The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  ‘It won’t be long before they get him to talk though,’ said Dr Komodo from the passenger seat as the wheels of the car peeled and sent them flying out of the car park, ‘if he’s alive, he’ll talk eventually!’

  ‘I wouldn’t underestimate him, Carl’s hardier than you think. He might have been stupid enough to get caught but even with truth serum, he’ll hold out. I’ll put money down that he knows how badly he’s fucked up. I reckon he’ll want to do everything he can to give us a head start. He may be a daft prick, but he’s also a stubborn sod!’ Shoop wished that he believed his own words, the odds of Carl holding out weren’t good. He had to say what he’d said though. He couldn’t have any more doubt poisoning their effectiveness.

  The car screeched out of the car park and headed east out of the city.

  ‘Quick! Hail a cab! There they go!’ squealed Cat seeing the Mercedes bound out of the underground car park and fly away from them. It was quite a way off and she was sure that they wouldn’t have seen her. She didn’t want to be seen, her ways were sneaky, she would work at them from the inside not the outside, that was what the other two were for.

  Tim decided that a cab wouldn’t do the trick. Tim was too big to fit into an average taxi, the driver would undoubtedly drive too slowly and most of the cabs in the city had restrictions on their speed. He stepped out in front an approaching van, stopping it with a signal from his huge hand. The driver thought that, even if he’d hit the colossus in front of him the van would’ve stopped anyway with more damage done to it than to the gigantic human in the middle of the road. He looked like he could stop a freight train by letting it hit him in the chest.

  Tim reached in and pulled the driver out through the side window, which had been closed. He flung the driver away like an elephant tossing a small child.

  They all piled into the van and started after Shoop and his crew. They were quite far ahead and the Mercedes was much quicker that the van. They doggedly gave chase none the less. Luckily, the road out of town was relatively straight and they could see them clearly, hurtling away off in the distance.

  The Mercedes turned left down a dirt track and headed toward a secluded bay. By the time that the van reached the Mercedes Shoop and his men were skating along on the top of the water in a sea-plane. Tim darted out of the van, dipped his hand in his pocket, pulled out a tracking device and hurled it at the plane.

  It missed by mere inches as the plane rose into the air, Shoop brandishing an obscene hand gesture out of the cock-pit window.

  ‘BASTARDS!!!!’ bellowed Tim, frightening a local man nearby. Tim pummelled the poor sod into the ground to relieve a little frustration.

  He walked back to the van grunting angrily, seething, hands dripping with blood. Cat was grinning.

  Tim stopped, seeing her expression, ‘What are you so bloody happy about?’

  ‘Oh nothing.’ She said, ‘I just wouldn’t be surprised if we catch up with those four before long.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Asked the Satellite, grasping his bloodied neck.

  ‘Never mind,’ Cat made a dismissive hand gesture, apparently waving the matter away, ‘I think we should go and see if our friend Carl is awake yet.’

  Carl was awake. Carl was also nowhere to be found. There was just a trail of beaten policemen in the hospital. Apparently he’d been shot nine times and only woken up with a bit of a hang-over.

  ‘Bugger!’ said Cat.

  Chapter 19

  A Cold Window and a Warm Hand

  The hall erupted.

  Cheers and whistles leaped up and filled the air as the credits rolled up the huge projection screen hanging on the vast wall. All agreed, Shoop TV night was sensational, the best idea that anybody had had in years. Not only had there been incredible daring chases, battles with police, intrigue and mayhem, but they’d been treated to a new character. A strange little man in a lab-coat had emerged from the secret bunker in Scotland and made for Edinburgh, white knuckles on the wheel, staring intently at the road, determination tattooed on his face. He appeared to be out on very serious business.

  Ben, Mike and the editing crew for the program stood on the make-shift stage taking bows as the crowd erupted. They even had to come back for an encore. Then a hugely prominent, international rock band took to the stage and bounced the old stone castle off its foundations. They’d just played a stadium gig in Glasgow the night before and had taken the opportunity of being in the neighbourhood, well relatively speaking, to join in on the Shoop TV festivities. Their manager was an old Knight Templar and had served in many nasty conflicts with the weird and wonderful creepy things of the world. He had the scars to prove it too. He’d heard about the event and was desperate to get in on it.

  The entire band were made honorary Sion members and were sworn in accordingly. They received their Priory seals with much reverence. Actually, they received their Sion seals with a little too much reverence, so Jill took the piss out of them a little bit as she didn’t believe that there were many things in the world that should be taken that seriously. ‘Maybe tea,’ she said ‘Tea is important. Always tea with reverence, but only a little reverence, not too much! Reverence is all well and good, but too much of it’ll give you cancer!’

  The band laughed, started drinking herbal tea and then gave up drugs. Well, for a couple of days anyway. They used the following logic to start up again.

  ‘Jill said that too much reverence gives you cancer. When we’re off drugs we’re all serious and spiky, which is sort of like being too reverent……. anyone for a spliff?’

  ‘YEAH!!’ cried the rest of the band cheerfully.

  They worried a little that Jill would be disappointed with them. They didn’t want Jill to be disappointed with them as they were very impressed with her and found her to be a “deeply groovy lady!” They needn’t have concerned themselves. Jill didn’t get disappointed very easily. The last time that she’d felt even slightly put out was when a huge meteor had plopped out of the sky and destroyed the entire dinosaur population. But that had only really bothered her slightly. She didn’t dwell on it, she just started again. It gave her a chance to iron out some of the mistakes of the first time around.

  Of course Jill hadn’t been a She then, she’d been an it. The race of beings that she’d been born to were hermaphrodites, both sexes in one. They chose when they were going to get pregnant and just went ahead and did it. It saved a lot of hassle when it came to unwanted pregnancies and the like. This also meant that you didn’t get too many fourteen year olds bumping into you in shopping malls pushing scores of prams containing babies eating cheesy wotsits with pierced ears. In her native society wishing pregnancy upon someone was seen as a blessing and the sentiment was frequently used between parting friends. Instead of goodbye or see ya later people on her home world tending to say go screw yourself.

  The evening had been a grand success. Better even than the previous weeks with the Cirque de Soleil.

  The party continued long into the night, the morning and the next day. In fact, that particular Thursday didn’t end until Sunday afternoon. Such was the fuel that Shoop’s antics had instilled. Jill half hoped that next Thursday wouldn’t get any more exiting as Thursday could end up being a day that lasted a whole week, which would’ve been a shame as Jill was particularly fond of Tuesdays and didn’t want to miss them.

  She slept like the dead on Sunday night and didn’t surface again until Tuesday morning, happy that she hadn’t missed the whole day, feeling new and refreshed. Actually, Jill didn’t really need sleep, it wasn’t natural to her alien roots. She had never needed to sleep before, but she found it strangely pleasing. She really enjoyed a good nap. Wandering around in her subconscious was a marvellous past time, an experience that was completely unfathomable to any human as her subconscious pretty much spanned the entirety of the universe and even crossed over into some parallel ones. Her dreams were as epic as a million galaxies and, as Jill liked to put it, “A bloody good laugh!�
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  She woke, washed, dressed, made herself a good hot really big mug of one of Mike’s particularly delicious tea concoctions and went for an amble around the castle grounds. The snow still lay thick all around. It was cold but Jill felt warm inside and out.

  ‘Hey Ben!’ she said as she approached the only person conscious enough to venture into the gardens, ‘how’s it going?’

  Ben looked like his brain was a thousand miles away. He was staring vacantly over the scene with a slight smile tickling his face. He was clearly in a state of awe.

  ‘Oh!........hey Jill!’ he said as he snapped out of his dream-like state, ‘I’m good yeah…..really good!.... Would you look at this.’ He gestured with his hand out over the rolling white country, ’I mean……….wow! You know?’

  Both of their eyes draped over the undulating miniature hills of the garden, here and there patches of green could be seen through the white where evergreen trees refused to shed their leaves and the ground was dotted with dozens of the small purple winter flower that Jill and Mike had invented the week before. They looked out over the grand loch, the brutal mountains beyond it and the clear blue winter sky. It was breath taking.

  ‘Yeah, its good isn’t it.’ said Jill, cupping her mug of tea with hands and giving it a good slurp.

  ‘How’d you do it? I mean... look at it!’ his hands raised to encompass the vista like a spokes model presenting a shiny new car. His gesture felt a little inadequate for the scene, ‘How did you do this?’ his voice was awe smattered.

  ‘Well I can’t really take all the credit for it. What I contributed was barely ten percent of the work, the universe did the rest.’ Said Jill.

  ‘But still, you must be proud.’ He looked at her, ‘you MUST be!’

  ‘I enjoy it.’ She said, ‘its pretty. But I don’t like the term “I”. The physical conduit that represents my existence on this plain of reality just channelled and amplified the events that lead to what we see. I was just being practical really.’

  ‘Jill?’

  ‘Yes Ben?’

  ‘Shut up! You’re spoiling it for me.’

  Jill gave a little chuckle and playfully slapped Ben on the arm, ‘Good point,’ she said, ‘but you did ask!’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose I did.’

  They both stood for a while, silently letting the pleasure of their vision soak into their acceptance.

  The process went something like this;

  ‘BLOODY HELL, WOULD YOU JUST LOOK AT THIS!’ joyful yelps inside the mind, then, ‘bloody hell, would you just look at this.’ as the view slowly soaked into the brain. Then, ‘There’s no way I could ever be happier.’ Then a bit more soaking in of the scene and then, ‘well, I could be a little bit happier, if I had a brand new huge mug of tea I could be happier.’ Then, ‘bloody hell its cold out here, sod this, I’m going back inside!’

  It was all said in complete silence but they both appeared to reach the same decision at the same time. They caught the last thought together, turned and walked back to the relative warmth of the castle. I say “relative” warmth, as castles are never really particularly warm, even on scorching summer days. The plus side of this being that they do act as a nice place to cool down when the temperature rose. The irony is, however, that a scorching summer day on the Isle of Skye is the equivalent of a snowy winters day in the Australian desert, it just didn’t happen.

  They went up to Jill’s study where a log fire was burning and put the kettle on. Ben’s mind wandered as he warmed his hands on the hot cup of tea. His face slowly morphed into a look of concern as he became more and more lost in his thoughts.

  Jill had been standing at the window admiring the view. She felt Ben’s increase in discomfort and realised that he was turning in on himself. The room seemed just that little bit darker as she turned to look at him, the light from the snow blinding her for a moment as she tried to adjust her eyes to the dark room.

  ‘A penny for them!’ said Jill softly.

  ‘Sorry?’ blurted Ben, as if he’d just been woken from a nightmare. His head snapped up as the sound of Jill’s voice poured warmly into his ears.

  ‘Your thoughts.’ Said Jill, ‘a penny for your thoughts.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ben shaking his mind clear of whatever it was that had held his attention so ardently. Jill could see, though, that the thought hadn’t completely given up its grasp. ‘Sorry, I was miles away!’

  ‘Clearly.’ said Jill, ‘What’s up? Or should I just guess. I’m pretty good at guessing you know.’

  ‘Oh its nothing,’ said Ben, quite unconvincingly.

  ‘It’s your brother isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes and no!’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Jill.

  ‘Well, um, it’s just, ‘Ben’s thoughts trailed off again for a moment, trying to form themselves into a solid response. He pieced the puzzle of his concern together in his mind and continued.

  ‘See, um, I’m not worried about him finding us and doing nasty things. I’ve accepted that and am fairly cool with it all, no, it’s just that, well, I’m worried about how I’ll react when I our paths cross.’

  ‘How do you know that your paths will cross?’ asked Jill knowingly.

  ‘I don’t know, it just sort of feels, well, inevitable. I’ll not be able to rest knowing that he’s out there spreading his black soul over everything that he touches. I won’t be able to live the rest of my life knowing that he’s out there wantonly destroying people’s lives, like he did to my next-door neighbour and my parents. The pain that he’s caused shouldn’t be endured by anyone, and now his influence is so vast.’ His brow was furrowed with worry, clearly he felt partially responsible for what his brother had done. He blamed himself for not being able to do anything to prevent it.

  ‘It’s really very daunting,’ he continued after a pause and some very heavy sighs, ‘and something in my gut tells me that only I can stop him. I don’t know how, I just know that it has to happen.’

  Jill smiled at him, ‘You’re certainly a fighter by nature, that much is for sure.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ben with a self-deprecating exhalation mixed with an amused, yet embarrassed smile. He waved the remark away with his hand, ‘I don’t know about that, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have been another thieving junky on the streets if you hadn’t found me.’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ said Jill assertively, ‘You would’ve fought on regardless. I’m a pretty good judge of people. Ask yourself this, would I have taken you in had your worth been anything other than very apparent?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ben smirking, ’We’re both just plain fab!’ He joked

  Jill saw the uncomfortable nature of the joke. She saw that he didn’t mean it and that he wanted to get off the subject. She didn’t want to push him so she said

  ‘Yeah, I’ll go along with that!’ and the mood instantly lightened a little. Some of the weight seemed to slip off Ben’s shoulders.

  ‘But that’s all beside the point,’ said Ben, returning to his original concerns.

  ‘And the point is?’

  ‘How am I going to react when I see him again? How’s he going to react when he sees me? I’ve got the feeling that there’ll be a god-awful fight, and, when I think about it late at night and staring at the ceiling in my room, I can’t see how either of us could let the other live past the confrontation. I hate the thought, it makes me sick to my stomach but one of us is going to have to kill the other one!’ Ben hung his head, almost sobbing, tears welling in his eyes, despair dripping out of him, soaking the very room, making it feel even darker, colder, more damp, but Jill wasn’t affected by the drenching. She stood by the window, dry as a bone, a beacon of light.

  ‘Drink your tea Ben, it’ll clear your chakras.’ She said, which forced a reluctant chuckle from Ben. She was an expert at diverting people. She stood for a moment in silence, letting Ben’s mind do what it needed to do. He needed to despair right now, but she nudged it every now and then with a flipp
ant word, just to make sure that his misery didn’t take hold and drown the poor man.

  Jill sipped her tea and turned back to look out of the window, letting her eyes feast on the immense setting.

  ‘It really is quite special out there isn’t it? I mean, our bodies are nothing but the tiniest of tiny blinks compared to the enormity of activity that’s been going on out there for millennia.’ She put her palm on the window, it was freezing after the heat of the mug of tea and she relished the contrast. She breathed in deeply, closing her eyes, smiling, soaking in the sensation and letting it flood her. The euphoria made her laugh out loud.

  After a moment she opened her eyes and turned her head, catching Ben’s eyes with a soft blanket of larger perspective. She beamed her mind at him, gently, soothingly stroking him with it.

  Ben felt his palm flash from hot to cold and felt all of the pleasure of the moment that she was experiencing. He let out a little laugh, his heart bursting with the glee of it.

  Then, as quickly as the moment had come, it passed away and Ben was changed. The moment had been a microcosm, it made him see the bigger picture, the pointlessness of his grief, the wonderment of pain and suffering, hot and cold, death and life. The moment had been the universe in the palm of their hands and they let it go gladly.

  Ben saw it now. It wasn’t that he was scared of how he or his brother, the Boss, would react. It wasn’t that he was scared of killing or being killed, no, the whole problem was simply the fact that he was feeling fear. Jill hadn’t been scared of how her little science experiment would work out, if she had been, she would be seeing the world a lot differently than she did now. Instead of seeing breathtaking mountains outside the window, she would have been reminded of millennia of death and destruction, meteors, comets, dinosaurs, volcanoes and all manner of fire and death. Her hand on the window would’ve been shocking, uncomfortable, cold and unpleasant. In fact, if Jill had been scared, the world probably never would have happened in the first place.