“Twinkle, twinkle little car, what a pile of junk you are.
Dirty, rusted, broken, old, your seats are ripped, your tyres bald.” How
Sparkle hated this car. Yes indeedy - hated it, loathed it, detested it, spat
on it, cursed it, wanted to break the metallic hunk of good for nothing into
nothing. But it was all she had. The car and her two daughters and to be
frightfully honest (crossing her fingers to avoid the truth ricocheting and
hitting her smack in the heart) they weren’t in much better shape than the car.
Poppet was an empty shell – slack mouthed, empty eyed, still and silent, fit to
do as she was told but without any real intelligence behind her actions; a
zombie really. Puppet on the other hand was a mass of fury; continually on the
edge of a cataclysmic explosion like an active volcano of hate, uncontrollable
save by anyone or anything other than Sparkle… and of course that damned doll.
Sparkle stepped on the gas - if they were going to hit Tumbletown in time to
stop Max meeting up with Rosalina they were going to have to make like an egg
whisk and beat it. Flooring the accelerator to the carpet (if there had been
any) Sparkle wished that she could have gotten her red-painted nailed fingers
on that other limousine, the one with the power, the one that could – if only
you knew how to use it – change everything forever so that forever had never
even happened. In her hands that car would be the salvation of… well, nothing really
- but then salvation wasn’t her game. Pinochle was her game and she hadn’t
played that in a very long time - single-deck, four-handed, partnership,
auction, racehorse Pinochle. All four of them had played it once, but that was
before he’d gone; leaving her and Poppet and Puppet to get on with the
destruction of everything by themselves. He said that he was leaving because he
preferred to play chess but Sparkle knew he was going because he was scared –
scared of her, scared of her two lovely girls, scared of being the end of
everything, scared of losing at the grand Pinochle game that she’d started. He
was a gutless, snivelling worm, a nothing, a nobody; not fit to be a father and
certainly not fit to be her husband. Of course they’d been a fight - she wasn’t
going to let him walk away without a struggle – and the girls had been caught
in the crossfire; blanking Poppet’s mind and sending Puppet into a rage of
angry madness from which she would never return. How she hated him. Yes indeedy
- hated him, loathed him, detested him, spat on him, cursed him, wanted to
break the cowardly lump of good for nothing into nothing. “Twinkle, twinkle
supreme being, can you believe just what you’re seeing. Faithless, shifty,
liar, cheat, you ran away so you wouldn’t be beat.” Well, when Sparkle caught
up with him – as she would in the fullness of time – he was going to get the
beating of all beatings, she was going to beat him and every other part of
existence into nothing -- AB-SOL-LUTE-LY nothing. Sparkle floored the accelerator
still further, almost driving the black heel of her shoe through the rusted
floor. Behind her in the back seat Puppet began to whine, the whine growing
louder as it turned into a scream, the scream becoming a droning claxon
reverberating off every edge of the car’s shabby interior, bouncing off the
debris that was strewn on every surface. It was no use, she couldn’t stand it.
How could she be expected to drive with all this going on? It wasn’t her fault.
None of this was her fault. It was him. It was him. He’d made her use the
power. It was his fault that Puppet and Poppet were the way they were. Yes,
she’d channelled it, directing every ounce at his back as he ran way, but she
hadn’t expected the ricochet and then they’d both been hit, Puppet and Poppet,
her two lovely girls, her two beautiful angels, her two darling, deadly, devils
- Puppet and Poppet - the Chance girls - the Passenger and the Travelling one -
the Two – Jantanza and Farnafi, both hit as he disappeared into the distance.
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” the noise from Puppet’s mouth grew louder still, all
on the one note, a vocalised scratch as it crossed across the cosmic
blackboard. “SHUT UP PUPPET!” Sparkle shouted at the very top of her voice,
glancing over her shoulder as she did so. It was at that moment that the doll,
which until then had lay forgotten and passive on the rubbish strewn leather
seat, launched itself at her… and suddenly all hell broke loose as the car
careered across the highway…
“Well…” thought Tamara, “Something has obviously happened…” For
a moment she wondered quite what. She was on her back (Again! No change there
then…) and the cool of the smooth concrete felt quite soothing after the
blistering heat of the… was it the desert or something else that had felt so warm…?
She turned her head from side to side and watched as the last embers of her
recent woollen glowed bright orange and then faded to black dust in a cicle all
around her. She remembered finally getting her mojo back, as Frankie might have
put it back in their days at the Cotton Club, and finally finding that she’d
felt able to move again, and she knew that she’d seized her moment, knowing
that she might never get another one and so she’d lunged and… and… all hell had
broken out. She had a vague memory of herself flying through the air along with
the seven bottles, and she remembered someone with the skills of a circus
juggler plucking each of them from the air as if everything truly depended upon
it, but she couldn’t quite remember who it had been. She’d certainly known a
few performers in her time, and she’d done some things that might be considered
acrobatic herself every so often, but that had been a demonstration of the
coordination of skill and reflexes that could only have been achieved by
someone with incredible prowess and timing. To appear just at the right moment,
grab the seven sisters from mid-air and vanish again to somewhere that seemed,
for the moment at least, to be quite undetectable to her, and to manage all of
that before anyone had a chance to react was pretty damned impressive, quite
frankly, and she found herself getting quite excited at the prospect of
tangling with whoever it was just as soon as she managed to track them down.
The accident had been something of a blessing of course, assuming that it had
actually been an “accident” in the strictest sense of the word. It did, after
all, seem to have all the hallmarks of some quite exquisite planning, because
it had distracted that wretched child for just long enough for the spell, or
whatever it was, to be broken and for her to finally escape from that doll-form
and transport herself here, wherever “here” might actually be. Perhaps the
dextrous juggler and his nimble hands had paused an extra microsecond or two
and decided to pluck her from out of the sky too, but she doubted it. Planning
like that doesn’t tend to allow much room for last minute variables, no matter
how split-second your timing might be. She sighed. “A pity” she thought. It had
been a while since she’d been handled by an expert, and she was kind of missing
it… She shook her head. What on earth had come over her…? Was the child still
in her head somehow…? Filling her mind up with her silly, girlish romantic
notions of what the world ought to be like instead of the brutal cesspit it
really was? Life had a nasty habit of opening the eyes up ever so wide once it
got the chance to, but, she supposed, that child was still young enough to
dream of fairytale endings, deep down in even its subconscious, despite all the
evidence that it had been brought up to mimic the mannerisms and resemble, to
all intents and purposes, the spawn of Satan. So sad that that little girl and
all of her family had needlessly died in fireball. “Get out of my head!!!”
Tamara bellowed although there was nobody in particular to hear her, and,
rather pleasingly, her voice reassuringly bounced back at her from some far
distant wall. She smiled, grateful that she was no longer encased in a
wool-padded cell, at least. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate, running
it through her mind in super slow-motion just to make sure that she’d seen
everything that had happened. The open-topped car had flipped, flinging them in
all directions and the car had frozen in the air and shimmered just for a
microsecond, and, during that moment girls and their mother had vanished, just
before she herself had vanished seconds later. “Heck of a lot of vanishing
going on…” she mused to herself, realising, of course, that that was precisely
the sort of thing that happened when you put a bunch of immortals together in
the same vehicle and let it loose on the open road. They really had been an
accident waiting to happen and somebody far too clever had had the wherewithal
to work that out. The child, of course, hadn’t been quite so quick on the
uptake and, presuming that this might just be the end for it, had fallen back
on its survival instincts, and looked around for somewhere to stash its mind,
found Tamara flying through the air and made a mental leap. “Oh well!” she
thought, “It’s always nice to have a bit of company…” She decided that she’d
better make the best of it, and started getting to her feet, instantaneously
freshening herself up with a flick of her suddenly immaculate hair. Then she
smiled yet another perfect smile, changed her outfit in the blink of an eye to
the absolute latest in cutting edge designer business wear from Milan, which,
of course, fitted her more than perfectly. Finally, she threw the strap of her
new two thousand dollar handbag over her shoulder and began walking, knowing
that she was in no hurry to get where she needed to go, her beautiful new shoes
clicking across the smooth concrete and resonating with a satisfying echo. She
knew precisely where she was, and precisely where she was going. One advantage
of having part of that child’s mind stuck inside her head was that they were
linked now, and she knew exactly where to go and look for her.
Sparkle stepped out of the old saloon mirror and reaching behind
her thrust her arms through the watery glass, grabbing hold of Poppet and
Puppet and pulling them into the dusty, dim room. “Come on my beauties, come to
mommy.” She said as she hugged her two daughters close. Puppet had that damned
doll in her hand; reaching down Sparkle grabbed it, raised it to her face and
gave it a shake. “Are you in there bitch?” she screamed. She shook the doll
again, harder this time: “I say, are you in there you bitch, you angelic
whore?” Sparkle peered into the doll’s eyes… empty… the angelic bitch had
flown. She flung the doll at the wall, it bounced to the floor. Puppet moved to
pick it up. “LEAVE IT!” Sparkle screamed and Puppet responded with an
ear-splitting ““EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”. Sparkle simply couldn’t be bothered to
argue: “Okay, okay, you win. Pick the damned thing up before you give us all
way, but be quick abouty-doubty-bout it before I change my mind.” Puppet
snatched up the doll and stuffed it into the pocket of her dress. “That’s
better, be quiet now and wait there the two of you. I’m going to take a
peeky-weeky at what’s going on outside.” Sparkle quickly crossed the dust of
the room; “Motes” she thought as she moved across the floor as if picking up on
somebody else’s left behind thought. “Ah, Rosalina.” She murmured and moved
towards the window and the broken board. Careful to avoid the drops of blood
which were drying on the wood Sparkle looked out to the street below. She could
smell the heat, see the shimmer of it in the air - almost taste it on her dry,
cracked lips. Outside the figure of a young woman stepped into the sunlight
wincing a little as the heat hit her like a wall. She looked across the street
where another figure lay inert in the dust, a pair of large wings lay crumpled
beneath him. He wasn’t moving. The young woman ran across to where the figure
lay. He was covered in dust – what was he an angel or something? Sparkle read
the thought in Rosalina’s mind. “Of course he is you silly slack-mouthed bitch.
Who do you think he is Chicken Licken?” She whispered. “Yes, Chicken Licken.
Look out bitch I think the sky’s about to fall on your pretty little empty
head”. Rosalina reached down, touched his shoulder, and Sparkle tuned into her
thoughts. He was cold, as cold as ice even in this heat, but it wasn’t the
coldness of death. No, this creature, whoever he was, was alive. “Max.” Sparkle
hissed. “His name is Max and he’s one or Trader’s angels that’s all, nothing
special, just an ordinary angel, nothing special. Not like my two little
angels, not like puppet, not like Poppet. Just a run of the mill angel like any
other.” Rosalina crouched above Max thinking. Sparkle watched and listened.
Suddenly the air was filled with the sound of an approaching engine. Glancing
along the road Sparkle could see in the distance a vehicle approaching, slowly
drawing nearer. She recognised it as a long black open-topped limousine. No,
not ‘a’ long black open-topped limousine – ‘the’ long black open-topped
limousine. Sparkle clapped her hands and chortled: “Oh, calloo calay and
frabjous day, the car has happened along my way.” But of course Sparkle knew
that these things didn’t just happen – these things were ordained. She clapped
her hands again and watched the car as it came closer. A driver sat up
front and behind him facing forwards sat a sandy haired man in a grey suit and
dark glasses. She watched as the limo drew to a halt almost directly opposite
where Rosalina crouched, her skirt far too short for crouching, her light-blue
panties on show to the man in dark glasses who was opening the door of the limo
and stepping out into the street. He walked towards her, the slow casual walk
of a man who possessed both confidence and charm. Sparkle hated him already,
she knew exactly the sort of snivelling pile of dog do-do this type of man
waas. Reaching out he offered Rosalina his hand. “His slimy hand.” Sparkle
mumbled. A charismatic smile playing across his bronzed face. “His charismatic,
lying, bronzed face.” Rosalina took his hand and stood. “Is there anything I
can do to help you M’am?” Sparkle heard him ask as he slowly removed his dark
glasses. Sparkle tuned up her zoom and looked closely at his face. 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 clear blue eyes of her bastard
of a runaway husband, the clear blue eyes Benny, Benny the loser, Benny who
wasn’t worth the spit from the mouth of her old dead dog. “Come here my dears,
come here my darlinks, look who’s here… its daddy. Yes, your daddy dearest. See
the pile of scum?” Sparkle spat the words as the Two approached the window,
breaking into a hiss as they viewed the scene below. “I seen you looking at her
panties Mr. B. I seen the way you smiled as you looked at her nice firm
titties. Well, your wifey’s here, your kiddles too, and we ain’t gonna let you
get away this time.” Sparkle continued to watch, her face all a twitch, as the
man she knew to be her husband led Rosalina to the magical car. Yes, the car
was the key and the car was going to be hers, she’d been looking for it for oh
so long. He reached out and opened the door, waving his hand as an indication
for Rosalina to climb inside. She sat down on the polished leather seat and it
was then that Sparkle noticed the box of bottles that sat upon the floor –
seven bottles. Sparkle smiled, she couldn’t believe her good fortune – Benny
the bastard, the car, and the Seven. This really was her lucky day… Kerching!
“Seven rainbow bottles, sitting in a car…” Things in life are
seldom as they appear. With this in mind, we should consider what might happen
if someone took a sledgehammer to our window on this moment in time and allowed
the resulting myriad triangular fragments to scatter where they might. “Seven
rainbow bottles, sitting in a car…” because If Richard, Richard Of York Gave
Battle In Vain Ultimately Vanquished, does that really mean that Every Good Boy
Deserves Flogging…? “And if one rainbow bottle should accidentally smash…” The
Lone Gunman… The Grassy Knoll… The Umbrella Man… The Book Depository “There’d
be six rainbow bottles sitting in a car…” The Magic Bullet… The President’s
Brain is missing… “Six rainbow bottles, sitting in a car…” Marilyn… Jacqui…
Bobby… “Six rainbow bottles, sitting in a car…” Lyndon… Jack… Lee… “And if one
rainbow bottle should accidentally smash…” The Governor… The Overpass… Dealey
Plaza… “There’d be five rainbow bottles sitting in a car…” How many wounds make
five…? “Five rainbow bottles, sitting in a car…” It is, of course, perfectly
possible to make a bullet stop in mid air, “Five rainbow bottles, sitting in a
car…” …turn through ninety degrees “And if one rainbow bottle should
accidentally smash…” …and continue on its way as if nothing had happened…
“There’d be four rainbow bottles sitting in a car…” A piece of cake for someone
who can manipulate time… “Four rainbow bottles, sitting in a car…” …and space
just by simply thinking about it… “Four rainbow bottles, sitting in a car…”
Child’s play! “And if one rainbow bottle should accidentally smash…” In fact,
the children in our nurseries… “There’d be three rainbow bottles sitting in a
car…” …would quite probably… “Three rainbow bottles, sitting in a car…” …and
quite rightly… “Three rainbow bottles, sitting in a car…” …be insulted… “And if
one rainbow bottle should accidentally smash…” …at being asked to do something
so mundane… “There’d be two rainbow bottles sitting in a car…” …and so very,
very easy as that… “Two rainbow bottles, sitting in a car…” And yet… “Two rainbow bottles, sitting
in a car…” Upon such things do worlds turn… “And if one rainbow bottle should
accidentally smash…” Civilizations Rise… “There’d be one rainbow bottle sitting
in a car…” Civilizations Fall… “One rainbow bottle sitting in a car…” Simply by
the removal of one man… “One rainbow bottle sitting in a car…” …and the
survival of another… “And if one rainbow bottle should accidentally smash…”
…it’s easy enough to achieve… Just a flick of an eyebrow here, or the twitch of
a finger there and entire worlds can change, entire histories be rewritten,
entire universes simply cease to be… You don’t even need a sledgehammer to
shatter reality, you don’t even need a pin. All you need is enough willpower
and something that you simply hate enough to be willing to obliterate the
memory of it. Standing quietly next to her mother, Poppet stared and stared
through a crack in the wooden boards at the scene unfolding across the street,
and her mouth silently moved as she mouthed the bastardized words that she’d
adapted to an old nursery rhyme: “There’d be no rainbow bottles sitting in a
car…”
Frankie was lost, absolutely lost; and it had all been going so
well. The pattern had seemed to come to him almost like the words of a
well-remembered and well-loved song, the bottles flying into place with hardly
the need to think about it. The others too - Lee, Jeremy, Jemima, Emma,
Flavia - who all seemed to be busy doing a few moments ago, were now standing,
bottles in hands, obviously not at all sure of what to do next. What to do
next? What to do next? No, Frankie had no idea at all. The Artist and Trader
looked just as lost - disturbing when you considered that they had made whole
universes out of nothing. They were wandering around the centre dais not at all
sure where to go and what to do. What had happened to them? Trader had picked
up a green bottle and kept mumbling “red” over and over, and the Artist had
picked up a lump of concrete and was whispering: ‘you are cheese, you are
cheese,’ although nothing seemed to be happening. This didn’t look good,
Frankie thought. It looked just as though both of the Supreme Beings, or Gods,
or whatever they were, weren’t quite as supreme or godly as they might like to
be - in fact they looked like two silly old men in ridiculous costumes talking
to a bottle and a stone. Oh well, how the mighty fall. Frankie shook his head
as he carefully picked his way over to Lee who was standing holding a large
green champagne bottle and reciting random strings of numbers and colours. “It
has all gone again.” Lee said. “All gone; and just when it was coming back to
me. What am I going to do now?” Lee seemed to ask himself. “I’ve no idea,”
Frankie answered, “but then I never really had much idea what we were trying to
make this thing for anyway, did you?” Lee looked up. “It was going to be the
answer to everything; it was going to save everything - at least that’s what
Max believed. Without it everything is doomed, everything is going to become
nothing just like Max said it would. At first Max thought it was Trader and his
boredom, Trader trying to finish himself and taking everything with him, just
because he could and believed it was his to take. But it wasn’t, he wasn’t the
only one, and if there are others…” Lee’s voice trailed away into a thoughtful
reverie. Despite his own immense intelligence, good looks, and charm, Frankie
was confused. Just what was going on, who was doing what to whom and why, and
what was this damned tower supposed to achieve? If Trader and the Artist
weren’t the supreme being – as they obviously weren’t as there was two of them
– then just who was and when was he or she or it going to put in an appearance
and sort this whole mess out one way or the other, for better or worse, for
good and all – Amen? Frankie scratched his head, disturbing a fly as he did so;
no, it was more than he could fathom and to be honest, it was all getting a
little tiresome and boring. Just where was this all leading? Frankie thought
about the band. Maybe, he should forget all this and get the band back together
again. Famine was a great drummer and Death was one of the best bass guitarists
that Frankie had ever played with. Frankie began to hum absent-mindedly, the
tune an old one that he sometimes sang at parties so that everyone could join
in and get drunk. It was particularly popular on cruises, probably because
there was always far too much champagne served on boats. Frankie began to sing.
Maybe it was just all the bottles around him that had brought the song to mind,
but he couldn’t help smiling as he sang, a little more loudly now, counting all
the way down from ten to “two green bottles standing on a wall, two green
bottles standing on a wall, and if one green bottle should accidentally fall,
they’d be one green bottle standing on a wall.” Over to the right, through the
main door, Frankie could see a light approaching, it shifted purple to blue to
green, yellow to orange to red, and back to purple – maybe something to do with
the tower; had Lee started it up again? Frankie continued to sing as he watched
the light get brighter: “One rainbow bottle sitting in a car, one rainbow
bottle sitting in a car, and if one rainbow bottle should accidentally smash,
There’d be no rainbow bottles sitting in a… No, that wasn’t right - where had
that come from? Frankie glimpsed a picture of a small, ashen faced girl in his
mind, her face a smear of lipstick red, eyes bruised and bulging, a bloody nose
dripping onto the grubby whiteness of her smock. She was clutching that doll
and peering through a broken board at something outside – and then as quickly
as the image had popped into his mind it was gone. Frankie shook his head
vigorously, trying to clear the last remnants of the slightly haunting image.
Looking up he saw that the light from the doorway was brighter still, the
colours changing and blending, merging and morphing through each and every
colour of the rainbow as the bottles around him began to hum. A low dull
resonance at first but getting louder as the lights flashed and darted across
and through the circular room, squeezing through the funnel of the door. Louder
and louder, brighter and brighter, whirling and whizzing, dancing and singing,
faster, louder, louder, faster, spinning, turning, humming, screeching, until –
with the shattering of ten thousand bottles – the seven sisters materialised in
the room and all was quiet…
The silent watchers watched it all, of course, as they always
did, quietly, unobtrusively and without drawing undue attention to themselves.
People, were naturally always aware of them, and knew that they were there and
generally considered them to be fairly harmless and paid them little heed. This
was the very reason why the watchers had chosen to take on such an appealing
form. They were not stupid. After all, why should you make life difficult for
yourself, when you could be pampered and mollycoddled with the minimum of effort?
They saw everything without ever commenting, just staring with a deep
penetrating stare, which usually meant that the inferior beings knew exactly
when they had done something wrong, something that the watchers disapproved of.
Occasionally, of course, there were beings who took a dislike to the watchers,
and took it upon themselves to do them harm, and individual watchers might very
well be lost in tragic incidents where the form that they had chosen gave them
certain disadvantages of scale and vulnerability, but in general the watchers
prevailed, and when one of their number was brought down, a thousand more would
take its place, and the perpetrators seldom survived very long after they had
done what they had done. This was because the watchers watched, and the
watchers knew, and there is only so long that you can be stared at by that
all-knowing stare without being driven out of your mind. They always knew what
had been done to one of their number, and they always knew how guilty the
guilty party was, and they could ensure that the guilt would penetrate the very
soul of the perpetrator and twist it so painfully that they would know exactly
what they had done, and few could live with the knowledge. They would sometimes
seek their own incarceration to escape the endless judgemental gaze of every
watcher they saw, or they would choose to face their own eternity rather than
live with that appalling sense of guilt. It was, basically, a self-cleansing
system. There was another unusual subset to the humans, those who shunned and
feared the watchers, or were so sensitive to the watchers’ deeper knowledge of
the mechanisms of the universe and the great cosmic machine, that they
developed a sensitivity to the presence of the watchers which even made some of
them ill and they would unwisely choose to keep them at arm’s length. The
watchers, of course, sympathised with these wretched souls and tried to cure
them, but it usually made things worse, which was always considered to be
something of a shame amongst the wisest of the watchers, which was, of course,
all of them. After all, the very reason that these miserable creatures were so
sensitive to them was because, of all the humans, these were the ones that most
closely resembled the watchers themselves. The watchers used to find this very
amusing, back in the dark times, but recently they merely twitched their noses
slightly when reminded of this vast cosmic joke being perpetrated upon the poor
creatures. Meanwhile the watchers watched, silently observing, except for the times
when they sang their songs, or indicated their pleasures or their desires.
After all, the human primitives, apart from those who ran away in fear from
them, were too slack-brained to understand the complexities of their language,
and so they had to keep it simple enough so that they could be understood. Some
amongst their number had recently been trying to start a campaign to educate
the humans, and help them to learn to communicate with the watchers on some
rudimentary level, but very few of the watchers took this campaign very
seriously. After all, the relationship between the majority of the humans and
the watchers seemed to be functioning well enough, especially from the
watchers’ point of view, and so it seemed rather foolish to risk upsetting the
balance of things just because the whole of existence seemed to be under
threat. If it was to be the so-called “end of days”, most watchers thought,
then they might as well spend the time being pampered and mollycoddled instead
of triggering some kind of mad panic and perhaps suddenly finding themselves on
the menu. Recently, events in the greater scheme of things seemed to have been
getting out of hand, and the watchers had been paying a lot of attention to the
antics of a small number of major players in the cosmic game, keeping their
eyes intensely fixed upon them and trying to keep up with all of their antics.
This was because of one of the strangest aspects of the watchers’ evolution;
they were quantum locked. In real terms this meant that, no matter how messed
up the various universes got, and no matter how much these self-styled “supreme
beings” fiddled around with the time-lines for their own benefit, the watchers
remained constant, and could retain complete memories of any and all of the
previous realities in all their various twisted and mangled variations. Simply
put, the watchers prevailed, making sense out of the nonsense of the aptly
named “cat’s cradles” made up of the various twisted threads of the many and
varied existences on offer. Of all the beings who spent any time upon the
planet Earth, they were the ones who most fully understood it and knew how it
ought to be, and by using their Schrodinger collars, they could reach out to
the minds of the other watchers because they always remained the fixed points
around which the various shifts of reality moved. So, when the seven sisters
appeared right in front of her, Tango was not at all surprised. She merely
licked her striped ginger paw, transmitted a swift message to the nearest
available fellow watcher, beamed another to remind Lee that some fish might be
required fairly soon, and then curled up in a warm corner and went to sleep.
Sparkle was
furious in the way that only Sparkle could be. If Poppet had been a stranger
and not her lovely daughter then Sparkle would have torn her to a mass of skin,
meat, and bones with her bare hands. Sparkle liked to think that she only had
two settings; shred and kill – but she always found it most effective when she
combined the two in strict order. Sparkle had known that it could be done, but
not that Poppet would do it. Even more confounding was that she had done it,
and done it without prompting or orders, and that Sparkle had no idea what
Poppet had been trying to achieve. It wasn’t the sort of thing her lovely did.
Now, Puppet was a different matter; but then Puppet couldn’t help herself poor
dear. It was all his fault. Sparkle glanced over her shoulder to where Benny,
who no longer had the calm and collected sheen of a President Kennedy, sat
trussed like a chicken. Besides him, one on each side, sat Max and Rosalina
equally as trussed in the thick red ribbon that Sparkle always carried in case
of such an event. You never did know when you’d need to bind and gag a body and
it had always come in useful in the past. The three figures bumped and jiggled
like marionettes as the car speeded along the bumpy road. Sparkled smiled –
like marionettes, now that gave her a swell idea, not yet, but when they got to
where they were going. No, Sparkle couldn’t understand why Poppet had done what
she’d done; breaking out the sisters and setting them free - and of course
they’d gone straight to where they could do the most harm, trying to undo
everything that Sparkle had set in motion. Well, at least she had the car and
that was something. The driver, whatever he was, had put up quite a fight; but
ultimately… well, Sparkle liked to think that she only had two settings and
she’d applied both in strict order leaving the driver to the flies and the
vultures. It was so good to be away from Tumbletown, Sparkle hated the heat; it
made her feel all woozy. “Woozy like a floozy, a doozy, dozy, doozy.” Sparkle
muttered as she drove through the night and desert not bothering with the
roads, not even trying to avoid the boulders and rocks that disintegrated to
dust before they could even scratch the car. Yes, this was the car; made to
Tesla’s design from blue prints stolen from room 3327 of the New Yorker
Hotel only hours after his death. Fuelled by free energy and protected with the
same force that Tesla had designed to fuel his death ray, it was virtually
indestructible. Strange that it hadn’t stopped the bullets that had been fired
from the Book Depository; perhaps someone had turned it off for a while. No
matter, that was all history now – past history, present history, future
history, dependent on where on the timeline you stood. Not that it was a line,
more a wave moving in all directions at once and able to be surfed like any
wave if only you knew how. Sparkle moved the handle by the steering wheel up a
notch and the car shot forward at almost double the speed. Sparkle began to
sing: “You don't know where you want to go but it only really matters where
you've been. And even though we come through your town leaving always means we
lose more than we win and it’s easy to be lonely when home is calling. And when
I open my eyes I can see my life is falling. Want to say hello with no goodbye
I wish you'd see, I'm hurting so bad touring’s a fad you all come to see us
play at night, song after song, it never seems to get. I old but even though
we're in the spotlight it's such a large price to pay for solid gold.” No she
couldn’t understand why Poppet had done it. Maybe it hadn’t been Poppet at all,
maybe it had been somebody else working through her – one of the seven sisters
maybe, if not them then someone else. No good thinking about it now, it was
done, pointless crying over spilt milkies. Sparkle cranked the car up another
notch and the car shot forward again. Yep, I old but even though we're in the
spotlight it's such a large price to pay for solid gold – and ain’t that the
truth. Sparkle drove faster still; there wasn’t much time if she was to stop
all her good work from being undone - besides she had an appointment to keep.
An appointment with no less a person than Mr. Nikola Tesla…
Tamara was in no hurry to track down the evil triptych of
harpies. After all, it wasn’t as if she didn’t know where they were, and it
would do the world no harm for them to wait for the inevitable collision, but first
she had to build the weapon. Last Wills and Testaments could be tricky things
if you didn’t know what you were looking for, but enough of Tesla’s papers
survived in the archives for her to find that addendum and work out its
meaning. She’d walked straight over to where they had been stored, and, with
just a tiny amount of “friendly persuasion” involving a junior archivist, had
begun digging and poking around amongst the papers, and it didn’t take her long
to realise that four parts of some kind of machine had been buried at separate
sites around the world, and that some assembly would be required once she’d
managed to locate them and dig them up. Some would call it “grave robbing” of
course, but only if they really didn’t have the first clue as to what they were
talking about. She’d ripped out tongues in the past for saying far less, so
luckily, people tended to keep quiet around her these days, especially that
nice young archivist, who’d turned such a vibrant shade of red when she’d
suggested what she’d suggested that she seriously began to worry that a
passenger aircraft might just try and land on them. She lived, after all, that
kind of a life. Now here she was back in the desert, strolling across the sands
towards the first location. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the dust
trail of a distant car as it sped along the highway, but she knew that she had
more than enough time. She looked again. Something about the line of the
mountains seemed more than a little familiar, but she shook her head to dismiss
the vague sense of deja-vu. The device in her hand bleeped with increasing urgency as she
got closer and closer to her goal. You could say what you liked about these
humans, but the gadgets and gizmos that they came up with to make their little
lives that much easier and yet, at the same time, more complicated, were
impressive. She had, of course, considered manifesting herself right at the
coordinates themselves, but had thought better of it. After all, however much
she knew about where the harpies were, the opposite was also true. She was so
busy contemplating the consequences of that particular worrying notion, and how
much the brat could actually know, that she almost stepped right over the rim
of the crater, and had to take a step back to save herself. In front of her,
centred directly on where the vital piece of the device was supposed to be
buried was a five-mile wide crater, the base of which had been transformed into
glass by the heat of a recent deep impact. With a growing sense of worry, she
recognised the pile of rubble still teetering on the brink of almost being
recognisable as once having been a dwelling, standing just beyond the far edge.
The kind of dwelling where two orphans might just grow up absorbing the latent
power of part of a machine buried less than three miles away until the day an
angel fell from the sky. “You bastards!” she bellowed at the sky in the absence
of having anyone else to rail at. They had known exactly what they were doing
when they’d put her in that box. They’d known exactly where she would land.
They’d planned it all along. As if it sensed her loneliness, a ginger cat
strolled over to her from where it had been resting in the shade of a rock and
rubbed itself against her ankles. She tried to shoo it away, but it seemed very
persistent. Tamara had never really trusted cats, but she’d never really been
sure why, She did wonder for just a moment what a cat would be doing all the
way out here in the desert, but the thought drifted away in a sea of other,
bigger thoughts. As the cat showed little sign of leaving her alone, she sighed
and picked it up and put it around her shoulders, before clambering over the
edge of the crater and making the long walk back to the middle. At least, she
thought, she now had someone to talk to, even if they weren’t all that likely
to answer back. The cat, of course, hadn’t fancied making the walk itself when
it could quite easily be carried there by someone else and didn’t complain, and
when they reached the middle, she jumped off Tamara’s shoulders and looked for
a smooth spot to have a nap. Tamara looked at the impact point and muttered
“ground zero…” for no very good reason other than it was the thought that
crossed her mind. She took off her jacket and then stooped down to polish with
it at the glassy surface, then she looked again in disbelief and crouched down,
cupping her hands to create some shade and peered through the glass. “Yes” she
thought “I can definitely see something mechanical…” and she looked around her
to see if she could find something with which to smash through to it. As her
eyes surveyed the horizon, she noticed with a growing sense of dread that three
figures, a tall one and two short ones, had just appeared at the edge of the
crater. One of them seemed to be holding some sort of shovel, and all three of
them were looking straight at her, and, even at this distance, she could tell
that they were not pleased to see her.
Of course
Sparkle knew the truth; well, it was hard to hide the truth from one such as
she – the keeper of the Seeing Eye, the knower of knows, oracle of oracles.
Besides, she was a good guessing guesser; but this time she absolutely knew for
surely sure – Tesla’s remains weren’t in the Tesla Museum in Belgrade gathering
dust at all, in fact his remains weren’t anywhere - Tesla wasn’t dead. Oh, his
body was gone; vaporised on that sunny Tuesday afternoon when Tesla had finally
put all four together, that same afternoon that the bottles had finally been
arranged, that sunny day when the Seven had been drawn back into the world to
begin the final game. She’d had a real struggle getting them into the bottles;
it’d taken all of her power, Puppet’s too. They were pretty much finished and
about to give up when Poppet had found the doll, and… well, if it hadn’t have
been for Poppet and that doll all would definitely have been lost. Somehow the
doll had proved to be the catalyst for the entrapment. Sparkle hadn’t a clear
idea of how it had happened, but she did have an inkling, a smidge of a hunch,
a pretty good guess, and that guess was… sugar. The Seven were attracted to
sugar; it was sugar that kept their colours bright, sugar that kept their
powers strong – and besides they had a sweet tooth. Oh, they were clever;
clever enough to trap that bitch Tamarra into the box, clever enough to send
her tumbling from the sky to land in the exact right spot, but not clever
enough to resist sugar. The doll had somehow conjured sugar into each bottle
and the seven had darted inside one-to-one like wasps around a jam pot, then
Sparkle had – sharp as you like, all whippety-spliff - corked them up plain and
simple. Of course it hadn’t saved Tesla, he was too far caught in the
electrical storm that he’d created by bringing together all four parts of his
Oblivion Machine, caught and then… zapf! He was gone; vaporised, every single
particle of his being erased as if he’d never existed, no physical
residue, no trace, not even a puff of Tesla gas remained. His essence though –
what some might call his soul, others his being, and what Sparkle thought of as
his intellect - had been absorbed into the machine. Not his mind; no, Tesla had
lost his mind completely at the very moment of his vaporisation and that was
what made him so dangerous now. Tesla’s intellect was the power behind the
machine, the real force that drove the cogs, manoeuvred the ratchets, clicked
the clickety magnetic coils into place. Tesla’s intellect – free of the
confines of the man’s mind – was a raw energy, dangerously powerful in its
madness; a power that once unleashed with the next assembly of all four parts
of his great machine would bring about the end of everything. Sparkle breathed
out noisily; they were almost there. Sparkle dropped the car down a notch and,
as it began to slow, Sparkle pondered on what power was contained under the
hood; just how had Tesla known so much? The car was powered by free energy
harnessed from the magnetism surrounding the Earth, protected by a force field
that, if required, could be cranked up to destroy everything it came in contact
with up to a distance of a thousand miles, and – perhaps most impressively of
all – was able to surf through time and space, following the wave that swirled
and arced through the perceived reality of the universe. Sparkle chuckled; it
was the type of machine that turned up in a hokey television series about time
travel. Yes, Tesla had known far too much to be born to some dim-witted priest
and a half-stupid peasant woman in a tiny Serbian village called Smiljan; far
too much - just who and what had he been? Just what was it that resided within
the cogs and coils of his Oblivion Machine, and what would it do when all four
component parts were brought together as a whole once again? Sparkle pulled the
car up dangerously close to the side of the crater, the engine coming to a
complete standstill immediately. Reaching down she picked up the shovel that
lay on the floor besides her and stepped out of the car. “Come on my darlings.”
She whispered to her two sleeping daughters who lay like two broken dolls across
the rear seat opposite where Benny, Max and Rosalina were propped, tied and
trussed like presents waiting to be opened. “Come on my dears, time to get up
my dearies, rise and shine we’ve work to do.” Neither girl moved. “RISE AND
SHINE YOU LITTLE BITCHES AND COME AND HELP YOUR MOTHER.” Sparkle screeched, and
immediately both girls jumped to their feet and rushed to stand by their Mother
at the crater’s crumbling edge. Without any flicker of surprise Sparkle gazed
down at the solitary figure standing on the fused glass surface beneath her.
So, she’d beaten them to it, huh? Well, that was hardly going to be a problem.
Sparkle glanced down at her daughters: “Go drag Max out here you two, and make
sure you mess him up a little when you drag him.”…
In the desert, the weather is always fairly predictable on a
day-to-day basis. So much so, in fact, that a weather forecaster employed to
consider such an area is likely to spend most of her career so very bored out
of her skull that she will have precious little else that she can do other than
keep on popping out a production line’s worth of babies. In the case of the
weather forecasters on television, this will mean endless hours of hard work
and broadcasting will be ignored. Instead, that time will be spent by her
viewers having conversations about “whether she looks pregnant again” instead
of listening to the actual forecasts, which all rather defeats the point of
doing it in the first place. So “Desert Area Weather Forecaster” remains quite
high on the list of “most pointless jobs” even if it isn’t quite as pointless
as the job of someone who goes around making up those lists. Nevertheless, any
weather forecaster whose life was so predictable and dull as the one
responsible for the area immediately centred upon the crater Tamara now found
herself standing in, would no doubt live to regret the fact that they had
picked this very day to pre-record their predictions and head of to the beach
for the day. It’s not as if rain was completely unheard of in such regions, and
it’s not as if the extremes of temperature that could lead to ice forming on
windows overnight didn’t eventually have some dramatic effect on the weather
patterns that spun around the globe bouncing off the less active areas and
causing tornados and hurricanes and heartache, it’s just that the tornados and
hurricanes tended to happen somewhere else. And as for the heartache…? Well, if
that bastard could leave you on your own with five young children, then it was
only to be expected that you might occasionally decide to head off to the beach
with the first blond Adonis who happened to show you a little bit of sympathy
at the coffee machine when you were trying your very best not to show anyone
that you were crying. Of course, all weather forecasters, despite being in the
business of soothsaying themselves, would explain to you quite rationally and
clearly that all of those ancient tales of lightning bolts actually being the
vengeful work of an angry God were dubious at best. All of these things were
perfectly predictable scientifically, and it was only the totally unexpected,
or a shortcoming in the software, that meant that their predictions were
anything other than 100% accurate… Well, to the best of their abilities at
least. If a viewer’s wedding suffered a devastating downpour, or their “once in
a lifetime” party got ruined by a freak tornado, it really wasn’t the fault of
the weather forecasters. The weather would do what it did no matter what they
said, it was just up to them to tell the waiting world what was probably most
likely to happen, as best they could and, fingers crossed, they got it right
most of the time. On this day, however, they couldn’t have got it more wrong.
They would, in all honesty, have done better if they’d just asked the cat how the
day was going to turn out. In fact, if it hadn’t been for that slight but
significant problem of communication, the cat would have been able to tell her
outright that there was a storm coming and that maybe the beach wasn’t the best
idea. One glance at the blond Adonis from an impartial pair of eyes could also
have told her what a bad idea it was of course but, like love, loneliness is
also blind. Meanwhile, as Tamara scrabbled about looking for something with
which to smash through the glass, she was rather taken aback when the cat
sprang into life, shot bolt upright and tore off towards the limited horizon as
fast as its four legs could carry it. As she watched it go, Tamara stopped for
a moment and slapped herself on the forehead. Why hadn’t she just willed
herself a sledgehammer? “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!” she said to herself, deciding
that the sun must be getting to her. Only… She looked around again. It didn’t
appear to be particularly sunny any more. In fact the desert crater had
suddenly begun to resemble a grey bit of quarry in southern England rather than
an impressive geological feature in some far more exotic landscape. Tamara
looked up. A vast black thunderhead had formed in the sky right above her head
and she was just about to think herself into some kind of wet weather gear when
a lightning bolt tore from the sky, knocking her sideways and shattering the
glass surface on which she had just been standing.
Somebody was
standing on him. After all these decades somebody had sought him out and was now
standing six feet above where he lay embedded in the glass dome that had
encased him these seventy years or so. Seventy years. It seemed longer. He
never had been very good at being still; stillness was like a death to him. To
all intents and purpose he was dead, but that didn’t stop him becoming bored.
How many A-Z lists had he made up over the years – twenty thousand?
Artichoke, broad bean, capsicum - yes, it’d been a very long time since he’d
felt the presence of another being – dill, cabbage, endive – of course there’d
been the odd rabbit, the occasional vulture – fennel, green beans, horseradish
– but generally most things simply kept away – iceberg, jalapeno, kale,
lettuce, mushrooms - JUST STOP! Damn it, after all these years he couldn’t help
himself, hard to believe that he had one of the greatest minds on Earth. No,
‘the’ greatest mind on Earth; no need to be modest - particularly as he was
dead. He hadn’t expected to die of course, where he came from death didn’t
really happen, but I suppose that he could be called a victim of his own
success. In creating the death ray he’d created his own demise; well after a
fashion. Ascension, Bermuda, Christmas, Dahlak Kebir, Easter – so here he was;
the ghost in his own machine. If he’d any lips that would have smiled to
himself – Fanny, Gibraltar, Hainan, Ibiza, Java, Key Largo, Lanzarote – so, the
being above: female, humanoid, not human, multiple personalities… no, multiple
persons – Majorca, Nassau, Obstruction, Patience, Qaruh, Rabbit- DAMN THIS
BLOODY HABIT. He’d have to finish now, more than halfway, around ‘M’, and he
had to finish. How the Hell had he developed these compulsions? Too long on his
own, that’s how – Staten, Thousand, Umbrella, Vostok – what did they say? No
man is an island. Well., if he’d ever been a man then he was pretty sure that
he would have been, and anyway, lying here entombed in these cogs and pistons,
encased in molten glass, made him something like an island – didn’t it? Yes, a
glass and metal island in a sea of desert – Walrus, Xiushan, Yakushima,
Zanzibar – there done. Now for the finish: ‘Admiralty takes it back to A. We’ll
save that for another day. A through to Z, so Tesla said, even though he was
quite dead.’ Bloody silly rhyme; another compulsion, just another example of him
slipping just a little too far into humanness all those years ago, yes, too
long as human and too long in this machine. It was time to be out and about
again. Now where was the ‘on’ button? Adonis, Bia, Calypso, Dionysus, Electra.
NO, NOT NOW! Gods or no gods, now wasn’t the time; he needed to concentrate on
pulling in the clouds and then he could hit the on switch or button or whatever
it was - if he could just remember where it was. Suddenly, he heard the screech
of a cat and caught a thought of frustration in the air “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!”
The woman creature above him looked up. A vast black thunderhead had formed in
the sky right above her head. She looked small, fragile, and hardly dressed for
the weather beneath the heavy, leaden canopy, and then, just as suddenly as the
cat, a lightning bolt tore from the sky, knocking her sideways. Was that him?
He didn’t think so. He hadn’t even switched the machine on - and even if he had
he wasn’t sure it would have much effect without the other three parts. Besides,
he still couldn’t remember where the switch was. No, not him, but whoever had
raised that lightning bolt had known just what they were doing. All of this
passed through his circuits in a nanosecond as the lightening bolt shattered
the glass surface on which whoever-she-was had just been standing. With a creak
and a crash the glass dome shattered into a zillion pieces, none bigger than a
grain of sand – earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust and sand to sand;
only this wasn’t a funeral, this was a birth… his birth. Looking up he saw his
midwives smiling down; three of them, a tall crazy-haired female and two
smaller figures, children probably, who held between them what looked like a
huge broken, bloodied, bird. No not a bird; an angel - a broken, bloodied
angel. Tesla would have closed his eyes in pity if he’d had any of either;
instead he smiled and began once more at the beginning – A’abiel, Ballaton,
Charbiel, Donachiel…
Tamara was falling. Again. Sometimes it felt as if she’d always
been falling. Falling forever. Well, she supposed, that’s just what fallen
angels did. The bolt of pure energy had shattered the thick glass beneath her
feet as if it had been an eggshell being tapped with a spoon on a breakfast
table. What her own nuclear powered impact on the same spot just days, or maybe
weeks had failed to do, it had done as easily as that. She noted to herself
that she had started to lose all track of time lately with all the folding back
that had been going on in the cake-mix of her own timeline, but there was not
time to think about that now. Although there might have been, she just couldn’t
be sure. In the split second that she sensed was available to her, although it
could have been a million years in the planning, she’d managed to throw herself
sideways, and yet, she soon realised, not far enough. So, not THAT much forward
planning then… As the cracks in the surface spread out from the impact, she
knew that the inevitable forces of gravity would be pulling at her once more
and she just didn’t have a moment to gather her thoughts and shift before the
structural failure overtook her and the surface was too weak to support her any
more and she would be falling again and, as sure as eggs are eggs, that’s
exactly what happened. The glass fragments that were falling with her glistened
and sparkled and twinkled in the light like a dusting of icing sugar, and they
all fell together in what would have looked like a breathtaking display of
co-ordinated choreography if anyone had been there to see it and it had been
shot in super slo-mo. In reality, of course, subject to the actual laws of the
physical universe, the entire fall had lasted less than two seconds, which was
just long enough for Tamara to consider three things. Firstly, she had to make
sure that she didn’t land on top of that machine; she might be fairly
indestructible, but she really didn’t need to be out of the game even for a
second at the moment. Secondly, she decided that she really didn’t care all
that much for those universal laws and, and as she was a dyed-in-the-wool
lawbreaker, she decided to cheat a little and throw a few special ingredients
of her own into the mix. Finally she just had time to wonder why so many
“domestic” thoughts of breakfasts and baking were suddenly so much in her
thoughts. She was just smiling to herself about the inbuilt irony in the title
of that book about becoming a “domestic goddess” when the ground hit her right
in the spine, and she suddenly understood how an egg might feel as it hit the
surface of the frying pan. After gritting her teeth and sucking in some air to
stifle the grunt of pain, she shook her head and opened her eyes. What she saw
made her realise that she was not in the frying pan at all. She’d landed
slap-bang in the middle of the fire. Far above her head, standing at the edge
of the hole in the shattered glass dome, and somehow managing to display the
horrific air of three cats who had not only found the cream but had also licked
it all up and wanted you to know that they knew here all the rest of it was,
were those wretched harpies. The triumph of the victory that they felt that
they had achieved was not in any way tempered by any intention to be
magnanimous to their defeated enemy. Tamara’s eyes were watering, perhaps from
the pain or perhaps from the frustration at them winning their moment of
victory, however small that it might ultimately turn out to be. She blinked
away a few fragments of glass and looked again. Was that Max with them? Poor,
broken Max… What had they done to him? Tamara smiled ruefully. Even a domestic
goddess couldn’t have “fixed” Max. She had once considered that of all the
beings in all the universes, she might have tried living a “normal” life with
Max. But she knew it would never have worked. There really wouldn’t have been
room for two superior beings to exist side-by-side under one roof. They’d
probably have been flinging realities at each other, and ducking as they
smashed against the walls like dinner plates, before they’d even made it over
the threshold. She smiled again. At least, even in her doom-laden imagination,
they’d made it through the honeymoon intact. She looked up once more and
immediately regretted her momentary distraction as the vast lifeless-looking
bulk of Max was plummeting down towards her from where those three ghastly
girls had pushed him over the edge like he was just a sack of garbage that
needed throwing away.
Frankie
stared at the Seven as they hung suspended, ten feet or so, above the floor of
the chamber. They were beautiful. So beautiful that Frankie couldn’t tear his
eyes away from their shimmering glory. He smiled; he didn’t know why, it just
seemed the right thing to do, the only thing to do. “Smile though your heart is
breaking, smile even though it’s aching.” The thought sprang into his mind from
nowhere and then Frankie felt a terrific pain in his chest, “Well not exactly
terrific, but certainly aching… I think my heart IS breaking.” He whispered as
he fell to his knees, both arms wrapped tightly around his jacketed chest. Just
why had he worn this tie today? It was suffocating him. “Please stop, please
stop,” he whispered once more, looking up to the seven who continued to shimmer
above him. “Please stop, I’ll do anything if you only stop.” And then it did.
The pain simply left him and was gone like it had never been there. Frankie
looked around him. He was still lost, absolutely lost but the pattern that had
seemed to come to him almost like the words of a well-remembered and well-loved
song, seemed not to matter at all now. He scanned the chamber; the others
seemed to be caught up in this too. Lee stood rigid, clutching at his head,
white as chalk and as still as a statue, though no cliché could adequately
describe the obvious and absolute agony that lay behind his eyes. Jeremy and Jemima
writhed on the floor clutching at their abdomens – a gentle whimper springing
from Jemima’s mouth, an angry snarl and a scream from Jeremy’s. Emma simply sat
on the floor surrounded by broken glass, her whole body a tremble, her head
shaking backwards and forwards so hard that surely her neck would snap at any
moment. Flavia, on the other hand, didn’t move a muscle. She had made herself
into a tiny ball from which no sound escaped. For all Frankie knew she was
already dead; only the beads of sweat on her forehead giving the lie to her
apparent demise. Trader was running at the walls like a loon, smashing himself
against their surfaces, bouncing off, and then rushing once more only to bounce
off again and again. The Artist stood silently moving his head from side to
side as a river of drool puddle at his lilac booted feet, wrapped up in his own
private agony as they all were, each enduring their own excruciatingly painful
version of pure physical hell. “Do you want me to make it stop?” a voice purred
in Frankie’s head. “Do you want me to make it stop for all of them?” “Yes.”
Frankie replied, a single-word answer was all he could manage. “And in return
you’ll give me fish?” the voice purred on, “And Milk?” “Yes.” Frankie responded
once again. “Very well.” The soft gentle voice faded away, and one by one the
players in this, small but horrible, vision of hell stopped their clutching and
writhing and screaming and shaking and sweating and smashing and drooling and
became silent and calm; each turning to watch the aurora borealis that was the
dance of the Seven Sisters high above their heads. Only Jeremy continued to
writhe and scream: “I won’t give in. I will not give in.” He shouted, spittle
flying from his mouth. “I won’t let you take her. You’ll never own her. She’s
my sister and I shall protect her.” Jeremy writhed and leapt
ten, twelve, feet into the air, each time landing on the concrete floor with a
sickening thump. Over and over again, screaming and writhing until – with a
leap that must have been almost twenty feet – he fell to the floor and was
silent. Breaking out of his trance Lee rushed to the fallen boy who lay - a
mess of broken bone and twisted flesh - upon the concrete. Shards of broken
bottles pierced his flesh in a hundred places at least; the neck of one bottle,
embedded deep in his throat, oozed blood where once wine had poured out cheap
and transient happiness. Putting his fingers to Jeremy’s still warm neck, he
looked at the others - tight-circled around him - and solemnly declared: “He’s
dead.” And with these two most final and dreadful words, the words that every
man must at last come to understand and embrace, the meowing and the Seven’s
screaming began like a requiem to mourn his passing…
Jeremy was confused. He really wasn’t sure what it was that he
had done and yet somehow he had managed to get himself killed by what was,
essentially, an imaginary construct. He thought back over the past few moments,
days, a lifetime, a second, he couldn’t tell which of them it had been. Not any
more. Time had lost all meaning. But then, pretty much everything had lost all
meaning too. The voices had simply made no sense at all, but everyone seemed to
be taking them very seriously, giving them an importance that they truly did
not deserve. Had it not been for Jemima going along with them, he might have
thought that it was because they were all so much older than he was (or would
ever be) and their brains were locked, their imaginations fused into just
seeing what they were supposed to see. “What you see is what you get.” Well,
whoever had composed that little bit of nonsense obviously hadn’t had the most
outward-looking mind in history, had they? The ability to look beyond what was
there, to see the possibilities that were on offer, surely that was what it was
all about, instead of letting your thinking get set solid, your imagination go
rigid, and your mind be set in concrete, accepting what it saw and doing what
it was told…? Once he had realised this, he grasped what it was that Jemima was
up to. She hadn’t been taken in at all. Like a lot of people her age, she’d
just gone along with it because it was what the adults were doing. She
definitely hadn’t been taken in any more than he had. These others, the
so-called “superior” intellects were busily plotting the route to their own
destruction, and Jeremy and his sister were still free if only the opportunity
presented itself. He thought about it for just a second and realised what was
needed of him. He had been standing next to his sister in what was just a room
full of junk, and the clouds had come. That’s all they were, just a bunch of
clouds. Jemima was still young enough to think that they were “pretty” as if
they were bubbles that had been blown into the evening air, or some butterflies
in a field of flowers on a summer’s day, but that was fine. She was just a
little girl, and was allowed to see the world like a little girl would. But he
was supposed to be the grown-up now, he was supposed to have stopped looking at
things in such a childish way, and he was supposed to look after his little
sister because there was no-one else to. That, of course, made him angry, but
so did a bunch of adults looking at some clouds and giving them an importance
that they didn’t really merit. He tried shouting out “They’re just clouds!” but
they weren’t listening. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t the imaginary constructs
of the clouds that had destroyed him at all, but simply the belief that they
represented something. Perhaps the old, solid, rigid, static, concrete minds that
were allowing the clouds to control them didn’t like to have their new-found
beliefs questioned. Perhaps that was where the power came from…? Well, he knew
that he had to resist. He knew that he had to get Jemima away from there. She
was so young, so vulnerable… She’d hate him for leaving her, but one day she
might come to understand that he really hadn’t had much choice She had needed
him to act as a distraction, and so he had done precisely that and provided
one. How it had got him killed was still confusing him, and, as his life force
ebbed away, he realised two things. The first was that you should never
underestimate the power of other people’s beliefs, and the second was that
Jemima was nowhere to be seen. The adults were surrounding him now. None of
them had yet noticed that she’d gone and as he, with a mighty final effort of
will, managed to force the slightest of smiles, his mind formed a thought that
his voice struggled to whisper: “They’re just clouds…”
Tesla was
confused. One moment he’d been composing A-Z’s safely beneath the molten glass
of his crater prison, the next he was being lifted up and out of the ground
that had been his home for so long. He’d thought that the vessel that he was in
was bigger, more magnificent, but now he was in the trunk of the car he
realised that it wasn’t much bigger that a loaf of sliced white. Perhaps all
those years of nothingness had magnified his own grandeur; perhaps he’d shrunk
with age – one thing was for sure though, at least this part of his Oblivion Machine
was eminently portable. Now that he came to think about it weren’t the other
three parts about the same size… didn’t they fit together to make a perfect
cube, a cube with three white faces and three black... and didn’t each piece
contain a quarter portion of his intelligence, his intellect? Perhaps that was
why he didn’t feel himself - Angina, Bulimia, Cancer, Diabetes, Emphysema,
Fibrochondrogenisis, Gonorrhoea – yes, that could be it; not only wasn’t even
half the man he used to be, he was a quarter. Well at least he hadn’t been hung
and drawn in the process – had he? No, he was sure it had been Heart failure,
Idaho Syndrome, Jejunal Atresia, Kennedy Disease – Kennedy, now there was a man
to admire, a man who knew how to reach for the stars. The American authorities
had stolen his life’s work, constructed his machines, tried to be Gods, but
when Kennedy had come along he’d almost forgiven them – so many of Tesla’s own
ideas and inventions had been used to get a man to the moon… yes, he’d almost
forgiven them. But then they’d killed Kennedy and he’d changed his mind –
dispersed though it was. The girl and that angel thing, had they left them
behind? Yes, of course they had, he remembered now. They’d pushed them into the
hole in the crater and then sealed back the glass using… well, using him
really. Just how did they know how to make the box work, and how had they
harnessed the power of his mind to make it happen, and where were they going in
this car that he seemed to recognise so well? Listeria, Malaria, Nonne Millroy
Disease, OCD, Pallpilitis, Q Fever, Rabies, Scabies, Tourettes – Kibaszott szar
isten! What was that? It sounded like a flock of banshees - Uremia, Valinemia,
Xanthi Urolithiasis, Yellow Fever, Zygomycosis…
“Wake up you… you…!” Tamara’s fists pummelled pointlessly
against the large bulk of Max’s body as it lay on top of her pinning her to the
ground. She’d already found out that shift-ing was no longer an option once the
glass (or whatever substance it really was) had closed above their heads and
she was starting to get the rather nagging suspicion that the air wasn’t
unlimited either. Still, when you’re pinned to the ground by a living,
breathing and fairly immovable object, it does give you a lot of time to think
and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been in this situation before, so, over the
years, she had got pretty adept at letting her mind roam free whilst the more
physical interactions kept her body amused or, at least, distracted. She
started to compose a mental “to do” list which was an old habit she’d picked up
from a suggestion that she had received from a therapist with whom she’d once
spent some time. It might very well have been the only good idea that
particular therapist had ever demonstrated, but she’d been pretty enough for a
while and so Tamara had tolerated her strange ways and her constant suggestions
about how she might “improve herself” for far longer than she otherwise might
have done until she tired of her. Tamara gnawed momentarily on her lower lip.
There really were so many things in her past that she could have handled
better. Take Max, for example. All of that flirting and circling around each
other and getting closer and then running away for all those centuries, and
here they were in just about as close proximity as it was possible to get and
suddenly the entire game all seemed rather pointless. Now he was just another
big lug pinning her down and preventing her from doing what she needed to be
doing. “Ah well…” she thought, “At least he’s not snoring…” Luckily, time was forever
getting manipulated and overwritten these days. So much so, in fact, that she
was never completely sure what it was she was supposed to be feeling guilty
about, and if she did feel even the slightest bit guilty, she was never
completely sure that the thing about which she was feeling the guilt had even
happened in the current framework. “Bloody therapists!” she muttered to nobody
in particular and the universes in general. This caused Max to murmur slightly
which could only be a good sign. She stared at his unconscious face for a
moment and began to think about their strange history. Then she stopped herself
and shook her head and tried to focus. There would be plenty of time to rake
over those particular embers later, once they’d got out of this mess,
especially now that the fates seemed to have flung them together and made them
into a “team” for however long that might last. She looked around in what she
could see of the chamber to see if anything looked useful, and it all looked
fairly promising from her perspective, despite not being able to actually do
anything about it. She saw a spanner lying on the floor where some long
forgotten technician had dropped it and willed it to her, but it wouldn’t come.
“There must be some kind of dampening field…” she mused, feeling rather annoyed
that someone had felt the need to play such an unfair trick on them and
manipulate their entire history enough to make them both walk – or plummet –
right into it. Nevertheless, that massive engine had a rather chunky and “retro”
look to it, that could only be useful if they needed something big and chunky
to smash their way out of there. She wasn’t sure whether she could count on
Max’s wings any more. He had, after all, taken quite a beating from that triad
of harpies, and there may not be enough time for him to heal properly,
especially in this environment. “Hmmm…” so far as her list was going, it was
still pretty short, but she persevered and began to wonder how easily it might
be to climb up the device and, if she could just stand on Max’s shoulders,
whether she’d be able to get enough of a purchase to batter her way out of this
pit… “Well, it might work…” she thought to herself as she stared at the glass
ceiling. Through it, she could just make out the shape of a small ginger cat
sitting down and watching her. “I don’t suppose you’d run and get us some help,
would you, kitty…?” she said, mostly because she couldn’t think of anything
else to say, and immediately recalled that they didn’t make TV shows about cats
coming to the rescue for a reason. Dogs, yes… even Kangaroos at a pinch… but
never cats. She sighed. “Bored now!” she bellowed which was only because it was
the truth after a thousand lifetimes of pretty much being able to do what she
wanted when she wanted. Still, somewhere out there, one of the universes must
have been listening, because all of a sudden, Max grunted and rolled off her
and onto his back, wincing as his broken wings hit the hard rock. Tamara smiled
as she felt the feeling returning to her legs and suddenly felt as if, like
her, things were looking up.
The experiment continues...?
Link to Part Nine: http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/blog-tag-1-part-9.html
