BLOG TAG (1) - Part 9

Continued from Part Eight http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/blog-tag-1-part-8.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:-

Frankie should have gone when Max had told him to get his coat, but somehow he’d become distracted and his coat had become a cat and the cat needed feeding and then suddenly Max was gone; leaving Frankie behind to... to do what? Frankie wasn’t quite sure. It seemed to be a whole world of not being sure, nor knowing what to do, at the moment. Strange really; Frankie had pretty much always known what to do – that’s why he was such a great crooner. You got out there, you sang them a song, you listened to the applause. Now, he didn’t even know what song to sing. Now, he wasn’t even sure where out there was… and he couldn’t hear any applause, a meow maybe, but no applause. So, what now? Did the cat or cats need feeding again? Was there more than one? Just how many cats were there? Where had they come from? And what were those strange collars they wore? Coat and cat, well there was only a letter between them; and what with the chaos the Seven had caused, Trader, The Artist, the others, and Jeremy’s death… well, sometimes he felt that he was losing the plot. If God reversed was Dog, then what of Cat? Frankie shook his head repeatedly – what was he thinking now? He’d been having these disjointed thoughts ever since the Seven Sisters, maybe it was their song that had done it – or the light that seemed to be what they were formed from. Just what had Tango done to the Sisters, they certainly didn’t seem to be around now? Tango? Was that the cat’s name? The ginger cat that asked for fish and milk and seemed to be able to talk; at least Frankie had heard the words in his mind. It was something to do with those collars he was sure of it. Frankie looked around the room. He seemed to be doing that a lot recently. He need to get out of this place, take a break, up and go, get out. After all, none of this was his responsibility really, it was all Max’s doing; and Frankie wasn’t exactly a Team Player, no indeed, he was more of a solo act, always had been. Yes, he’d leave Trader and Lee, The Artist, and the rest, to sort this mess out for themselves… it really had very little do-be-do-be-do with him. Time to put an egg in his shoe and beat it – egg whisk time baby. Frankie felt his spirit’s lift as a cloud seemed to pass from in front of the sun. He’d take a holiday, a long one; Bermuda or somewhere, the Grenadines, somewhere hot and sunny where he could wear ridiculously loud shirts and cool straw hats. A holiday sounded good, a holiday sounded great. Mexico even; yes Mexico – tacos and chilli and burritos and that piss thin Mexican beer; he could drink that beer all night chasing each one down with a shot of Tequila with plenty of salt and lemon. Mexico then… let’s go! Frankie was just about to step into the slip when he felt something at his feet weaving in and out and around his legs. Frankie looked down. “Going somewhere?” The cat who might be called Tango purred. “Not exactly, I was just thinking that maybe a little break would be nice.” Frankie replied. “Hmmm… not Bermuda then? Not the Grenadines? Definitely not Mexico; after all, who needs tacos and chilli and burritos and that piss thin Mexican beer that you could drink all night, chasing each one down with a shot of Tequila and plenty salt and lemon? No, you aren’t going anywhere at all are you?” And then Frankie realised that he wasn’t; he didn’t even want to think about going anywhere, he didn’t need to – all he wanted to do was get this lovely kitty some fish or whatever his heart desired. Why on Earth had he even considered leaving? “Now about this Dog God thing.” Tango continued, “It’s just a silly coincidence; you realise of course that dogs are the exact opposite of God. Man’s best friend? More like man’s worst disease – they’ve inveigled themselves into man’s sensibilities until they are in control. Silly mankind, to be controlled by creatures that are ruled by instinct with no free will; they’re all being controlled too you know and one day their controller, who is one of the least amicable beings at large in the universe, will decide to press the button and turn them against you and mankind had better look out. Us cats, on the other hand, always and only have the universe’s best interests at heart, no self-interest in the mix at all; not like those dogs – always looking for a bone, a stick, or a pat on the head. Now fetch me some minced chicken and a little cream will you? I’m rather peckish and I need to make a journey. I don’t see why I should sort out this silly mess you’ve all been making of things but someone has to do it, and seeing as you angels, supreme beings, children, and goodness only knows what other creatures have completely no idea what to do next, I think a little treat before I leave is in order. Now while you get me my food I think I’ll take a little nap. Go on, off you run.” And as Tango, his Schrodinger collar beginning to pulse with a soft blue light, curled up in a warm corner and prepared to go to sleep that’s just what Frankie did…

Frankie was still running fourteen hours later. He ran and wherever he ran to, there they were. The green-eyed monsters. The more that they sensed that he wanted to get away from them, the more they wanted to be near him, so that, as he fell exhausted into the sand he realised, finally, that he could never escape them. They were everywhere and there was nowhere that he could run to. He bounced between them all like a silver ball in a pinball machine and they batted him around as if he was some kind of interesting toy to be passed on down the line. They’d told him to run, so he ran. The only problem was that he couldn’t run away, and the further he ran, the more his mind screamed at him about cream and chicken and fish, and the more he tried to block it out, the louder it screamed. He would be running in one direction and his personal reality would warp and he would find that he was running back in the opposite direction, back towards that wretched creature and its simple demands. He tried reasoning with it, he tried pleading with it, he tried to persuade it that if this food was so vital perhaps it might like to try getting it for itself, all to no avail. Eventually, his mind and spirit completely shattered, he had found himself in the doorway of a little corner shop, and, with nowhere else to go, had pushed it open. Somewhere inside the shop, a tiny bell had tinkled and Frankie had looked about him. This was the kind of place that he hadn’t seen in years. From floor to ceiling, the shelves were stacked with a jumbled assortment of just about grocery product that you could ever really need and little stars of fluorescent cardboard were tacked to the edges of the shelves to indicate the various prices of the products on display. At the back of the shop, almost camouflaged by the sheer bulk of stuff was a counter and a till and, standing behind that in a loud outfit that meant that he too could barely be made out amid the various packaging styles that were all screaming for attention was a short, bespectacled and rather plump gentleman in a patterned hat and waistcoat. Frankie had just stood there, trying to take it all in. As he looked he noticed, curled up at the end of the counter was another sleeping moggie. At least it had looked as if it was sleeping. Frankie, who never had a particularly good sense of trust even at the best of times, hadn’t been entirely sure. “You’ll have come for the cat food, yes…?” a voice said, and Frankie nodded dumbly, taking a step forward and… reality shifted and he had fallen onto the sand again. He’d shaken his head and the shop had returned around him and those pleasant eyes had looked through the streaked glass of their  spectacles and the voice was asking him whether he wanted a carrier bag to put the food in… The cat at the end of the counter was awake by that time, stretching and cleaning one of its paws. It had frozen for a moment and looked Frankie straight in the eyes. If Frankie hadn’t known better he could have sworn the eyes glowed with a bright green light just for a split second. Then he was in the desert again and, feeling dizzy, he slipped and fell and found himself looking straight into the face of Tamara, albeit a face distorted by a thick sheet of melted glass. She’d been waving her arms and trying to attract his attention. Then he was back in the shop, and the shopkeeper was picking him up off the floor and fussing over him and asking him what was wrong. He shook his head again and accepted the bag from the shopkeeper. The cat, it seemed, had finished its latest cleaning routine and started to curl itself around Frankie’s legs and he was too bewildered and exhausted to shoo it away. Reality warped once again, and once again Frankie found himself in the desert, with just the echo of a distant voice shouting after him that he had but a saucer in the bag for him because he thought he might need it. “Don’t worry” Frankie muttered under his breath “I’m sure I’ll be back in a moment…” only this time, he was surprised to find, he seemed to have arrived properly. The desert seemed solid and permanent and he was most definitely there. He looked down and was equally surprised to discover that the cat had come along for the journey, almost as if reality had shifted around the cat itself, but that was clearly an absurd notion. He looked again and could see Tamara who wasn’t waving this time but instead had just fixed him with a hard stare that seemed to be wondering just what the hell did he think he was up to. He looked at her again, shrugged, and decided that he really ought to feed the cat, and so he reached into the bag and, ignoring the strange array of tools that seemed to have been slipped into it, pulled out a saucer and a pot of cream and set about getting his priorities right.

Sparkle drove the limo, slipping it in and out of the ebb and flow of time as she searched for the second part of Tesla’s machine. Of course she had a rough idea where it was, but she had to get the timing right – too early and she might get caught up in the blast, too late… and she’d be too late. It didn’t help that this car was tricky to drive; the controls far too sensitive for Sparkle. Sparkle was more of a thrust and grab kind’a girl and this car was all slip and shimmy. She’d managed to get the geographical coordinate thing pretty lickety-spittedly, but the time travel thing was just a tiddly-widdly bit trickier. At first she’d been missing places by dozens of years and it was pretty hard to guess what time you were in because in general the landscape didn’t change much. Once they’d driven past a troop of US cavalrymen who had given chase for a few minutes before being headed off by a band of Indians at the pass, and another time an old Ford truck - covered in dust and piled high with chairs, beds, and ploughs, the thin-faced children who rode on the bed of the truck pointing in amazement as they whizzed past - flickered into sight for a few moments. In general though she was pretty much driving blind; why hadn’t they put some sort of counter on the dash? Back in the trunk Tesla caught this thought and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t there. He’d certainly designed one, not for this car, but for that other car all those years ago, the one that now lay gathering dust somewhere in a Chicago warehouse along with so many of his other inventions. Sparkle cranked the car up a notch. Back in the trunk Tesla could hear the thrum of the engine. There was no other engine in the world just like this one, this was the first; just how many others they’d built since he had no idea, but the engine in this car was the same one that used to sit in his car; the same car that now lay gathering dust in that old Chicago warehouse; the car that had housed the very first engine able to generate its own power using Free Energy, a triumph of engineering and physics… a perpetual motion machine. Tesla remembered the experiment that Albert Michelson had performed back in 1889. They (the great and the good of the scientific community) were trying to detect the aether, the great Free Energy power source that surrounded the earth. Of course the Michelson Morley experiment, as it became so well known, had failed. Yes, of course it had, they’d kept him away, but if he’d have been there he’d have shown them how to do it. In fact he didn’t need an experiment – he would have shown them the aether in action. But they weren’t interested. So, it wasn’t until that fool Einstein said that there must be an aether, re-igniting quantum thinking with that single statement, that anybody began to listen. All that special relativity nonsense; how gullible the scientific world was; how desperate to clutch at the latest straw of fashion. Of course Tesla had proclaimed that he could provide the world with free energy years before, and would have done if it hadn’t have been for Mr JP blasted Morgan… and Einstein took all the glory but achieved so little. And then there was Keely - now Keely was quite another matter. Keely had it more-or-less right all along but he was such an undisciplined fool. If only he’d have followed a few sound scientific principles, not been so much the showman - maybe then somebody might have listened to his ravings. Damn that woolly thinking Einstein, with his theatrical hair and penchant for movie stars. It was Einstein who paved the way for that bloody fool Oppenheimer… had he got all this in the right order? His mind really wasn’t what it was. Not that it mattered, the order of things was easily changed, history easily rewritten. Oppenheimer with his pathetic attempts to harness an energy that should never have been harnessed really didn’t matter at all, and as for his ‘A’ bombs… weapons of mass destruction? Mere toys, playthings, insignificant nothings when compared to the force of the aether… the aether was the underlying force holding the universe together. The aether with its many, many, secrets, with the greatest secret of all: the bomb deep within that could destroy everything – the earth, the solar system, the universe – not just a couple of Japanese cities. No, not simply gravity control and free energy, but a bomb. Tesla had harnessed it in his death ray, but un-harnessed it was the bomb to end all bombs. KABOOM! Yes, ultimately the ultimate secret of the universe must rule – mustn’t it? Was he mad? Just another mad scientist cackling in his castle? Well maybe, but despite everything he dreamt of, everything he’d achieved, they always took it back to bloody Oppenheimer and his silly bomb. Had they no imagination at all these people? Probably not. After all, of all the places the could have chosen to conceal the second part of his greatest invention, the invention that would allow them to harness the aether - control gravity, ride through time, destroy everything if they were so careless - where do they choose to hide it?  The Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, that’s where. 3,200 square miles of nothing including that desolate Godforsaken Jornada del Muerto Valley, how he hated that place. Yes, those fools hide the biggest secret of all, or at least part of it, on the White Sands Missile Range; the place where they were still testing their toys, a place that could be blown to high heaven with even the slightest mistake. How clever they weren’t – and now here he was, riding in the trunk of this car with God knows who, to save part of himself before they could destroy his work with their confounded stupidity and incompetence. AND they’d hidden it below the Trinity pyramid! The ugliest monument to the ugliest event in the world - and time was running out it seemed… KABOOM! 

Somewhere in the desert, a flower bloomed. Like many of its kind it knew little of how or why it came to be there, it merely knew that it was. Against all the odds, it had pointed itself towards the big bright ball in the sky and tried as hard as it could to reach it. It had sprouted up from a tiny seed that had passed through the digestive tract of a passing bird and landed in a spot just shaded by a rock which provided just enough condensation during the cold nights to give it enough water to germinate it and allow it to grow and so, for a brief moment, a splash of colour could be seen amongst the great expanse of the otherwise brown ordinariness of miles and miles of an almost empty landscape. As lives went, the flower didn’t have a long or distinguished one, and it didn’t change the world like one of its illustrious forebears one did, it merely pointed itself towards the light and tried its best to attract a passing insect to pollinate itself and pass on its genetics to another generation that it would never live to see. During the day, the sun burned very hot and did its very best to bake and dessicate this small natural wonder, but it remained resolute and resilient and kept on trying and kept on living right until the day when it was squashed flat by the tyre of a passing army jeep on its way towards “ground zero” and the great big human secret test. Even after that, the plucky little flower somehow managed to cling on and was still trying to pull itself upright when another man-made flower bloomed briefly in the desert and fried it and just about every other piece of organic matter in the immediate area to a crisp. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the world is really trying even harder to tell you something about your right to survive. The General whose Jeep had flattened the little flower, never actually saw it, of course, and he wouldn’t have really cared about it all that much if he had. The General wasn’t the kind to appreciate flowers, even though one of his junior officers had displayed a worrying tendency to attach them to the lapels of his dress uniform at military functions, but he would have missed very much the tobacco plants that worked so very hard to provide him with his trademark huge cigars which were always clamped between his teeth but which were seldom actually lit. After his own flower bloomed so briefly and so brightly in the morning desert sun, the General did decide to light his cigar and declare humankind’s greatest failure as a glorious success. They had failed, of course, to create the power source that the “Top Brass” had always claimed that they had wanted to, but the General didn’t mind that. After all, what they now had was the very latest in Ultimate Weapons, and nobody else had one of those yet, and so his country was about to become “Top Nation” for as long as it could keep a secret. This, the General estimated, was for about three minutes after his flower bloomed, which gave him just long enough for a decent, self-satisfied smoke. He knew, of course, that it wasn’t “his” flower at all, just as he also knew that the signals that were already flying through the airwaves to his opposite numbers on the other side would still mean that “they” would need some time to catch up and create their own “Ultimate Weapon”, and so, for the moment he knew that he was Top Dog, and, to mix his metaphors as much as he misunderstood the word “ultimate”, he was most definitely in the driving seat. He smiled and appreciatively sucked the smoke from his cigar into his lungs alongside the floating radioactive particles that would eventually kill him at forty two, far away from any battlefield, and, without any trace of irony, ordered his driver to drive towards the still boiling crater. Once they had got as close as they dared, he grabbed his field glasses and stared through them towards the centre of where the explosion had occurred, just to satisfy himself that the box that he had placed beneath the device the night before had been totally obliterated. He was immensely pleased when he saw that there was nothing to see, and let out a howl of joy before he composed himself and instructed his driver to return them back to headquarters. The General, for all his medals and stars was no scientist, and it never occurred to him that a blast will travel in all directions including straight downwards where, undisturbed for more than half a century, the second box would nestle almost completely unharmed, and from where, one day, like a stubborn seed, it would emerge once more into the daylight.

Frankie looked at the ground beneath his feet; it looked solid enough for a desert. How he hated the desert, the way the dust clung to his shoes, the feel of the sand in his hair. He shook his head; hadn’t Tamara been here a moment ago, and where was that shopkeeper? He was still confused; would it never stop? It seemed that nothing was constant any more - had it ever been? Maybe not, but things were definitely getting worse; in the words of that dreadful old standard; “Fings ain’t wot they used t’be” Frankie jumped. At his feet the shopkeeper’s cat weaved between his immaculately suited legs leaving behind ginger hairs where its fur touched the expensive material. Did cats have fur Frankie wondered? This cat had strange eyes, they seemed to flash green - or was it just the light reflected in them from the clouds above? The saucer was empty again. Reaching down Frankie poured some more of the cream into the ceramic dish. Willow pattern wasn’t his favourite design and the saucer was a little chipped around the rim, but the cat didn’t seem to mind as he greedily lapped at the surface of the thick cream. So, what else was in the bag? Frankie’s head was suddenly full of an image of Mary Poppins reaching deep into her carpet bag and drawing out an impossible array of objects - standard lamps, aspidistras, books… was there a parrot? No, that had been on the end of her umbrella.  A spoonful of sugar? Well, it did help the medicine go down and Frankie could do with some medicine of one sort of another, he felt terrible. It was probably the confusion, Frankie hated confusion - he’d once put on two socks that didn’t exactly match, the fish motif on one was blue and on the other green, he’d felt disorientated for days. Even the knowledge that he had another pair just like it hadn’t helped. Frankie shook his head vigorously; maybe he could shake the confusion away. He glanced at the bag, perhaps it contained something that might help. Reaching into the bag Frankie’s hopes were dashed as he realised that this was just an ordinary plain white plastic carrier bag, nothing special, just a disposable bag the same as the thousands that littered the highway, got caught up in trees, washed up on shores, were wafted high above apartment blocks all over the world. Just where would the world be without carrier bags? Paper sacks, that’s where the world would be and in all honesty Frankie found that a far more palatable alternative. Paper sacks were not only sturdier, they were recyclable - and they had that feel of a past and a better age about them, an age where Norman Rockwell bag-packers carefully packed un-shrink-wrapped zucchinis for polka-dot frocked housewives with demi-waved hair in convenience stores, before carrying the paper sacks out to the smiling housewives’ shiny pink convertibles. Frankie sighed; he was such a nostalgic old fool. Reaching into the plain - and quite frankly tacky - carrier bag, Frankie began to remove the bag’s contents. There seemed to be an odd assortment of tools and instruments inside the bag – a small hammer that began to buzz when he picked it up and stopped immediately when he put it down, an electric can opener that was much too large for the average size can, a child’s bow complete with a rubber-sucker tipped arrow, a pocket watch, two black cubes that seemed to be made of glass and were a little bigger than a pair of dice, three slim metallic rods which shimmered with the colours of the rainbow and were etched at intervals along their lengths and finally, a needle. Frankie laid the tools in a neat line on the dusty concrete at his even dustier feet, the bleak monument towering above him at more than twice his height. Odd – he didn’t feel as confused any more, maybe there was something amongst the contents of the bag that had helped after all. Frankie looked skywards… that hideous monument - a rough, and far too thin, pyramid pointing to the clouds above where the odd green light still flashed in the clouds. What was that? Some sort of electrical storm? “They’re just clouds…” Frankie whispered, but somehow he knew that they weren’t. Reaching down he purposefully picked up the plastic bow and arrow, pointed it at the clouds, drew back the bow and let the arrow fly up into the sky. “No confusion here boss,” he murmured as he realised he knew exactly what he was doing, even if he didn’t know why he was doing it. Up and up it went, gaining speed and momentum as it rose, shimmering with the green light that rushed from the clouds to meet it like lightening attracted to the spike of a stupidly raised umbrella. Up, and up, and up, and up, until - disappearing into the clouds with a flash of green – it vanished and… nothing. Frankie waited - still nothing. He waited some more - nothing. Frankie was disappointed; he’d expected something a little more interesting to happen – an explosion perhaps, maybe a cosmic light show of some sort. But nothing, not a flicker, not a rumble, not even a pop. They were just clouds after all. Frankie felt the cat around his legs once more. Looking down he met the gaze of his feline travelling companion who was staring up at him intently. The cat’s eyes blazed with green fire, flashing and sparking, as if a tiny furnace had suddenly fired-up inside its head and a small voice from above asked; “Can you help me down from here?” Looking up Frankie was surprised to see a boy perched on top of the monument, clinging to the point of the pyramid with one hand and clutching a rubber-tipped arrow in the other. “Yes, they were only clouds… well, at least they are now.” And then Jeremy jumped, letting go of the arrow as he did so…

Tamara, despite the fact that she was no longer flat on her back, was still looking up, and, even if things themselves seemed to have thought about looking up before instead deciding to scuttle off and find a dark corner to weep quietly in, she tried to remain optimistic. After all Frankie was up there, building some kind of contraption which looked as if it might just get her out of this hole which, whilst she hadn’t exactly dug it for herself, had been rather of her own making. Kind of. Higher powers might be the ones guiding her hand (and if they were, then her hand would be pointing at them soon enough and giving them a damn good ticking off) but it had been her body that had been the one that caused the explosion that had exposed this quarter of the last resting place of the man who had either been destined to save humanity or destroy it, depending upon point of view and political persuasion. As she looked up, she noticed her reflection and, despite the distortions of the melted not-glass and the unflattering angle, she decided that the body itself, despite all it had been through, still was passable enough to be filed under “not bad” and she decided that it was probably a “keeper” for at least as long as this body shape remained fashionable. Not that she could do all that much about it if it wasn’t under the present circumstances. What was it about the strange environment of this chamber that so dampened her abilities? Was it the stones around them? Or the way that the not-glass seal distorted the sunlight that caused this effect? Was it that unidentifiable metal formed into a mighty machine that somehow was sucking away all of their energy? Probably. Was it the air? She thought not, even though she was aware that the air was rapidly diminishing. Normally, she wouldn’t have noticed, but these strange human sensations of weakness and frailty were making her acutely aware of her own mortality which, she suspected, probably came with the territory. Still, she was grateful that she had, at least, chosen a suitable outfit and sensible shoes for the job in hand even though she really, really needed to get herself to the nearest five star hotel and spa just as soon as she could and perhaps grab herself the latest in chic little numbers from Milan or Paris on the way. Never in her incredibly long lifespan had she more understood the expression “freshen up” and all that it entailed. Visions of huge bathtubs and cleansing foam and… Max… filled her mind. She looked across. She wondered what Max made of her in her current form. There he lay, still sleeping for, in their terms, what seemed like an eternity. This chamber seemed to have slowed his powers of recuperation down too. They were both suddenly all too human and she, for one, didn’t like it, although the thought of having an all-too-human life alongside Max did kind of appeal to her. “Oh, get on with it, Frankie…” she found herself thinking, still struggling to catch her breath and feeling an all too human desire to pee, and an equally human sense that she really didn’t want Max or Frankie to see her doing so as she sauntered casually off into a dark corner to deal with the necessary proceedings. With an enormous sense of relief that both Max and Frankie had been otherwise engaged, she straightened herself out and watched with a certain amount of fascination as the small stream of her own urine trickled down the slight incline and watched with amazement as it finally reached and touched the strange metalwork of the machine that still sat in the centre of the room pointing skywards. The moment of contact between her inhuman outpourings and the nonhuman machine was astonishing and she would quite possibly have been obliterated as she stood there watching it, mesmerised, if Max hadn’t flung himself at her and moved both of them out of harm’s way, straight through the stream of urine and, Tamara noted regretfully, quite ruining her outfit. Seconds later, a mighty roar of energy erupted from the top of the machine and burst through the not-glass seal, causing a cascade of fragments to rain all around them and knocking Frankie and Jeremy right off their feet. As the air cleared and Max and Tamara emerged blinking from the little cover they’d been able to find, Frankie’s head appeared at the rim of the hole. “This was supposed to be a rescue!” he shouted, “Are you taking the piss…?”

Arctic Tern, Blackbird, Chaffinch, Dunnock, Eider, Falcon, Gannet, Heron, Icterine Warbler, Jay – this was getting really tiresome, he couldn’t break the habit but what else was there to do stuck in this trunk? British birds weren’t one of his favourites but after years and years of making A-Z listings simply to keep his mind active (well, at least the quarter part of his mind that was entrusted to this component of his machine) you had to try everything – Kestrel, Lapwing, Magpie, Nuthatch, Osprey, Partridge, Quail, Robin, Swallow – and all this rushing around was so unnecessary, yes there were four parts to the Oblivion Machine but you could reach all four from a single portal. There was no need at all to go rushing all over the country, all you needed was to know how to access the right continuum and - ZIZZ- all four at once. How he loved that word – ZIZZ – was it real or had he made it up? This Sparkle creature, just who was she and what was her game plan? Game plan – what a marvellous phrase, one he’d learnt from J. Edgar Hoover during the time he resided in a small nickel isolation box on top of that lunatic’s desk. Later, that same box, still with him inside, had stood on another desk belonging to Richard Nixon in the oval office. Just how or why he’d been allowed these vacations he didn’t know; if they had any purpose at all he couldn’t understand them - he had seen some interesting things though, like Hoover drunk and in drag, and Nixon making, faking and destroying tapes in their hundreds. There he went, his mind wandering again, moving from one thing to another in an almost random way. He needed to pull some order back, get straight, as straight as a quarter of his whole could… maybe that was the problem? He’d lost his mind… well, seventy-five percent of it… now where was he? Swallow, Treecreeper, and U and V - always such a problem. Talking of problems, that was exactly what Sparkle and her two offspring were… problems waiting to happen. Just how big a problem was yet to be seen, but if they got their hands on the Oblivion Machine it could be a very big problem indeed, the biggest problem ever, the problem to end all problems. Perhaps he should try to do something about it, try to help stop them. He was aware that some sort of race was going on around him (he wasn’t that confused yet), even knew who some of the key participants were – those two inside the caldera, who were simultaneously under the monument, buried deep in Alaska, and hidden in Yellowstone National Park, these others in this car, and those others in the tower. It really was a confusing mess, and how he hated confusing messes. Now how to sort it out? What could he do to unconfuse the confusion, help make matters better… or worse? Which did he want to do anyway, and just whose side was he on? Confused, confused, confused… and at the end of it all how did he want this whole sorry mess to end up anyway… and did he really care? Back in the day when he’d built what he called his Death Ray, told all the major governments about it, gave each of them a set of plans, all a chance of greatness, he’d done it in an attempt to stop war and destruction; but what had they done? Waged war with some childish toys of their own, that’s what. Yes, he’d wanted them too scared to use the Death Ray, too scared because: if one of them used it, then they all would, and that would be that. So instead they build their silly nuclear missiles and undertook a policy of standoff and one-upmanship like the petulant children that they were. He never gave any of them the Oblivion Machine though. The Death Ray had been local, but his masterpiece was all-encompassing; set the Oblivion Machine in motion and there would be no stopping it. So here they were rushing to win another part of his machine, whilst out at Trinity the girl and that man-thing were about to emerge at a place they weren’t even imprisoned in and, if they understood and wanted to, could easily reach out to the other two cubes and bring them all out together. That was the thing with spatial concussion; you could easily place things in different spaces in the same space at the same time, easily grab three-quarters of the whole, three-quarters of him, in one action… if only you knew how to do it. Just how clever where they, this Max and Tamarra, would they realise their opportunity and grab the upper hand? Treecreeper… how he hated the end of the alphabet; it defeated even his brilliant mind. Oh well, might as well complete - Wren, Yellowhammer, Zipetty do-dah…

“Uh-oh!” thought Max, “I’m seeing double…” That, of course, is seldom good, even if it’s after downing several double measures of the finest drinks known to man. He thought perhaps that he’d knocked his head as the machine exploded and he leapt to cover Tamara, but as the dust cleared and he blinked the worst of the grime from his eyes, he thought that he caught Tamara looking at him in a curious way. Something about her eyes seemed to be telling him that she had just come to some new conclusions about him. In the past this had seldom been a good thing, and Tamara had always been a slippery customer even at the best of times, and there had been precious few of those. What Max didn’t yet realise was that Tamara was busily processing what had appeared to her to be a rather huge act of self-sacrifice. Whilst Max had been completely out of it, she had become increasingly aware of her own mortality as long as she remained trapped in that pit, but she’d also been aware that Max had been just as vulnerable. So, when Max had leapt in front of her to protect her from the blast he had actually been in genuine danger of dying to save her worthless self and she was starting to think that this had been rather impressive. Long buried thoughts of affection and longing were beginning to resurface from deep inside her and these emotions were quite baffling her. They were also making her completely forget that Max had been totally unaware of the real danger that he had been in, and his leap hadn’t been quite so much of a leap of faith as she imagined it to have been. Equally, with much of the strange metal vaporised, and the pit once more open to the sky, his damaged body was already beginning to repair itself. So much so, in fact, that Max was already beginning to shrug off the residual pain and think about what he was going to do once he felt that he could successfully flex his wings again. Or at least he would have been if only… If only Tamara didn’t keep looking at him in quite such a peculiar way. He paused. One of the Tamaras was looking at him in a funny way at any rate. The other one was scrambling up the pile of debris in a desperate attempt to get out of the pit and into the light. “I am seeing double then…” he thought, but he very quickly dismissed the thought. He’d woken up on enough floors of enough dives to know that if you did regain consciousness seeing double, the two images tended to be doing much the same thing at the same time. These two were doing very different things and in very different places which could only mean that there were two of them now, and, whilst he imagined for a moment that such a situation might lead to some interesting nocturnal adventures for anyone who was so inclined, twice the Tamara could only double the problem as far as he understood it. This also failed to explain the other two Tamaras who were looking down at him from the rim of the pit and who seemed to be shouting at him at least a couple of phrases that pretty much implied in no uncertain terms that he should hurry up. Stranger still, when he suggested that they should all shut up and speak one at a time, the four blank stares (well, three blank stares and one blatant letch) that he received in return seemed to imply that they were completely unaware of each other. Now, Max was no stranger to the unusual phenomenon of the cat’s cradle being weaved by alternative realities, so he pretty swiftly concluded that there were four different events happening concurrently around him and that something that had been contained either in that underground chamber or in that machine was definitely trying to tell him something. Now, if only he could stop for a moment and think clearly, although the look that the first Tamara was giving him really didn’t help all that much with his concentration. He closed his eyes and the long rambling code that he had been reading out zombie-like inside the tower suddenly came pouring into his mind, and rearranged itself into a mathematical equation which proved absolutely that four into one into four really would go. “Arctic Tern, Blackbird, Chaffinch…” he said, and at least one of the Tamaras was far too busy fantasising about what she wanted to do to him to notice how strange that seemed. Suddenly, he snapped open his eyelids and he knew exactly what needed to be done.

Tesla felt the explosion even though they were still miles away from the action. The Sparkle woman wasn’t going to be happy, not happy at all. Not only had they managed to escape their glassy prison but they’d pulled all four parts of the machine out with them, even the one that until only seconds ago had been inside the trunk, the one that held him inside it. Tesla looked around him. There they were, all four cubes and Tesla realised that he was no longer in the trunk of the car, nor was he inside his cube, nor was he a fourth of his former self… he was back together again, his old self. Well, four of his old selves actually but that wouldn’t last long, it was only the echo effect of the explosion and the effect of the time ripple as all four of the planes containing the parts of the Oblivion Machine were simultaneously exploded and imploded like a mirror shattering and forming in the same instant, a minor misalignment which would soon correct itself, but meanwhile - what fun. Tesla watched as all four Tamaras watched all four Maxs stumble and totter about clutching their heads as four Frankies and four Jeremys looked on incredulously. What a hoot… and then Tesla noticed the cat. Tesla had never liked cats, there was something about them that was unnaturally natural, an excess of life, an excess of unlife, not death - they were both alive and unalive simultaneously and, Tesla noticed to his discomfort, that whilst there were four of everyone else… there was only a single cat. The cat weaved its way through the Maxs, the Tamarras, the Frankies, the Jeremys… three Tamarras now, two Maxs, still four Frankies, but only a single Jeremy. Time was pulling itself together once again, the spatial planes realigning, soon everything would be back to normal – or as normal as things ever got in this universe. Tesla had realised a long time ago that one man’s normal was another man’s extremely strange. Take his current situation for instance. Being dead and disembodied, an energy contained with four black cubes which, when reconstructed, might lead to tremendous good or total annihilation, didn’t bother Tesla one iota. Is was as ordinary and normal as the rising of the sun was to other people – not that that particular event was as normal as most people imagined, but he wouldn’t go into that just now - save to say it was one of the four powers that fuelled the oblivion machine, box two he thought, or was it three? Never mind, he’d remember later, getting back together was bound to need a period of readjustment. Tesla watched the cat is it strolled towards Max, a huge smug grin stretched across its more than feline face. He saw Max close his eyes as the cat weaved in and out of his legs and around his feet purring in an almost melodic and hypnotic way. Tesla listened… it sounded like a code, no not a code an equation, a long and complicated equation that he knew he recognised. Suddenly it all came pouring back into his mind, rearranging itself into a mathematical equation which proved absolutely that four into one into four really would go. “Arctic Tern, Blackbird, Chaffinch,” Tesla absent-mindedly mumbled, as suddenly Max’s eyes flew open as he joined with Tesla in his chanting: “Dunnock, Eider, Falcon, Gannet, Heron, Icterine Warbler, Jay.” Simultaneously their eyes locked and they both knew exactly what needed to be done. Tesla looked down at his body; a real body with hands and feet and knees, not that he could see them all – he was wearing one of his favourite suits and his highly polished boots. He was back in the world, corporeal, embodied in the truest sense, and they had the solution. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime perfect moments, one of those moments that nothing can spoil… well, almost nothing… what was that? All heads slowly turned as in the distance the sound of an approaching car grew louder moment on moment…

In a cloud of dust and with the scream of rubber on dust and gravel, the car glided to a halt, with a faint whiff of burning coming from the brake shoes but not a hint of a squeak. The bright sunlight reflected off the highly polished jet black surfaces of the bodywork which seemed to almost repel the dirt, dust and grime that would cling to other, lesser vehicles like the more desperate party in the death throes of a failing marriage. It’s very easy, though, to avoid getting any of the world’s crap to stick to you, when time is standing still. You can just slip through the atoms without them even noticing. The sound of the screaming that was not really screaming and the clouds of dust that was not really dust had nothing to do with that patch of desert at all, they were merely the laws of physics screaming out in frustration and pain at such a violation of them and calling out for assistance to any passing patrol officer, although none was likely to come. A rear door opened and a shiny black leather shoe emerged to plant itself firmly upon the ground, followed by a leg hidden within the material of a dark blue suit. Pretty soon, that tall, familiar and iconic figure was standing before him, with his hand lifting up to brush back the hair from his face. The piercing blue eyes locked onto Tesla’s own with just a hint of admonishment before that familiar boyish grin spread across his face and he turned to look back towards the car. The woman in the pink woollen suit sat motionless, statue-like, frozen in time herself like all of the other mortals, but the driver turned and smiled a dazzling smile right back at Jack. Tesla was seldom short of a word or two, but all of his thoughts melted away when that driver smiled and the last thing that he could remember thinking was that he had somehow found a way to save her after all. The driver turned and opened their own door, climbed out, and sashayed those familiar curves around the front end of the car before throwing off her cap and shaking her head to allow those platinum blonde tresses to fall around her like a halo. She ran over to the ice cool figure launched herself at him in an embrace that spoke volumes of the fun she expected them to be having, but he pulled back and did everything that it was possible for him to do to resist her charms. There was, after all, a job that he needed her to do. She stood back a step, chastened, and straightened out her hair and uniform and Tesla, in his new body, felt so many twinges and pangs of pain and hurt and jealousy that he wondered for a moment whether he’d have been better off staying back in the box. However, he just stood there, mesmerised by her every move as she went around to the trunk of the car, opened it up and opened up the custom-made silver-coloured suitcase inside it. Then she strolled nonchalantly around and picked up the four cubes and, with a wink in Tesla’s direction, placed each of them into the slots provided for them and slammed the case and then the lid of the trunk firmly shut. With that she blew Tesla the slightest of kisses, bent down to retrieve her cap and got back into the driving seat before placing it back on her head, carefully tucking those golden locks back inside it, and checking her reflection in the mirror. Unusually for him, Tesla was confused and he really didn’t like to be confused. He wondered what time it was which was, of course, a completely redundant thought at that particular moment. As was, of course, the idea of a moment, but he decided to let that pass. It suddenly struck him that his new present was also his distant past and that Johnson, Nixon, Ford and all the rest were still in the future and all those years of sitting by their sides were still ahead of him and he hadn’t really escaped at all. As he watched the car turn around and head across the desert back in the direction of Love Field and the cruel intervention of fate and the brutal revenge that the laws of physics would shortly take, a single salty tear formed in one of his newly acquired eyes and rolled slowly down his cheek. Back at the airstrip no one would even notice that they’d left on this little excursion, and, but for the momentary glitch of interference on the recording of a TV camera image, it might never have happened. Within an hour, the world would be running back on its proper tragic course and dark agencies would be dealing with the suitcase and the girl, but it wasn’t for them that Tesla was weeping, he realised, but for himself. He had thought that he was escaping from his prison, but instead he’d been building it all along, and he’d even sprung the trap himself.

So there they all were; what fun -Tesla weeping, Sparkle Monroe smiling, Benny Kennedy grinning, and the other three... frozen statues in a frozen landscape. Trader emerged from the slip just in time to see Sparkle and Kennedy disappearing into the distance in that bloody car of Tesla’s. He wished he’d shut up snivelling, Trader never could stand a crying scientist and it really didn’t become Tesla somehow, not in that suit and those boots. Now where was The Artist? He’d stepped into the Slip with him, should have been here by now; just what was holding him up? Suddenly, with a loud clatter followed by a few crashes, The Artist came tumbling out of midair almost carrying what looked like a very shiny tube with flashing red and blue lights covering its surface. There appeared to be what looked like some sort of sight at one end and a trigger type affair at the other. Tesla stopped crying and looked at the contraption that lay at The Artist’s feet. “Where did you get that?” He asked. “Big warehouse, 1961, tucked away at the back behind a couple of saucers.” “My Saucers?” Tesla continued. “Well it wasn’t a bloody tea party,” The Artist snapped, “recognise this little beauty?” “Of course, it’s one of the prototypes I made for my Death Ray, much smaller than the real thing of course, but capable of some serious destruction. It has a number of settings from ‘total annihilation’ to ‘knock over’, even ‘freeze’.” “Well aim the bloody thing and freeze them before they get away completely. I take it you do know how to use this thing?” Tesla gave him a withering look, of course he did, he’d invented it hadn’t he? Placing the device high on his shoulder Tesla took careful aim. Squinting along the barrel and down through the sights, he squeezed the trigger gently - a high-pitched whine, rather like the sound of an elongated squeak that a psychotic mouse might make, began. The dust of the desert quivered, small grains of sand rising into the air where they hung suspended about a foot above the ground. In the distance the speck that was the car, stopped. It didn’t slow as it came to a halt; it simply stopped, dead, in an instant, still. Tesla adjusted one of the dials on the barrel of his invention, and suddenly the car drew closer by a quarter of a mile. It hadn’t moved backwards in reverse, it simply appeared in a space which was not as far away. Another turn of the dial and it was closer still; another and it was less that 500 yards away. Tesla turned the dial once more and the car appeared 10 yards behind where they stood. “Not bad for a cry-baby.” Trader said. “The controls were never as sensitive as I planned.” Replied Tesla; “I was hoping to do it in one.” Pointing the weapon towards Max and Tamarra, he squeezed the trigger again, “What are you doing you Tricky-Dicky?” The Artist screamed. “That was Nixon.” Tesla replied, squeezingg the trigger once more. Jeremy was the first to move, followed by Frankie, then Max and Tamarra. “I’m pleased that worked. The last time I tried it the fellow I tried it on was dust when the ray hit him. Now shall we?” Walking towards the car Tesla opened the driver’s door. “Ah, not quite, I really must try adjusting those controls.” Two piles of dust, like miniature volcanoes, lay dustily upon the driver and passenger seats. “It only needs to be a fraction of a micron or two out. Shame, still can’t be helped… Association football, baseball, cricket, darts… Max stepped forward and, taking Tesla gently by the arm, helped him to site on the concrete base of the monument. Returning to the car he nervously reached to open the back door; just what was he going to find – more dust? Snatching at the handle he pulled the door open wide and, much to his relief, there lay Rosalina fast asleep on the back seat. But where were Poppet and Puppet? Max frowned as from inside the trunk of the car came a giggle, followed by what Max could only describe as a howl of rage - and suddenly the close-quartered air of the car interior was filled with hair and stuffing, as Poppet and Poppet burst snarling and bloody through the fabric of the seat…

Drip… drip… drip. Second by second a story unfolds. Once again Max woke up not all that sure about what had just happened to him. Once again his mind struggled to make sense of the world as it came back into focus around him. Once again he’d been tied and bound by circumstances beyond his control and by beings who wished him harm. By now, he mused, he ought be getting used to it, thinking of each event as just another obstacle to be endured on the road to enlightenment, but, once again, he very quickly came to the conclusion that he really, really didn’t like it all that much. Drip… drip… drip. The liquid was getting into his eyes and making him have to blink it away in irritation and he was struggling to focus. It was the constant pain and suffering that got to him. Sometimes it really didn’t seem fair that it was always him, as if being virtually indestructible gave everyone else the right to test it out. Ironically it seemed that those beings who only had one shot at life somehow got to look after themselves a bit more, and other people trod more carefully around them so as not to tip them over that fine line between the very edge of being and the plummet into the bottomless pit of oblivion. “Ah yes… Oblivion…” a part of his mind that didn’t really seem to belong to him seemed to be suggesting that this word was somehow significant. It would come to him, he was sure… Drip… drip… drip… if only this wretched fluid wouldn’t keep dripping onto his face. Finally he couldn’t stand it any more and snapped open his eyes as widely as he could to let the light flood in. He almost immediately wished that he hadn’t. The scene in front of him was utter bedlam, like something from somebody’s idea of hell made real. The metal and the flesh and the wiring and the blood and the wool all intermeshed and intermingled into a scene that Doctor Frankenstein might have considered to be “a bit much” and left even him contemplating the remains of his breakfast as they lay splattered and steaming on the floor in front of him. In the middle of all this carnage those wretched Harpies were working on something, building something which was part biological, part mechanical, part electronic, part knitted and entirely worrying. As he struggled to regain his senses, Sparkle took a step back and triumphantly pressed a button of some kind, and Max winced as the drip… drip… drip… now had an electronic beep… beep… beep… to accompany it. Even Frankie would have struggled to find a beat and a rhythm in that, Max thought as he tried to get to his feet and struggled to find them. That was the point that he realised where the dripping was coming from as he found himself staring at the gaping hole which was sitting at the top of his prone body where his head usually was. That Poppet must have ripped his head clean off when she came at him and, whilst he knew that he was probably going to be perfectly fine in the fullness of time, Max decided that he really, really didn’t approve of people going around doing such things, especially to him. He also knew that recovering from that kind of injury was going to take some doing.

“They’ll get me back. Yes, they’ll get me back.” She said aloud from wherever the place at the other side of back was. “I’m not that easy to keep down, it isn’t that simple to be rid of me. I’m the kind that sticks around, hangs about, cannot be kept down. They’ll get me back, they’ll get me back. When Simple Simon met that pie-man going to the fair he bit off more than he could chew. Not us though, we can chew and chew, bite and chew, bite and chew, chew and bite and chew. And did I let him taste my wares? Did I? Well, no. Well, yes. Why would I? Why wouldn’t I? He was such a churlish boy with his slack mouthed grin and mismatched eyes, his nervous twitch, his silly giggle – and all that touching… touch, touch, touch, touch, touch, touch, that’s all he wanted to do, he wouldn’t stop. Taste my wares? Well maybe a little, but not until he’d shown me his penny, and a very pretty little penny it was too. But who was he but the ever fool; trying to cheat by saying that he didn’t have any,  when he had plenty, more than enough. Silly boy, silly, silly boy – a little taste, a taste of my pie and then I look his penny and ripped him to shreds – more pies for the gristy mill. How we dined that evening. Poppet and Puppet cleared their plates licking up every spillage and splash until not a trace remained, not even the gristle of his puggy piggy nose. They are such good girls my lovelies, very good girls, my lovely good lovely girls. La la la, I can feel them now bringing me back, knitting and sowing and moulding and spelling, shaking up the dust and shit and blood, the flesh and phlegm, the wool and sand, the springs, the leather, the twine, the paper. The twists, the turns, the mumbles, the oaths; the skin, the bone, the sinew, the fat, singing and humming – twinkle, twinkle, little star - how I wonder what you are – up above the world so high – like a sparkle in the sky. Sparkle. Sparkle. Sparkle. Sparkle. There’s no keeping me down – Sparkle, Sparkle, little bat – how I wonder what you’re at – flittering in the dark night sky – I’ll put you in a nice bat pie. Yes, they are getting me back I can feel it. I wonder what they are making me from, and more importantly who? I hope they’ve got their dirty little bloodied mits on Tamarra; her hair would be nice and I quite like the idea of a bit of Jeremy. Hmmmm, which bit though? But not The Artist; I want nothing to do with him. The last time he and I got together it was a catastrophe… cats everywhere, more cats that you could swing a room in, cats underfoot, cats above-head, wall-to-wall cats... too many cats and, well let’s just say that those darn cats have too much say in the way things turn out. You might as well not turn up if there’s a cat around; they spoil everything, smug frigging, feline, faeces eating, fudge cakes. No, no cats. No cats whatsoever, not the slightest hint of cat, not a single meow, a whisker, not even a jumping cat flea and that is THAT! And if I even imagine a cat’s tail snaking and shallying… well, I’m done. NO CATS, I really don’t like cats… too, too, too, too, too, too much catty power. Come on Poppet, get weaving Puppet, I can’t hang around here forfuckingever, get me back and make it snappy; like a crocodile sandwich, an over-sprung mousetrap, a tremble-motion land mine. Get me back and I’ll bake you a pie, a nice fat juicy pie, all goo and slime, sticky and succulent, whistling and wheezing, crying and cursing – now, what who would you like in it? Not Peter Piper, not bat, not cat, not dearest dusty daddy... I know! How about…” And with that half finished sentence Sparkle was back and looking at herself in the mirror that Puppet was holding up for her to look at herself, her new self…

Max, from his position of great disadvantage, was the first to notice the cat stroll over and sit down at the periphery as the madness continued erupting all around him. The cat strolled over, sat down and looked across at the humans for a moment before deciding that it probably served more purpose of it started licking its paw to pass the time, and that’s precisely what it did. Over the course of the following few minutes (was it really only minutes…? It seemed like days…) it was joined my three other like-minded tabbies all of whom took that contemplative moment to consider the story unfolding in front of them and decided that it was far more productive to get the sand out of their paws. If those waging their pitched battle for control of something so infinitely uncontrollable as the universe had been paying a little more attention to what was going on in the bigger, wider picture, they might have realised that the four felines were sitting exactly at the cardinal points and were forming a perfect square enclosing their battlefield. And, if those four points were to be rotated about the very centre of their war zone, by the simple matter of each small cat choosing to take an indirect stroll across to where the next cat had been sitting, then, without even being aware of it, they would be enclosed by a perfect circle of feline energy. It started very slowly at first and the movement was barely perceptible, but within moments this ring of power had started to form and build in energy and within moments a roaring white circle of light was surrounding all of them as they tangled with each other to try to gain their prize. Max, ironically, was in the best position to watch this all unfold as he was incapacitated enough to not be taking part in the bigger battle as it was unfolding. He was able to watch as outside the circle the world plunged into darkness and an infinite number of possibilities and probabilities were stripped away until all that was left was the four of them standing inside a white circle of light, surrounded by an endless darkness and looking around, blinking and wondering what the hell was going to happen next and where the others had disappeared off to, if they were anywhere at all. As best he could, and with a growing sense that he was already starting the healing process, Max looked  around him and sensed instinctively that, whilst they hadn’t yet quite reached the end of this particular journey, they had, perhaps, at last reached the beginning of the end.

Cats! It was the beginning of the end. Through Max’s old eyes Sparkle stared at the reflection of the four perambulating cats in the mirror. She hissed, and with her hiss came other smaller hisses from Poppet and Puppet as the cat’s continued to cradle. She’d been dreading this moment always but always knowing that it would eventually come. It started very slowly at first, a barely perceptible movement, in moments a ring of power started to form, energy building moment on moment and forming a roaring white circle of light, surrounding them all as the cats tangled with each other as if they were becoming one and many at the same time - The One made from many. SHIT the game was up! The Supreme Being had revealed itself at last. If she’d put money on it, she’d have sworn it was whales, dolphins at a push – but never cats; nasty, flea-ridden, balls of fur and shit. SHIT and FLEAS. There was no other way of describing it; the universe was turning to shit and fleas. Sparkle felt something nip her woollen leg, deep into the yarn and through to the beached bone beneath, another, then another – she was covered in huge stinking fleas. Someone had to help her! Puppet! Poppet!  But Poppet and Puppet had their own circus of nipping blood-suckers to contend with. She could feel herself withering, diminishing with each new bite; she was draining away and in front of her eyes she could see Puppet and Poppet diminishing too, getting smaller, returning to rags and sawdust, becoming the dolls Sparkle had grown them from. Her babies! They were killing her babies! Sparkle screamed, but her scream was cut off before she’d really got stared as she returned to the dust that she had been made from. Her last thought was for the cats – she wished that she’d brought some fish. After she’d gone, taking the two tattered and bloody rags dolls with her somehow, Max looked around. He didn’t recognise this place at all. He seemed to be standing in the centre of a square orange plain; the purple sky high above him seemed to have edges like a box - and corners. High in the air, at each of the four corners, Max could just make out a figure - although he couldn’t tell who or what it was. Max turned and viewed the four horizons; at each of these corners stood another figure, eight figures in all with him at the centre. Just where was he, who were they, and what did they want? As he pondered these questions some of the figures above him began to move, slowly floating towards him – two, three, all four; a tumble of swirling colours. Max checked the figures on the distant horizons – one, two, three – three of the figures began to move towards him, but not the fourth. The fourth figure remained still and distant in its distant corner, but as the seven figures came closer Max realised what they were. It was the Sisters, the Seven Sisters. Max had never felt more helpless in his life – battered and practically headless he watched through some inner eye as the sisters approached, an ever-changing iridescence of colour. They were almost upon him, Max half-hoping that they were here to finish him finally. He’d been waiting to fall for a very long time and if it was soon to be over… well, he’d had a good run for his thirty pieces of silver even if the ride had been a little bumpy. Reaching into his pocket he took out a crumpled packet; just one left, he could smoke it while he waited, after all – even though he knew he shouldn’t, it wasn’t as if it was going to kill him or anything. Max stood smoking, waiting and thinking of oblivion, waiting, smoking and waiting for his end to come at last… and then another movie began to run…

Endings can be tricky things. Some people never know when to stop and keep chipping away far beyond the point at which the story should really have stopped, others believe that the story, like life, is never over until it’s over and that each little event or moment is just another chapter in the glorious whole. Others will maintain that, whilst beginnings are always interesting, it’s the endings of stories which give them their true purpose, their ultimate goal and can, of course, leave that bittersweet feeling that you can feel if the story ends when you want it to go on forever, or when it somehow has failed to answer any or all of the questions that you have been asking yourself as the story, such as it was, unfolded. “What was the ship of the damned all about?” “What was happening in that western town?” “What was all that surgery in aid of?”  “What the hell had happened to Lee?” “…or Tesla, come to think of it…?” and so forth. If you put all of those “The End” caption cards (even the more pretentious ones saying “Fin”) on a continuous loop in a cinema, none of them would tell you all that much about any of the stories that had been told, they just indicated that, for the moment at least, the story was over, and all of the questions about how the star-crossed lovers were going to solve their perhaps insurmountable problems were just left dangling and, perhaps, waiting for the sequel that would never come. Characters you enjoyed cut off forever and destined to merely loop back to the beginning and start all over again on their quest towards that caption card, the big close up and fade to black and out into the car park. But the all-powerful jester controlling Max’s destiny was enjoying himself far, far too much to be finished with him yet. He had too many of those annoying little questions lurking in his mind, even though he had been the one who planted most of them. He considered, just for a moment, mentally pulling back for a huge crane shot showing a slowly healing Max diminishing in scale in the centre of his big orange plain, surrounded and looking outnumbered and outgunned and facing a suitably enigmatic fate. He toyed, for a moment or two, with locking Max in an eternal but suitably dramatic freeze-frame, and he even rattled through a list of suitable (and unsuitable) typefaces and colours and styles for the big and final closing caption. He even toyed with a few sweeping and emphatic chords for the soundtrack inside his mind, but he decided that he was far from ready for that. He was not quite prepared to let Max off the hook that easily and concentrate upon some other poor marionette for a while because he was having far too much fun messing with him and Max, bless him (Oops! Best not go THAT far – luckily he had his fingers crossed when he thought that thought…), always looked so fantastically annoyed about things when they didn’t quite go according to what he amusingly still seemed to consider to be HIS planning. There was something about the irritation he displayed, that bemused and furious frown, which made his observer enjoy his efforts at fighting against his fate really so very much, and he hadn’t had quite so much fun messing around with the destiny of a “lesser being” in millennia. That look on his face as Sparkle tore his head off had been priceless and worth all of the effort it took to get all of the elements to that point in space and time and all of the clearing up and re-knotting of the fabric of reality which he would need to do afterwards so that he could go about his business as usual once the game was over. Meanwhile, Max needed to suffer just a little longer, so he made his move on the great gaming board, and the orange square removed itself back to a familiar battleground, and Max found himself once more feeling the dust and the heat of an old western town beneath his feet, ready to do battle with the Seven Sisters on what he thought were more like his own terms, and with Frankie and Tamara at his side. You could say what you like about those insignificant specs that called themselves “humans” he mused, but they’d always made really entertaining westerns…

So, the final showdown at last; it had been a long journey full of twists and turns, cul-de-sacs and dead ends and this is where it finished one way or the other. Max checked his head, running his hands over his features where scant moments ago there had just been a stump. Yes, all there, back again; that was quick. But now was not the time to ponder the wonders of regeneration, even if Max knew it hadn’t happened without a helping-hand from somewhere. No there were bigger proverbial fish to proverbially fry. And the biggest fish of all? Either the universe went on in its usual meandering and nonsensical way or it stopped dead here, and when Max meant dead he really meant dead, not pickled, soused, or smoked – nothingness, zip, nada, dust. Dust. Tesla’s four boxes lay in the dust at his feet, empty of Tesla now; Tesla was elsewhere playing his part in the final movement of this weird and scary symphony. Only Frankie and Tamara stood with him, Frankie to his left, Tamara to his right; all differences put aside, the squabbling over either for ever or just for now depending on the outcome of what was about to happen. The others were also elsewhere doing other things, things that needed to be done if they were to succeed. Max could almost feel the arrangement clanking into place. Each and all involved in placing the final few bottles in position, engrossed in the symmetry of it all, Tesla orchestrating this final movement, his wild white hair swept back just the way he liked it, baton in hand, keeping the time, dictating the beat. So here they were - the three of them. There had been times over the millennia when they had played every playable role there was to play, even some that weren’t – friends, lovers, enemies, strangers, master and servant, sadist and masochist. They’d done it all at one time or another, they knew each other so well that they were almost interchangeable, very nearly a single entity. Max hoped that they were going to take all that time and learning, the knowledge, the good and bad and use it to defeat the Seven Sisters. Back in his towers Max knew that Lee was ready to harness the energy they were going to need to defeat the Seven, and it was going to take all of the energy of both towers to do it. Max had needed to play the duality card to make this possible; splitting off reality in two directions so that Lee and the others could be in two places and in two different times at once. It was the only way they would be able to get enough energy to shut off the Sister’s colours; the colours which, if allowed to grow any brighter, would destroy the universe in a blaze of merging white light. In the beginning was the light, and in the end it would be the light that made it all happen in the first place. It was never the word. It was always the light. The light of the Seven Sisters; the creators of the universe; it was always them. Max picked up his guns. Yep, that was the way it was going to work, the arrangement would create the power in the towers, the towers would feed Tesla’s Oblivion machine, and the Oblivion machine would feed the guns with raw energy bullets. Why? Well, that was just the way things happened in the movies and that was all reality was - a movie playing on a flickering screen. If you were lucky you were in a comedy, if you weren’t then you got a leading role in a disaster or horror film. Max slipped the revolver into his pocket then buckled the twin holstered six-guns around his waist, finally slinging the Uzi over his shoulder. On each side of him Tamara and Frankie picked up an assortment of guns which included a musket from the civil war, a pearl handled ladies revolver, a tired old hunting rifle, and a Smith and Wesson Model 29 revolver, chambered for a .44 Magnum cartridge. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t going to matter much what the bullets were fired from, the effect would be the same and Max was hoping for annihilation. Only by destroying the creators of all could all be saved. Perhaps after this there would be no God, perhaps there would be too many gods, who knew? What a nonsense the universe was. Sometimes Max thought that it might be better just to let it go, let the Sisters finish the job they started and end the cycle with a bang or a whimper or a flash of colour. Sometimes Max wondered why he bothered, where he found the strength and energy to carry on, what difference would it make if he wasn’t here. But that was the rub. Max would always be here. Even if everything were to become nothing Max would be a part of that nothing - that was the way with immortality, there was no ending. That was why Trader had become so obsessed with his own demise; he knew that he could never stop. They all knew it; and that was what ate them up piece by piece like a worm devouring an apple, the apple becoming part of the worm eventually. It was bad enough being an integral part of the universe - a constant - without the universe becoming nothing. If the universe became nothing then Max would be a part of that nothing, not even part of a worm… and knowing that you were nothing had to be the worst fate that Max could imagine. He didn’t know if Tamara and Frankie thought this way but he thought that they did, he was almost sure that he’d seen the desperate pain of realisation flicker across their faces from time to time. Trader knew for sure and The Artist had given up his mind rather than contemplate it any further. Yes, there were more things in Heaven and Earth – black shadows creeping under doors, masterpiece tattooed misanthropes, murderous porn-star politicians, long dead film stars, faux smiling presidents, flies one minute but not the next… better that though than nothing at all. And if all the world really were a stage then Max had played every part and taken each encore breaking his legs in the process every time; and he wasn’t prepared to give that up and exist without a part to play. Reality was just a movie, a film to be run, not real at all - an unconnected series of random events given the semblance of order by the actors playing it out. There was no direction; the director’s chair had always been empty, the cameras left running to capture the lack of action, the super-trooper switched off, the stage dim. Once there had been light. In the beginning was the light, so let there be light, and cameras, and action. A clapperboard clapped behind them and cameras whirred, on cue a tumbleweed blew across the dusty street and disappeared out of shot, hot winds blew from the surrounding desert bringing with them the whistle of a theme from a spaghetti western – ‘The Good, The Bad, The Ugly’? Not quite, it lacked that particular theme’s melodic irony. Max glanced at Tamara, then at Frankie - they both nodded. In unison the three of them began to walk slowly towards the shuttered building across the street from them, the saloon doors swinging backwards and forwards as if someone had just entered, or just left the building. A cat hissed from within the saloon, and Max turned off the safety on the Uzi as his thoughts returned to that eighth figure. The final act was about to play out and Max was hoping that the scriptwriter was an optimist or at the very least had a wicked sense of humour…

The seven sisters exhaled. It was good to be breathing again even if they had to inhabit this old wooden building in order to do so. Was it really an “old” building anyway? One day it might be, but this primitive wooden structure could have been built yesterday, or a hundred years before, or simply created as a battleground a few seconds before their arrival as a mere vessel for them to occupy and from which to fight their battles. The sisters did not fail to note the ironic touch which had placed them inside a building which was a temple for the worship of all forms of bottles and their content, nor did they fail to notice the rows of glass vessels just waiting for them stacked upon the shelves at the back of the saloon bar. They glared at them, willing them to shatter, but they would not. They just remained there, oblivious but present and, to add insult to injury, reflected in the wall of mirrors in front of which they were arranged. Had the sisters not been enjoying their new found freedom quite so euphorically, they might have perhaps noticed that an inability to shatter even one small glass vessel might have indicated that their own phenomenal powers were not quite so awesome as once they were, but they didn’t. Instead they shrugged a metaphysical shrug and decided that it was probably best not to toy with the wishes of whoever had enough power to transport them here and manipulate even the sisters’ awesome majesty to their will. There were, after all, other games to be played, other muscles to flex in order for them to gain the rewards that they felt they so richly deserved. As there were muscles that needed flexing, they flexed them, and the ancient timbers which they were now inhabiting creaked and groaned in sympathy. It felt good to have corporeal form again, no matter how abstract, and if this building was merely a stepping-stone on the way towards something more malleable, then they were prepared to play the game and prove themselves worthy of such a gift or four. It never crossed their collective mind, at least not yet, and despite all of the power at their disposal, that the best traps are always the ones into which we walk willingly and with our eyes wide open, the ones that only feel like a trap after they have been sprung, the ones that we only even realise are traps when we look back and come to the conclusion that we have been living inside them without even knowing it, and sometimes it takes a while even then. Instead they savoured their moment and investigated every nook and cranny of their new form, poked mental fingers into every grubby corner and looked inside every crack between the floorboards and behind every bookcase and they felt that this was good. They knew their environment, they were sure of their battleground, and they knew every little secret it held, so that, when those swing doors finally crashed open and the unwitting warriors arrived to engage in their final bloody battle, all of the advantage, all of the knowledge of the field of battle, would be theirs. As best they could, their entire beings roared with maniacal laughter, which manifested itself as the rattles and creaks of an old house settling and caused the house mouser to hiss and decide to look elsewhere for its mice. They didn’t even notice. They were too busy enjoying their moment of triumph. Freedom for them was finally only moments away. The vessels were approaching. The doors swung open. They pounced.

Seven highly colourful, rainbow-patterned, mice scampered across the saloon floor and hid behind an old overturned table as Frankie and Tamara came in through the doors low and fast, taking up standard positions either side of the still swinging doors. With Tamara’s cry of “Clear” Max followed the pair into the building at a dash, moving from side to side and swinging his Uzi from left to right before coming to a disciplined halt in the standard kneeling position in the centre of the barroom floor. “Go now.’’ Max shouted and Frankie launched himself, thrusting towards the bar in a crouch, swiftly moving in assertive attack mode over the glasses and bottles that littered the floor and making them fly in all directions as he swiftly traversed the twenty or so yards of empty space. Reaching the long wooden bar Frankie leapt upwards in a powerful bunny hop, coming to rest on its dusty wooden surface. Frankie’s image watched him, reflected in the mirrors and the hundreds of glasses which lined the barroom shelves, as he checked around the bar from his new vantage point. Left – clear. Right – clear. Frankie peered down over the bar and took a long, long, look around - up and down and then down and up. “All clear” the thousands of reflected Frankies said with a single voice and with Frankie’s declaration Max nodded towards the stairs and Tamara lifted her twin pistols high in the air, keeping them forward and her line of vision clear, as she purposefully made for the steps. Speed was of the utmost importance, taking them two at a time she was on the landing in seconds, crouching and looking from right to left at the two small flights that ran off from the main staircase. Left – clear. Right – Clear. She nodded once, giving the thumbs-up, and Frankie and Max retraced her steps in scant seconds, separating fluidly to left and right each taking a staircase in unified purpose and motion – Frankie to the left, Max to the right. Frankie froze at the top of his staircase and came to a defend-zone crouch, the shotgun he was holding pulled tight into his stomach. He could feel the stock in his gut, the shortened barrel in his hands, the cold steel feeling reassuringly good against his calm, dry palms. “In position” he cried, his eyes checking the corridor ahead of him, flicking back to the barroom below and then back to the corridor once again, and back, and back in regular measured motion. This was the tricky bit. Each corridor had five rooms leading off from its short length; two on each side and one at the end. These had been the ‘entertaining’ rooms, rooms where lonely cowpokes could get a bath, a shave, and pretty much anything else they wanted after a hard ride in the saddle or a hot day on the range. With a meeting of their eyes Max and Tamara moved as a liquid single entity taking up position each side of the first door. Max kicked it open with a single focused kick, their guns outstretched before them ready for anything the room had to throw at them. Max took the right of the room, Tamara checked the left – the room was clear, not even a beetle moved inside its shuttered window expanse. On to the next, and the next, left, right, left, right – all clear - until they finally came to the end room. Tamara kicked the door open this time, managing to send it crashing from its hinges and down onto the floor in a cloud of dust. They stepped back, the reduced visibility posing a threat, and waited for it to clear. This room was larger than the rest; it must have been for groups - party time pardners, no spurs, leave your guns downstairs - all clear. So far so good; the pair moved back up the short corridor, Tamara reclaiming her stance on the landing at the top of the stairs and taking over the job of watching the bar below allowing Max and Frankie to check the other set of rooms. They were all empty too, nothing much in any of them apart from some rotten furniture, a few empty bottles, and a discarded whalebone corset - red and edged with frilly black lace beneath the dust. Max, Tamara, and Frankie walked down the stairs and back to the barroom. “Well that was an anti-climax, I’ve had more excitement at a quilting bee.” Tamara said, “What next?” “Drink?” Frankie responded going behind the bar and picking up a bottle of bourbon and three dusty glasses. “Have you any ice?” Tamara asked and all three burst out laughing; the tension of the last quarter hour dissipating in an instant. An hour later and they were into their second bottle, the guns piled high on an empty table behind them, their guard more than just a little down. There was nothing here but a few mice, they could hear them squeaking as they scuttled invisibly around the room as only mice can. They raised their glasses: “To mice!” and laughed and somewhere both near and far away the lever moved just a fraction of an centimeter, a single notch, as the ball bearing span faster and faster down the spiral chute towards the hammer which was poised above the platform that would rise and ring the bell that would sway and clang and toll and topple the domino bridge which would push open the creaking saloon door that would release the spring which would send the hidden weight crashing to meet the huge bag of marbles causing it to force the multi-coloured glass spheres  into the volume of the still and empty saloon where, at the very least, they would smash all those bottles and glasses which were resting behind the bar to smithereens, then on to dust in a vortex of spinning , fragmented, broken glass light. Perhaps now was a good time to give the Seven their powers back, it would take tremendous energy but there was no shortage of that if you knew where to look…

As ever, it was Tamara’s instincts that saved them. Quick as lightning and hewn in the very dives in which they were making what might very well turn out to be their last stands. There was just something. The softest of clicks, the faintest of stirrings in the air and alarm bells were ringing on some instinctive level which Max had long ago ceased to marvel at as it was the cause of their many pitched battles being lost across the centuries. Frankie’s survival instincts were, of course, legendary themselves, skilled as he was in the dark arts of self-preservation, but it was Tamara’s reaction which saved them all. Max was, of course, a survivor, but he’d always take a moment to look around and see who else there was to be saved, and choosing to take that moment had caused him a great deal of pain through the years, none of which he believed he regretted, although his head had usually told him differently whilst it was ticking off his bleeding heart. As she dragged them all to the ground Tamara had the wherewithal to freeze enough of the air to stop the cascade in its tracks and as they rolled aside, the loss of momentum meant that a hundred thousand marbles were suddenly rolling across the hard wooden floor. This caused Frankie, who was the most vulnerable of the three, sitting as he had been in the most open space, a great deal of trouble as they all leapt for whatever cover they could. “You’re going to have to try a lot better than that…” muttered Tamara to herself as she took aim at a mouse which was a surprisingly odd shade of blue as it scrabbled about dodging the rolling glass carpet. Sadly, Frankie’s uncontrollable momentum as he tried to regain control of his movement nudged her arm at the crucial moment and the bullet went wide, allowing the blue mouse to escape into a hole just ahead of a torrent of glass finding anywhere and everywhere to go. There was a moment’s pause when the only sound was the sound of rolling glass on hardwood floors. Tamara and Frankie exchanged a glance, wondering whether the worst of it was over, and then the marbles shot back out of the mousehole like bullets, pinging and ringing as they ricocheted off the various objects hanging from the walls, and yet somehow failing to touch the building itself as if they didn’t want to harm it. Eventually, with the inevitable eventual loss of energy, they fell to the floor and were lost again amongst all of the others, rolling around with that endless rolling and clacking sound as they bumped up against each other. Somewhere out of sight, another transformation took place somewhere within the fabric of the building itself, which creaked and groaned in agony as its molecules were being forcibly rearranged. Somewhere else something splintered and a resounding Crack! Shot across the heavy air, obliterating the other noises just for a shocking moment. Tamara was already holding her hands over her ears and trying to press herself as close to the floor as she could to get out of the path of the glass, but that sudden jolt made even her jump and she suddenly understood what it was that had made so many of her victims start to whimper in terror down through the centuries. She was, however, determined not to be caught doing that herself, especially not with Max and Frankie around, and instead a slow trickle of blood oozed down her chin as she bit her lip to stop herself from moaning out loud. She opened her eyes to risk a quick look around. On her left, under the splintered remains of a table, Frankie was cowering, with his own hands pressed firmly against the soft fabric of his hat brim and covering his own ears. He seemed to be singing show tunes to himself to keep out the noise and had his eyes clamped firmly closed, his weapons lying uselessly beside him. What she didn’t realise was that he was hoping that the flying glass would somehow be transformed into flies and that he would know that there was a modicum of control returning to his life, but that was not to be, and Frankie really was never at his best when things were getting out of his control. So where was Max? She risked another glance, this time to her right, but she couldn’t see him. Somehow he’d managed to take a few blows from  flying arsenal and she could see the bloody trail leading across the floor and around the back of the bar. She blinked to clear her head, and decided to make her move and join him, just as the floorboards began to curl up and around her in an effort to trap her. She began to fight back, tearing at them with her bare hands, and as she did so she noticed Frankie was having to try to do much the same thing, but he seemed to be having even less success than she was. She was determined not to scream, though, deciding to let Frankie do that for her. Later on, she’d be able to mock him mercilessly about it, if they ever got out of this. Suddenly she heard a “Boom!” and a shriek as Max rose up from behind the bar, his feet still kicking at the planks which were trying to trap his feet. The hot shotgun he was holding was still smoking from that first shot and the hole punched through the front wall of the building by the explosive shell seemed to be pouring with a cloud of pink coloured gas. She wasn’t sure, but just for a moment it seemed to coalesce into a face contorted in agony, before it froze into a more angry looking one and the cloud shot forward and, in the blink of an eye was ripping and tearing at Max as he uselessly tried to fend off a gas attack with a rifle butt. Both of them fell out of sight behind the bar, but it was the cloud that rose up seconds later, this time in the form of a huge cobra, before striking back down, presumably at the remains of the floor where Max was lying.

The experiment continues...?

Link to Part Ten: http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/blog-tag-1-part-10.html