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