Johnny was still out there somewhere and so was she; probably up to her pretty ears studying art and lit at the University of California. Later, of course, after Operation Buster, they’d come out here often, staying in one of the survivability structures, the one that was a palace inside and not an empty shell of a building like the rest. She’d never known exactly where it was - security had been so tight, but it didn’t matter just as long as Johnny and she got to spend a little time together. Just how long had she been stuck in that one… eleven, almost twelve years? She’d only ever been stuck twice, once in Harahesne and then that time in Norma Jean. Just how did that happen, and why? Eventually she’d managed to get back in the Slip though - August 5, 1962. What a hoo-ha that had caused. They had to cook up a suicide and any number of conspiracy theories to cover up that one, and all because she’d finally managed to slip away, vanishing into thin air. Poor Johhny, well she hadn’t had a lot of choice really, she should never had told him so much and he shouldn’t have asked so many questions and then gone on to spill his guts to Bobby. He looked so handsome waving from the open-topped, black limo as she watched him from the book depository. It was so long ago now, or now - depending on how you looked at it. Tamara Mourning turned towards the survivability structure behind her. Was this the one? She couldn’t tell, they’d all looked pretty much the same; and then the door of the building flew open and out ran a young boy and an even younger girl. They raced towards her over the fused sand as a voice she knew only too well screamed “The children are mine, Max! Bring them to me!” She was wondering when Frankie would turn up again and this time he’d brought along Max. It was almost a crowd, but after three months in that glass cube it was about time that things began to get interesting again. Tamara held her arms out towards the children and called “Come to Mommy, kids” and shifted.
“Mothers, eh?” thought Max. It didn’t matter how much they screwed up their short little lives for them, it was nearly always their mothers they called out for when it came to the crunch. As the chimney stack had started to fall, Max had been on the brink of gathering all three of them together and trying to make one last, desperate attempt to vanish the hell out of there when he’d looked up and found both of them bolting out of the door bellowing “Mommy! Mommy!” at the top of their young lungs. He started to shout after them that he thought it really wasn’t a good idea to go out there, especially after what they’d just been hearing, but before he could form the thought, they had burst out into the hot, bright evening light of the desert. He knew now that the children were important somehow, significant to some complex web of intrigue that was far above what these Americans might like to think of as his “pay grade” so, deciding for a moment that discretion was the better part of valour, he bolted after them just late enough for the stack of masonry to miss him in a way that would have made a perfect death-defying moment for an action hero in an American movie, but for him just felt far too close for comfort. “It might look good in the trailer, though” he mused as the clouds of dust engulfed him and he ran blindly onwards, tripping over the door frame and sailing in a perfect arc to get another mouthful of sand. As the dust started to clear, he looked up just in time to see a figure flicker into view in the distant heat haze. The children continued running towards her and then all three were gone, swallowed up by a gap in reality. He paused for a second to try and take it in. He’d accidentally stumbled upon a couple of golden trump cards in the great game he seemed to have found himself playing, only to lose them in the blink of an eye. He pounded his fists on the hot sand in frustration and was on the brink of bellowing with rage when the whole world went black and that hated voice bellowed “Where are they, Max? What have you done with them? They are mine!” causing the freshly formed black glass at the base of a recently created crater not so very far away to crack and shatter into atoms, leaving just a memory of the shape of a woman that had been punched into its surface to float away on the warm dusk breeze.
And then... nothing. "Time to get up honey. Your sandwiches are in the fridge." Emma Cornucopia yawned and stretched in the sure knowledge that her sandwiches were in the fridge.
The immortals don’t really sleep, but when they do their experiences of it are much more like interludes, a montage of madness and not-forgotten memories that hit their brains like a blitzkrieg and pummel them back into consciousness, just in case any of their peers think that they might be slacking on the eternal job of salvation and damnation. So it had ever been, so it ever would be, so it was. “Open your eyes!...” The crash of thunder.... The hooves of a thousand horses... The flash of lightning... A bombardment of never-ending rain... The bugler’s plaintive call of retreat... “Forward, aim, kneel, Fire! Second wave!...” Hammering the nails into flesh... Tomatoes... The Somme... Light on... The blood, mud and horror of the trenches... Door open... “Wait for it, wait for it...” Drowning in a frozen sea... Light on... “Keep your head down, son...” Tomatoes.... The Fourth Horseman rides... Lettuce... “She’s going over...” A few slices of a good mature Cheddar... Dark, light... Black night... “Open your eyes!...” A dainty little Merlot... “Stick with me, kid, you’ll be all right...” The chink of glasses... The stones pounding onto vulnerable flesh... “Ready, aim... fire!...” A thousand people crammed as tightly as possible into a tube of steel deep below the ground... A flash of light on the horizon out of a bright blue sky... “I don’t think I can hold her any longer!...” The horses... Pounding hooves... “Charge!...” Falling, falling... I could have fallen forever... The seedy, sticky spurtings from which we all spring from... The far-distant rumbling getting closer, closer... The sand beginning to shake and vibrate... “Open your eyes!...” Grunting, grinding, pushing, shoving... Patterns swirling in an infinite variety of shapes... Brown paper envelopes passed from hand to hand in dark corners of seedy back alleyways... The fist on the face... The darkness of the alley... A wall falls... A sea of arrows coming this way... “They’re here!...” A hundred million souls all living in one place and every one of them feels utterly alone... Thrown to the ground... Kicking... Punching... Scratching... “Butter or spread...?” Up to our necks in blood and oil and mud... Sinking, sinking... Drowning... Door open, light on... The ripping and tearing of the barbed wire... “Fresh or sliced white...?” “Look out! She’s wearing a bomb!...” Sitting on a Roman Candle waiting for someone else to light the fuse... “Mayo or salad cream...?” “Hard a starboard!” “Just a hint of English mustard...” “I don’t think she can take much more, Captain...” “Just a slice of fresh ham...?” “Get down! For God’s sake get down!” “Or French...?” “Open your eyes!...” Crisp, warm sheets... The soft dawn light beyond the yellow curtains... Such a good night’s sleep... Such a relaxing, restful slumber... Such a great life, she wishes it could stay like this forever, if only those dark memories would just go away. She needed a shower, and the smell of freshly brewing coffee drifted across the morning air. The day was still full of hope, and all was well in the world, Max had already left and... and... are there sandwiches still for tea...? You betcha! She looked around. Something wasn’t right. Where the HELL was she...?
A million personalities, a hundred billion memories, are difficult to keep track of, even for a superior mind. Occasionally, just for a moment you can find yourself standing there wondering just who you are and struggling to work out the internal logic of how you ended up who you are. Faces of strangers stare back at you, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers...” and the world becomes one of strangeness. No, more than that, strangeness once removed. It becomes difficult to work out what reality is, and the confusion of images and lives overlaid over other images and lies gives each an every one of them a gossamer semi-transparency, like layers of tissue paper each showing a different slice of life. Stare at the kitchen table long enough and you’ll see the desert beyond, and the alleyway at the back of the night club beyond that, and further and further back, the Copa Cabana, the Oval Office, the ship of fools... The whole universe swirling in the folds of a bread roll, the patterns on the surface of an apple or the swirl of a drop of milk in a cup of coffee. So it was that morning - if it was a morning - if she stared hard and long enough at the Cup of Joe - and only she knew the dark tale of how it really got that name - she thought she could see... No! She could see Max walking across the desert a billion years ago, yesterday, tomorrow, the trail of his footprints stretching behind him and upwards across the gradual arc of the crater she’d made. She wondered, briefly, how the C.I.A. had decided to explain that one, but it didn’t really matter. They’d soon have far bigger problems to worry about. She looked at Max and felt a moment of what could only be thought as as sorrow - Damn these echoes of these tiny human lives and their sentimentality! Why is it that the most wicked were always the most sentimental anyway? - looking at his miserable face as he stared at the fragments of the cracked glass of the ground she’d transformed after her fall. Her second fall she supposed. There was something about the curl of his lip, that lock of hair that he kept brushing out of his eye that was damned attrac... Hell! The mother of those kids had been far too strong... and far too flirtatious for her own good... and look what it had got her. Still, at least she knew where Max was right now, or at least right then. Getting there might still be a problem, but then he wasn’t going anywhere soon, as far as she could tell. Nevertheless, it had to be admitted that Max did have a damned fine ass... She’d have to see what she could do about that when she got hold of him. After all, nobody could be allowed to have a finer one than she did... That bloody woman!... What was she doing to her mind? It was true that the fresher they were, the stronger they were, and that maternal bond, so well hidden in life, seemed to be trying to hide the children from her... Where were they anyway? She shook her head, and Emma returned. Out there, somewhere in time, there was another Emma, of course, one who considered herself to be as real as she was, right until the moment she slammed into the brick wall of her own destiny, but she didn’t really matter. Not yet anyway. Max was still walking around, trying to work out where they’d all gone, clinging on to that soul-ripping tiny spark of hope that he might still find them, and save himself. “Keep looking, Max!” she smiled to herself “I’ll be there before you know it.” She looked at him again. He still looked kinda cute... But then he vanished... No, this time he was snatched... and she couldn’t find him anywhere.
The immortals don’t really sleep, but when they do their experiences of it are much more like interludes, a montage of madness and not-forgotten memories that hit their brains like a blitzkrieg and pummel them back into consciousness, just in case any of their peers think that they might be slacking on the eternal job of salvation and damnation. So it had ever been, so it ever would be, so it was. “Open your eyes!...” The crash of thunder.... The hooves of a thousand horses... The flash of lightning... A bombardment of never-ending rain... The bugler’s plaintive call of retreat... “Forward, aim, kneel, Fire! Second wave!...” Hammering the nails into flesh... Tomatoes... The Somme... Light on... The blood, mud and horror of the trenches... Door open... “Wait for it, wait for it...” Drowning in a frozen sea... Light on... “Keep your head down, son...” Tomatoes.... The Fourth Horseman rides... Lettuce... “She’s going over...” A few slices of a good mature Cheddar... Dark, light... Black night... “Open your eyes!...” A dainty little Merlot... “Stick with me, kid, you’ll be all right...” The chink of glasses... The stones pounding onto vulnerable flesh... “Ready, aim... fire!...” A thousand people crammed as tightly as possible into a tube of steel deep below the ground... A flash of light on the horizon out of a bright blue sky... “I don’t think I can hold her any longer!...” The horses... Pounding hooves... “Charge!...” Falling, falling... I could have fallen forever... The seedy, sticky spurtings from which we all spring from... The far-distant rumbling getting closer, closer... The sand beginning to shake and vibrate... “Open your eyes!...” Grunting, grinding, pushing, shoving... Patterns swirling in an infinite variety of shapes... Brown paper envelopes passed from hand to hand in dark corners of seedy back alleyways... The fist on the face... The darkness of the alley... A wall falls... A sea of arrows coming this way... “They’re here!...” A hundred million souls all living in one place and every one of them feels utterly alone... Thrown to the ground... Kicking... Punching... Scratching... “Butter or spread...?” Up to our necks in blood and oil and mud... Sinking, sinking... Drowning... Door open, light on... The ripping and tearing of the barbed wire... “Fresh or sliced white...?” “Look out! She’s wearing a bomb!...” Sitting on a Roman Candle waiting for someone else to light the fuse... “Mayo or salad cream...?” “Hard a starboard!” “Just a hint of English mustard...” “I don’t think she can take much more, Captain...” “Just a slice of fresh ham...?” “Get down! For God’s sake get down!” “Or French...?” “Open your eyes!...” Crisp, warm sheets... The soft dawn light beyond the yellow curtains... Such a good night’s sleep... Such a relaxing, restful slumber... Such a great life, she wishes it could stay like this forever, if only those dark memories would just go away. She needed a shower, and the smell of freshly brewing coffee drifted across the morning air. The day was still full of hope, and all was well in the world, Max had already left and... and... are there sandwiches still for tea...? You betcha! She looked around. Something wasn’t right. Where the HELL was she...?
Tamara Mourning, Marilyn Monroe, Emma Cornucopia. She bit into the sandwich, mayo oozing down her chin. She’d needed that shower to wash away the others that she’d split out into at that moment; ‘Come to Mommy’ and they had. They were in here too. It wasn’t like she could help it; it wasn’t like they were dead, and despite what some of the others might believe, it was nothing like being a vampire. Eating souls was very different from drinking blood - or coffee come to that. This coffee tasted good. Mommy had really known how to make coffee that hit the spot. Of course none of them were dead. They were simply referenced and filed, ready to be called, brought back and reanimated whenever she needed them. Alive for ever really, just waiting for her call; ‘Hello operator, can you connect me to… Violet Dalrimple, Manola Griert, Zelda Smillan, Enola Gaye, Yvette Dubois, Sophie Hawkins, Eva Braun, Tessa Bing, Theda Bara, Clarice Clarice, Nawal El Saadawi, Leana Castello, Peggy Damiano, Ashlea Redington, Flo Pittenger, Rachell Blanc, Otelia Latimore, Elidia Mcbath, Simonne Galbreath, Eliana Smithey, Cecile Ruggerio, Dorothea Tanning, Rowena Augsburger, Marcia Saucier, Elda Rambin, Tiffani Ellingwood, Olivia Richards, Sarai Kegley, Remedios Gregoire, Zoraida Foy, Natalie Rady, Beaulah Meis, Joanie Rudy, Tanika Biron, Magali Coate, Deng Yujiao, Renata Venema, Luba Daniell, Marylee Leeper, Lucila Jowett, Kerrie Hults, Keli Hankey, Nanette Wyant… and all of the others inside her. Emma wondered where the boy was. He should be in here too. But boys would be boys and they were so hard to keep down, that’s why she really only took in females. Of the dozen or so thousands stored away inside her, only around a hundred were male. Well, let’s face it – they were all pretty much the same. Same cocks, same thoughts, same smell; only their looks differed slightly. She finished the sandwich, wiping away the tomato juice from her chin with the chiffon of her mother’s scarf. She had to find Max. Max would know what to do about the body. That was the trouble with Frankie, he just blundered in, and once he’d touched someone none of the Host could touch him or her again – it wasn’t a good idea to try to touch the damned; it was bad Karma, hari-kari, rock n’ roll suicide. Emma looked into her mother’s open eyes – was that a tear just there in the corner - or maybe it was a message?
A million personalities, a hundred billion memories, are difficult to keep track of, even for a superior mind. Occasionally, just for a moment you can find yourself standing there wondering just who you are and struggling to work out the internal logic of how you ended up who you are. Faces of strangers stare back at you, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers...” and the world becomes one of strangeness. No, more than that, strangeness once removed. It becomes difficult to work out what reality is, and the confusion of images and lives overlaid over other images and lies gives each an every one of them a gossamer semi-transparency, like layers of tissue paper each showing a different slice of life. Stare at the kitchen table long enough and you’ll see the desert beyond, and the alleyway at the back of the night club beyond that, and further and further back, the Copa Cabana, the Oval Office, the ship of fools... The whole universe swirling in the folds of a bread roll, the patterns on the surface of an apple or the swirl of a drop of milk in a cup of coffee. So it was that morning - if it was a morning - if she stared hard and long enough at the Cup of Joe - and only she knew the dark tale of how it really got that name - she thought she could see... No! She could see Max walking across the desert a billion years ago, yesterday, tomorrow, the trail of his footprints stretching behind him and upwards across the gradual arc of the crater she’d made. She wondered, briefly, how the C.I.A. had decided to explain that one, but it didn’t really matter. They’d soon have far bigger problems to worry about. She looked at Max and felt a moment of what could only be thought as as sorrow - Damn these echoes of these tiny human lives and their sentimentality! Why is it that the most wicked were always the most sentimental anyway? - looking at his miserable face as he stared at the fragments of the cracked glass of the ground she’d transformed after her fall. Her second fall she supposed. There was something about the curl of his lip, that lock of hair that he kept brushing out of his eye that was damned attrac... Hell! The mother of those kids had been far too strong... and far too flirtatious for her own good... and look what it had got her. Still, at least she knew where Max was right now, or at least right then. Getting there might still be a problem, but then he wasn’t going anywhere soon, as far as she could tell. Nevertheless, it had to be admitted that Max did have a damned fine ass... She’d have to see what she could do about that when she got hold of him. After all, nobody could be allowed to have a finer one than she did... That bloody woman!... What was she doing to her mind? It was true that the fresher they were, the stronger they were, and that maternal bond, so well hidden in life, seemed to be trying to hide the children from her... Where were they anyway? She shook her head, and Emma returned. Out there, somewhere in time, there was another Emma, of course, one who considered herself to be as real as she was, right until the moment she slammed into the brick wall of her own destiny, but she didn’t really matter. Not yet anyway. Max was still walking around, trying to work out where they’d all gone, clinging on to that soul-ripping tiny spark of hope that he might still find them, and save himself. “Keep looking, Max!” she smiled to herself “I’ll be there before you know it.” She looked at him again. He still looked kinda cute... But then he vanished... No, this time he was snatched... and she couldn’t find him anywhere.
F**k. He must be getting old. Strike that; he was old. Still, life wasn’t so bad, although he shouldn’t really swear. After all he had the plants, and the life forms, and the rocks, and the stars, and everything in between. In fact, he was every-f**king-thing in between. There it went again, that tendency towards what their no-nothing-f**king doctors called tourettes, but he knew was actually f**king enlightenment. That was the thing with omnipresence, the side effects were a ball-breaker – tourettes, alzheimers, synesthesia, various types of cognition. Trader looked out towards the water, the red waves gently lapping at the green sand shore. No, that didn’t work. Somehow, no matter what combination he tried, the sea always ended up as blues or greens and the sand seemed to look best in earthy hues. Trader smiled, it was easy to forget that there was no such thing as an earthy hue before he’d made it. How he loved holidays. He’d been on holiday for a while now, just how long he couldn’t exactly remember, but a long, long time; at least an aeon or two, whatever an aeon was meant to be, they had come up with the most ridiculous words to measure something that didn’t actually exist and they clearly didn’t understand. Anyway, enough time for him to form a star, create a solar system and then destroy it, slowly collapsing what he’d spent billions of years building. Oh well, such is art. He smiled again. The Host could look after Earth - if they were big enough and stupid enough to still want it. It’d only been an experiment anyway. He done his best, but only the sea and sand were completely right he felt. The flora and fauna? Well, there was variety but only as a result of so many failures, he’d been aiming for a single plant and a single life form, not all the abominations he’d ended up creating – roses, giraffes, whales, orchids, peacocks and all the rest. And as for man! What a terrible mistake that had been. Still, Mourning was charged with sorting that one out – just as long as Frankie didn’t get in her way. He couldn’t understand Frankie at all. He’d had such potential. At one point he’d seemed to be the obvious choice, his successor even, but then… Just what Frankie saw in the ‘World’ as he called it was simply beyond him, and why would anyone call themselves ‘Master of all worldly things’ anyway? It was hardly a complementary title, self-imposed or not - ‘Master of a steaming turd’ more like . And as for Max, well, he’d never really understood where Max stood in all of this. After all, he didn’t want to rule and he didn’t seem to want to destroy, just what was Max he wondered and what exactly was his angle? Trader made the sea a jade green, the sand an almost white coral pink. There that was better; if only life forms were as easy.
Max opened his eyes and found that we was looking right at himself. He knew that he hadn't slept because he hadn’t slept for as long as he’d been alive, but whatever it was that he had been doing, he had the strangest of feeling that it might be preferable to what was about to happen to him. He tried to get up, but found that he was tightly bound by the kind of metal contraption that really wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of those old “Frankenstein” movies if the colours hadn’t been all wrong. How could stainless steel be green? Why were the bare concrete walls of the circular room turquoise? By straining his head around away from the hated face mere inches away he could see that it wasn’t just a dodgy paint job, this stuff had been changed on an atomic level which was, of course, impossible unless you were... “Oh, oh...” When his eyes opened, Max took a step backwards. He’d been admiring the handiwork and craftsmanship that had been put into this facsimile, when it dawned on him that it wasn’t a facsimile at all. In some incredible way, the figure that had been securely bound before it appeared in his dark space was him, but they couldn't both be here at the same time because that was impossible, unless, of course you were... “Oh, oh...” That they came to the same conclusion and said the same thing simultaneously was the clincher. He’d seen something similar once before, so very long ago on a boat, but he’d known that that was probably some kind of trick, but this... this was uncalled for. He flinched as he saw himself mouth the words “This is uncalled for” whilst strapped down over here and pacing around the room over here. He knew that he’d been in tricky spots more than once before, but this, this was new and he really didn't like it. “I really don’t like this!” he/they both bellowed angrily at the lemon grass dome of the ceiling above them, decor obviously designed by a maniac, but a maniac that had him totally at his mercy, which was new. He looked across the room at the self that stared right back at him. Here he was walking around yet at the same time unable to walk around. They were different, they were exactly the same, but somewhere in the gap between the similarities there had to be an answer. Then Max felt the very fabric of reality around him starting to be slowly shredded and manipulated on a sub-particle by sub-particle level, and that started to really, really bother him. Then the voice began to boom in a way that made the very cells of his mind vibrate: “Where are the children, Max? I need the children!” and then the endless maniacal cackling laughter that bounced around the inside of his skull and refused to escape, bouncing backwards and forwards, overlapping and building, getting louder and louder and louder, and which was eventually joined by an everlasting howling scream from deep within a million throats, all of which were his own. For the first time that he could remember, Max found himself trying to summon up a wish for himself, that somehow sleep would come, but he knew that it never could, and the only one that might be able to make it happen had Max totally in his power and seemed to find it all terribly funny...
Puff! There I blow your candle out. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. He watched another stranger die, thinking back to the ship as he watched. It seemed so long ago now, almost a lifetime - which it was if you counted the half-life that always came with a body-borrow. Six weeks in that body had been hell. Well, not so much the body, more the personality that he’d had to adopt to go with it. That was the thing with body-borrows, once you’d evaporated their essence (that thing that some might call a soul) and eased your way in, you had to BE them for all you were worth. Max was a pretty good actor but even he’d struggled with Norman Hampson. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. Norman was just one of those guys that it was impossible to like, it wasn’t that he was evil, he wasn’t even bad - it was because he was just plain boring. He’d done well to get re-elected though particularly with that story in the press. The boat trip had been a celebration. Even so, it must have cost him a fortune to take all of his campaign team on a two week cruise, not that he was short of cash; the Hampson’s were old rich with oil and new rich with software. Max remembered their silly, shocked faces when Frankie had come clean, shrugged off his crooner cool and displayed himself as the flaming angel he so enjoyed appearing as. One minute he’d been singing ‘My Way’ the next he and the band had gone all out on one of their killing sprees. Only a small one by their standards - a couple of hundred people was a trifle when you’d brought whole continents down. It’d provided an hour or two of fun for Frankie and the boys though and by the time they’d finished there wasn’t a sign of life on board. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. The papers had renamed the ship Mary Celeste II and invented dozens of theories – aliens, sea monsters, suicide pacts, pirates… none of which were a million miles from the truth. After all, the Host had been all of those things at one time or another and it was still being reported in the papers. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. It was the same brand that Pamela had smoked, he’d found out after from Tamara. Just how she’d got messed up in that whole sorry episode was beyond him. All he could think is that she’d stumbled onto the ship by some sort of unlucky Slip - wrong place, wrong time. The alternative was that she’d been in on it with Frankie and the boys and that just didn’t add up. Tamara hated Frankie despite Frankie feeling exactly the opposite way towards her. Not love exactly, but the closest that Frankie was ever likely to come to it, a kind of sex-lust-violation-master-servant thing, with Tamara being the master, or mistress, or whatever. That was Tamara for you - all whatever’s, so full of contradictions, so confusing, confounding, calculated, condescending. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. Even her name was a conundrum, a play with her own nature; Tamara Mourning… Ha! Tamara Mourning; such a great name for a being who’s sole purpose was to stop tomorrows and mornings as soon as she possibly could. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. No, not lived; Tamara was created to stop tomorrows and mornings as soon as she possibly could. It was taking her a while though and that was partly Max’s fault. Well, maybe Trader should clean up his own mistakes and not leave the Host to do his dirty work for him. Yes, Tamara really was a conundrum perhaps that was why Max loved her so much. Puff! There I blow your candle out. Max watched another stranger die, except it wasn’t a stranger it was him over and over, death after death, and with each looped death that voice “Where are the children, Max? I need the children”. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. He watched as he died over and over; bound to the table, in the corner of the room, out in a cornfield, on a ship on the sea, floating above the table and the voice bellowing each time he died: “Where are the children, Max? I need the children”. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything.
Benny the Entertainer put on his new straw boater hat, stared at himself in the mirror, and admired the shiny red ribbon that he had tied around the crown. It sure was a mighty fine day to be alive, yessiree-bob! Benny and his three close harmony chums were going to make a mighty fine day of it, he had no doubt about that, Nothing, but nothing was going to get in the way of that lil’ ol’ nugget of sunshine in his zippa-de-doo-dah-day! He smiled the broadest, gleamingest grin at himself and was sure that he caught a definite ting as the sun glinted off his teeth as they grinned right back atcha, baby! He inspected his carefully trimmed pencil moustache, and found it to be perfect in every detail, and then he tilted that mighty fine hat of his to just the correct jaunty and everso slightly rakish angle, smoothed down the shiny red and gold striped vest over his crisply ironed shirt and found that everything that could have been done had been done. He was, as his mother would have said, looking perfectly dashing, a mighty fine specimen of manhood, but he knew that he was even better than that. Even if he said so himself he was pretty darn tootin’ perfect, and nothing, but nothing was going to ruin his day. “Lookin’ good, Benny! Lookin’ good!” Out of the corner of his sparkling and brightly dazzling blue eyes he caught the briefest glimpse of the redness and ruin of the bed, the brutalised and savagely disfigured remains of that once lovely lad who had given him succour and a place to lie his head last night, that red soaked foppish curl of lank blond hair just setting the scene off perfectly. No, the memory of the boy was not going to ruin his mighty fine day, he simply would not allow it to. Everything was tickety-boo and he felt in fine fettle. He sang a few bars of “Camptown Races” to himself, just to get himself in the mood, carefully placed all of his tools and accessories carefully into their various compartments in his little brown leather travelling bag, and clipped it shut, listening happily for the satisfying click of the fastenings being secured. It really was going to be a beautiful day, and, as the sunbeams crept brightly through the venetian blind, he caught another glimpse of his mighty fine handiwork and found it to suddenly seem to be, if possible, even more of a thing of beauty. Some might suggest that it was grotesque beauty of course, but still a beauty nonetheless, even in the so-called cold light of day. No, he reminded himself, he was indeed a true artist, and with his latest masterpiece, he decided, he had even surpassed himself and was now such an absolute genius, that the art historians would laud him and raise him up above the very Gods of Mount Olympus in his glory, and, if he didn’t have to kill them all to make them see it, so much the better. Or not. He grinned at his reflection, which grinned back at him, and he thought that he noticed just the tiniest flaw in his own perfection. He reached out for the dental floss in order to give his teeth a final once over, and curled a perfectly formed lip over his immaculate teeth in readiness. Once that little job was done, that final fragment of the night’s activities disposed of, he took a step back to admire his handiwork at creating the absolute perfect look for such a perfect day and... instantly paled as he caught just the briefest glimpse of a reflection of the familiar hated face of Frankie standing right behind him. His thoughts turned, briefly and with infinite sadness, towards the regret of his perfect day now lost and ruined, and he even found a moment to make an attempt at gulping out the first syllable of a suitably humble sounding “Mister...”, right before his nose was smashed into the mirror and the pattern of his beautiful red and gold silk waistcoat was splattered with another more random decoration of deepest crimson. He howled in anguish at the thought of so many personal losses, whilst spitting out a King’s Ransom’s worth of dental work, and, as he tried to get a grip on the remains of his nose, saw a thousand images of himself reflected in the shattered mirror. He was still lookin’ pretty good despite this setback he thought, and as he slipped out of consciousness he heard that voice that he so loathed saying “Oh no! Don’t you dare pass out on me, Benny! You know I’ve got a little job that I want you to do...” but by the time he was being told what it was, he had already blacked out and the Camptown Races were singing their song and Benny was already betting all his money on a bobtail nag, but somebody else had bet on the grey...
Max opened his eyes and found that we was looking right at himself. He knew that he hadn't slept because he hadn’t slept for as long as he’d been alive, but whatever it was that he had been doing, he had the strangest of feeling that it might be preferable to what was about to happen to him. He tried to get up, but found that he was tightly bound by the kind of metal contraption that really wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of those old “Frankenstein” movies if the colours hadn’t been all wrong. How could stainless steel be green? Why were the bare concrete walls of the circular room turquoise? By straining his head around away from the hated face mere inches away he could see that it wasn’t just a dodgy paint job, this stuff had been changed on an atomic level which was, of course, impossible unless you were... “Oh, oh...” When his eyes opened, Max took a step backwards. He’d been admiring the handiwork and craftsmanship that had been put into this facsimile, when it dawned on him that it wasn’t a facsimile at all. In some incredible way, the figure that had been securely bound before it appeared in his dark space was him, but they couldn't both be here at the same time because that was impossible, unless, of course you were... “Oh, oh...” That they came to the same conclusion and said the same thing simultaneously was the clincher. He’d seen something similar once before, so very long ago on a boat, but he’d known that that was probably some kind of trick, but this... this was uncalled for. He flinched as he saw himself mouth the words “This is uncalled for” whilst strapped down over here and pacing around the room over here. He knew that he’d been in tricky spots more than once before, but this, this was new and he really didn't like it. “I really don’t like this!” he/they both bellowed angrily at the lemon grass dome of the ceiling above them, decor obviously designed by a maniac, but a maniac that had him totally at his mercy, which was new. He looked across the room at the self that stared right back at him. Here he was walking around yet at the same time unable to walk around. They were different, they were exactly the same, but somewhere in the gap between the similarities there had to be an answer. Then Max felt the very fabric of reality around him starting to be slowly shredded and manipulated on a sub-particle by sub-particle level, and that started to really, really bother him. Then the voice began to boom in a way that made the very cells of his mind vibrate: “Where are the children, Max? I need the children!” and then the endless maniacal cackling laughter that bounced around the inside of his skull and refused to escape, bouncing backwards and forwards, overlapping and building, getting louder and louder and louder, and which was eventually joined by an everlasting howling scream from deep within a million throats, all of which were his own. For the first time that he could remember, Max found himself trying to summon up a wish for himself, that somehow sleep would come, but he knew that it never could, and the only one that might be able to make it happen had Max totally in his power and seemed to find it all terribly funny...
Puff! There I blow your candle out. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. He watched another stranger die, thinking back to the ship as he watched. It seemed so long ago now, almost a lifetime - which it was if you counted the half-life that always came with a body-borrow. Six weeks in that body had been hell. Well, not so much the body, more the personality that he’d had to adopt to go with it. That was the thing with body-borrows, once you’d evaporated their essence (that thing that some might call a soul) and eased your way in, you had to BE them for all you were worth. Max was a pretty good actor but even he’d struggled with Norman Hampson. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. Norman was just one of those guys that it was impossible to like, it wasn’t that he was evil, he wasn’t even bad - it was because he was just plain boring. He’d done well to get re-elected though particularly with that story in the press. The boat trip had been a celebration. Even so, it must have cost him a fortune to take all of his campaign team on a two week cruise, not that he was short of cash; the Hampson’s were old rich with oil and new rich with software. Max remembered their silly, shocked faces when Frankie had come clean, shrugged off his crooner cool and displayed himself as the flaming angel he so enjoyed appearing as. One minute he’d been singing ‘My Way’ the next he and the band had gone all out on one of their killing sprees. Only a small one by their standards - a couple of hundred people was a trifle when you’d brought whole continents down. It’d provided an hour or two of fun for Frankie and the boys though and by the time they’d finished there wasn’t a sign of life on board. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. The papers had renamed the ship Mary Celeste II and invented dozens of theories – aliens, sea monsters, suicide pacts, pirates… none of which were a million miles from the truth. After all, the Host had been all of those things at one time or another and it was still being reported in the papers. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. It was the same brand that Pamela had smoked, he’d found out after from Tamara. Just how she’d got messed up in that whole sorry episode was beyond him. All he could think is that she’d stumbled onto the ship by some sort of unlucky Slip - wrong place, wrong time. The alternative was that she’d been in on it with Frankie and the boys and that just didn’t add up. Tamara hated Frankie despite Frankie feeling exactly the opposite way towards her. Not love exactly, but the closest that Frankie was ever likely to come to it, a kind of sex-lust-violation-master-servant thing, with Tamara being the master, or mistress, or whatever. That was Tamara for you - all whatever’s, so full of contradictions, so confusing, confounding, calculated, condescending. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. Even her name was a conundrum, a play with her own nature; Tamara Mourning… Ha! Tamara Mourning; such a great name for a being who’s sole purpose was to stop tomorrows and mornings as soon as she possibly could. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. No, not lived; Tamara was created to stop tomorrows and mornings as soon as she possibly could. It was taking her a while though and that was partly Max’s fault. Well, maybe Trader should clean up his own mistakes and not leave the Host to do his dirty work for him. Yes, Tamara really was a conundrum perhaps that was why Max loved her so much. Puff! There I blow your candle out. Max watched another stranger die, except it wasn’t a stranger it was him over and over, death after death, and with each looped death that voice “Where are the children, Max? I need the children”. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. He watched as he died over and over; bound to the table, in the corner of the room, out in a cornfield, on a ship on the sea, floating above the table and the voice bellowing each time he died: “Where are the children, Max? I need the children”. Max lit another cigarette. He knew he shouldn’t, but it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything.
Benny the Entertainer put on his new straw boater hat, stared at himself in the mirror, and admired the shiny red ribbon that he had tied around the crown. It sure was a mighty fine day to be alive, yessiree-bob! Benny and his three close harmony chums were going to make a mighty fine day of it, he had no doubt about that, Nothing, but nothing was going to get in the way of that lil’ ol’ nugget of sunshine in his zippa-de-doo-dah-day! He smiled the broadest, gleamingest grin at himself and was sure that he caught a definite ting as the sun glinted off his teeth as they grinned right back atcha, baby! He inspected his carefully trimmed pencil moustache, and found it to be perfect in every detail, and then he tilted that mighty fine hat of his to just the correct jaunty and everso slightly rakish angle, smoothed down the shiny red and gold striped vest over his crisply ironed shirt and found that everything that could have been done had been done. He was, as his mother would have said, looking perfectly dashing, a mighty fine specimen of manhood, but he knew that he was even better than that. Even if he said so himself he was pretty darn tootin’ perfect, and nothing, but nothing was going to ruin his day. “Lookin’ good, Benny! Lookin’ good!” Out of the corner of his sparkling and brightly dazzling blue eyes he caught the briefest glimpse of the redness and ruin of the bed, the brutalised and savagely disfigured remains of that once lovely lad who had given him succour and a place to lie his head last night, that red soaked foppish curl of lank blond hair just setting the scene off perfectly. No, the memory of the boy was not going to ruin his mighty fine day, he simply would not allow it to. Everything was tickety-boo and he felt in fine fettle. He sang a few bars of “Camptown Races” to himself, just to get himself in the mood, carefully placed all of his tools and accessories carefully into their various compartments in his little brown leather travelling bag, and clipped it shut, listening happily for the satisfying click of the fastenings being secured. It really was going to be a beautiful day, and, as the sunbeams crept brightly through the venetian blind, he caught another glimpse of his mighty fine handiwork and found it to suddenly seem to be, if possible, even more of a thing of beauty. Some might suggest that it was grotesque beauty of course, but still a beauty nonetheless, even in the so-called cold light of day. No, he reminded himself, he was indeed a true artist, and with his latest masterpiece, he decided, he had even surpassed himself and was now such an absolute genius, that the art historians would laud him and raise him up above the very Gods of Mount Olympus in his glory, and, if he didn’t have to kill them all to make them see it, so much the better. Or not. He grinned at his reflection, which grinned back at him, and he thought that he noticed just the tiniest flaw in his own perfection. He reached out for the dental floss in order to give his teeth a final once over, and curled a perfectly formed lip over his immaculate teeth in readiness. Once that little job was done, that final fragment of the night’s activities disposed of, he took a step back to admire his handiwork at creating the absolute perfect look for such a perfect day and... instantly paled as he caught just the briefest glimpse of a reflection of the familiar hated face of Frankie standing right behind him. His thoughts turned, briefly and with infinite sadness, towards the regret of his perfect day now lost and ruined, and he even found a moment to make an attempt at gulping out the first syllable of a suitably humble sounding “Mister...”, right before his nose was smashed into the mirror and the pattern of his beautiful red and gold silk waistcoat was splattered with another more random decoration of deepest crimson. He howled in anguish at the thought of so many personal losses, whilst spitting out a King’s Ransom’s worth of dental work, and, as he tried to get a grip on the remains of his nose, saw a thousand images of himself reflected in the shattered mirror. He was still lookin’ pretty good despite this setback he thought, and as he slipped out of consciousness he heard that voice that he so loathed saying “Oh no! Don’t you dare pass out on me, Benny! You know I’ve got a little job that I want you to do...” but by the time he was being told what it was, he had already blacked out and the Camptown Races were singing their song and Benny was already betting all his money on a bobtail nag, but somebody else had bet on the grey...
The experiment continues...
Link to Part Three:
5 comments:
And then... nothing. "Time to get up honey. Your sandwiches are in the fridge." Emma Cornucopia yawned and stretched in the sure knowledge that her sandwiches were in the fridge.
Don't you want to play any more, akh...?
Yes - that's my paragraph. I thought we needed to introduce a new element to build on and try to vary the paragraph length. I have plans for Emma Cornucopia.
Not a problem... I was just checking... It did actually have a certain air of finality about it... Still, I wasn't going to let that stop me, even though I need to address the notion of quite how to let you know that there's been an update...
Had to reply in 2 parts Martin. Had reached the character limit.
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