The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  The air was thick with hysterical laughter; the giggle fit was making it very difficult for the players to keep levitated on their teetering limbs.

  After a few minutes of chuckle addled writhing on Mike’s behalf, all four of the protagonists flopped to the floor and lay in a titter-some tangled mess.

  It was somewhat of an odd sight to see, especially given it’s setting in the plush, antique ridden, book smothered room of one of the oldest clan castles in Scotland. The sight made the man entering the room laugh even harder than the tangled lump of limbs were.

  It took him a good fifteen minutes to compose himself after the fit of giggles, during which he started hyperventilating and gasping into a brown paper bag, tears of joy streaming down his face.

  They all started to settle down a little. Jill went to put the kettle on. The gasping man eventually got around to telling the rest of them why he’d entered the room in the first place.

  “So, Paul, what can I do for you?” asked Jill.

  “Well,” Paul sipped his herbal tea and nearly choke as he forgot the age old proverb never giggle and drink tea at the same time. He coughed a little said, still smiling at the recent hilarity, “Um, see, the thing is, and I hate to break up all the fun with this, but I’ve got some bad news.”

  Bad news doesn’t tend to look right coming from a man who’s giggling, but this didn’t seem to bother the Sion and the others.

  “Thing is,” continued Paul, finally getting a grip on his laughing fit, “Well, you know how we sent some people to help pack-up Jeeves’ vault, well, the second load of people, that were coming from Fife, bumped into Shoop Winkle at the front door. They thought about maybe trying to get past him, but things got a bit emotional. Winkle threatened them, they had a bit of a group hug and then Shoop shot one of them in the leg. He’s alright and all, but it seems that Mr Winkle has made off with almost the entire museum that Jeeves had stored down there.”

  “Oh dear,” said Jill half-heartedly, still enjoying the memory of the giggles they’d just had, “at least they got a hug out of it, I really like hugs!”

  “Yeah, me too man,” said Gemma.

  “Do you fancy one now?” said Jill

  “Yeah!” spurted the girl enthusiastically.

  They locked in each others arms, engaging in a long and deeply felt embrace. Jill told Paul to carry on with his story. Other people around the room decided that they would like a hug too and before long, everyone was clinging onto to someone or other.

  “Thing is, “ said Paul over Mikes broad shoulders, “that after we found out about it, we sent some people to check on Jeeves in the school. I’m sorry to have to say it but, it looks like he’s been poisoned. Looks like a massive overdose of that truth serum that Winkle uses.”

  “Oh now that is a pain, Jeeves was my squash partner, anybody else want to take his game off him?” everybody looked at the floor knowing that Jill was a fierce squash player. “Fair enough.” Said Jill and as an afterthought, “If Mr Winkle keeps going on like this I’ll have nobody left to play with, but I suppose it’s all worth it, and I’m sure Jeeves will be fine.”

  “Yeah,” said Mike despite the fact the Jeeves was dead. He relinquished the nice warm hug he was engaged in with Paul and stood for a moment, enjoying the potent sense of satisfaction that the hug had given.

  “It looks like Shoop and his men have vanished. There was no sign of them anywhere.”

  “Oh I wouldn’t worry about that, he’ll pop up again. He’s quite tenacious like that, and besides, I shouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t just wondered up to his secret hide-out in the highlands. It’s the only place I know of where the Sphere Of Influence won’t be able to track him.”

  Shoop would’ve been greatly dismayed to have heard Jill mention the secret hide-out. The point of secret hideouts was that nobody knew about them, they were supposed to remain secret. Shoop’s hide-out had only been known to four people. Him, George, Dave and Mike, in actual fact it had been known to a great many other people. Shoop had had to hire workmen to help built it but made sure they would never say anything to anyone about it by cutting out their tongues. They were paid massive amounts of compensation and never had to work again, but it didn’t really make up for not being able to talk. He also informed them that if any of them even thought about trying to let anyone know about the place, then he’d know about it. He would then hunt them down, torture them, kill them, bring them back to life again, torture them some more and then mince them in front of their families before doing the same to them. Shoop felt confident that none of them had communicated the location of the bunker to anyone.

  Despite Jill knowing about the facility, none of the workmen had communicated anything to anyone. For some reason, Jill just knew things. None of her followers had any idea how she managed to just know these things and didn’t much care to find out either, they just really liked being around the woman. She made them giggle; she made them feel as if the horrors of the world were all part of a grand design. There were no answers in Jill’s world, neither were there any questions, life just was. It made everyone that came into contact with her happier, whether they wanted to feel that way or not.

  Nobody asked her how she knew what she knew, they just had faith in everything that she was. They didn’t have to try and have faith in her; it wasn’t a hard-acquired commodity. Anyone who spent time with her just felt it. Nobody really knew why they felt so relaxed and happy around her, they just did.

  “I suppose it’s a silly question, but did they get away with the map?” asked Jill nonchalantly.

  “I’m afraid so man.”

  “Bummer,” said Jill without an ounce of real concern, “I suppose that means he’ll be finding me before long, never mind, I’m sure it’ll all workout okay. We should try and get hold of Ben though, I think he’ll want to be in on whatever happens.”

  “Yeah!” said everyone in the room in unison.

  There was a brief silence. Then Mike piped up, as if something had suddenly occurred to him.

  “I forgot to tell everyone, I just went into town and bought the new Lord Of the Rings trivial pursuit game, anyone fancy it?”

  The room suddenly took on a glowing air of glee as everyone got very excited about the prospect.

  Mike ran off to get the game board.

  Chapter 11

  Cabin Fever

  It took Shoop and the rest of them six hours to travel to the hideout. Conscious that they needed to stay under the radar of the Sphere Of Influence, they went the long way around. They took the country roads across to the west coast, almost to Glasgow, and then headed north. By the time they reached their destination the sun was creeping it’s way into the winter morning sky. They arrived just in time, as they drove up the glen a blizzard started. If they’d waited another hour the road would have been completely blocked off. It added to Shoop’s sense of security. If they couldn’t get out, then the chances of anyone getting in would be minimal. Not that anyone would find them anyway.

  They pulled into the secret bunker.

  “I need all of this inside before anyone has a break. Take it down to the hanger, that should be big enough to house it all.” Commanded Shoop.

  “You could help us you know!” said Dr Komodo through his scowl, though bleary eyed from the journey.

  “You just lost that extra five percent I was going to give you dip-shit!”

  “Bollocks!” cursed Komodo under his breath.

  After that, no-one complained as Shoop went inside for a drink and some sleep.

  Shoop’s hide-out was very secret indeed. It had been built on the very site of the crash landed UFO that his mentors had found so many years ago. As I’ve said, apart from the tongue-less workmen, only four people knew of the place until then Mike and Dave went missing. For a while Shoop worried that they had told The Boss before their disappearance, but he had used it enough times since then to know that it wasn’t a concern. Shoop wasn’t happy about showing the indepe
ndents where it was, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

  Still, he did feel that too many of his secrets where being revealed. There was a quiet concern in the back of his mind. He’d given away too much to The Boss; on top of that Bunty Autumn and Mr Jeeves had known about his existence when they shouldn’t have done. Now the independents were privy to one of his most closely guarded secrets. He knew that if he ever fell foul of any of them, or his ability to pay them massive amounts of money for their services was compromised, then they’d turn on him faster than a tabloid on a celebrity. It was an uncomfortably precarious position to be in but he didn’t see that he had any choice in the matter.

  He was on the run from the Sphere Of Influence and had a strong feeling that the strange hugging men, Mr Jeeves and Bunty were all part of the Priory Of Sion, which meant they’d be looking for him too. He needed allies, and these men were the closest he could get to any. He saw difficult and dangerous times ahead and he needed a few handy guns by his side.

  He also had to move a hell of a lot of crap from Jeeves’ vault and he didn’t fancy doing it himself.

  He also sensed very lucrative times ahead, he didn’t know why he felt that way he just simply knew that if he made it through to the end of this mission that they’d all be a lot better off that they ever had been; this meant that he could rely on the band of misfits without too much anxiety. Still, there was a dark cloud on the horizon. Danger was imminent.

  Shoop had helped to finish off the building of the bunker with his bare hands in the early years of his helping Dave and Mike, which was unusual for him as he far preferred idleness to activity, especially when he could get someone else to do it for him. It was a characterless, charm-less underground series of grey rooms and extensive corridors. The road that led to it was little more than a dirt track and it ended at the side of the mountain that, fifty years earlier, had seen an alien space-craft smash into the side of it. The bunker lay under the mountain and the entrance of it was two massive vegetation covered sliding doors. Every time Shoop went there, great pains were taken to ensure that the opening of the doors was never seen.

  Before entering it, the surrounding area had to be scanned for life and a telescope scrambler engaged so that it couldn’t be seen, either by earth bound visual aids, or satellites. This nifty little gadget projected a hologram and had been developed from the technology salvaged from the crashed craft.

  The bunker was pretty much the same as any other, from an interior design point of view, that being that it had no interior design in it at all. It was concrete, pipes and cables with heavy metal doors and felt a bit like the guts of a power station. It served its purpose well, however. It hadn’t once been compromised and was one of the few places in the world that Shoop felt safe. He was confident that he and his team could take all the time that they needed to sift through the sheer mass of information and artefacts that they’d stolen. Even his paranoia about how easy everything was going was beginning to subside. He could relax a little, which was handy as he believed that life was destined to get a lot more complicated and dangerous in the months to come.

  Shoop had found that, invariably, if things go well for a while, the universe had a tendency to make sure that luck flipped over and he had to pay his dues in sweat and blood. Shoop hadn’t paid his dues to the universal machine for some time now and wasn’t looking forward to the bill coming in.

  The information that they’d managed to find while at Jeeves’ house had proved to be not just the tip of the iceberg, but a penguin perched on top of a thick layer of snow on top of said icy mass.

  Shoop and his team stayed in the bunker for weeks while George and Dr Komodo raked through Jeeves’ mountain of stuff. They were feverishly trying to find out exactly what they were looking for, as that seemed to be a point that nobody seemed to be too clear on. They just knew that Shoop’s sixth sense was rarely wrong.

  Because of the heat that they’d brought on themselves, both from the Sphere Of Influence and the Priory Of Sion, none of them could afford to be seen outside of the bunker. They simply couldn’t risk being found.

  After a few weeks Shoop wandered into the hanger where Jeeves’ things had been stored, to speak to George and try and find out how much longer they were all to be trapped in the bunker. The room was awash with papers, books and all manner of odd looking relics. George was nowhere to be seen.

  “George?” yelled Shoop as he trekked through the hanger and its heaped contents.

  “George!”

  “Hello? Oh, hi Shoop.” George’s head popped out from behind a pile of books with a big smile on his face. He hadn’t had to do this much research ever before and was clearly in hog’s heaven.

  “How’s it going?” asked Shoop.

  “Well, it’s been a bit of a hard slog,” he said, appearing not to mind in the slightest, “but we’re getting there. I think we may have figured out what it is that we’re looking for, well, sort of.”

  “Look George, I know you’re enjoying yourself in here, but you have to get a sodding move on with this shit! The boys are going mental with cabin fever. Yan stared at Carl the other day. None of us knew what Yan had done until we found Carl fourteen hours later, super-glued to the underside of his own bed. Yan seemed to find it all very amusing. It took us an hour to cut him off. His skins healing fairly quickly, but if his supply of weed runs out I don’t want to think about what he’s going to do to Yan.”

  “These things take time Shoop, you’re all going to have to be patient.” Said George.

  “Bollocks to that, give me what you’ve got and I’ll see if I can do anything. There must be something we can do to keep the boys busy.”

  “Okay, okay, look, sit down there for a minute.”

  Shoop planted himself down on a pile of flattened cardboard boxes while George went off in search of something. He came back brandishing some papers.

  “Well, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to separate the valuable from the not so valuable, which meant trying to figure out which information was worth money to somebody and which information was just interesting.. Problem with that was, it’s all worth massive amounts of cash to someone or other. The illuminati alone would buy us a country just for that pile over there.”

  “I’m not sure, but I think we’re looking for something that’s bigger than money George. My senses wouldn’t be as intense as they are for some thousand year old design for a food blender.” said Shoop looking at a piece of parchment with a diagram of a mill with a whisk attached to it. “Wow, he said, you really do have a lot of crap to sort through.”

  “You don’t have the slightest idea Shoop.”

  “Anyway, thousand year old blenders aside, as I said, we’re looking for something bigger and more important than cash, my sixth sense has never lied to me. There has to be something in this room that’ll allow me to finish The Boss off and sit pretty for the rest of my life. I want nothing short of total freedom and vindication.”

  “Well, there’s one thing that I’ve been looking at. You remember how I said that I’d found out that the Priory Of Sion could be two thousand years old.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, I’ve been digging into that while Komodo has been looking for cash generating papers and the likes. I did my best to trace the origins of the POS with the use of a number of documents without much success. It’s history is scattered all over a thousand different books and scrolls, all I could find out was it’s rough age, and some references to an earlier organisation that pre-dated it. It was all very vague. I was at the point of giving up when Dr Komodo found a map yesterday. Wait there and I’ll get it.”

  George disappeared again. He could be heard rummaging around and swearing for a while until he found what he was looking for.

  “Aha! Got it!” he staggered back into view, stumbling over some debris. He was holding a parchment encased in a simple wood and glass frame. He handed it to Shoop “Be very careful with that.”


  Shoop gave him a look that screamed, “What sort of a bloody idiot to you take me for?”

  “Right, anyway, we puzzled over this for a while not quite knowing what it was. It’s deeply coded. The more it didn’t make sense, the more determined we became, we were up all night staring at the damn thing. We eventually managed to make a little sense out of it. This writing here is a mish-mash of different languages, some dead, some ancient, some modern. It’s also slathered with codes and ciphers, the likes of which neither of us has ever seen. Komodo managed to come up with what we think is the code-breaker though.”

  “Good work Komodo!” yelled Shoop into the room, hoping that the man buried under papers would hear him. A muffled voice said something that sounded a bit like.

  “What?”

  “It looks a bit like a family tree on acid, with some steroids thrown in for good measure.” said Shoop eye-balling the parchment quizzically.

  “Yeah, but when you start using the code-breaker it starts looking a bit different. It starts looking a lot more like a map. You won’t be able to see it, it’s like one of those magic eye pictures, you have to get the knack of it before the full picture reveals itself.” George went on.

  “It starts here in the middle and jumps from location to location all over the world, from what I can make out anyway. I’m going to need to work on it a lot more before definite answers can be given.”

  “Interestingly enough it starts in India, in Srinagar Kashmir, in the very town where the crypt that housed the POS symbol that we found on Bunty Autumn’s belt buckle is.”

  “Oh no, this is Jesus related isn’t it!” said Shoop.

  “Well,” mused George, “the man that you lobotomised in that crypt strongly believed that Jesus had survived the crucifixion and fled to the east. He thought that Jesus had died, some sixty after the supposed crucifixion, in India.”