BLOG TAG (1) Part 6

Continued from Part Five http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/blog-tag-1-part-5.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:-

Max opened the door and there they were, Jeremy and Jemima concentrating on a game of chess. Jeremy was dressed in a cowboy outfit – black hat, rawhide waistcoat, chaps and spurs. Jemima in a pink and black saloon gown – bustled and flounced with a striped and feathered pillbox on her head. “Howdy partner,” Jeremy said, glancing over towards where Max was standing. He cocked his thumb over his shoulder. “He’s through there.” Max could hear the slight hum from behind the steel and rivet door; the machine was winding down. Max walked towards the door, grabbed the heavy steel handle and turned the crank. The door creaked open like an effect in a horror movie. Inside the soft blue light flickered and undulated, a miasma of blue mist hanging six inches above the floor. Small tongues of sharp, blue lightning flicked throughout the thin film of mist, small serpents of cold fire. Max scanned the floor… what was that? In the centre of the room lay the body of a man, blue lightning caressed his prone body, making him flicker in and out of view like an old, jerky film. The air smelt copper, electricity everywhere. It had to be Lee. ‘Lee!’ Max called, “Lee, are you okay?” Lee didn’t answer. Stepping into the blue mist puddle Max waded towards him. His ankles tingled where the mist touched and as he moved deeper towards the centre of the room the tingling became a stabbing prick of pins-and- needles, then red-hot piercing pain. By the time Max was standing over Lee’s fallen body his legs were on fire all the way to his knees. Max crouched: “Lee, are you okay?” Max grabbed Lee’s shoulder, turning him over so that he could see his face. Max gasped; it wasn’t Lee’s face at all. Deep black spheres stared out of a pool of darkness that seemed to be an empty space of black nothingness… what was it, a black hole? Suddenly the darkness darkened further and something began to move in the hole where Lee’s face should have been, except it wasn’t a hole it was a portal, a door to another somewhere, a somewhere that had no right to be anywhere on this planet, and certainly not in this room in Lee’s tower. The tower was insulated; just how had it been breached, and what was it that was moving deep inside the dark universe that had once been Lee? Max jumped as the steel door behind him flew open with a deep metallic thud, crashing the concrete wall and sending a bell-like toll reverberating through the perfectly round chamber. “Howdy partner,” Jeremy shouted above the din, “STAND BACK!” Jeremy drew the plastic six-gun from its plastic holster and pointed it at Max. He pulled the trigger, something flew from the barrel with a loud pop and then the world went mad…

He knew that they had been well hidden. He knew that they had been concealed when nobody would ever find them, unless they had an infinite amount of time and patience. If you could hide an entire universe in the space inside a single atom, and then surround that atom with such a huge number of similar atoms containing similar universes, the chances of coming across the  right one by accident were so remote that you would really have to be at least a minor  deity to even have the remotest chance of tracking them down and, whatever that artist was, he was nobody’s god. Mind you, some of the beings Max had met during his long life might just have been able to manage it, but most of them, he knew, really couldn’t be bothered with that sort of nonsense and preferred experimenting with the various effects of  messing around with the chemicals that they’d forged during that first big party back in the old time. “Perhaps”, Max wondered as reality cracked, twisted and folded around him in a myriad of colours which human minds couldn’t even of begun to imagine, “it’s time for another Big Bang...” and he put aside a millisecond of his concentration to design the flyers, the invitations and the guest list before he thought better of it. After all, the problem with any Big Bang was that you never really knew what you were going to get, and another eternity spent as a silicon-based lifeform wasn’t something which he was quite prepared to risk just yet. Still, someone or something was having a jolly good go at messing around with things and this troubled Max greatly. Someone or something had managed to hijack Lee's great experiment and had been using it to track down the children, and that someone or something therefore probably thought that they had a pretty good crack at finding the source code. The problem, as ever, with things that exist on a quantum level is that quantum events had  a rather nasty habit of spontaneously popping into existence, having a bit of a dance with their anti-matter opposite numbers, and then annihilating each other before anyone had any chance to notice that they were there. Occasionally, however, the annihilation was less than wholly successful and you were left with the kind of “somethings” which he was dealing with here. Spontaneous manifestations and almost-but-not-quite replicas of the children, torn from the heart of an atom by the gut-wrenching power of Lee’s rather remarkable tower. The problem with these proto-children is that they were also almost-but-not quite perfect in much the same way as someone picking up a dropped penny is almost-but-not-quite a billionaire. In these sorts of games, “almost” just didn’t really cut it. Instead, these quantum nightmares were now running riot, shaping their own twisted view of reality to a form of their own choosing, and that really wasn’t likely to be a good thing. What they really needed, he thought, as he pulled the rubber sucker-tipped dart from off his forehead, was putting over someone’s knee and being given a damn good hiding. He idly wondered, briefly, whether he could transport them to a suitable time when that sort of thing was less frowned upon, and so he was distracted for a few moments from noticing that when pulling the dart away, his face had remained attached to it instead of to his skull. His detached face grimaced at falling for such a simple kindergarten trick, but he was actually in luck because his relocated eyes were able to notice “Jemim-ish” just in time as she swung the blunt end of a hobby-horse at the back of his neck. He ducked, stepped backwards into the ruins of Lee’s face and vanished off on his travels again.

When Lee came around he was surprised to find that he was clutching a wooden hobby horse far too closely to his chest. God, how his head hurt and his face felt like it had been ripped off then clumsily replaced by somebody who didn’t quite understand where ears, eyes, and a nose should be. All of his features felt just a little bit out of alignment, a fraction of a fraction of a millimetre off the centre of where they belonged. His face felt disjointed, crazed slightly almost like it was made from a crystal with million upon millions of individual facets. Lee lifted his hand to his face and stroked his chin. It certainly didn’t feel crystalline. It felt like skin. He shook his head. He had to pull himself together, stop his imagination running away with him. Throwing the hobby-horse to one side Lee got to his feet. Ouch, that hurt even more now that he was standing. He walked towards the control panel; he really needed to make sure everything was closed down, the last thing he wanted was to open a hole in the Slip and watch the universe funnel away into God knows where… at least he didn’t want that to happen just yet. Lee was confused… when he’d started this project for Max he was sure that he’d known what he was doing, but now… well now, he wasn’t sure about anything. This tower, what was it for? And Max, just who or what was Max? Lee wasn’t even sure about himself. Who was he? What was he becoming? His eyes flew over the knobs and switches; his hand making adjustments to the ebb and flows, turning down a dial here, up a dial there, flicking a switch, pressing a button. All to the original design, no changes, not even the controls. It would have been child’s play to swap out the old buttons and switches for a laptop and an active screen but they had decided not to do that. There was a reason for it, oh yes a very good reason… but just what was it? Lee couldn’t remember. Behind him a door opened. Lee turned to see who had entered the control room; Jeremy and Jemima… was that their names? Lee was pretty sure that it was. Jeremy was dressed as Robin Hood in Lincoln green, a feather in his jaunty hat and Jemima as Maid Marian, be-wimpled and bodiced with a radiant smile. ”Good morrow sire” Jeremy declared as Jemima offered up Lee a curtsey. “Would’st thou like to join my merry band?” Lee watched as Jeremy raised his toy longbow and fitted a rubber tipped arrow into the string. It twanged as the arrow flew through the air towards Lee who, clumsily stepping to one side, managed to avoid it. It whizzed past Lee’s left ear and with a plop hit something behind him. Lee turned. Hanging in mid-air, six feet or so from the tower floor hung Max’s face, suspended, the rubber tipped arrow sticking from the centre of his forehead. Max opened his mouth and groaned; a thick black substance which flowed like plasticized oil came out of his open lips and began to form a body beneath him. The black rippled and trembled as it became skin and cloth and leather, changing texture and colour as Max’s skin and hair, clothes and shoes, gradually emerged from out of the blackness. Max opened his eyes; he was back and he’d brought the answer with him. Reaching into the pocket of his jacket Max took out a long thin envelope and, tearing the seal, took out a single sheet of paper. Unfolding it with care Max began to read aloud…

“Green butterfly twelve; Purple tree seventeen; Brown imp one hundred and thirty three” Max began, intoning the words as if they were some kind of incantation. Lee looked across the room. Thankfully, the children had stopped dead, like statues, as if hit by a magic spell, or, better yet, a sudden dose of Calcifying Lottswyphe Syndrome. Well, whatever it was that had happened to them, Lee was at least grateful that it had. He needed a moment of peace, an opportunity to think and to try and work out what this was all about. He had, after all, that kind of a mind. That was what they employed him for. Lee looked back towards Max and noticed from the way the wafer thin parchment was unfolding itself, the paper seemingly doubling in length for every fold it lost, that Max might be talking for some considerable time as yet. The words continued to come; First a colour, then some random-sounding object and then a number. Some kind of a substitution code, perhaps...? No, whomsoever was controlling this little lot would have used something far more cunning than that. On the other hand, the intonation, whilst somewhat soporific, did seem somehow to have a kind of almost familiar hidden meaning for him, which was, of course, utterly ridiculous. He shook his head. He was suddenly feeling  tremendously thirsty. He crossed the room, mentally chiding himself for not paying more attention to the words as Max droned on and on in the almost mantra-like monotone that he seemed to have decided was the best way to read out loud something so utterly bland and rhythmical, and which would have been tedious to listen to even if it had been being read by your greatest fantasy should they have been sitting there sitting there stark naked under a big sign saying “Take me now, you irresistible sex god, you!” He could, Lee thought, at the very least try to throw the occasional joke in. That was always the problem with these so-called higher powers and their portentous ways; they really had no sense of humour. Lee imagined that he had read more interesting telephone directories, and then realised that he had actually read more interesting telephone directories. Right now, however, what he really needed was a drink. His mouth felt like he had spent a fortnight in the desert searching for a fallen angel... Now, where the hell had that memory appeared from, and, more to the point, just whose memory was it? Lee remembered the glazed looks on the faces of his friends when, as a boy, he had insisted on reading out the binary converted value of Pi to the ten thousandth decimal point before he would allow them to drink his stash of lemonade. Lee had never had many friends, but this kind of thing did tend to test their loyalty. However, now, listening to Max droning on and on and on, he started to realise quite what an ordeal it must have been for them all, and he whispered a pointless apology in the general direction of his own personal history and raised an imaginary glass to their memory. Why was he thinking about drinking again? This thirst was really starting to overwhelm him now. He stumbled across to his desk and pulled open a drawer. Inside it he kept a small milk crate full of bottles of soda-pop, for those nights when he really needed to keep a clear head and couldn’t be bothered leaving the room to go and fetch one. He grabbed the nearest of the glass bottles. Dandelion and Burdock. That would do nicely. Strangely, it never quite tasted as good as he expected it to, nor quite the way that he thought that he remembered it did, but no matter, it would do the job nicely. He twisted the cap. The fizzing sound momentarily drowned out Max as he droned on in the background, “Peach butterfly five hundred and two; Turquoise orangutan twenty seven; Brown cantaloupe one thousand and ninety six...” Lee put the glass neck of the bottle to his lips and took a gulp and then paused. “What did you say?” Suddenly it had dawned on him that he knew precisely where he was supposed to look for the solution to this ridiculous code. It was so obvious he almost kicked himself for having been so slow on the uptake. “Hold on! I need to write this down!” He shouted across to Max as he scrabbled around in the desk and grabbed a pen and a notebook and then he paused for a moment, gnawing on his own lip, knowing full well that he was going to totally regret what he was about to ask. Then he asked Max anyway. “Could you start again, please? From the beginning...?”

Tamarra had lost her. One moment all three of them had been wading their way through the bustle that is the Nanjing Road in full flow, walking east on their way to the People’s Square - and the next she was alone. Well, if it is possible to be alone with thousands of people all around you. She should know better than to trust Frankie, but she couldn’t manage to pull this off alone, not with the way Max had been behaving. But now she’d lost Flavia and she was down to one again. Somewhere inside Tamarra someone was humming. Well, at least she still had Emma Cornucopia and she sounded content enough… at least she was for the moment. But there was going to come a time when she’d want to be out and with the other three. That was the reason she’d sought out Flavia; as a companion for Emma until it was the time… and of course it evened things up. Max had Jeremy and Jemima and she had Emma and Flavia – or at least she’d had Flavia until Frankie had turned up on the scene, stepping out of nowhere and knocking coffee all over the place. Now Frankie and Flavia had disappeared and she was down to one again. How was she going to make the end without all four? Tamarra scanned around her; she towered above the heads of the mass of Chinese shoppers that surrounded her and in the normal course of events would have been the centre of attention. Of course, she’d taken precautions against that and although she could be seen, she’d signalled that she wasn’t to be noticed. As far as the crowd was concerned she was nothing unusual, despite the fact that she’d taken out her wings and was causing quite a breeze as she gently flapped them ten feet above their heads as she hovered. Tamarra couldn’t see them anywhere, they’d certainly moved fast. She flapped her way towards the square, moving swiftly, her wings beating time to some music that only she could hear. She searched the crowds below. It was no use; she was never going to find them. It was then that she noticed Frankie standing smoking a cigarette at the entrance of Metro Line 2. Gracefully she swept down to land beside him. “I love it when you fly at me like that.” Frankie purred, a cloud of blue-grey smoke curling from his flaring nostrils. “Want one? They’re good, Hongtashan, Red Pagoda Hill to you, best smoke in the whole of China, a million Chinese cancer victims a year can’t be wrong.” She shook her head. No, she didn’t want a cigarette, she wanted Flavia. Just what had Bennie done with her? Bloody Max – if only he’d stop being so incorruptible, after all what did it matter to him if this shitty little planet and all the shitty little people on it were extinguished. There were plenty of other places to go, plenty of other life forms to amuse themselves with. Just because Earth was Trader’s favourite planet and the people on it continued to amuse him, despite his growing ennui. It wasn’t as if Trader had got it even half right. In fact he’d done a pretty poor job – what with slugs and wasps, cancer and cholesterol, and all those bloody religious contradictions. That was the thing with Trader, it was all trial and error; he was a gifted amateur at best. Somewhere deep inside Tamarra a sound emerged as Emma began to mumble. What was wrong with her? A few moments ago she’d been humming now it sounded as if she were chanting. What was that she was saying: “Green butterfly twelve; Purple tree seventeen; Brown imp one hundred and thirty three…” Just what the hell did that all mean? “Give me a cigarette,” she said nudging Frankie in his elegantly suited ribs. What had he called them? Red Pagoda Hill? Hongtashan? Whatever. Tamarra drew the smoke into her lungs – well it wasn’t as if it was going to kill her or anything… and with that Emma began to cough and cough and cough.


Some considerable time later, Lee staggered down the long spiral staircase which penetrated deep into the Earth beneath his precious tower. It had been a long few nights and he was exhausted. Max had droned on and on for hours and then, as he had read out the last digit, he had paused, whispered the word “End” and started all over again, his voice cracking with the strain. Lee tried to offer him some of his Dandelion and Burdock, but Max just ignored him, and so Lee had instead feverishly started what seemed to be his own allotted task and scribbled down every word of that bizarre incantation, and then had to listen to it through another three times just to make sure that he’d got it all down correctly and to fill in the odd gap. Lee knew that his own memory was pretty impressive, but he also knew his own limits. He had wondered, briefly, whether it might have been more sensible to simply try and wrestle the exponentially growing paper from Max’s grip, but one look at him standing there looking so determined soon persuaded him away from that ridiculous idea. Thankfully, at least, the children had remained stock-still throughout. He had worried that some greater power might animate them to prevent the message from getting through to him, but then it dawned  on him that whatever greater power that it was would probably prefer to find out what Max was actually saying, and was probably doing his or her listening through the children anyway. After all, wasn’t that what this was really all about? Finding out “The Answer”, whatever that was supposed to mean. Certainly, when you considered the methodology being used, Lee wasn’t even sure that he really wanted to know what the question was. He did also wonder two, more troubling things; firstly that if who or whatever that Higher Powered being was was so very powerful, why couldn’t it just read the damned paper for itself...? And, secondly, because he himself was a mere mortal and had needed to listen to the message quite a few times through, any so-called “Higher Power” would probably have been able to get it all memorised on the first go, and was therefore probably a few hours, if not days, ahead of him. “Mind you”, he muttered to himself as he tried to stop himself from falling down the stairs, “There’s not been much sign of the world ending so far, so maybe everything’s going to be all right.” He shivered. He really wasn’t likely to convince anyone of that particular notion, least of all himself, but he couldn’t really stop now, could he? He reached the bottom of the staircase, tried to catch his breath, wiped the dripping sweat from his brow, and listened carefully for whether there were any sounds to be heard of the wretched children pursuing him down the spiral staircase. Several days with nothing to consume but bottles of fizzy pop had done little for his own constitution, so he couldn’t really imagine what it might do to two hyperactive young brats, especially after they had had what looked, at least, like a very long rest. Still, there was nothing to be heard, so he pulled a small key from inside his undershirt where it usually hung on a thin chain forged from an improbable alloy around his neck, and opened one of the seventeen doors that led off the landing at which he had arrived. The door opened into a vast, cathedral-sized space, the floor of which was covered with glass bottles of almost every colour and size imaginable. He picked one up, a brown one with a butterfly moulded out of the surface of its neck. He grabbed another, purple one, which had a faded and partially ripped beer label saying “Orangutan Lager” peeling off it. “Oh yes,” he thought to himself, “I know exactly where to look!” and he was depending on his own strangely-built mind to find the order in the chaotic looking scene laid out in front of him. Then he happily set about his impossible seeming task, finally happy in the knowledge that all those years of struggle, trying, and eventually succeeding, to capture lightning in a bottle had indeed had some actual purpose.

Emma’s cough grew louder until Tamarra began to shudder with the ferocity of the storm going on deep within her. Tamarra tried desperately to control Emma, dumb her down, make her coughing stop, but the harder she tried the worse Emma’s cough became until Tamarra’s body began to jerk to the rhythm of the hacking. Frankie watched incredulously as Tamarra’s whole body began to rise and fall, jumping into the air then crashing to the ground like a wooden marionette being pulled up and down by some sadistic puppeteer. Suddenly Tamarra let out a scream and seemed to be yanked a full ten feet into the air. With a flump and a huge exhalation of air she crashed back to the ground and lay still. The coughing inside her stopped as Emma fell silent. ‘Was it over?’ Frankie wondered. And then as if in answer to his question the coughing began again but this time it came from Tamarra. She coughed and coughed, each repeated bark getting louder and louder, longer and longer, with less of a pause between each until the cough became one long, continuous drone; sounding a little like a badly damaged vacuum cleaner that had been vacuuming up gravel for days. The volume continued to rise until with a final terrific yelp Emma Cornucopia flew from Tamarra’s mouth, unravelling like a ribbon before filling out and coming to rest at Frankie’s well-heeled feet. Emma smiled up at Frankie: “Can Flavia come out to play?” Frankie felt blessed; this must be his lucky day. “Come with me and we’ll see what we can do.” Frankie replied smiling down at her. He offered her his hand and Emma took it. “Let’s go find her, she’s waiting for you. I’m so pleased that your cough has gone. Would you like a cigarette? They’re… “Yes, I know - good… Hongtashan, Red Pagoda Hill, best smoke in the whole of China - I’ll take one. Well, it’s not as though it’s going to kill me or anything is it? Might make me cough a little, but I enjoyed Tamarra’s and without it I wouldn’t be here.” She smiled up at him as she took the cigarette, “Thanks Frankie, how’s the fly problem.” Frankie suddenly lost his smile, he’d been clear for weeks, all under control, but now she’d mentioned it he knew that they’d be back. That was how it worked. He was fine so long as he didn’t think about it, but the moment that he did… buzz – a fly flew past his ear and landed on the collar of his shirt. Frankie reached up and flicked it off. “C’mon,” he said “We’ve got to go; we’ve got a train to catch. They walked towards the entrance and down the steps to Metro Line 2. “Better finish off that cigarette, we don’t want to break any laws.” Emma drew deeply on the cigarette, threw it to the floor and crushed it dead with the heel of her white sandaled foot. “What about Tamarra?” She asked. “What about her?” Frankie replied. “I’ll just be a minute.” Emma ran back out of the entrance to where Tamarra lay, she knelt and whispered in her ear: “Don’t worry, I be back for you.” Then reaching around behind Tamarra’s back she plucked a long white feather from one of her wings: “I’ll write you,” she said “Yes, I’ll write you and let you know where to find us”. Then she was up and away and back to Frankie.


Lee danced and tiptoed slowly through the sea of bottles, taking infinite care not to knock any of them and cause any chaotic misfortunes to the delicate structure of their layout. If Max’s careful readings were to be believed, the secret to universal harmony lay somewhere in the precise pattern that the bottles were standing in in this room at this precise moment in time. If anything were to upset the fine tuning of that, the secrets could be lost for en eternity, or at least until the universe could be manipulated once more into wantonly displaying the one answer which everyone was looking for in so blatant and obvious a manner. And if that were to happen, then it was hardly likely that Lee would ever get another chance to see it. Other, unimaginable minds would, instead get that privilege and Lee himself would be doomed to know that he had been so close to knowing the answer and then would have had it cruelly snatched from his grasp. Well, he wasn’t going to let that happen, not on his watch. If it took him the rest of his life, he would gather together the bottles on the list, in the order stated, and he would uncork them and release the genii of knowledge. Oh, yes, it might not seem that obvious an answer at the moment, but he knew that if anyone could fathom it out, then it was him. After all, hadn’t the message been read out to him personally and put in a format that only he was ever likely to understand? It was obvious now that he was meant to work out the answer, as if it was his destiny. He had already tracked down the first half dozen bottles and placed them carefully in their allotted positions on the floor of the antechamber. He knew that he was on the right path as, as he positioned them next to each other, the fragments of power that he had once trapped within each of them started to respond to each other, fizzing and crackling as if trying to reach through the coloured glass and reach their neighbours. This, Lee decided, was going to be fun. As he positioned the latest bottle next to its fellows, he heard a slight snap of power as the electrical bolt within it leapt across and actually caused the green bottle to wobble and tap against the amber surface of its neighbour. After that, it all went very quiet again, apart from the sound of the low drone coming from Max warbling away again from somewhere far above him. Lee carefully consulted his notes and set off on another careful visit into the bottle room. After about half an hour, he had managed to carefully manoeuvre himself about thirty feet into the room when he started to lose his balance and his uplifted toe just grazed the top of one of the bottles as it passed over it, giving him just the tiniest of electric shocks. He froze as best he could, and wobbled about on the spot, watching whether that bottle was about to topple over and start the kind of bottle-based domino topple that would have made record books the world over if there had been anyone else there to witness it. The bottle settled itself down again. Lee considered for a moment whether the shock was some kind of defence mechanism designed to stop him from picking up the wrong bottles. After all, none of the others had shocked him when he’d first touched them. Then he realised that he’d been holding his breath for quite some considerable time and exhaled gratefully, before attempting to return to the task in hand. This latest bottle on the list was a comparatively easy one to get hold of. The number was quite a low one and he thought that he could already see it out of the corner of his eye, as if it was somehow calling out to him to go and pick it up. He carefully placed his foot back on the floor and was preparing to make his move when about a hundred bottles exploded all around him. He spun around, crashing to the floor and smashing several more as he did so. As he cried out in rage and frustration he looked towards the doorway, and, between blinking away his tears of disappointment he thought for a brief moment that he saw a Bishop brandishing what looked like a machine gun, and then he saw Max pouncing on him and then they seemed to be fighting for control of the weapon. Lee put his head down as another volley of bullets whizzed over his head and didn’t see much more after that, but he heard the smashing of glass all around him, and his body thrashed and heaved on the ground as he wept bitterly for all of his lost dreams.

So they weren’t going to catch one of the trains that ran every few minutes on Metro Line 2 after all. At the bottom of the steep concrete stairs Bennie reached into his white waistcoat pocket and withdrew a tiny bronze key. Emma couldn’t discern any part of a door in the pale green wall, but Frankie reached towards a one of the large red stars that were painted at intervals along its surface and the key seemed to disappear as he inserted it. Emma had no idea what he’d inserted the key into, the wall looked perfectly solid to her - no keyhole of any kind, not even a tiny hole. Even so, with a clicking of falling tumblers a large rectangle of wall clunked forward and Frankie levered it open. He gestured for her to go into the darkness, furtively looking around to make sure nobody was watching. Emma hesitated, it smelt musty in there and she’d had enough of being enclosed in the dark. Tamarra’s holding room hadn’t been illuminated, it had been really black inside Tamarra and Emma was sure that it wasn’t just the lack of electric light that had made the all enclosing darkness so completely pitch. She shivered; she was glad to be out and the thought of going into another black void wasn’t exactly enticing. She stood hesitating in front of the entrance to God knows where until she felt a hand in the centre of her back roughly push her forwards. Frankie pulled the door firmly shut behind him, blocking out the last of the light and making the darkness complete. “I can’t see. Where are we going?” Emma screeched - and then the lights came on and she could see that they were standing in a long dark tunnel. The light illuminating the burrow-like passage streamed from Frankie’s eyes and mouth, dimming each time he blinked and again when he closed his mouth to form the words to speak: “This way… be quick.” He said. “We have a lot to do and a puzzle to solve. Do you like puzzles? I hope so, because you hold all of the clues.” Emma was about to ask what Frankie meant when he began to walk swiftly away down the tunnel, taking his light with him and leaving Emma in increasing shadow. She ran after him, caught up, and fell into step three or four feet behind his immaculately suited figure; Frankie was in a hurry and Emma found it hard to keep up. The floor of the tunnel seemed to slope downwards, and as they walked further the slope got steeper and steeper. Before long Emma had to push pack on her toes to stop from tumbling forward and she wondered just how long this tunnel could be and how deep were they going to descend, where did it lead to... hell?. They seemed to walk for hours and then, imperceptibly at first, the downwards slope of the floor began to reduce until it levelled out once more. Frankie reached into his waistcoat pocket, this time removing a tiny silver key. Reaching forward he repeated his magical door-opening performance and stepped into the space beyond. Emma followed and found herself standing in a completely circular room. High above her head small blue sparks skittered across a latticework of red iron girders which seemed to go upwards into the darkness for ever. ‘Where are we?’ she asked. “Long Island,” Frankie replied “and you my dear are standing in the original Wadenclyffe Tower. Now, look who’s here to greet you.” Frankie’s headlight eyes dimmed as he turned to look at a figure that approached them from the opposite side of the room.  Emma knew her at once even though they’d never met before - it was Flavia. She watched as Flavia carefully picked her way across the sea of piled-up bottles that covered every inch of space around her; thousands upon thousands of bottles, all shapes, all colours, all sizes. It was a tricky operation; but Flavia seemed used to it and was soon standing, in front of Emma. Flavia reached down and took both of Emma’s hands in her own, she smiled at her and Emma beamed back. “Right.” said Frankie, “To work. Emma holds the code and Flavia has the touch. Let’s get this show on the road. We have work to do-be-do-be-do.”


A replica... A copy... A facsimile... Whatever you wanted to call it, it had taken years of painstaking work, all of which, of course, had been achieved in, by human standards, almost appeared to be an instant, and without hardly any of that tiresome hard graft, any agony or ecstasy, being needed at all, and what there had been needed of it had been burdened upon others, so that hadn’t mattered much, either. It was always handy to have worshippers to unload your grievances upon, even if, in the end, it eventually killed them, but then that was “blind, unquestioning faith” for you, and if they were daft enough to believe in finding their salvation through him, then, quite frankly, they deserved everything that was coming to them, even if it was nothing. Still, when you have eyes that can see pretty much everything, and minds that are, however much those minds might try to deny it, linked on some level, these things become just so much more easy to achieve when you are a great artist, and simpler still if you are a master forger. You didn’t even have to bother putting a spy in the enemy camp. Just a quick subroutine, and a keyword monitoring system in place and whenever something appropriate got a mention by the right party, the senses just tuned right in, the entire will became focussed on the event at hand, and  one set of  unsuspecting pawns just let any number of cats out of all sorts of bags without even noticing. So, no sooner were the words out of Max’s mouth, and the spark of a memory had begun flashing in Lee’s mind, than the copy of that hidden chamber was already ordered, planned, created, delivered and the invoice sent out so that it could be paid for. After that it was just the small matter of planting the seeds of a thought about the inherent dangers of such fundamental heresy in the Bishop’s mind, rewriting and manipulating his personal history to bring him to just the right place at just the right moment and the job was done, and the opposition thwarted. Every little detail, every little action that had put whatever event had been put in each of the bottles had been meticulously backtracked, traced and replicated, such were the powers that the artist had at his fingertips. The attention to detail was so precise that the copy was as indistinguishable from the original as to make it almost identical. In fact, with a swift shift to the timeline, it actually became the original, with the room, the very one that Lee was so agonisingly (and loudly) lamenting the loss of, now being little more than a cheap knock-off. The artist knew that he now had the answer within his reach. It did trouble him, slightly, that, for all his omniscience, someone had managed to conceal something so vital from him, but he dismissed the thought. It was obviously some strange quirk of non-logic that had managed to scramble itself. After all, if it wasn’t that, then he would have to start wondering about whether there was something out there more powerful than himself, and if that was the case, then, well, he might just have to consider taking some kind of oath of fealty himself and, to be perfectly honest, that way madness lay. Better to believe in a glitch, some twist of fate caused my the mangling of so many possibilities and realities. After all, even he couldn’t keep his eye on absolutely everything at once, could he? Everyone deserved a nanosecond off every once in a millennium. Anyway, it didn’t really matter all that much. He’d still managed to spot the problem and he was now dealing with it, so it hadn’t actually escaped his attention at all, had it? All it took was a bit of preparation to manoevre the final few pawns into position and then all that he had to do was to wait, and waiting was really something that he had got really rather good at.


Tamarra awoke under the light of the full moon. She was cold. Cold because a damp unhealthy wind was whistling up from the metro line below, cold because her torso was exposed allowing her wings the freedom they needed to function, cold because Frankie had Emma in his greasy grasp, cold because even though she knew she had a job to do, she didn’t really want to do it, not deep inside, none of her hers wanted to do it, and cold because Max… well, just Max really. Yes, Tamarra was cold. Getting to her feet a little unsteadily she looked around her… now, which way would they have gone? Tamarra felt sure that they’d gone down the steps to the metro below, but after that? Would they have got on a train? From here you could travel to anywhere, changing trains whenever you needed and ending up in any of the far flung provinces this nation was so crammed with. Yes, they could be anywhere – Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Heliongjiamg, Shanxi… anywhere or just around the corner. There was no way of knowing, Frankie would have seen to that; covering his trail with all the expertise he possessed. What now? Just what now? Frankie and Max had, between them, won this particular battle; each had a code-breaker and each had tool-maker… both could build the answer and do with it what they would. Tamarra shivered. She was cold and her hand was trembling. She looked at her right hand; it was indeed trembling. Odd? Why would just one of her hands tremble with cold and not the other one? Tamarra watched as the trembling in her had continued to grow until it moved in a shake, becoming a jitter like the flapping of a bat’s wing. The hand flapped and flapped until something flew out from it and floated to the floor below, lazily drifting to and fro until it settled on the floor, dreamily moving backwards and forwards until it came to rest on the floor, a sheet of paper drifting in the air then coming to rest on the floor. It seemed to float for ever, backwards and forwards, coming to rest on the floor before floating down once more, resting and floating, floating and resting, in the air and on the floor and in the air again, until finally landing as words began to appear on the paper. Tamarra reached down and picked up the page: ‘Eleventh star from the steps. Any key will do. Emma xx P.S. I said I’d write.’ Had she? Tamarra didn’t remember her saying that she would. Steps and stars, now what could that mean? The steps of the metro descended in front of her… oh well, what had she to lose? Tamarra descended praying for stars.

Stairs and stars and stars and stairs and stairs and stars and stars and stripes... “Surely, it couldn’t be that simple...?” she mused. The stairs led down into a wide rectangular tunnel entrance which was constructed below a replica of that famous national emblem, a carved bas-relief cut deeply into the polished marble surface. It seemed very dark in there, almost too dark for someone who was just going to catch a train to safely do so. She counted the stars, left to right, diagonal up, diagonal down and discovered that there were indeed eleven of them, so she made a direct line for the eleventh one across and made sure that she was directly beneath it as she carried on down the flight. Nothing significant seemed to happen, and she relaxed a little, wondering whether the precision really mattered all that much and wondering if she had just happened to walk underneath the tenth star, or the fifth, the outcome would have been any different. Still, with a “nothing ventured” attitude, Tamarra allowed herself to be swallowed up by the gloom, her feet rhythmically following the predictable descent of the stairway as it took her deeper and deeper underground. She found that she was suddenly very alone in the darkness without any of the other people who had been rushing towards their own destinies all around her just a few moments earlier. After a while, she began to feel a rather odd sensation, she felt as if the path of her forward movement was rotating slightly in the darkness, turning in a clockwise direction as if the wide, commercial, solid concrete, marble-clad utilitarian structure had transformed into a delicate spiral staircase taking her further and further and deeper and deeper down and down and down into the pitch blackness in front and below and now even above her. The “clunk, clunk” of her shoes on the marble had gradually changed to a “click, click” as her heels started to hit what sounded, at least, like metal. She paused, remembering an unfortunate incident with a heel getting caught in the mesh of a step on the Eiffel Tower and an unpleasant and quite lethal tumble. For a split second she quite unnecessarily blinked her eyes to shut out the light that wasn’t there, and her feet were now encased in some seriously high-end trainers. These, of course, she still couldn’t see, but she felt better knowing that they were there. After a moment, she drew in her breath and then continued in her descent, keeping one hand carefully in contact with the handrail as it followed its own similar twisting spiral through the darkness, running parallel, she hoped, to the steps beneath her new shoes. She smiled to herself about the fact that she now was, quite literally, a “woman in comfortable shoes” as the saying went. “Ah well,” she thought to herself “it makes a change from my usual round heels...” Her eyes seemed to be refusing to adjust to the darkness despite the length of time she had been in it, and nothing became even slightly visible, not even the stairs which she was continuing to descend. The continuing process of placing one foot in front of another was literally becoming an act of blind faith and she began to wonder, with growing uncertainty and nervousness, whether there would be a next step, or the one after that, and instead she would find herself hurtling down into an endless empty void with no knowledge of where, or even if, it might eventually end. It was all very well smashing into a desert at the speed of light if you could actually see the desert as you approached it. That kind of thing you could prepare yourself for, but this...? This was something new, something unknown and, she was surprised to find herself realising, something to be feared. Yet still, each time, she took another step, and another, and another, and each time a step seemed to appear underneath her incredibly well fitting sole. She did still have to consider every time whether this would be her last step, but equally, she was beginning to wonder quite how long this could go on for. Then, suddenly, from out of the darkness, she was blinded by the bright light of a door opening ahead of her and the vague sense more than an actual tangible image, of a silhouetted figure holding the door handle in one hand and holding out his other hand as if he wanted to take something from her. As she blinked her eyes to painfully try to adjust to the deluge of sight and sound breaking into an experience that had, she realised been all rather calm and soothing despite the fear, an all-too familiar sounding voice chattered impatiently at her, “You brought the paper...? Good! Good!” before snatching the piece of paper out from where she realised that she had still been clutching it in her free hand.

He stared at the paper, a mixture of disbelief and disappointment passing like the shadow of a stroke across his face. Screaming he ripped the paper into tiny shreds and threw it to the ground stamping his foot and spluttering, tiny specks of spittle flying all over Tamarra. “Where is it? Where is it, you bitch?” Tamarra looked at Lee with surprise. This wasn’t what she expected at all. Firstly she’d been expecting Frankie, secondly from what she knew about Lee his reaction was, to say the least, a little out of character. Tamarra looked at the shreds of paper that lay scattered around her trainered feet. Just what had he expected to see? In Tamarra’s mind a picture was forming. For no reason other than it was there; she saw a woman driving a big black sedan along a dark deserted desert road. The woman’s name was Sparkle, her teenage daughter Puppet; Puppet and Sparkle driving the highway in a big black sedan along a dark deserted desert road. They both looked nervous. Puppet was eating a Hershey bar trying not to let the crumbs fall onto her pink sweater, it was hot and the chocolate would melt as there wasn’t any air-conditioning in the car. Both were wearing black horn rimmed spectacles - “in disguise” as Sparkle put it. They were running away, driving and driving, mile after mile, going somewhere else, anywhere else, trying to get away from…. Tamarra tried hard but she couldn’t see what they were trying to get away from, but she knew it was something bad… something very bad and then FLASH… They were gone and Tamarra was back and staring at her trainered feet as the shreds of paper surrounding them began to reform themselves into a single sheet. Lee had stopped shouting and was also staring at the paper, a smile forming out of his scowl as he reached down and snatched up the paper again; “This is it, this is it!” He gibbered, almost tearing the paper once more as his trembling hands lifted it to his face. “Yes, this is it, this is it!” Lee was ecstatic as he read the words scrawled across the paper; “Sparkle, Sparkle, in a car. Travelling with Puppet you run so far. Fast along the road you fly, Even though you don’t know why.” Somewhere in the distance the sound of an approaching engine. “Sparkle, Sparkle, in a car. Travelling with Puppet you run so far. Fast along the road you fly, Even though you don’t know why.” The noise of the engine grew louder as Lee continued to chant. “Sparkle, Sparkle, in a car. Travelling with Puppet you run so far. Fast along the road you fly, Even though you don’t know why.” The noise of the engine was deafening and then stopped completely as the big black sedan smashed through the white tiled wall and skidded to a halt just a few feet in front of Tamarra. Through the unbroken windscreen Tamarra could see two figures, a curly, red head, wearing black horn rimmed spectacles and a teenage girl in a fluffy pink sweater also wearing horn rims. “Welcome to the tower. I trust you have the codes and bottles.” Lee pulled back his face, revealing a Frankie face beneath. “Deal with this.” The woman in the glasses shouted to her daughter as Puppet launched herself out of the car and across to where Frankie Lee was standing. Reaching around the back of Frankie Lee’s head Puppet tied one of her strings around his neck and pulled. With a loud PLOP Frankie Lee’s head flew off, disappearing beneath the car and coming to a halt: “Sparkle, Sparkle, in a car. Travelling with Puppet you run so far. Fast along the road you fly, Even though you don’t know why. Sparkle, Sparkle, in a car. Travelling with Puppet you run so far. Fast along the road you fly, Even though you don’t know why. Sparkle, Sparkle, in a car…” “Shut that off Puppet.” The woman, whose name had to be Sparkle, ordered her daughter. Puppet rushed towards the car and, reaching beneath the rear fender, pulled out the still talking head. She deftly crumpling it into a small ball and popped the wrinkled object into her mouth before swallowing it with a relish too obvious to be wholesome. “Good girl, Puppet. Good girl.” Sparkle turned to face Tamarra, removing her glasses to reveal eyes as green as cheese mould. She smiled; “You must be Tamarra, the Artist has told me all about you.” She smiled again, even wider, impossibly wider: “Puppet wants to play with you, don’t you puppet? Now stand completely, very, very, still…”

The car sat idly gleaming amongst the ruins of the wall, its paintwork and its glasswork all surprisingly intact considering the force with which it had struck the wall. Beneath the highly polished surface of the beautifully-tooled hood, the finely-tuned engine ticked and clicked as its parts slowly cooled from the long and incredible journey for which it had been especially built, forged plate by plate and screw by screw from almost indestructible elements torn from the heart of a dwarf star. Its surfaces were immaculate, its engineering as close to perfection as it is possible to come, and its comforts beyond measure and yet Sparkle had somehow decided to treat it like it was a pig sty. All through its brass and oak interior lay strewn an unbelievable amount of discarded food wrappers, empty drinks containers, sweetie wrappers, cigarette cartons, dog-ends, torn-up “Wanted” posters, parking tickets, used prophylactics, discarded make-up packaging, the old clothing and other bits and pieces of forgotten disguises, and an almost unbelievable number of screwed-up receipts, and that was only the tip of the iceberg as far as the junk was concerned. It spoke of travelling a long, long way, packing in haste, a desperate craving to get away, and a desire of not wanting to stop and to never look back towards wherever it was they had been escaping from. If the machine had ever had a heart, it would have been well and truly broken to see the state that it had been left in. On the back seat, half buried in the rubble left by these uncaring lives, amongst various other forgotten toys, sat an old rag doll, its faded clothing and worn-out materials speaking volumes about once having been much loved and played with, but now just thrown amongst the other unwanted junk. If the legs had been visible, any casual passer-by would have seen that they were long and thin and made of a material that implied tights of horizontal red and white stripes. The faded blue dress was star-spangled with white, and the roughly-stitched head was made of a flesh-coloured material which was half-hidden by a halo of red rags that represented its hair. If there had actually been a passer-by, however, they might also have been drawn to look again at the lost toy and not really know why they felt such a need to do so, and it is just possible that they might never have realised that the reason was that there was something very odd about its eyes, something not quite right, something perhaps more than a little devilish.  They might just have shuddered slightly to themselves, a momentary shiver that perhaps they might later laugh off as “someone walking over their grave” or whatever other superstitious nonsense came to mind, but they would have walked away from that strange harmless looking plaything just as quickly as they possibly could, carrying with them a sense of dread that they could never quite pin down the reason for. But there was indeed something very odd about its eyes, because normally the eyes of a doll might be stitched out of dark cotton, or be made of black shiny buttons, or they might even be craftsman-made eyes, designed to resemble the eyes of a real person, but these eyes were none of these things. These eyes were twin orbs of deepest, darkest black, and, whilst they watched with an impassive lack of care as Tamarra suffered her latest indignities at the hands of what looked like an innocent child, no light escaped them and no reflections could be seen upon their shiny surfaces. However, after a few moments, despite the dark heart which the mere look of these eyes might have once implied to that casual observer as they ran as fast as they could in search of fresh air and escape, those very eyes blinked for a second as a single tear escaped from one of them and trickled down the faded red circle of an artificial cheek before slowly being absorbed into its surface.

“And now to work, the time for all dallying done - all done, undone, de dum de dum. Leave her now Puppet but put her down gently, we don’t want her to break. It’s you and I puppet, you and I, as ever it was and as ever it will be - do, be, do, be, do. Yes, you and I whose heavy task is set. Do you remember that way back when my dear, when all was new and fresh and good? Way back when before this goddamnedawful mess? Na na na na na na nee… just how did everything get so messy? Na na na na na na noo… What are a gal and her daughter to do? Yes, what are a gal and her daughter to cock-a-doodle-do? All this way and what do we find? Another fine mess waiting to be cleared away, just another mess for Sparkle and Puppet and Poppet to clean up, up, up and away, another world, another messy missy, another messy mess, mess, mess. Bring me the brooms, bring me the mops. Oh, will this cleansing never stop? Well, if she thinks I’m doing this without her she’s got another thing coming.” Sparkle moved towards the car. “Put her in the back with the rest of the trashy, rubbishy, detritus. That’s where she belongs to live... alive, alive oh - in with new and out with the old.” Sparkle opened the shiny black door of the limousine, reached in and swept some of the rubbish off the back seat and out onto the ground, clearing a space in the chaos of litter that covered every inch of the interior of the vehicle. Out it all came, tumbling, over and over – plastic toys, gum wrappers, dead beetles, old pantyhose, lottery tickets, water bottles, shrunken rats, a polythene bag of something darkly red and not quite solid. Out it all came, tumbling over and over and coming to rest by the wheel of the car. “Yes, what are a gal and her daughters to dog-a-doodle-do? If a job’s worth doing then it’s worth doing well. I yam what I yam I says, I yam what I yam says I. Pass me the pickaxe, pass me the spade, undertakings a dying trade.” Reaching in again Sparkle heaved out a huge swathe of trash and flung it on top of the pile outside the car. “Out you come dust, out you come trash, memories, hopes, a torn satin sash. Out you come secrets, out you come teeth, excrement, kisses, potatoes and beef. Out you come whispers, out you come sighs, out you come Poppet it’s her turn for cries.” Sparkle grabbed hold of the old rag doll that had lay half buried on the back seat and carefully placed it on top of the pile of rubbish. “Bring her over Puppet. Bring her over and sit her with Poppet.” Puppet carefully lifted Tamara as if she was as light as a feather and, carrying her the short distance across to the rubbish pile, sat her next to the rag doll. “They you go Poppet, a doll for you to play with.” The dead dark eyes of the doll seemed to darken still further as the pile of rubbish began to tremble, twitching and tumbling until it moved as if alive. “Come Puppet, come Poppet, my daughters, my dears. Come Poppet, come Poppet, we’ll drink her wet tears. Come Puppet, come Poppet, my daughters, my loves. Come poppet, come Puppet, and put on your gloves.” The mouth of the rag doll opened and, as if caught up in some sort of vortex, the pile of trash began to force its way down her throat piece by piece - the plastic toys, discarded food wrappers , empty drinks containers, gum and sweet wrappers, dead beetles, cigarette cartons, old pantyhose, torn-up “Wanted” posters, parking tickets, lottery tickets, used prophylactics, discarded make-up packaging, water bottles, dog-ends, the screwed-up receipts, the shrunken rats, the old clothing and other bits and pieces of forgotten disguises all disappeared into the doll’s open maw and with each mouthful the doll grew larger and Tamara shrank a little. Taller and plumper the doll became, shorter and thinner Tamara, until finally the polythene bag of something darkly red and not quite solid crept up and burst as it entered Poppet’s mouth, disappearing deep inside her. She opened her brilliant blue eyes, yawned and stretched, letting out a horrendously noisy belch as she did so. “Welcome home my dearest Poppety poo, it really is so goodly good to be seeing you.” Sparkle reached down and carelessly snatched up the rag doll that sat beside her daughter. The faded blue dress was star-spangled with white, the tights a horizontal red and white stripe. A single tear escaped from one of the doll’s cavernous eyes and trickled down the faded red circle of her artificial cheek before slowly being absorbed into its surface. There was no mistaking her though; the doll was completely Tamara, the tiny white wings and red rag-doll hair gave up that particular secret. Sparkle flung the doll onto the back seat of the car with distain, then turned to her daughters; “Come on you two, get your gloves on; there’s work to do and our kind of work is best done in disguise”…


Lee sat on the floor amongst the chaos and the debris and the shards and splinters of coloured glass. He’d stopped weeping quite some considerable time ago when, despite the fluids in his system, no more tears would come and he had merely sat there, retching like a kitten with a furr-ball until he had exhausted himself. His life’s work, as far as he could tell, lay all about him in ruins, and he was pretty sure that unless one of these creatures who had come into his life and tormented him for all these years was going to grant him another extension, he was fairly unlikely to get another lifetime to work his way through. Miraculous and awe-inspiring though they might be, they were also unforgiving and merciless when it came to the lives of mere mortals, and Lee knew that he was probably already on borrowed time. He sniffed, remembering his grandmother and her insistence that it never did any good to sit there feeling sorry for himself and managed a small, rueful smile. Finally, he managed to steel himself to risk lifting his head and opening his eyes to survey the damage. He sniffed, shook himself and stood up, straightening his clothing as he did so. There was, after all, no point in letting yourself go, and he did need to look his best for the inevitable retribution. The glass  crunched under his feet as he turned around, revolving himself just once in order to see the entire room. Many of the bottles had survived the Bishop's attack, of course. It wasn’t as if he could have had enough bullets in that one small weapon, even if it was a weapon given to him by whatever Gods he worshipped. Max had seized him and was beating him to the ground long before he’d had any chance to rattle off enough shots to do any real quantity of damage to the bottles themselves, but the ones that he had hit, along with the ones that Lee himself had smashed as he fell and then ran for cover were enough to ruin the delicate balance of the structure of the pattern, and once the “Domino Effect” had done its work, it was unlikely that even Lee would have been able to rebuild the pattern as it had been. Despite his phenomenal capacity such things, there were just far too many variables, too many chaotic little details that might creep in to alter the delicately balanced mathematics of it all, and, he surmised, just one bottle being even a molecule out of position might effect the outcome of the answer, and he really didn’t want to be accused of being the butterfly that flapped its wings and destroyed the whole of reality. That responsibility, he reasoned, was not the sort of burden anyone should wish to carry upon their shoulders. He sighed, and wondered whether he should just get his sweeping brush and clear up. He did wonder, finally, what compulsive madness it had been to keep all of these bottles in the first place, and he realised that there must have been someone else’s hand in it, and shuddered at the thought of having been so easily manipulated. Then he stopped when his eyes fell upon the fallen machine gun, lying where the Bishop had dropped it when Max had grabbed him. Then a curious thought struck him. He looked at the room again, wondering whether, perhaps, that the intervention of the Bishop had been part of some greater master plan, and whether the floor of shattered fragments might actually provide the answer. After all, the colours and the objects were still out there in the debris somewhere, and even the numbers might still be relevant. He bent over and picked up the machine gun, put his arm through the strap and put it over his shoulder. If it was, he reasoned, a weapon of the Gods, it might just come in handy if he needed to open negotiations for his own survival later on. “What are you going to do with that, Lee...?” came the familiar voice of Max from the doorway. “I... I... I...” he stammered, before feebly adding “was just tidying up...” “Of course you were, Lee... Of course you were” smiled Max, knowingly “Meanwhile, I’ve been having a few words with our friend the Bishop here...” He dragged the exhausted remains of the once proud man through the doorway from where he had been still holding him in a vice-like grip whilst he’d been talking, out of Lee’s line of sight. Lee gulped when he saw him and look a step backwards, crunching more of the shattered glass as he did so. “Giving him a few lessons in alternative theology. We’ve had a nice old chat, haven’t we, Bish...? Managed to rethink some of his more highly held beliefs...” The Bishop, of course, said nothing, and then fell to the floor as Max finally released his grip. Max then turned his steely eyes upon Lee, before smiling the broadest of grins. “Quite a mess he made...” “Y-y-yes”, Lee was all that managed to summon up as a reply. “No matter” said Max, to Lee’s astonishment. The astonishment turned almost immediately to dismay when Max added “We need to be somewhere else. Get your stuff! We’ve got a journey to make...”


Lee was not a travelling man. He was terrified of flying, wouldn’t travel by boat as he couldn’t swim, and got car sick on even the shortest journey; so he’d never learnt to drive. He’d never even learnt to ride a bicycle - strange when you considered that he was raised in Peking, so he couldn’t even pedal his way around. To say Lee was nervous was an understatement. Lee was shaking as he gathered together his stuff which amounted to a change of clothes and half a dozen notebooks which contained everything of any worth that Lee possessed – his ideas, thoughts, observations; the sum total of a lifetimes work. Notebooks! In such an age Lee often wondered why all this wasn’t digitally held on his computer, but there was something about a notebook that helped him think, helped him to clarify his thought processes, helped him to distil those processes into a reality. Of course, the mayhem caused by the Bishop was a set back but, Lee had decided over the last twenty minutes or so, not insurmountable. He had his notebooks, the shards and glimmers of the great arrangement, if not in tact, at least available, and he still had Jeremy and Jemima and they were the real key. So with all that and his notebooks going for him all was not lost after all. Lee tucked his notebooks into the almost new backpack and began to whistle – whistling a happy tune, as the song said, always made him feel less afraid… and Lee was afraid, very afraid. It wasn’t just the travel, he knew that was a necessary evil, but there was something about those children that Lee didn’t like. Ever since the episode with the plastic gun and the bow and arrow something had changed about them, mind you that had been one weird episode, something to do with the dimensional shift that the tower sometimes generated. The creation of parallel dimensions was really the work of God, but Lee didn’t believe in a single supreme being - after all there seemed to be more supreme beings around than you could shake a stick at. Everyone knew about Trader and then of course there was the Artist, and they’d been hints of others some nights when the tower was at its most powerful. Other mighty beings,  slipping in and out of this reality from theirs – call then gods, or supreme beings, or even the eldritch ones if you chose, dark and powerful… yes, supreme…certainly. Parallel dimensions phasing in and out of the tower, like those distant foreign radio stations on FM radio when he was a boy. Hilversun, Luxembourg, Budapest - and in between the garbled foreign languages the wonderful noise of the static. It was the static that interested him, if gods were to be found anywhere it would be in the random confusion of the static. If only he could get that static under control. The arrangement might well have sorted it, still could if he could get it working. No not if… when… he would get it working. Lee lifted the backpack to his shoulder just as Max entered the room with Jeremy and Jemima. “Why are they here?” Lee asked. “They’re making the journey with us.” Lee looked surprised, “Why do we need them? Where are we going?” “The other Wyclyffe Tower, the original. It might be small but it has something we need.” “What’s that?” Lee replied. “The others, all of them – Frankie and Tamara, Emma and Flavia, Trader, The Artist, Benny, jeez I’ll even take the Bishop if I have to. Listen Lee, things are getting serious. It isn’t just the universe at stake any longer. It’s bigger than that. Bigger than you, or even I can imagine. It’s everything Lee, absolutely everything and if we get this wrong that’ll be it, everything will be gone and they’ll be no chance of anything again because everything won’t have ever happened. This isn’t about time, this isn’t about space or alternate dimensions - this is about nothing ever, a nothing so nothingness that it’s too empty to fathom. An empty like there’s never been before, everything gone because it was never there and never will be and nobody – no god, or supreme being, or even big bang to ever make it happen. Yes, it’s time we all stopped fighting amongst ourselves and joined forces to make this right, because if we don’t… well, that’s it. You see, despite everything Sparkle has just turned up just as it was written and she’s got The Puppet and The Poppet with her. So you see old fellow if we don’t stop all this tomfooling and fighting we are all well and truly royally screwed, fucked, nada. Now are you ready?” Lee stepped forward too confused to ask just who in Hell’s name was Sparkle and just who or what were The Poppet and The Puppet? Joining hands with the others he stepped forward as  they all fell, screaming and singing and laughing and whistling, into the whirling Dervish that was the Slip…


“Hello...?” Despite the vast proportions of the chamber in which she now found herself, to her surprise, her voice didn’t echo back at her. Odd that... How had she got here...? The last thing she remembered was... was... She realised that she actually didn’t want to remember it at all, whatever it was. She shook her head as if to clear it of an unwanted thought that was creeping into her mind and started walking. “Is there anybody there...?” she ventured, not exactly expecting a reply, and certainly not getting one. Just the slightly dead sound of her own footsteps which still failed to receive any kind of an echo or reverberation to confirm that they were really happening at all. She could tell that this gloomy old hall, or whatever it was, was huge, but she couldn’t get any sense of quite how large it was because there was nothing in it to give her any sense of proportion. Now that was one of the universe’s more bitter jokes. After all this time, all she found that she wanted was a sense of proportion. Since when had she ever wanted that? The more she peered into the gloom, the more she realised that she was in some kind of a dome, illuminated only by those twin windows set into a wall, some way ahead of her. Of course, she still hadn’t managed to work out yet whether they were a hundred yards away or a hundred miles, but, she reasoned, the only way she was going to find that out was to go over there and look for herself. She laughed again. Somehow every phrase that was coming into her head at the moment was inadvertently summing up her situation rather neatly. She’d probably been “looking for herself” for far too many years now, and still hadn’t found much that she would have felt comfortable writing home about. If she’d ever had a home, of course... Or someone to write to... She sighed. “What an odd thing to think about... and what an odd time to be thinking it...” she thought. Still, there wasn’t anything much else she could do apart from walk and think and walk some more. I still seemed odd though, that so many thoughts of comfort, domesticity and nurturing were flooding into her usually flint-like mind. Part of her, she realised, really just wanted a cuddle... She stopped. “Right!” she bellowed indignantly, “Stop this right now. What have you done with the real me?” But her words just drifted out into the large, empty void to be absorbed by the soft and spongy textures of those distant surfaces that she still hadn't reached and could only barely see. After waiting a few moments for the inevitable evil cackle to fill the air from her unseen tormentor, she shrugged when it didn’t actually come, and continued walking towards the light. If only she could see outside, she reasoned, she might be able to work out what was going on. Or, at the very least, where she was. Slipping into the slip was usually easy enough, but it did tend to help if you knew where you were setting off from. Otherwise you could trap yourself there, and it was never fun just waiting out an eternity or two, just hoping that someone would eventually pick on your square at random as their escape route. She seemed to be getting closer to the windows now. Either that or the walls really were closing in on her. But that would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it...? As she approached those twin, unblinking openings into the world beyond, it did, however, seem to her as though it was starting to get hotter and hotter, and her clothes were starting to stick to her as the exertion of all that walking had its inevitable side-effects. What she wouldn’t give right now for a long soak in a cool bath. She felt slightly dizzy for a moment, as if she wasn’t getting quite enough air, and her arms and legs were starting to feel stiff and heavy. She stumbled slightly and she had to reach out and steady herself, placing both of her hands onto the window ledges which, she realised far, far too late, seemed to be made of something organic, like... wool...? Just as she came to the realisation that those two windows onto the world really were a pair of eyes, and that what she could see through them was almost too difficult to bear looking at, the room finally closed in and encased her head so tightly in its woolen bonds that she couldn’t even hope to open her mouth to let out the scream even if she’d been the sort of creature who would have. Instead her muffled oaths of planned retributions and the kind of colourful language that she had once spent hours teaching to all of the dockers, sailors and squaddies she had once known were heard by nobody, as she was forced to watch impassively from the back seat of a huge car as the three harpies started their work.

The experiment continues...


Link to Part Seven: http://m-a-w-h-writers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/blog-tag-1-part-7.html