Continued from Part Four http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.com/2012/02/blog-tag-1-part-4.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:-
Trader picked up the miniature chess piece holding it between his finger and thumb, turning it over and over again. He’d lost his way and how wearying that had become. So tired of it all now, so bored - time to give it all up, time to move on. Down in Tumbletown the girl was about to find the door, well he might as well help her by unlocking it - it might provide a few moments relief from the absolute tedium he felt so constantly these days. He flicked the chess piece to the dusty floor and as he did so Rosalina found the door, not that she knew it at the time. It was hidden behind an old saloon mirror that was resting against the wall behind her, chipped and pocked, the silver missing in places and replaced by dirty brown smears. It was a big mirror, ornate, but she wouldn’t have noticed it if it hadn’t have been for the movement deep within its reflected centre. Movement like watching a video on a screen, men in masks holding scalpels, an empty operating table, a woman who looked like a nurse reaching into her gown pocket, pulling out a large black gun, shooting the mirror people (What were they, a surgical team?) one by one. She seemed to be a good shot - and fast. One by one the gowned men dropped to the floor, instruments and trays silently clattering around them. Rosalina was captured, engrossed by the scene. This was such a cliché, the stuff of cheap horror novels – here she was locked in a room in God knows where and she stumbles across a mirror to… well, to what… another dimension, the future, the past? And just what was that naked, winged thing, outside in the dusty main street? She sighed. She still had no idea how she’d gotten here or if gotten was really a word at all. This place couldn’t be real could it? The scene in the mirror changed. An immaculately dressed man, dusted himself down, whilst two others fled from the room he was standing in. He slowly walked to a large window set in the wall and stood looking down, a look of surprise then shock upon his face. He looked familiar but she couldn’t quite place where she’d seen him before. Something was happening behind the glass in that room and whatever that something was it wasn’t good. The man threw his head back in a silent scream and all at once the mirror shattered into a thousand pieces, perfect squares of black and white tumbling over and over within the mirror, never falling through into the room where she stood though, and within the chaos of the black and white tiles a body spinning over and over, clothed, then naked, then winged as it appeared out of nowhere and plunged, falling the six empty feet to the dusty ground below. It was him, the creature outside - and then the mirror became a door, an old wooden door with a dusty iron handle. Without thinking Rosalina reached out and pulled down on the handle. Immediately the door opened and stepping through she found herself at the top of a set of rickety steps leading down to the parched ground below. She couldn’t see the street from here; the steps were at the back of the building. She descended and walked up the shaded alleyway between the building she’d been trapped in and the almost identical building standing next to it. Stepping into the sunlight, the heat hit her like a wall. He was still there in the dust, his wings underneath him. He wasn’t moving. It was no use, she had to see if he was okay, even if he wasn’t a he at all, even if he was an it. She ran across to where the figure lay. It was definitely a he, his nakedness now that she was up close proved that. The feathered wings looked real and he was covered in dust – what was he an angel or something? She reached down and touched his shoulder. He was cold, as cold as ice even in this heat, but somehow she knew that it wasn’t the coldness of death. No, this creature was alive. What to do next? She crouched above him thinking as the air suddenly filled with the sound of an approaching engine. Glancing up she saw in the distance a vehicle approaching and as it slowly drew nearer she recognised it as a long black open-topped limousine. A driver sat up front, behind him facing forwards, a sandy haired man in a grey suit and dark glasses. The limo drew to a halt almost directly opposite where she crouched, her skirt was too short for crouching and she hoped that her laundry wasn’t on show. The man in dark glasses opened the door of the limo and stepped out into the street He walked towards her, the slow casual walk of a man who possessed both confidence and charm. He offered his hand, a charismatic smile playing across his bronzed face. Taking his hand she stood. “Is there anything I can do to help you M’am?” he asked, slowly removing his dark glasses as he spoke. His eyes were a watery blue, the same blue eyes she’d seen in dozens of photographs, the clear blue eyes of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The Assassin paused as he cleaned his weapon and gave just a moment of thought for the lives of his four targets. “Would it be better...” he mused, “...to let them continue to dance their merry dance...? Or should I just get on with this job and snuff the four of them out?” There was, of course, no real debate required. Failure to do his job was simply not an option. Inevitably, however, he found himself thinking about the four of them and all the trouble they had been causing and then he was rather surprised to find that he was smiling. His own existence hadn’t exactly been without its fair share of chaotic outcomes either, he realised. He smiled again as he finished snapping the weapon back together “So what...?” he thought, “A job is a job...” and the Assassin had never yet failed to complete a contract. After all, that would just be rude. Not only that, of course, but if he did fail to deliver, he didn’t hold out much hope for his own future. He shrugged again. “So what...?” He’d probably lived far too long already anyway. With a slight sigh born out of the fatigue of familiarity, he grasped the eight bullets which he had personally hewn from the burning hearts at the centres of eight distinct and separate dwarf stars as the only material capable of bringing down their kind, and loaded the weapon. He knew that he wouldn’t need more. One each to bring the four subjects down and one more each for the coup-de-grace to the head. He blinked four times. Four locations. Eight shots and the job was done. He sighed again and then sat down to begin his long after-work duty to bear witness as the tangle of reality unravelled and the inevitable entropy began to kick in. He waited as the world burned and was consumed, watched again as galaxies collided and died, and continued watching until the very last flicker of energy in the universe settled down into silence. Then he waited a couple of billennia longer just to make sure that nothing had tried to slip its way past him and, finally satisfied but still somehow completely dissatisfied, he vanished, leaving a slight cloud of black dust and nothing else but a memory of a lost universe behind him and the single thought drifting through the cold and empty darkness: “So what...?”
When Max awoke he was surprised to find that he was naked. Surely he’d been dressed when he was in the observation room; and just where was he? The room around him was pristine and the brightest shade of pink he’d ever seen. Pink heart cushions were strewn upon the bed he lay upon, a pink French Louis the something or other stood in one corner, a pink upholstered love seat in another. The carpet was pink, as were the shades of the two pink table lamps that stood upon the pink bedside tables. On one of the tables stood a pink framed photograph of a good looking couple – a beautiful blonde woman and a clean cut man with one of the biggest smiles he’d ever seen. On the other table stood a pink phone - an old one, something from the fifties with a dial, a huge handset, and a curling spiral pinky wire. The phone rang. Sliding across the pink satin cover of the bed Max picked up the glossy plastic handset. He listened. A recorded voice instructed him that room service was unavailable but would resume as soon as possible. Max wondered what normal service actually was in a place like this. Getting off the bed he tried to walk towards the window and was at once overcome with dizziness. How could that be? He’d never felt dizzy before, not in a million years. Max smiled - a million years, five million years, what did it matter? Time wasn’t the same for the Host. The phone rang again. The same recorded voice instructed him that room service was unavailable but would resume as soon as possible. Max placed the handset back in the cradle. The dizziness had passed. Walking towards the curtained window Max noticed a fly on the pink fabric. With a swish from the rail above his head Max pulled the curtains open only to find a pink papered wall - no window. Crossing the room to the pink painted door he took hold of the handle and tried to turn it. It wouldn’t turn at all. It felt like the handle was fixed firmly into the fabric of the door – and was it a door at all? Max carefully examined the crack around the door’s edges, running his fingers over the line, trying to find the slightest raise or depression on its surface. There wasn’t one. So, there was no door either, just an area of wall that gave the appearance of a door. The phone rang. Moving away from the door Max picked up the handset and held it up to his ear. That same recorded voice instructed him that room service had resumed and was now available. Then the handset began to buzz and Max felt something climb into his ear. Dropping the handset he swiped at the fly that had crawled out it and then into his ear. He managed to knock it to the floor where it crawled towards the discarded handset disappearing into the earpiece once more. Max continued to watch as the buzz got louder and louder still, the fly remerging once again. It crawled across the carpet towards his naked foot. Max lifted his foot to stamp on it but stopped mid-air as another fly crawled from the handset… followed by another, and another, and another. Black fly after black fly came out of the phone as Max began to furiously stamp as the trickle of flies became a stream, then a solid river of buzzing black, filling the air around him like a fog. The phone rang, despite the handset being disengaged from the cradle, and a voice Max recognised crooned in a deep baritone that normal service was here to stay.
The Assassin paused as he cleaned his weapon and gave just a moment of thought for the lives of his four targets. “Would it be better...” he mused, “...to let them continue to dance their merry dance...? Or should I just get on with this job and snuff the four of them out?” There was, of course, no real debate required. Failure to do his job was simply not an option. Inevitably, however, he found himself thinking about the four of them and all the trouble they had been causing and then he was rather surprised to find that he was smiling. His own existence hadn’t exactly been without its fair share of chaotic outcomes either, he realised. He smiled again as he finished snapping the weapon back together “So what...?” he thought, “A job is a job...” and the Assassin had never yet failed to complete a contract. After all, that would just be rude. Not only that, of course, but if he did fail to deliver, he didn’t hold out much hope for his own future. He shrugged again. “So what...?” He’d probably lived far too long already anyway. With a slight sigh born out of the fatigue of familiarity, he grasped the eight bullets which he had personally hewn from the burning hearts at the centres of eight distinct and separate dwarf stars as the only material capable of bringing down their kind, and loaded the weapon. He knew that he wouldn’t need more. One each to bring the four subjects down and one more each for the coup-de-grace to the head. He blinked four times. Four locations. Eight shots and the job was done. He sighed again and then sat down to begin his long after-work duty to bear witness as the tangle of reality unravelled and the inevitable entropy began to kick in. He waited as the world burned and was consumed, watched again as galaxies collided and died, and continued watching until the very last flicker of energy in the universe settled down into silence. Then he waited a couple of billennia longer just to make sure that nothing had tried to slip its way past him and, finally satisfied but still somehow completely dissatisfied, he vanished, leaving a slight cloud of black dust and nothing else but a memory of a lost universe behind him and the single thought drifting through the cold and empty darkness: “So what...?”
When Max awoke he was surprised to find that he was naked. Surely he’d been dressed when he was in the observation room; and just where was he? The room around him was pristine and the brightest shade of pink he’d ever seen. Pink heart cushions were strewn upon the bed he lay upon, a pink French Louis the something or other stood in one corner, a pink upholstered love seat in another. The carpet was pink, as were the shades of the two pink table lamps that stood upon the pink bedside tables. On one of the tables stood a pink framed photograph of a good looking couple – a beautiful blonde woman and a clean cut man with one of the biggest smiles he’d ever seen. On the other table stood a pink phone - an old one, something from the fifties with a dial, a huge handset, and a curling spiral pinky wire. The phone rang. Sliding across the pink satin cover of the bed Max picked up the glossy plastic handset. He listened. A recorded voice instructed him that room service was unavailable but would resume as soon as possible. Max wondered what normal service actually was in a place like this. Getting off the bed he tried to walk towards the window and was at once overcome with dizziness. How could that be? He’d never felt dizzy before, not in a million years. Max smiled - a million years, five million years, what did it matter? Time wasn’t the same for the Host. The phone rang again. The same recorded voice instructed him that room service was unavailable but would resume as soon as possible. Max placed the handset back in the cradle. The dizziness had passed. Walking towards the curtained window Max noticed a fly on the pink fabric. With a swish from the rail above his head Max pulled the curtains open only to find a pink papered wall - no window. Crossing the room to the pink painted door he took hold of the handle and tried to turn it. It wouldn’t turn at all. It felt like the handle was fixed firmly into the fabric of the door – and was it a door at all? Max carefully examined the crack around the door’s edges, running his fingers over the line, trying to find the slightest raise or depression on its surface. There wasn’t one. So, there was no door either, just an area of wall that gave the appearance of a door. The phone rang. Moving away from the door Max picked up the handset and held it up to his ear. That same recorded voice instructed him that room service had resumed and was now available. Then the handset began to buzz and Max felt something climb into his ear. Dropping the handset he swiped at the fly that had crawled out it and then into his ear. He managed to knock it to the floor where it crawled towards the discarded handset disappearing into the earpiece once more. Max continued to watch as the buzz got louder and louder still, the fly remerging once again. It crawled across the carpet towards his naked foot. Max lifted his foot to stamp on it but stopped mid-air as another fly crawled from the handset… followed by another, and another, and another. Black fly after black fly came out of the phone as Max began to furiously stamp as the trickle of flies became a stream, then a solid river of buzzing black, filling the air around him like a fog. The phone rang, despite the handset being disengaged from the cradle, and a voice Max recognised crooned in a deep baritone that normal service was here to stay.
When that particular voice at the other end of the telephone line had been recorded it had ended up sounding as if it had a slightly “mocking” quality to it, which was rather a shame really, because all the owner of that particular voice had ever wanted was to be taken seriously. Mr Cheeseman had grown up with a furious stammer, a general air of awkwardness, the kind of sartorial lack of elegance that could only have been picked out by his mother for him, and the unfortunate combination of slight body and disappointingly average looks that had consigned him to always being the last to be picked whenever football teams were being chosen in sports classes. The stammer he had eventually managed to get under control by railing against his lot in life under his breath before he said what he had to say, but so many other things that were stacked against him were far beyond his own abilities to have any control over them. He had endured his school years being the butt of all their tasteless jokes, snide comments and contempt, but had left his education looking and sounding much the same (give or take a hair and an octave or two) as when he entered it. Happily the selection process for the career he chose was mostly done on paper and by the time he had made the final cut it was too late for them to take one look at him and dismiss him out of hand as being an unsuitable candidate and so he found his place in the world. Sadly for him, that place was as a lowly clerk in a lowly and oft-forgotten office where he persevered despite all the tasteless jokes, snide comments and contempt from his colleagues. For rather too many long years he was forced into meetings in which any suggestions he made were pointedly dismissed by the smooth-talking bastards with the perfectly toothy grins who were running the show. Why they kept insisting on him being there when they weren’t at all interested in what he had to say was quite beyond him, but he endured it, knowing that not being seen to cause a problem or to rock the boat was the best way to climb the career ladder. After that he spent fifteen years on the very same career rung because he had never managed to draw attention to himself by rocking the boat or causing any problems. Meanwhile he watched as the faces in the suits at the front of the meeting room changed as often as the strategies and the policies did, and he decided that perhaps he needed to alter his own approach. After all, he wasn’t getting any younger and still nobody was taking him seriously, despite the fact that he knew that he had a great deal to offer them. His face, sadly, seemed destined never to fit. The makeover he attempted at one time just got him more of the deathly triad of jokes, snideness and contempt, and he slunk back to his desk determined that he would show them all one day. The pact that he eventually made with the forces of darkness did actually improve his life a thousand fold; He went off and became an actor. Sadly, despite all the best manipulation of perception that the powers of darkness attempted, Mr Cheeseman was still never really “leading man” material but he made a living playing a regular on a Radio Soap opera for a few years until they killed him off in a bizarrely unsuccessful ratings-grabbing attempt that fully convinced him that nobody had actually ever liked his character at all, and his career limped along for a few years in tiny recording booths in Soho, where he recorded voiceovers for cheese adverts (imaginative lot, those advertising executives...) and made ends meet by taking those little corporate jobs that nobody else really wanted, recording the kind of bland, generic messages that gave people their early-morning call or informed them that the kitchen was now closed and room service would be no longer available. This, rather naturally gained him even more jokes, snide comments and contempt, this time from people that he had never even met, but that did, at least, stand him in good stead when he finally made a success of himself by standing for Parliament and winning a seat in the House of Commons. Whether anyone listening to those dreary messages in all of those dreary hotels ever actually realised that they were being woken up by a Minister of the Crown remains, of course, unclear, but, by then, that didn’t bother Mr Cheeseman any more. People were finally paying him some attention at last.
Of course, Cheeseman’s success had all been down to Frankie. It had been Frankie who had sorted the stammer, reaching deep into his mouth and pulling it from his throat whilst he slept. It had been Frankie that had got him his part in ‘Travis Place’ (he’d played the handyman Bert until that very messy accident with the lawnmower) and it had been Frankie who’d got him into Soho. Of course, it hadn’t all been cheese ads – some of the work was of a more interesting nature… not all of it voice work either; even that had been down to Frankie though. Cheeseman had woken one morning with an uncomfortable lump in his panama bottoms and when he’d looked down his sweet little todger had become an angry fat trunk of a serpent thing. He’d worn a mask in the films of course (Frankie’s idea again) and they’d billed him as ‘Disguised Dick - the man with the mask and the foot long….’ Well, you could probably guess the rest. Thanks to that mask though none of his constituents would; all that they knew about him was that he was Bert from ‘The Place’. Of course, a few of them might know about the telephone work but none of them knew about the skin movies… or the flies. The first time he’d become aware off the flies it had come as a bit of a surprise – well, it wasn’t everyday that you began to leak flies from every orifice. If it had been a real shoot then that flick would have made a fortune - as it was though, it was just for fun and the camera hadn’t been rolling. She still snuffed it though and snuffed it good, suffocating on the thousands of flies that had filled her throat and choked her to death. Yes, it had been a good day indeed when Frankie had skipped his way into Cheeseman’s life; without Frankie he’d be still sharpening pencils, ticking boxes, pretending to laugh at the jokes of people he hated, and spitting in their coffees when he went to the coffee machine. Now Frankie had promised him even more. He was to be one of the chosen - yes, Cheeseman the chosen… how he loved that billing. It needed to be up there in lights, bright and bold and brash and blinking. The chosen starring Charlie Cheeseman - there were to be four of then in total. The chosen four, just too even things up. After all, Trader couldn’t have it all his own way. The four - Cheeseman, Benny, the Artist (who sometimes went by his other name of Assassin) and Lee. It was Lee that held the key; he already held the brother and sister and was planning how to get the other two from Tamara, the one she’d taken inside for safe keeping and the girl from the coffee bar. Four against four - it seemed fair odds - and with only four mounts available only one group of four could lead the Apocalypse. Cheeseman threw back his head back and laughed, a vomit of flies streaming from his mouth… Good Apocalypse, bad apocalypse – just like the two cops who’d interrogated him in ‘Travis’ that time he’d been accused of burning down the pool house. Good cop, bad cop – Travis wondered what sort of Apocalypse it would prove to be. Not just yet though. Buzz, click, buzz, click. Frankie was still planning it all. Buzz, click, buzz, click. He’d always claimed that he’d really enjoyed his time in an asylum, it had given him time to think, time to plan. Buzz, click, buzz, click. Buzz, click, buzz, click. Buzz, click, buzz, click. High above Cheeseman’s head the cloud of flies passed across the sun and the world became even darker.
Max was, quite literally speechless. He didn’t dare to speak and he couldn’t be sure whether it was the pinkness of the hideous hue of that hated hotel room or the blood vessels in his eyeballs bursting as he clenched absolutely everything to stop the flies from gaining entry into his body that was causing the redness which he could still see despite his eyelids being shut as tightly as possible. He shook his head to cut out that hateful, taunting voice, which he could still hear even though his index fingers were shoved in his ears to keep out the worst of it, and his pinkies were doing their level best to do the same job with his nostrils. “Damn this reality!” he was thinking, mostly to stop himself from having to think of where else those flies might try to get in. Well, he’d done all that he could with what he had. Everything else would just have to fend for itself. He could feel them crawling about all over his body, landing and launching and vomiting and tasting and he could feel them multiplying and getting deeper and deeper until they buried him completely and they were crushing each other by the simple weight of numbers. If only he could transform himself into a fly himself he might be able to escape this madness. He felt a strange calmness overwhelm him. If this really was the end he thought that he might like to experience it properly after so many lifetimes of surviving pretty much anything that several universes had thrown at him. Then, after a while it all went very quiet and still. He snapped his eyelids open and looked. There was nothing but blackness and he could barely move. Someone, somewhere had miscalculated. A tipping point had been reached. Keep on filling the box and, eventually you fill it. There was nowhere else for the flies to go. They had been crammed in so tightly that the evil little corpse-munchers had either been crushed or suffocated. He could already smell the decay as they began to decompose around him. He’d only have to wait a couple of days and the decomposition would reduce them enough that he might be able to move around a bit, and, after all that he’d been through, what was a couple of days stuck in a room full of dead flies? Heck, if it came down to it, they might even supply him with a source of some protein. For the first time in quite some considerable while, he allowed himself to feel a bit cheerful. He caught a whiff of something. Was that Chanel Number 5? With his luck, he chuckled (that was odd...) it would just be someone from Channel 5 wearing bad after-shave and offering to do a documentary about “The Open Fly Man”. That kind of thinking occupied him for the next 48 hours after which he found that he was able to stand up. The room was in a heck of a mess, but he already knew that over in the wardrobe, his tuxedo would be pressed and pristine and waiting for him, hopefully not transformed into a ghastly shade of pink. Maybe before putting it on, he might call reception and have some company sent up. He looked around the room and thought better of it. The telephone was probably best avoided anyway, he thought. He waded through the remains of the ocean of fly corpses around his knees and opened to wardrobe door. “Odd...” he thought. The tuxedo wasn’t there, but an immaculate pink pink cocktail dress was. The door swung back and he caught sight of his own astonishingly beautiful naked body topped with a beautiful head of peroxide blonde hair. “Wow!” he thought, “She’s gorgeous...” and he waited for the familiar response from his loins, which perplexed him when it didn’t happen. A second later he realised just who it was he was looking at, and as he stared into those deep, mournful, big, sad and beautiful eyes, which were looking right back at him, he realised that he could have a serious problem.
Lee turned up the power and the lightning high above crackled and roared with an even greater fierceness. Outside the world was a bleached white as bolt after forked bolt hit the ground sending up clouds of glowing electric dust into the electric wind, whipping it high and away like a miniature cosmos caught and scattered upon a cosmic breeze. The colours were incredible – greens, electric blues, yellows, oranges, reds – the crowds sitting on the ground lining the edge the facility applauding with each new clap of monstrous thunder. Here it was – the show of shows, not quite the show to end all shows… no, that would come, but not yet… but a show nonetheless. Lee inched up the power, not quite taking it into the red on the dial. He wondered what would happen if he were to cross that line, he had an idea of course, he knew the theory, but the actuality of it could and probably was something completely different. No, for now he would have to content himself with the control he had. On the blurred screens in front of him he could see the scenarios, fuzzy, sharp as a knife, fuzzy again. The Artist, the Assassin, appeared on one display his deranged smile filling the screen, the barrel of a rifle had been placed in his mouth and he was toying with the idea of pulling the trigger. Sometimes he did, other times he didn’t, but Lee knew that it was simply the Artist’s way of staving off boredom. My, how that creature bored easily, so easily that the only way to release the tedium was to kill – even if it was only himself. To the right, on a second monitor, Rosalina Pink held the still groggy Max upright whilst President Kennedy’s driver drove them out of town. Kennedy himself sat opposite his hands neatly folded in his lap, a huge smile upon his face. The driver’s eyes flicked from side to side checking the upper windows of each building as they slowly manoeuvred their way through the tumbleweed. On another screen a ragged, black, butterfly flew across a dirty brown sky and landed briefly on a magenta leaf. On yet another, a beautiful blonde waded through a sea of flies and opened a wardrobe to be greeted by an immaculate pink cocktail dress, she gasped, grabbing at the place where her balls should have been. Underneath, yet another screen showed the room next door where Jeremy and Jemima were quietly playing chess. Lee glanced at screen after screen – Frankie talking to Tamara, blood flowing freely from both their noses, a tall tree bowing in the wind, Cheeseman writhing under a pair of naked Asian twins, Benny chasing Flavia across an empty field his immaculate suit ripped and dirty – it would never be clean again, a huge pink eye blinking over and over, static, a vortex of black and white spinning endlessly on and on and on… picture after picture, scene after scene. How could Lee control all this?! How could Lee even bear to look at all of this?! Lee tried to look away from the screen, but he couldn’t – he was captured, captivated, caught up in the endless, ceaseless images smashing through his mind. More and more screens appeared in front of him, images of places he’d never visited, people he’d never met, colours he’d never seen, structures he couldn’t even imagine, acts no natural being would perform. Dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of screens all there in his head, blocking out reality with their reality, filling his mind with their minds, feelings, shapes, hurts, worms, coldness, laughter, blood, songs, death. Was this what being omnipresent was like? The thing that had been Lee up until a few moments ago wondered… was this what it was like to be Trader? The thing that was Lee screamed – and then in an instant, suddenly finding himself back, he turned the dial to ‘off’ as quickly as he dare. Blood flowed freely from his nose and ears, his fingers trembled, his trousers - wet with urine - doing nothing to hide the erection he’d developed. Outside the show suddenly stopped, the crowd groaned, then applauded, as they stood as a single body and began to slip away, retrieving the ancient bicycles they’d left propped against the perimeter fence. The spectacle was over for another night… only the blackness remained, shifting and shaping until - standing away from the tree where it had puddled - picked up its hat and drew forth a jaunty whistle as it began walking slowly towards the tower.
Max was, quite literally speechless. He didn’t dare to speak and he couldn’t be sure whether it was the pinkness of the hideous hue of that hated hotel room or the blood vessels in his eyeballs bursting as he clenched absolutely everything to stop the flies from gaining entry into his body that was causing the redness which he could still see despite his eyelids being shut as tightly as possible. He shook his head to cut out that hateful, taunting voice, which he could still hear even though his index fingers were shoved in his ears to keep out the worst of it, and his pinkies were doing their level best to do the same job with his nostrils. “Damn this reality!” he was thinking, mostly to stop himself from having to think of where else those flies might try to get in. Well, he’d done all that he could with what he had. Everything else would just have to fend for itself. He could feel them crawling about all over his body, landing and launching and vomiting and tasting and he could feel them multiplying and getting deeper and deeper until they buried him completely and they were crushing each other by the simple weight of numbers. If only he could transform himself into a fly himself he might be able to escape this madness. He felt a strange calmness overwhelm him. If this really was the end he thought that he might like to experience it properly after so many lifetimes of surviving pretty much anything that several universes had thrown at him. Then, after a while it all went very quiet and still. He snapped his eyelids open and looked. There was nothing but blackness and he could barely move. Someone, somewhere had miscalculated. A tipping point had been reached. Keep on filling the box and, eventually you fill it. There was nowhere else for the flies to go. They had been crammed in so tightly that the evil little corpse-munchers had either been crushed or suffocated. He could already smell the decay as they began to decompose around him. He’d only have to wait a couple of days and the decomposition would reduce them enough that he might be able to move around a bit, and, after all that he’d been through, what was a couple of days stuck in a room full of dead flies? Heck, if it came down to it, they might even supply him with a source of some protein. For the first time in quite some considerable while, he allowed himself to feel a bit cheerful. He caught a whiff of something. Was that Chanel Number 5? With his luck, he chuckled (that was odd...) it would just be someone from Channel 5 wearing bad after-shave and offering to do a documentary about “The Open Fly Man”. That kind of thinking occupied him for the next 48 hours after which he found that he was able to stand up. The room was in a heck of a mess, but he already knew that over in the wardrobe, his tuxedo would be pressed and pristine and waiting for him, hopefully not transformed into a ghastly shade of pink. Maybe before putting it on, he might call reception and have some company sent up. He looked around the room and thought better of it. The telephone was probably best avoided anyway, he thought. He waded through the remains of the ocean of fly corpses around his knees and opened to wardrobe door. “Odd...” he thought. The tuxedo wasn’t there, but an immaculate pink pink cocktail dress was. The door swung back and he caught sight of his own astonishingly beautiful naked body topped with a beautiful head of peroxide blonde hair. “Wow!” he thought, “She’s gorgeous...” and he waited for the familiar response from his loins, which perplexed him when it didn’t happen. A second later he realised just who it was he was looking at, and as he stared into those deep, mournful, big, sad and beautiful eyes, which were looking right back at him, he realised that he could have a serious problem.
Lee turned up the power and the lightning high above crackled and roared with an even greater fierceness. Outside the world was a bleached white as bolt after forked bolt hit the ground sending up clouds of glowing electric dust into the electric wind, whipping it high and away like a miniature cosmos caught and scattered upon a cosmic breeze. The colours were incredible – greens, electric blues, yellows, oranges, reds – the crowds sitting on the ground lining the edge the facility applauding with each new clap of monstrous thunder. Here it was – the show of shows, not quite the show to end all shows… no, that would come, but not yet… but a show nonetheless. Lee inched up the power, not quite taking it into the red on the dial. He wondered what would happen if he were to cross that line, he had an idea of course, he knew the theory, but the actuality of it could and probably was something completely different. No, for now he would have to content himself with the control he had. On the blurred screens in front of him he could see the scenarios, fuzzy, sharp as a knife, fuzzy again. The Artist, the Assassin, appeared on one display his deranged smile filling the screen, the barrel of a rifle had been placed in his mouth and he was toying with the idea of pulling the trigger. Sometimes he did, other times he didn’t, but Lee knew that it was simply the Artist’s way of staving off boredom. My, how that creature bored easily, so easily that the only way to release the tedium was to kill – even if it was only himself. To the right, on a second monitor, Rosalina Pink held the still groggy Max upright whilst President Kennedy’s driver drove them out of town. Kennedy himself sat opposite his hands neatly folded in his lap, a huge smile upon his face. The driver’s eyes flicked from side to side checking the upper windows of each building as they slowly manoeuvred their way through the tumbleweed. On another screen a ragged, black, butterfly flew across a dirty brown sky and landed briefly on a magenta leaf. On yet another, a beautiful blonde waded through a sea of flies and opened a wardrobe to be greeted by an immaculate pink cocktail dress, she gasped, grabbing at the place where her balls should have been. Underneath, yet another screen showed the room next door where Jeremy and Jemima were quietly playing chess. Lee glanced at screen after screen – Frankie talking to Tamara, blood flowing freely from both their noses, a tall tree bowing in the wind, Cheeseman writhing under a pair of naked Asian twins, Benny chasing Flavia across an empty field his immaculate suit ripped and dirty – it would never be clean again, a huge pink eye blinking over and over, static, a vortex of black and white spinning endlessly on and on and on… picture after picture, scene after scene. How could Lee control all this?! How could Lee even bear to look at all of this?! Lee tried to look away from the screen, but he couldn’t – he was captured, captivated, caught up in the endless, ceaseless images smashing through his mind. More and more screens appeared in front of him, images of places he’d never visited, people he’d never met, colours he’d never seen, structures he couldn’t even imagine, acts no natural being would perform. Dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of screens all there in his head, blocking out reality with their reality, filling his mind with their minds, feelings, shapes, hurts, worms, coldness, laughter, blood, songs, death. Was this what being omnipresent was like? The thing that had been Lee up until a few moments ago wondered… was this what it was like to be Trader? The thing that was Lee screamed – and then in an instant, suddenly finding himself back, he turned the dial to ‘off’ as quickly as he dare. Blood flowed freely from his nose and ears, his fingers trembled, his trousers - wet with urine - doing nothing to hide the erection he’d developed. Outside the show suddenly stopped, the crowd groaned, then applauded, as they stood as a single body and began to slip away, retrieving the ancient bicycles they’d left propped against the perimeter fence. The spectacle was over for another night… only the blackness remained, shifting and shaping until - standing away from the tree where it had puddled - picked up its hat and drew forth a jaunty whistle as it began walking slowly towards the tower.
So now all bets were off as a billion and one possibilities intertwined and mingled and re-blended to form so many realities it could make your brain hurt if you had one about which you had to worry. For the higher powers like himself, of course, such things were of little concern. The great art, he decided, was in picking out the one true reality from the whole bloody mess and then making it make sense for the greatest number of beings involved in it. There would, naturally, always be casualties, those for whom the chosen reality never matched up to the one they thought that they had experienced, but they were usually ignored. Or else they would be locked away in places where they could do the least harm, preventing them from being able to rip apart the fragile fabric of the chosen existence’s web, something that they would be quite capable of doing if only they understood their own power. Quite often he used to visit them in the asylums and talk to them. After all, when it came down to it, these were the only beings who even remotely understood how things really were, so they were the only ones with whom he could have a conversation that made any kind of sense. He smiled to himself at the irony of it, sighed and turned his thoughts back to the great work in progress. Finding the one true path through the multi-dimensional maze to finally make some sense of it all was his gift, and his curse. They didn’t call him an artist for nothing, you know... He sat back and plucked a few fragmentary moments from the shattered mirror in front of him, strung them together to see how they played out, and then dismissed that version, scattered the pieces and started again. It was a fun little game which he had been playing for an eternity, but seldom tired of. Occasionally some of the lesser creatures would escape and would need putting back into their boxes, or sometimes, just to shake things up a little, into boxes that they didn’t belong in. The outcomes were always completely predictable, of course. Well, at least to him they always were. Occasionally, however, he could sometimes be amused for a moment simply by the incredulous looks on their faces. At other times he needed to take more direct action and he would assume the form of one of his more hated disguises when they began to risk harming the great work. In the end it didn’t really matter all that much where or how they ended up. He knew all about chaos and how the smallest fault could cause the most devastating outcomes, but just a flick of a cosmic paintbrush could sort anything like that out in a moment so short that no one could even begin to imagine how to measure it. The final masterpiece, in the end, that was all that mattered. If it had to be put right and if some microscopic entities got caught up in the fallout, then so be it. That is how it had to be. The great finished artwork was all that mattered. The calm, serene landscape that he would be finally able to hang in his own personal gallery and admire the perfection of. It had taken forever to achieve the latest version, the one that had so nearly reached the required level of perfection, and whilst he felt close to achieving it, there was still something about it that bothered him. Every time it seemed that he was closing in on completion, there always was something that ruined it, some flaw that made him put down his tools and start all over again. This time, however, he really thought that now he might be on to something, if only he could sort out one or two of the minor flaws that were still bugging him on the periphery of his consciousness. Even if they were barely noticeable, he knew that they were there and he needed to address them. He reached out a hand and for someone, somewhere, reality warped and twisted once again.
He walked towards the tower, reality twisting and warping like so many times before, becoming more like the Assassin with each step. No, becoming the Assassin with each step. This was the art, change was the art, becoming was the art… and then the art made him the Assassin. The Assassin stepped out of the blackness whistling a jaunty tune and tipped his Assassin’s hat to one side. “Each time I die, I come back stronger,” he murmured. Yes, each time he died he came back stronger; the gun in his mouth, the noose at his neck, the poison, the jump, the slash of his wrists, the burnings, the decapitations – each time he died he came back stronger. Of course it hadn’t always been this way. Once, he been an ordinary man – insane, but totally ordinary, locked away for killing the twenty or so workers and those few customers at the store he’d taken that summer job one summer’s afternoon so long ago. Well, they had been asking for it with their smiles and whispers and fornication, and the weather had been warm, and his mom had packed him cold meatloaf for lunch despite what he’d said, and he’d forgotten to take his meds - they were lodged somewhere deep in the back of his mom’s throat, and he was wearing his lucky socks, and the voice had spoken to him again the night before. The voice. Ah, the voice - how he loved to listen as it spoke of paint and canvas, sand and glue, fabric and horse shit. The voice, the voice, the voice, the voice, the voice. Yes, how he loved to listen as he carved the images the voice spoke into his flesh. It had hurt at first, but after a while the pain had gone away – carried away by the sound of the voice and the exquisite detail the Assassin had scored and scraped into the canvass that was his body. They’d tried to stop him at first, taking away his blades and gouges, not able to understand where he’d got them from. But when he didn’t stop, when he continued using his own fingernails as instruments, they gave up. He was a masterpiece, all art war was here – Picasso, Breugal, Warhol, Ernst, Turner, Emin, Da Vinci, Dali, and so many more that the list was almost endless, every inch of his body scarred with tiny, lovingly, faithfully, beautifully executed representations of their work. All thanks to the voice, the voice of the Artist, the Artist of all things, the Artist who was he and he him. He was almost at the tower now. In the end the final masterpiece was all that mattered and the tower held the power that he needed. It was the canvas, the paint, the sand and glue that would allow him to deliver the calm, serene landscape he so desired. Finally he would be able to hang in his own personal gallery, finally be able admire the perfection of total destruction, an end, a finish, annihilation at last. Yes, it had to be put right and so what if some microscopic entities got caught up in the fallout? That is how it had to be. The great finished artwork was all that mattered and it all started with those two children and their damned chessboard. He allowed himself to puddle to black, a deep black paint, allowing himself flow under the door then solidify once again on the other side. He reached out a hand… the children were about to become part of his picture.
Max woke. his head felt as if he was suffering from an infinite number of hangovers, which, in a way, he was. On the floor beneath him lay the tattered remains of what he thought might be the remains of a pink cocktail dress, ripped, tattered and torn as if it had tried to contain a body far too large than the one it had been meant for. Images of a thousand transvestite builders with Midlands accents flooded one of his infinite numbers of possible memories as he recalled a magazine that he’d once found just lying on a park bench on a springtime afternoon. Strange. Now where had he dragged that one up from? And why did he imagine that most of the gentlemen contained within its pages were all from the Midlands? He shook his head and stood up, happily noticing the rather fancy duds that were hanging on a hook on the back of the wooden door. The bootlace tie wasn’t really his thing, but the black frockcoat, waistcoat and all the rest looked mighty fine to his sore eyes. That was odd. He seemed to have developed quite a pronounced southern drawl which really didn’t sit all that well with memories of Birmingham, England. No matter. Those twin silver six-shooters hanging in that gunbelt looked pretty special too, and the snakeskin boots with the silver toecaps looked just the thing, too. Over on the bed, a wide brimmed hat looked as of it might just complete the ensemble and, within a few moments, it surely did. He caught a glimpse of himself in the tarnished looking-glass that hung on a nail on the wall and, as far as he could tell, the whole ensemble did indeed look “mighty fine”, and although the moustaches were going to take some getting used to, he definitely preferred this look to the one so recently lodged in his memory. He shuddered at the memory, checked his trousers to ensure everything was back as it should be, and then turned his attention towards the sixguns and gave them an experimental twirl, reholstered them and tried a quick draw. Not bad, he thought, although you could never really tell how good it was until it was far too late. He went across to pull open the door and step outside into the dry heat of a border town, with the blistering breeze blowing in from the desert carrying the tumbleweed down through the centre of the main thoroughfare. As he pulled open the door, he caught a glimpse of his best girl at the upstairs window of the old saloon across the road. He smiled to himself. “Carole...” he remembered, “She was O.K., Carole...” He went to pull the door closed behind him and spotted a half empty bottle sitting on a small cabinet beside the bed. “Waste not, want not...” he thought, and went across to take a slug of liquid courage. However, when he reached out towards the bottle, he noticed that it seemed to contain a viscous black liquid, a bit like the residue from a million crushed bluebottles, making a tar-like fluid of the deepest black. He sniffed at the bottle, discovering that it had the foullest odour, one that that spoke of an eternity of loneliness and rotting insects. He frowned and looked about for the cork, picked it up and was just about to shove it into the neck of the bottle when the substance inside, leapt out and launched itself at his throat.
It tasted bitter and then everything began to blur as someone, somewhere reached out a hand and for another someone, in another somewhere, reality warped and twisted once again. Reality, if that's what it was, fluttered backwards like a butterfly caught up in a tiny hurricane no bigger than the spread of its own wings. Max slipped into the pink ball gown and admired himself in the mirror. Not bad, even though he said so himself. All in all a pretty good representation of Marilyn Monroe aged around forty-something. Even in death she’d aged pretty well, very well actually. He’d found a pair of matching pink stilettos to go with the gown and he’d tucked a curl of hair behind his right ear. No underwear, well it wasn’t as if he needed it, Marilyn really was in very good shape. Max waded ankle deep through the flies towards the door. He had an idea that this time it really would be a door, he had no idea why; maybe it was just his woman’s intuition. He tried the handle. The door opened and he stepped through onto the landing. Downstairs he could hear music, laughter, the gentle tinkle of glasses being raised. Of course he had no idea how many floors below downstairs actually was but it didn’t sound too far away… but then how far was far? Max stumbled. Damn these shoes, he’d never quite managed to get the hang of high heels and these were probably the highest he’d ever slipped into. He walked towards the stairs; time to make another grand entrance. Just how many had he made over the millennia – a thousand, five thousand? First time in shoes this high though and of course he was going to have to sing, they always wanted her to sing and something told him it was a special party going on down there, a very special party. Oh well… how did the song go? “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday mister…” Yeah, he could sing that, even giggle at just the right point; after all, just how hard could it be? Max descended the staircase, only two floors after all; immediately in front of him stood a pair of tall pale blue double doors. Max listened to the party going on behind them. The same old raised voices with the same old arguments that he had heard time and again over the years whenever the old crowd went somewhere and music was being played. It was quite sad really, for not one of them could hold a tune if their lives depended on it. The soft tinkle of a breaking glass and the subsequent cheer and ripple of applause indicated to Max that perhaps it was time for him to go inside and play his part once more. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” he mumbled, opening his eyes as he heard the sound of more glass breaking. A lot more! Then the screaming and the shouting began. He stumbled in those damned shoes again as he moved forward, ready to go and find out what on earth could be going on. Just then the doors in front of him swung open violently, and he stopped, frozen in disbelief. There, immediately in front of him, dishevelled and rather sexily battered from fighting her way through the party guests, was a woman who, apart from the smeared lipstick, the slightly dishevelled hair, the running mascara and the tattered-in-all-the-right-places pink ball gown, could have been his exact double. The other party guests were doing their best to hold her back, but somehow the petite, unlikely figure, tottering along as she held a broken pink high-heeled shoe in her left hand, had forced her way through them to get this far and it seemed that she wasn't going to let anybody stop her. The woman stretched out a diamond-ring encrusted hand towards Max and screamed as if her very life depended upon it: “Max! Whatever you do, you’ve got to get off this ship!” Hadn't he been here before?.
The liquids tasted sour and bitter as everything began to blur as someone, somewhere reached out a hand and for another someone, in another somewhere, reality warped and twisted once again. Hadn’t he been here before? This really had to stop both of Max thought at once. This really had to stop, the repetition, the looping. Yes, this really had to stop, the tale needed to move on, journey’s end be reached, destiny needed to be fulfilled. This really needed to stop. They swallowed, not that they had much choice as the black and white liquids merged and forced their way down their throats turning to grey and burning as they went. Someone, somewhere reached out a hand and reality twisted back on itself, unwarping, flattening, black, white, black white, black, white, the sounds of birds, black, white, the vermillion sea lapping the shores of the green beach, black, white, the laughter of children, black, white, the sound of thunder, black, white, black, white, the buzzing of bees, the buzzing of bees, the buzzing of bees… buzzzzzzzzzzzzz… and Max snapped into the greyness of reality, tumbling, tumbling, tumbling, and coming to rest outside the tower. His throat burned, but at least it was a single throat. Max lay on the ground in the dust. Sitting up slightly he checked out his clothes. Who was he now? Looking down at his prone body Max was relieved to see that he was wearing the black suit and white shirt he usually favoured. He checked his hands - yes, they looked like his hands. He ran a hand over his face. It certainly felt like his nose, his lips, his chin. He was back – at least for now. Max felt the humming in his head, not bees after all then. The hum grew louder. Lee was at work, cranking up the tower, making the air blue with shimmering electrical storms, just what was he testing this time? Inside the building someone screamed… a man? Max had known Lee for a long time and whilst that scream could have been Lee, sounded almost like him; there was something that wasn’t Lee at all, something that wasn’t even human. Whatever had made that noise was in pain. Suddenly the light show was gone and the humming stopped. The crowd that had gathered around the building to watch, groaned, then applauded and stood almost as a single body and began to slip away, retrieving their ancient bicycles and peddling away into the night. Soon Max was left alone, sitting on the ground where he’d materialised. He didn’t notice the black figure approaching him from behind, nor did he notice as it fell to a puddle on the ground, a deep black paint, allowing itself to flow under the door. Max missed the dark shadow as it slipped its way inside the tower as he tried to stand. Woahh! That felt wrong, that felt very wrong indeed, his stomach was in turmoil, his head a spinning vortex, an interior launderette. Standing, shaky but on two feet,Max leaned forward, bending at the waist, and heaved out the dirty grey liquid that moved and swarmed in his stomach. It flowed and flowed, landing at his feet where it shivered and rippled before gathering itself into an imperfect viscous grey sphere before rolling away down the track and into the darkness. Max belched loudly. That was better. Picking up his hat, he drew forth a jaunty whistle and began walking slowly towards the tower… time to get on with things.
“Max” woke... Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! HAH!!! “This is more like it!” The deep black spheres that were now acting as his eyes swivelled around and surveyed the room hungrily. It seemed that he wasn’t going to be allowed to get away with things that easily. He walked across to the window and saw Carole staring back across at him through a window of her own. Only this was not like Carole he might have remembered if he still had a mind to remember with. Her eyes had been replaced by spheres of a pure a whiteness as his own were black. Outside “reality” or whatever else it was fractured. A brief vision of a tower bathed in the flickering light of an intense storm, a scream, a shout and the tear through the centre of the road slammed shut again and the ever-tightening loop of time sped on again, waiting until the next rupture would come along and allow for that momentary escape route to briefly open up. Max the cowboy squinted, blinking away the memory of that jagged rip which had been there just a lifetime ago. Across the road, Max the whore did much the same. They knew that they were connected somehow, drawn towards each other in a bizarre dance of destiny or death. Neither of them knew which it was yet, but they could both see the inevitability of their collision, their coming together to either cancel each other out or combine and grow more powerful. The cowboy slammed open the door and strode out into the street, almost colliding with an elderly gentleman who just happened to be unlucky enough to be walking along at that precise moment. “Hey! Watch Out!” the old man cried, but when he saw those deep black spheres where his eyes should be he gasped and looked away, muttering under his breath “It’s a two-way street, buddy... A two way street...” but not daring to look again upon that undead face. Across the road, at precisely the same moment, the whore slammed open the double swing doors of the saloon and matched the cowboy stride for stride, even pausing to scowl at an imagined irritation who had failed to nearly collide with her. Beneath the dust and the sand and the mud that made up the main thoroughfare of that old western town they could see what none of the inhabitants could, the great chessboard that lay spread out in front of them both. Their eyes locked again. Their game was now inevitable. The game was afoot. The game was on. She moved first, he countered, and she countered again, and so it continued, bringing them both ever closer to the middle of the street and that eventual collision and whatever terrors that might bring along with it. Just as if it seemed that they were about to have to fight for possession of one particular square, the ground tore open again, revealing the electrical storm surrounding a huge metallic tower, and they both vanished. Some way along the sidewalk, as the people around him reacted to the horrific stagecoach accident that their minds were busy persuading them that they had just seen, the old man looked up and smiled. The pawns were now in place.
Max woke. The tattered remains of the pink cocktail dress lay beneath him where it had been torn from his body by the inhabitants of some other nightmare. The inside of his head was telling him it had been one hell of a party and the lying evidence around him told him that it probably hadn’t ended well for whoever he had now become. He wondered, briefly, whether an infinite number of hangovers were better than one single hangover that lasted for an infinite number of years, but then he tried not to think about it because it made his head hurt. Even more so, if that were even possible. For a moment he thought that he remembered something, a shattered mirror, or an infinity loop bringing him around and around and back to the beginning. The thing about an infinity loop, or perhaps a course resembling a knotted Moebius strip passing through eternity, he realised, is knowing where to leap off and that involved using the kind of technology that only Lee seemed to know anything about these days, whenever these days actually turned out to be. Ouch! That really made his brain hurt. Someone, somewhere was messing around with reality and Max really wasn’t enjoying it at all. He never liked being messed around with, and someone had been messing around with him rather too much for his liking. Shaking his head and then immediately regretting doing so, he stood up and tottered over to where a dressing table stood at the edge of this rather tatty and warm wooden room. “Hah!” He thought, as he caught sight of his battered, bruised and broken doll of a reflection, “Her again...!” He felt a sudden wave of nausea and tried to remain conscious as the room began to spin around him, and the pain between his temples as he shook his head to clear it soon brought him painfully back to whatever reality this was. He looked in the mirror again. On the door of a wardrobe behind him hung a beautiful gown of the style once favoured by the saloon bar girls in the old wild west. For a moment he thought that he remembered seeing it somewhere, but the memory slipped away from him. Instead he went over and put it on and, with a little of the make-up which he, rather surprisingly seemed to have developed some expertise in applying, within a quarter of an hour or so he was looking, if not exactly a million dollars again, certainly worth a buck or two of anybody’s time. He walked across the room towards the door and opened it to find the small balcony that stood beyond it, overlooking the street beyond. Max stepped through the door. Across the road a tall cowboy in fine clothes emerged from the building opposite and tipped his hat towards him. Obviously, Max realised, the cowboy was mistaking him for the woman he himself knew so little about, but about which he realised he was probably going to find out far more than he bargained for. From underneath his rather fine moustache the cowboy then smiled up at her with what certainly looked like a certain amount of fondness, before seeming to notice something back inside the room from which he had just emerged and returning inside, closing the door behind him. Max smiled, and did much the same thing. Beside the bed he noticed that there was a small bottle of what looked suspiciously like some expensive scent or lotion, with a bulb attached to the neck to dispense whatever delights were within. “Well...” Max thought, “Waste not, want not...” and picked up the bottle, frowning as he noticed the milky white fluid within. There was something not quite right about the way it moved and flowed, he thought, but, before he had the chance to replace it where he had found it, almost immediately, the fluid seemed to realise that it had been noticed and propelled itself violently from its container and went straight for his throat...
The liquids tasted sour and bitter as everything began to blur as someone, somewhere reached out a hand and for another someone, in another somewhere, reality warped and twisted once again. Hadn’t he been here before? This really had to stop both of Max thought at once. This really had to stop, the repetition, the looping. Yes, this really had to stop, the tale needed to move on, journey’s end be reached, destiny needed to be fulfilled. This really needed to stop. They swallowed, not that they had much choice as the black and white liquids merged and forced their way down their throats turning to grey and burning as they went. Someone, somewhere reached out a hand and reality twisted back on itself, unwarping, flattening, black, white, black white, black, white, the sounds of birds, black, white, the vermillion sea lapping the shores of the green beach, black, white, the laughter of children, black, white, the sound of thunder, black, white, black, white, the buzzing of bees, the buzzing of bees, the buzzing of bees… buzzzzzzzzzzzzz… and Max snapped into the greyness of reality, tumbling, tumbling, tumbling, and coming to rest outside the tower. His throat burned, but at least it was a single throat. Max lay on the ground in the dust. Sitting up slightly he checked out his clothes. Who was he now? Looking down at his prone body Max was relieved to see that he was wearing the black suit and white shirt he usually favoured. He checked his hands - yes, they looked like his hands. He ran a hand over his face. It certainly felt like his nose, his lips, his chin. He was back – at least for now. Max felt the humming in his head, not bees after all then. The hum grew louder. Lee was at work, cranking up the tower, making the air blue with shimmering electrical storms, just what was he testing this time? Inside the building someone screamed… a man? Max had known Lee for a long time and whilst that scream could have been Lee, sounded almost like him; there was something that wasn’t Lee at all, something that wasn’t even human. Whatever had made that noise was in pain. Suddenly the light show was gone and the humming stopped. The crowd that had gathered around the building to watch, groaned, then applauded and stood almost as a single body and began to slip away, retrieving their ancient bicycles and peddling away into the night. Soon Max was left alone, sitting on the ground where he’d materialised. He didn’t notice the black figure approaching him from behind, nor did he notice as it fell to a puddle on the ground, a deep black paint, allowing itself to flow under the door. Max missed the dark shadow as it slipped its way inside the tower as he tried to stand. Woahh! That felt wrong, that felt very wrong indeed, his stomach was in turmoil, his head a spinning vortex, an interior launderette. Standing, shaky but on two feet,Max leaned forward, bending at the waist, and heaved out the dirty grey liquid that moved and swarmed in his stomach. It flowed and flowed, landing at his feet where it shivered and rippled before gathering itself into an imperfect viscous grey sphere before rolling away down the track and into the darkness. Max belched loudly. That was better. Picking up his hat, he drew forth a jaunty whistle and began walking slowly towards the tower… time to get on with things.
“Max” woke... Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! HAH!!! “This is more like it!” The deep black spheres that were now acting as his eyes swivelled around and surveyed the room hungrily. It seemed that he wasn’t going to be allowed to get away with things that easily. He walked across to the window and saw Carole staring back across at him through a window of her own. Only this was not like Carole he might have remembered if he still had a mind to remember with. Her eyes had been replaced by spheres of a pure a whiteness as his own were black. Outside “reality” or whatever else it was fractured. A brief vision of a tower bathed in the flickering light of an intense storm, a scream, a shout and the tear through the centre of the road slammed shut again and the ever-tightening loop of time sped on again, waiting until the next rupture would come along and allow for that momentary escape route to briefly open up. Max the cowboy squinted, blinking away the memory of that jagged rip which had been there just a lifetime ago. Across the road, Max the whore did much the same. They knew that they were connected somehow, drawn towards each other in a bizarre dance of destiny or death. Neither of them knew which it was yet, but they could both see the inevitability of their collision, their coming together to either cancel each other out or combine and grow more powerful. The cowboy slammed open the door and strode out into the street, almost colliding with an elderly gentleman who just happened to be unlucky enough to be walking along at that precise moment. “Hey! Watch Out!” the old man cried, but when he saw those deep black spheres where his eyes should be he gasped and looked away, muttering under his breath “It’s a two-way street, buddy... A two way street...” but not daring to look again upon that undead face. Across the road, at precisely the same moment, the whore slammed open the double swing doors of the saloon and matched the cowboy stride for stride, even pausing to scowl at an imagined irritation who had failed to nearly collide with her. Beneath the dust and the sand and the mud that made up the main thoroughfare of that old western town they could see what none of the inhabitants could, the great chessboard that lay spread out in front of them both. Their eyes locked again. Their game was now inevitable. The game was afoot. The game was on. She moved first, he countered, and she countered again, and so it continued, bringing them both ever closer to the middle of the street and that eventual collision and whatever terrors that might bring along with it. Just as if it seemed that they were about to have to fight for possession of one particular square, the ground tore open again, revealing the electrical storm surrounding a huge metallic tower, and they both vanished. Some way along the sidewalk, as the people around him reacted to the horrific stagecoach accident that their minds were busy persuading them that they had just seen, the old man looked up and smiled. The pawns were now in place.
The experiment continues...
Link to Part Six: http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/blog-tag-1-part-6.html
