The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  Shoop’s parents had believed that they’d found the absolute truth of the universe and couldn’t understand why Shoop wouldn’t adhere to it. This all seemed very hypocritical to Shoop. They wanted him to be anything his heart desired, as long as he agreed with them.

  In his early teens Shoop decided that he’d pretend to be a born again Christian for a while, just for a laugh, and every time he was anywhere near his parents he’d try and convert them, saying things like, “But this is the absolute truth of the universe, I can’t believe you won’t adhere to it!” which annoyed them quite a lot.

  Shoop had reached a point in his relationship with his folks where he knew that they weren’t going to stop there narcissistic belief that they were amongst the best people that mankind had to offer, due to the fact that they “cared” about the earth, and the environment, and animals, and human rights and hugged trees etc. etc. He realised that they were never going to even try to entertain the prospect that the universe was here before us and would be here long after we have gone the way of the dodo, and therefore didn’t care about us. The way he saw it, it was blatantly egocentric to think that the universe did anything other than not give a crap about the Earth and it’s inhabitants. He thought that the universe was too big to care about one insignificantly small group of people, who lived on an infinitesimally small planet, which circled an offensively insignificant star. Shoop thought he had more in common with the universe than his parents, simply because he shared the universe’s ability to not give a crap.

  Eventually, after decades of Shoop intentionally winding them up and going against everything that they believed, they stopped calling him and left him alone to do whatever it was he wanted to do; finally realising that the only way to the absolute truth of the universe was to realise that, when push comes to shove, nobody actually knows a damn thing about anything and there really is, unequivocally and absolutely no point to existence at all! This realisation gave them both massive nervous breakdowns and they spent the rest of their lives as vegetables.

  Callously, Shoop didn’t give a toss.

  Back in the dream, tasting the fluff from the carpet had become boring for the young Shoop and there was nothing else in the room that grabbed Shoop’s attention, so he resorted to doing impersonations of the weird woman sitting at the table with his parents. He started mumbling in a sort mock wordless whine that got progressively louder every time she would say her line, “Is there anybody there?” His mother shot him a look that didn’t so much say “Stop it or else!” but more “Darling, you are being disrespectful of another human beings deeply held beliefs and that makes me feel sad. I want to share the fact that it makes me feel sad and find out how that makes you feel.”

  Shoop gave her a look that said, “Piss off!”

  “Is there anybody there?” Said the woman again.

  “Is there anybody there?” Said the boy Shoop in the most mocking tone he could muster, which was very mocking indeed. As everybody knows, five year olds are very good at mocking people. Shoop could mock the life out of most other five year olds, in fact, if there had been some sort of mocking Olympic event, Shoop would undoubtedly have snagged the gold.

  “Is anybody TTTTHHHHEEEERRRRREEEE?” He mocked again.

  Suddenly Shoop felt a gust of cold air fly straight through him. Everything in the room began to shake, a cushion jumped off the throw rug on the couch and the clay dragon spat out all of its incense sticks. Everything in the room whirled around in a hurricane of unnatural activity.

  Shoop’s hamster cage, which was perching on top of a very high and shoddily built bookcase, decided that it was going to make a break for the door and hurled itself off the shelf.

  “BARRY….NOOOOOOOOOOO!” Cried Shoop. Barry was the name of his hamster. It was the name he would’ve liked for himself had he not been named by drug addled hippy morons.

  Shoop woke up with a cold damp crotch where his drink had poured onto it and a warm wet finger being squelching into his ear. Without hesitation he reached forward and flicked George with viciously abnormal strength in the left testicle.

  George stared into oblivion for a moment as if to decide whether or not he was in pain. He furrowed his brow a little, cocked his head to one side and then the agony hit him. It took hold of all his motor functions and he dropped to the floor squealing like a hen-night at a strip bar.

  Shoop raised an eyebrow and frowned at George with not a hint of sympathy. As far as he was concerned George had deserved his punishment.

  After a moment or two George attempted to speak. “You were dreaming the dream again.” Is what he tried to say, but because of the wincing and gagging it came out a little more like this:

  “You were …. Cough …. drea ….. gag ….. splutter ….. dreaming …...puke ….. hack ….. the drea ….. boak …. Cough ….. the drea …… splutter ….. splutter …. Gag …..puke ….. cough …. hack ….. cough …. The drea ….. cough ….. gasp …… the dream again …. spew ….. splat …. gasp”

  Shoop ambled over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a stiff gin while George tried to compose himself and stop vomiting.

  “My dreams are none of your damn business,” Shoop hissed over his shoulder. ”I thought we’d covered that before.”

  “Yeah,” strained George, the veins on his neck settling down a little but the bright red of his face still glowing, “I get the message.”

  Shoop swiftly threw the gin down his neck, poured another, slapped some pills into his mouth from a pillbox and washed them down with the second drink. He liked to call it his three course breakfast. The pills were an entire day’s sustenance in easy to swallow form. They had been developed by The Sphere Of Influence and had been sold to numerous military and astronautic agencies around the world. Shoop liked them because it meant he never had to chew again. Shoop didn’t like chewing. He much preferred liquid sustenance.

  “Was there a reason for waking me?” asked Shoop.

  “Well it certainly wasn’t to let you prevent me from ever having children that’s for sure,” George fumbled to his feet clutching his groin, “I’ve found some information on that belt buckle you brought in.”

  “Go on.” prompted Shoop.

  “Well, you were right about it ringing a bell, it did with me too. Do you remember maybe four or five years ago there was that American chap who claimed that Jesus had survived the whole crucifixion thing and spent the rest of his life peacefully meditating and teaching in the east.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Shoop gazing off into the middle distance picturing the memory. “I forgot about him. He won’t be having any theories about anything any time soon that’s for sure. Not unless he’s figured out how to put those little pieces of his brain back where they should be”

  “I’d still like to know how you managed to give the poor sod a lobotomy using nothing but a toothpick.”

  “Well George, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you ever cross me you’ll get first hand experience.”

  “The only reason I hang around here is for your warm, affable company Shoop.” Said George sarcastically, “Anyway,” said George moving things along as the idea of pain was not a welcome subject for him, especially with his groin still aching from Shoop’s heavy flick, “Something about the belt buckle you found put me in mind of him. I don’t know why, I think it was what Americans call a hunch. So, I went through the file on him and as I was scanning through it I found some photos.” George paused to take a hit of brandy, “If you remember, you tracked him down to that crypt in India, you know, the one he reckoned was the last resting place of Jesus.”

  “Yeah I remember.”

  “Well, at the time something about the crypt didn’t seem quite right. I couldn’t figure it out five years ago, so I thought I’d go back to it and study the pictures to see if I could track down what was wrong but the more I looked the less I saw. There was something that was bugging me but I couldn’t pin it down. I’d look for a while, then go back and
read through the file to see if I could find anything there; wonder off and try to find the symbol somewhere else etcetera, but I kept drawing a blank. This went on for quite some time when I noticed something. The more I looked the more I found my eye travelling to the same place in the photos. It was so obscure and subtle that I almost completely missed it. It was a small carving in the wood of the wall of the tomb. It’s barely even visible with the photo we had so I zoomed in on it and cleaned it up, here look.” George handed Shoop an enlargement on a section of the wall in the tomb.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “There,” George pointed to a specific part of the wall where a barely recognisable ruin of a carving could be seen. The tomb was housed in an ornate carved wooden structure in the centre of an unassuming white stone building. Around the walls of the internal crypt, were carved patterns in the wood that seemed quite uniform, except the one section that George had brought to Shoop’s attention.

  “You’re right, it doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the room but what is it?” asked Shoop.

  “Well, at the time we were there I seem to remember thinking that it might be some sort of vandalism. I suppose that’s why I kept looking straight past it.”

  George handed Shoop a piece of clear plastic with a scanned printout of Bunty’s belt buckle on it. Shoop placed it over the picture and lined it up with ruined carving. Apart from the letters depicted, Shoop could see that the designs were a near perfect match for each other. The carving had been so degraded over the years that it hadn’t seemed even vaguely similar to the buckle, but when placed, one over the other, the similarity was clear.

  “The carving on the wall in the tomb is in Hindi, but basically can be translated to P.O.S.” said George, “It’s very stylised and degraded but the letters can just be made out.”

  “Bugger!” Shoop sighed heavily and dropped his shoulders.

  “What? I thought this was good news, it’s a lead isn’t it?” said George, a little confused.

  “Yes George, it’s a lead, but the thing is it’s a lead that smells a bit like it could be religion based, and you know how I hate getting too involved with that crap. Let the church goers have their fun and the unwavering power of the Pope continue by all means. I mean, as long as they keep it behind closed doors and it doesn’t get in my way it’s fine, I just don’t like it when I have to deal with it. Especially when it’s related to crackpot conspiracy theories about how Jesus didn’t actually die the way the churches have been telling us for two thousand years. The church hates it when people tell them they’re wrong and that they’ve based their entire religion on thousands of years of Chinese whispers and power struggles”

  “Give me a vampire or an alien to tear to pieces and I’m happy; they’re easy. You can just run in, smack ‘em over the head or blow them up and nobody tends to mind too much, but as soon as you start messing with the church you get all those crazy Vatican bastards coming after you. They are, man for man, infinitely nastier than anything I’ve ever faced, even that huge sewer dwelling mutant super villain I came up against in eighty nine, which is odd really, because they’re supposed to be the stronghold of all that’s decent and good in mankind.”

  “I think you may be jumping the gun a little bit there Shoop, all we’ve got so far is a loose connection between a girls belt and a two thousand year old crypt, let’s not loose our heads and go getting too excited.” Said George knowing how worked up Shoop got about religious things and weird things crossing swords, but secretly hoping that it was exactly as Shoop suspected.

  Shoop liked it when these things were all nicely compartmentalised and kept away from each other.

  For the most part, this is what happened. Vampires couldn’t go into churches without wincing with the agony of seeing so many crucifixes and little green men had little or no interest in Buddhist temples, which meant that weird things tended to stay away from religion. Likewise, if you mentioned that you believed in werewolves and leprechauns to the clergy, they tended to send for the men in white coats, which kept religion nicely away from weird things.

  This tended to be the trend but every now and then Shoop would dig something up that would bridge the two. These occasions always ended very messily, a few of which he’d just managed to escape from with his life.

  The Gentleman that Shoop had met in the crypt in India had been lobotomised for very good reason. He was about to build a bridge between the two worlds of the weird and the religious. Proving that Jesus lived beyond the crucifixion was bad enough, but this fruitcake believed that he’d lived on after his real death and was alive and well and still touring the planet. Shoop had stopped the lunacy just in time and his pet hate of the two worlds mingling had been narrowly avoided. He didn’t care if Jesus didn’t die at the cross, in fact he thought that it was more than vaguely conceivable, but as for managing to stick around the planet for two thousand years, well… that was clearly just plain lunacy. Shoop had done him a favour by lobotomising him. As far as Shoop was concerned, the little thorn in his side that had been that lunatic man had been plucked out and gotten rid of a good long time ago; yet here they were looking over the file of that particular thorn and contemplating the real possibility of sticking it back in Shoop’s side again.

  Shoop didn’t like things sticking in his side.

  “You’re right,” grunted Shoop trying to calm himself down with some more booze. “But we need to figure out what this all means without them upstairs figuring out what’s going on.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want them near this one. I’m getting some strange feelings about this and would rather the Boss didn’t know about it.”

  “What sort of strange feelings?”

  “The same ones I used to get in the old days and I want to figure out what it all means before the Sphere find out about it.”

  “Fair enough,” said George, doing his utmost not to sound too enthused by what Shoop had just said. Shoop hadn’t been able to feel the gut feelings he used to have for many years and the feelings, back in the day, always came before something exceptionally interesting happened. George didn’t want to get his hopes up too much though. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Well George, I’m going to have a bit more shut-eye and you’re going to find out everything you can about this Bunty girl. I want to know who she hangs out with, where she lives, what she has for breakfast, the lot. I especially want to know if she’s connected to any organisations. She was very clued up and I’d be absolutely amazed if she wasn’t being taught and trained by someone somewhere.”

  “I’ll get back to the computer then shall I?” said George.

  “Yip!” Shoop headed back to his comfy old armchair, “and be nicer about waking me up next time or you’ll loose both of your bollocks instead of just having one of them flicked!”

  Shoop floated back into his dream about hamsters and hippies while George shoved his glasses further up his nose, imbedding them in his eye sockets, and got to work.

  Some hours later George was trying to work out how he could wake Shoop up without causing himself injury. There was a good chance that Shoop would lash out at him just to reinforce that he should never try to wake Shoop in a comedy manner ever again.

  Shoop was on the armchair grunting and writhing. He was clearly having the dream and it was just a matter of seconds before he screamed out BARRY NOOOOOO at the top of his lungs. George decided it’d be best to go for the friendly approach. He filled a glass with a gin and tonic and started waving it under his nose.

  Shoop’s grimace was so deeply installed that even when he was asleep it didn’t change, even in the face of the grand hamster losing emotions in his dream. His face had cemented itself into a grumpy scowl years ago and wasn’t about to change its habits now. The whiff of gin made Shoop happy in his sleep and his expression twisted into a kind of pained smirk. It was as if his facial muscles had become so accustomed to Shoop forcing his misery on them that any other ex
pression made his muscles contort in manners that no face should ever be capable of. It was the facial equivalent of a paralysed person attempting yoga while having an epileptic fit… on smack!

  His brain registered exactly what it was that his nose smelt and his eyes popped open to search for his quarry. He grabbed at the contents of George’s hand, threw the drink back and, with a variety of sleepy grunts and moans, went for a refill. “What have you managed to dig up?”

  “Well, I’ve managed to get very little on the girl. All I could find was that she worked in a suburban high school as a guidance councillor. She was very much under the radar so I tried cross-referencing her with all known secret societies and came up blank. Then I cross referenced the names of all the school’s employees, just in case, and came up trumps. There’s a librarian that works in the school with her by the name of Jeeves and his name lit up like an H-bomb. He’s been a member of a number of organisations including the Rosicrucian’s, the Templars, the Masons and the Hermetic order of the golden dawn.”

  “A few heavy weights there!” exclaimed Shoop through a sleep and drink gravelled throat.

  “Yeah, but here’s the bad news, I used the Sphere’s computer to find him and it turns out they’ve got him pegged as a member of an organisation called The Priory Of Sion.”

  George let this information float in the air in for a moment, letting Shoop grasp the full gravity of it in his own time. He’d long since learned not to make Shoop feel intellectually inferior, it usually ended in physical pain. Shoop had only just woken, and was never very sharp until his gin started kicking in. Finally it hit him, “Priory Of Sion? ………..Shit! ………..P.O.S……… The letters from the buckle!”