BLOG TAG (1) Part 4

Continued from Part Three http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.com/2012/02/blog-tag-1-part-3.html

As before, paragraphs in blue are my own and the ones in black belong to my fellow author, the blogger known as akh who writes
http://akh-wonderfullife.blogspot.co.uk/

The story continues:-

So there she was the pretty. But who was the girl sitting opposite her stirring her coffee in what seemed to be an attempt to make the cheap tinny spoon dissolve into the murky grey liquid? Tamara looked stunning, but then she always did. It was her hair he thought, never the same colour and never the same style but always so alive. Frankie remembered the ad… was she worth it? Well, she’d better be - the world was going to end on the flick of her hair or the hold of her hairspray. God how he worshipped her, not that there was a God any more really; he walked across to their table Shifting as he moved: “Can I get you a top up?” the waitress asked. They looked at him blankly and simultaneously shook their heads, ‘that’ll be a no then’ he thought. He looked at the girl; she was almost as beautiful as Tamara, not as tall of course but slim and willowy with a tumble of dark auburn hair. Big chestnut eyes too, Frankie very much liked big dark eyes they reminded him of that old song. Well , at least he’d found Tamara and this other girl who looked like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, or any other part of her anatomy for that matter. Just who was she and what was she doing with Tamara? Turning from the table Frankie the waitress move back towards the counter carrying the glass coffee pot in her right hand. She’d put it down and leave, if he stuck around too long Tamara would recognise him, he’d taken a risk getting that close anyway but he’d wanted to get a good look at the girl and Tamara had been too distracted to pick up him. Yes, he’d just put down the coffee pot and literally Slip away. He’d found Tamara and he knew what the girl looked like, so it’d be easy keeping tabs on them from a safe distance. He’d Slip back outside, across the street, and wait for them; then he could follow them to wherever they were going, assuming they were going together and Frankie thought that they were. The waitress reached the counter, but just as she was about to put down the pot, an old man, who’d been sitting on a stool eating noodles, stood up to leave. He reached down to pick up the brown paper package he’d placed on the floor by his tall stool, the string it was tied with was tangled in the leg. He yanked it, and then yanked again. The stool began to tumble just as Frankie the waitress drew level with it. It struck her leg making her stumble and as she reached out to steady herself the coffee pot tilted at an angle and the scalding hot coffee flowed over her arm, splashing down her pink uniform and onto her legs. Frankie screamed. Ouch, that was hot, that was very hot and it hurt. Hurt? No that was impossible. The host couldn’t be hurt. The host were beyond pain, unable to be damaged permanently and certainly not able to feel pain. There was no doubt about it though the coffee burn really hurt, it really hurt a lot. Frankie stood looking as the angry red blisters as they started to appear on his arm and legs. “Are you okay? Can I do anything to help?” Frankie turned as tears began to trickle down her cheeks, he couldn’t help it, he’d never felt pain before and he really didn’t like it. “Are you okay?” Tamara repeated - and then she recognised him and her nose began to trickle blood…

The buzzing begins whilst you are still in the dark. You hear the slight buzz and then the fluorescent tubes flicker and your eyes are suddenly flooded with the bright, pale blue, piercing light, but, if you are quick enough and clever enough to hear the buzzing, you might just have enough time to prepare yourself and prevent the worst of the pain. The buzzing continues all of the time whilst the lights are on, until the darkness returns with a soft  click and the soft green after-image changes to red, then blue then purple before the cool darkness returns. Then, with a slight buzz, the light returns. On, off, on, off, on, off. Buzz, click, buzz, click, buzz click. For hour after hour, day after day. You could try to count them, to keep track of things, count the seconds in your head, buzz, click, buzz, click, but the ones controlling the switch are far clever more than that. Sometimes the light show resembles a strobe, sometimes it is far more lethargic. You start to wonder whether it depends upon who has control of the light switch at any particular time, and their own personal sense of rhythm, but you quickly realise that you’re dealing with a far more sadistic kind of mind than that. What you have learned during each intense blast of light is a little about the plain blue-white room that you’re lying down in. At least you think that it’s blue-white, although that could just be the colour that the unforgiving light is painting it. Buzz, click, buzz, click. Apart from the smooth glossy service of the four plain walls, the floor and ceiling seems to be made of exactly the same material. It is, essentially, a cube of about eight feet in all of the three dimensions it is built in. Buzz, click, buzz, click. If you were feeling more than a little paranoid, you might start to imagine that some higher power had encased you inside this block so that nobody would ever find you. Buzz, click, buzz, click. If you were feeling paranoid, that is. Buzz, click, buzz, click. You make strange connections. For example, although why you think it might escapes you for the moment, you imagine that if this entire room, for some reason known only to them, had tumbled off a ship, apart from sinking like you would expect a block of concrete to, the only thing that could tell you which way was up would be the bare tubes of light embedded in the roof, and the cold slab that you are lying on, strapped up in a straitjacket of some kind. Buzz, click, buzz, click. With nothing else to do during the moments of lightness, you have already realised that there is no obvious doorway and no window. You also realise, however, that air is being pumped in from somewhere, but the vent is probably behind you, below you, underneath you. You might wonder how it is you got put in this room at all, but you know exactly what these creatures are capable of, so transmitting you into this featureless box would have been child’s play for them to achieve. Buzz, click, buzz, click. You might also wonder, briefly, about whether you are actually entombed within a child’s building block, but the moment passes, although it surprises you quite where the mind can wander to in the absence of all other stimuli, all the ingenious ideas that you get that you might otherwise never have thought of, all of those “get rich quick” money-making ideas, and, perhaps more nobly, all those solutions to the world’s problems that only ever really come to mind when you let your thoughts wander freely. Buzz, click, buzz, click. If you ever get out of this, you consider, you could probably persuade gullible Californians to pay you a fortune to spend a weekend in similar circumstances. Buzz, click, buzz, click. So, not all that noble then, when it comes right down to it. Buzz, click, buzz, click. It’s funny the things that you discover about yourself, too. Buzz, click, buzz, click. Max thought for a moment and realised that it really had to have been something in the coffee. Buzz, click, buzz, click. Perhaps it wasn’t any higher power that had put him in here after all. Perhaps he was just being held in a very human asylum for his own good. He had, after all, been acting very strangely in a very public place with no means of identification and no obvious next of kin to contact. Buzz, click, buzz, click. They were perfectly within their rights to lock him up and throw away the key and leave him to rot in this box for the sake of “public safety”. Buzz, click, buzz, click. Max would have laughed at that if he hadn’t thought that they might be watching his every move and trying to assess just how mad he actually was. Oh, and no matter what they did, they would still have absolutely no idea just how mad about it he really was. Not yet, anyway. Buzz, click, buzz, click. Frankie had always claimed that he’d really enjoyed his time in an asylum, but then he was certainly no Frankie and, if he wasn’t imagining things, he was beginning to believe that his strength might possibly be returning. Buzz, click, buzz, click. He wasn’t absolutely sure, but he thought that he could feel his wings again. Buzz, click, buzz, click. Just one tiny attempt at a bit of a flex and then... Buzz, click, buzz, click... click, click, click, click.

It had to be a temporary inflection. One of those wobbles that sometimes happens to reality, a kink in the actual, a blip in the certainty of certainty. Frankie was Frankie once more, his blisters gone and in front of him he could see that Tamara’s nose had stopped bleeding. It might have been the coffee, but more likely it was something to do with that bloody tower and that even bloodier Lee. Maybe a side-effect or maybe, just maybe, a part of Max’s plan. No, Max wouldn’t do that. Why would he want to make the Host human? If he did that, and even if he COULD, he’d die too and more importantly Tamara would die. Max wouldn’t want to be Tamara’s executioner - would he? On Max’s upside Frankie would die, and maybe even Trader himself. Did Max want to kill Trader and become number one? No, Max wouldn’t do that either – would he? Maybe Lee was working on his own; he was ambitious enough, a real player in the scientific world and more. Lee was so much more, another risk that Max had dared to take. Frankie had seen the tower. Actually, Frankie had seen them both, the original Wardenclyffe Tower and this latest one. They weren’t that different. In fact they were pretty much the same apart from the scale and the signs in Mandarin around the electrified perimeter fencing where good old US English had shouted “KEEP OUT” back in 1905. Perched on top of that original 187 foot tower had been a 55 ton dome of conductive metals, and beneath it stretched an iron root system that penetrated more than 300 feet into the Earth’s crust. What had Max said to the press? “In this system that I have invented, it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth, otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip… so that the whole of this globe can quiver.” Typical Max, over the top and full of theatrical crap, he really played that Tesla part hammy. Max claimed that his ultimate purpose for this “unique structure” was to change the world forever. Of course, he tested it on several occasions with spectacular, crowd-pleasing results. Frankie remembered the night of Max’s experiment, following a one-second test charge which momentarily set the night alight with an eerie blue hum, Max ordered his assistant to fully electrify the tower. Frankie couldn’t remember the assistants name but he’d disappeared into thin blue air that night. Max had stood at Pike’s Peak cackling diabolically like the original mad scientist, and as the Colorado night sky cracked with the force of the man-made lightning machine Frankie had felt the power gathering. Colossal bolts of electricity had arced hundreds of feet from the tower’s top and a curious blue corona had appeared enveloping the crackling equipment like a single gauze glove encircling an immense fisted hand. For a few moments, millions of volts had charged the atmosphere making Frankie’s hair stand on end. He could even remember the smell of blood in the air, an iron smell, electric and cloying on the tongue as it tasted - and then it had ended as the power had abruptly failed. He’d smelt that same smell recently over at Lee’s tower, much bigger than Tesla’s at almost 500 feet above and 2,000 feet below ground. When Lee had started it up the fireworks had been spectacular. Yes, truly spectacular and all of this was processed, memory on memory, through Frankie’s brilliant mind in less than a second as he gazed into Tamara’s dreamy grey pools. They were grey tonight and went so well with her silver blonde hair. He reached for the handkerchief in his breast pocket, an affectation he usually wore with his dinner jacket and one he’d picked up from Max. Frankie had noticed the way it always seemed to impress the girls when Max produced such an immaculately clean square of linen or silk when required. “Here, wipe that blood from under that cute little nose of yours.” His was plain cotton, Egyptian of course. “I should kick you in the balls,” she replied “but I’ll take your hankie and do what I have to do be do be do.” That was the way with Shifters, eventually the curiosity that had killed all those cats got the better of them and they Shifted and Shaped into each other picking up one another’s foibles and habits. Max had been Frankie, Frankie had been Tam, Tam had been… and so it went on, more than a racial memory, almost an individual knowing - a copy of course but only in the same way that twins are copies; there was nothing they could do about it really. They could be and always were and would be echoes of each other. “Who are these kids?” Frankie asked Tamara. “Our replacements” she replied wiping the last of the blood from her even cuter dimpled chin. Somewhere Frankie perceived another handkerchief fill with blood and heard the buzz, click, buzz, click of a brother in pain. Yeah, the knowing, there was nothing they could do about it really, but they couldn’t know everything about each other. Our replacements, just what did she mean our replacements...?

“Oh, that’s clever!” thought Max as he burst out of one of the white squares in the Spiral Chess Board, and he was even more impressed that it wasn’t the same chess board that he’d been trapped in. “All of them interconnected...” he mused, without being absolutely sure. He also wasn’t sure that he appreciated being one of the pawns in somebody else’s game, however and, as he looked around the oak-panelled drawing room that he had been transported to, he realised that he was looking for someone to pick a fight with, and a suitable target seemed to be sitting in one of the winged armchairs over in the corner, just in front of the fireplace with the ornate but utterly stopped clock on its mantelpiece, and, he assumed, smiling at him in that way such creatures had of doing so when they thought that they had you at a disadvantage. Max took two paces forward and froze. The room seemed very familiar as if it had been somehow plucked from his own memories, and it was almost as if it was precisely the room that he had somehow expected to find himself in. Or was that being too paranoid? After all, sometimes a room is just a room, and if it turns out to be just the sort of room that you expect to find yourself turning up in then there are truly no surprises. Sometimes things just are as they should be. The figure still seemed not to have noticed his sudden appearance. Like a bad extra in a magic movie, the astonishing had just appeared mundane. The normal reaction to a sudden manifestation out of nowhere should, at the very least, be one of surprise, but the figure just remained sitting there, motionless, as if everyone had just moved away and left him behind to rot. Either that or he was as deaf as a post. Max thought about shouting out, but then thought better of it. In these situations, he reasoned, discretion was sometimes the better part of valour. He tiptoed quietly across the room to where the figure still sat poised and ready, like a villain in a bad spy movie, to swivel the chair and announce that he was expecting him, but that continued to not happen. With a great deal of caution, Max reached the chair and tried to grab the figure firmly by the shoulder, but the shoulder just crumbled to a cloud of white dust which swirled and floated in the air and caused him to start coughing again. After his recent experiences, he really didn’t want to be reminded of how that felt. He carefully took a few steps around the chair until he was face-to-face with the remains of the calcified creature. He moved a little closer so that he could look it straight in the eye in this dark corner of the room. As he breathed out, the air from his breath caused the face to crumble and dissolve, but there had just been something familiar about the features that had remained in place for just that split second. There was nothing he could put his finger on, but this had once been someone he recognised. Perplexed, he turned around and sat himself down on the chair, through the powdery remains and waited until the clouds of dust settled around him, coating a large portion of the room in a fine layer of white dust. An absolute cat’s cradle of threads was starting to entangle him and he needed a moment to figure it out. Someone, it seemed, was using Lee to create a piece of technology that could destroy the Host forever. For the moment, the effects seemed to be temporary, but with a little more research and a little more funding, that was a plan that he really wouldn’t love to have come together. At the same time, someone, maybe the same someone, wanted Jeremy and Jemima for a purpose that he had yet to work out, although he was pretty sure if that was what he was thinking, the other three pawns in this bizarre game of chess were also thinking about it too. The thought that they might already have worked it out and be ahead of him troubled Max, as did the fact that the Artist had got himself involved. That usually meant that things really were far worse than he at first imagined, although his time in that cube, however long it may have been, had seemed to have cured him of that troubling dose of mortality he’d been suffering from. He thought for a moment about the poor humans trapped in their poor, fragile little lives and felt a sudden surge of respect and sympathy for their continued efforts, all of the continual trying that they kept on doing. If it had been him, he imagined, he wouldn’t dare get out of bed in the morning. He hoped that he would try to treat them with slightly more respect in future, but that resolution was already fading as new and more terrible thoughts started to come into his mind. He looked across the room to where the constantly shifting patterns on the ivory and jet surface of the chessboard he had just escaped from were idly dissolving and reforming into tighter and more complex spirals of dark and light, as if refusing to let the dust settle onto their highly polished surfaces. Somewhere just beneath his conscious mind he thought that he could hear voices coming from within the board. “Is it finished...?” “Is it finished...?” “Is it finished...?” “Is it finished...?” they seemed to be calling out to everyone in the universe and yet nobody in particular. Max glanced back at the chessboard and shuddered. If he had been trapped inside one of the white squares, just what exactly could be trapped within the black ones? Then, he was shocked out of this train of thought by an unexpected chime from the undead clock. He would have jumped at the sound, but he found that he seemed to be unable to lift himself out of the chair. He wondered, briefly, whether he was making a habit of getting himself trapped, but then he realised that it was all probably part of the same trap which was just as well. He wouldn’t want people to think that this was becoming his hobby or anything.

Lee was getting tired of waiting. It needed to be finished. The problem with working on canvas was that you could just keep on painting, layer upon layer, until everything became a blurred, colourless, muddy mire and when that happened there was only one thing for it; throw it away and start over. Yes, it was start over time and this time Lee was getting a professional in. Of course Trader had done his best, but at best Trader was a gifted amateur, a happenstance who just happened to be in the right place at the right time with a few buckets of paint and some brushes. Just a hobby really - he’d really hit the jackpot though; what an opportunity, a whole universe to have a go at. The artist on the other hand was a true professional, no need for experiments, nor a chance of mistakes. But first the canvas must be wiped clean and that’s where Lee came in. Lee detested the muddle of this eclectic, random universe, the reliance of chance in the evolution process, the effect of the butterfly flapping its wings, the roll and tumble of the cosmic dice. Order! He wanted order with every cell of his brilliant, genius, scientific mind. Order, and order, and order, an end to chaos, an end to Trader’s dabbling, an end to Max’s fixing, an end to Frankie’s posturing, and even an end to Tamara’s half hearted attempt at minor cataclysm. The end of the world? The end of the world was nothing. Not enough. Not nearly enough, a minor destruction in the scheme of everything, a localised event, a nothing, not nearly enough. Lee needed the end of everything; the world, the universe, the Host, Trader, the laws of physics, the make-up of chemistry, thought, and prayer, and ponies, and life and death itself. EVERYTHING! Only with the annihilation of everything could the start of anything begin, that anything would be the Artist’s vision, his masterpiece, the ordered chequerboard that the universe so badly required. Poor foolish Max - Lee couldn’t have managed it without him and it had to start somewhere, a catalyst, the fuse to start the whole party off… and Max had provided it. Lee looked at his beautiful tower; he had the two and all he needed now were the other ones…

The clock continued to chime as Max struggled to free himself from the chair and the air seemed to slowly acquire a heaviness, as if a storm was coming. The static built and grew and the floating particles of dust started to coalesce into one place. The same fine white dust that had once occupied the chair started to shift and move around Max and make as if to join up with its former particulate whole. The dust jumped and danced around in the air as if a surge of life had been supercharged into being once an unseen circuit had snapped shut. Realising that there was very little he could do, and that to continue to struggle was obviously a waste of energy which he might find that he needed later, Max attempted to adopt an air of calmness, even though his mind was racing. All around him the particles continued to swirl and spin into an ever compacting spiral of energy, not unlike the patterns to be found when you add milk to a cup of coffee, or millions of rocks to the orbit of a newly formed star, or a gravity bubble to the centre of a potential new galaxy. Moments later, the same figure who had occupied that very chair which now held Max so firmly in its grip had reformed across the room on the other side of the fireplace, building itself up in much the same way as a sand sculpture might if all the grains had minds of their own. The particles continued to shift and blur so that a recognisable face never quite fully formed. It was almost as if the face was someone he thought he knew, and their name was on the tip of his mind, but then, as he attempted to focus in on it, the thought escaped him and the memory ran back into the dark and the face dissolved and resolved itself into another and another as if trying to pin down a particular form but, instead, presented him with a gruesome gallery of half-moulded and half-familiar monstrosities. As it completed itself, however, the figure was no longer a white monochrome. This time the colours and shades were all there as if they had been somehow revitalised or recharged by an external and invisible power source. At the same time as he was watching this spectacle, Max also listened. The painful silence that the room had previously demonstrated had vanished and the slightly muffled sounds of the hustle and bustle of a busy street could be heard beyond the net curtains and the thin glass. Without seeming to move, the figure manifested itself over by the window and gazed through it to watch the activities of the street outside, before proclaiming in a voice that had more than a hint of the Confederate Southern drawl about it “Sitting right down through me, Max, did not strike me as an act of kindness at all...” He did not turn to address Max at this point but merely remained, motionless yet constantly in motion, and transfixed by the unfolding drama of an ordinary day on an ordinary street. From the world beyond the window frame, Max could not hear car horns or engines but the soft clump of hooves on mud and hard packed earth and the squeak of wooden wheels. The clock continued to chime again and again, far past the usual twelve, and he found that he still couldn’t move, but he was desperate to see the view outside into the street and find out just where it was that he had been brought to. Eventually, as if finally becoming bored with the spectacle of humanity going about its everyday business, the figure quietly seemed to turn and the particles resolved themselves again by the mantelpiece. The clock finally stopped chiming and the figure crumbled to dust once more. After a few moments of deafening silence, Max made an experimental move and found that he could now lift his legs up from the cushion he was sitting on, and so he made an attempt to stand up again and was pleasantly surprised to find that he could. With considerable caution he walked the few paces over towards the window. The disturbance made by his shoes lifting clouds of dust into the air to sparkle in the shafts of bright sunlight. He looked outside, but all he could see were the desolate remains of a long-forgotten and abandoned town crumbling to decay in the baking hot sun, and half buried by the sand and the dust of the high mountains. The place seemed familiar to him, much like he thought some of those faces the mysterious figure had recently shown him were, but, when he tried to focus on the thought, it skipped tantalisingly away from him back into the shadows, teasing and taunting him to chase it. Beneath his feet the floorboards bowed and creaked under his weight and showed every sign of collapsing under the sheer impertinent existence of him, as if the whole building was somehow being held together purely by its own memory of what it once had been, and its integrity and belief in itself was now being stretched and compromised by the mere presence of an example of the real world interacting with it. Before the room finally loosened its grip on reality altogether, Max dived headlong into the surface of the Spiral Chess Board and found himself spinning through an eternity of chaos.

She sighed. She had no idea how she’d gotten here; and was gotten really a word at all, and was the place she was sitting in real anyway? The dust played in the air all around her, caught in the beams of sunlight that forced its way through the cracks in the broken boarded windows. What were those things called, was it motes? Yes, she thought it was; the dust was dancing in the motes. Standing up she looked around her. This had to be a dream, one minute she had been sitting stirring her coffee with the spoon that the strange woman with the grey eyes and ash blonde hair had given her, watching the milk swirl as it spiralled away down deep into the coffee and waiting for her to come back to the table to entrance her some more. The next… well, this was the next. She stood and moved towards the window, the boards creaking beneath her feet as she did so, the dust parting with each footstep, leaving behind a trail as evidence of her passage. She looked out through one of the gaps in the boards; outside stood the dusty remains of an abandoned and empty town well on its way to non-existence as it crumbled and decayed in the boiling hot sun, half buried by the sand and the dust. Balls of dry grass, which would blow and tumble in the wind, sat like surrogate townsfolk in the centre of the street; it looked like one of those ghost towns out of the movies. Maybe she was hypnotised? Yes that was it; those clear grey eyes had swallowed her whole and sent her spiralling down into this town which was nothing more than a suggestion made real by her own subconscious mind, it only existed inside her head, it was made from her imagination. She peered out, if only she could make the gap bigger she’d be able to see more of the street, she couldn’t see the left hand side of the town at all. She grasped at a board and began to pull. Ouch! That had hurt, the rusting nail that a moment ago had been sticking out of the sun warmed board was now firmly embedded in the fleshy part of her palm. Carefully she drew her palm away from the board telling herself not to snatch, that nail looked rusty enough to break and she didn’t want a piece of ancient ironwork lodged in her hand. There - her had was free. Lifting her palm to her mouth she sucked; could you feel pain in an imaginary world, could you taste blood inside a hypnosis induced dream? More carefully this time she pulled at the board again. It broke away, clattering to the dusty ground below and coming to rest inside an empty barrel probably a remnant from a time when thirsty horses were tied to the rail that stood beside it. Rosalina Pink peered out and across the empty street; a single building stared back at her from the other side. It looked almost hollow, like one of those fake buildings they used to test the effects of the atomic bomb on buildings way back when. She’d seen them in old black and whites on the History Channel, yes she was sure it was one of those, what were they called… survivability structures? Somewhere a clock began to chime over and over and over again, it sounded like it was coming from inside the empty survivability structure, growing louder and louder, chiming faster and faster, building and building again, then silence followed by a soft hum. It seemed as though the hum was resonating from the ground beneath the building across from where Rosalina stood trembling, watching, and feeling the electricity beginning to build in the air. The hum grew louder, seeming to make the air outside quiver. Rosalina felt a trickle of blood run from her nose down her face to rest on her chin as she watched the blue glow begin to surround the building, making it shimmer and bend as if it was dropping in and out of reality. Louder and bluer, louder and bluer, building and building, making her head pound, her skin stretching taught across her face and hands. The world was spinning all around her, a huge tumbleweed spinning chaotically, spiralling, changing, blue, then black, then bursting into brain bleaching brilliant white as a winged figure appeared out of nowhere then plunged, falling the six empty feet to the dusty ground below.

Black, white, black, white. The constantly shifting spirals of the patterns dance around each other in ever more elaborate ways, shifting, churning, moving, constantly trying to gain the upper hand but constantly thwarted, and yet each one always clearly defined by the other, unaware that they owe their very existence to the presence of their absolute opposites. There are no shades of grey here, there is no blurring of the edges. An eternal shifting dance where neither can ever really win, but are they white squares on a black background or black ones on white? There is not an atom of space between then, so no one can ever really know, although very few creatures have ever been privileged to even get the chance to observe their awesome wonder. Not that Max was really finding any time to think about such things as awe and wonder, instead he had the distinct impression that he was skydiving towards eternity without a great deal of understanding of which way down actually was. As Max twisted and turned amongst the shifting shapes, he might occasionally catch sight of the face of a tormented soul seen through the dark or light surface of one or other of them, but he tumbled on past unable to free them, forever outside and unable to help. Max still wasn’t used to not being in control. It was a new feeling for him and one that he didn’t find much joy in exploring the impossibilities of as he tried to get his bearings and fix a focal point for himself. Eventually, with a massive amount of effort, concentration and the sheer force of his own willpower, he was able to manage to at least reduce the nauseating spinning and found that he was floating - or was he still plummetting? - in a much  more controlled way, which gave him another moment to think. All around him, at a distance that might be millimetres or a hundred billion miles, the black and white squares constantly shifted and moved and tried to dominate only to be forced back again by an equal and opposite force that seemed to be battling to try and regain the kind of order that the makers of a standard human-style chess board might have found so easy, but which seemed impossible to achieve in this realm of infinite changes and possibilities in which the black and white elements constantly fought to gain any kind of equilibrium. Occasionally they came close to a kind of rigid formality only to be plunged into chaos again by an overzealous almost-square seeking to gain an advantage. He was suspended somewhere both inside and outside this madness, lost in these metaphorical catacombs, Max decided, and the only way out was to be pro-active. Pick one of the squares and think himself through it. Despite the migraine-inducing patterns, his eye was drawn to a likely looking candidate, lurking around on the edge of reality far away, for the moment at least, from where the main centre of battle was currently being fought. Max narrowed his eyes, focussed his thoughts on that one piece of the puzzle and willed himself towards it, without even daring to blink in case he lost track of it. It seemed to be working. Apart from a little wobbling around the edges, the proto-square he had chosen seemed stable enough and began to seem to get bigger and bigger within his view, so much so, in fact that he began to wonder if he was going to crash right into it, sadly, he realised, without anything resembling a parachute. Just as he thought that he must be about to hit it, he blinked... and found himself in an observation room next to a tiny travel chessboard and surrounded by scattered chess pieces. The two players, who had been feeling pretty bored with their lives up until a few moments before, leapt to their feet in fear and astonishment, then looked at each other and fled from the room. “Just as well!” thought Max. It saved a lot of awkward explanations. However, as the alarm klaxon started to blare out a few seconds later, he realised that perhaps some explanations were going to become necessary after all. He clambered to his feet, brushed down his clothes, which, despite everything, still managed to be movie star immaculate, and staggered across to the observation windows which were all along one wall of the room. A few feet below him, a slightly familiar looking patient was lying on an operating table, surrounded by a surgical team. They appeared to be getting quite flustered at all the sudden interruptions and noise. The chief surgeon looked up from where he had already given up on attempting to save this unfortunate patient who he had mistakenly thought was just another accident victim. He waved dismissively, with the arrogant air of someone hopelessly out of his depth and therefore tragically prone to such chronic misdiagnosis, towards one of his assistants and barked out “You! Go and find out what the hell’s going on! I’m just about to harvest these organs...” The assistant quietly nodded and started heading across the operating room towards the double doors. Then she stopped and looked up towards the viewing gallery. Behind her mask she smiled and then she locked those very familiar eyes of hers straight on to Max’s own, and winked suggestively at him before making a gesture with her gloved hand as if she was blowing him a kiss. That done, she simply turned away, choosing to completely ignore the noises of panic that were now coming from the surgical team as their patient suddenly woke up feeling rather annoyed with them, and walked, ever so provocatively, out through the double doors. As she passed through the doors, she took a brief moment to skip carefully over the tumbleweed that took its opportunity to blow in through them along with a tiny cloud of brown dust, glanced up at him once more, and then allowed the doors to swing back and close again behind her.

<PAUSE>

This game of BLOG TAG will return, but, out of necessity, it needs to make a little pause for a couple of weeks and this little universe we seem to be creating will also have to tumble into limbo for a short while...

So, whilst we scrabble around through our own little lives, trying to find some coins for the meter...

STAY TUNED!

The experiment continues...

Link to Part Five: http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.com/2012/03/blog-tag-1-part-5.html