The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  In the back of his mind he could feel the monster of his sixth sense lurking, the vessel was in there too, holding it back, keeping it caged for the time being.

  ‘How are you doing that?’

  ‘There’s no way I would be able to explain in the short time we’ve got, in fact I could probably yabber on at you for a decade and you’d probably still be lost.’

  ‘Try me!’

  ‘I don’t think you’d get it.’

  ‘Just give it a go before I go mental and turn you into a rearranged version of yourself!’

  ‘Shoop, I’ve been around for so long and have knowledge of so many things that the merest hint of what I’m capable of would probably turn your brain into a raisin, but what I will say is this; what’s happening to you has happened to others before you, but nobody’s managed to get this close before. I must say, Babarus did a good job this time! You’ve done very well Mr Winkle.’

  ‘Babarus? Whet the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself, The thing is.. well… we don’t have much time, so I’m going to have to talk at you for a while and it’s going to be an awful lot to take in. I’ll give you a moment, just relax, gather yourself and I’ll try and explain.’

  Shoop swigged another inordinate amount of gin.

  ‘Okay… relaxed… start talking or I’ll fucking dice you!’

  ‘Okay… If you insist, are you sure you wouldn’t like a little more time to gather yourself?’

  Shoop gave her a look that would’ve turned a warm-blooded animal’s veins icey.

  ‘Fair enough… well this isn’t going to be all too easy to hear but I’ll try and start at the beginning shall I?’

  Another icey stare over a glug of gin.

  ‘Right… well… Here goes. I’m capable of conscious reincarnation and have been for millions of years,’

  Shoop raised an eye brow, wondering if he should cut off the discourse to do violence but then feeling the bottle of gin in his hand, decided otherwise.

  ‘About two thousand years ago I thought I’d spend a few lifetimes on Earth, see what it was like, how life here was getting on, but something happened to make me stay for a little while longer than I’d intended.’

  Shoop looked at her suspiciously, not quite believing her but it rang true with what George had said before about the vessel having been around for thousands of years. He took another draught of the gin.

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Well, this Babarus character was one of my disciples, I was Jesus by the way.’

  ‘Course you were!’ Said Shoop dryly.

  ‘Well, Babarus turned against me…’

  ‘I thought that was Judas!’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Judas was lovely, he wouldn’t say boo to a goose and would’ve done anything for me. The Catholic church painted him bad so that they had a name closer to Judaism to demonise, Babarus made sure of that.’ Jill sat in her seat, leaning back and making herself comfortable. Shoop didn’t know why, but something about the woman made him feel at ease. People that put him at ease pissed him off and he made a mental note to himself to not restrict any desire to kill her that may come up in the immediate future.

  ‘So anyway,’ Jill continued, ‘Babarus found out about some of the things I could do, the reincarnation, the making of creatures, creating things and he wanted to be part of it. Over years and years he worked against me behind my back, trying to find out my secrets. He wanted the power for himself you see, he’d become drunk by the prospect of the power of never ending life and creation.

  ‘It was him that handed me over to the Roman’s for torture. He thought that he could get the rest of the information that he needed while they beat and whipped me. It didn’t do any good of course.’

  ‘Okay… but how come you didn’t know what he was up to, you being sort of other worldly and all.’

  ‘Well… I was a tad naive you see. First time on the planet and all.’

  ‘I feel like I’m tripping!’

  ‘Just bare with me Mr Winkle, I’d take more time but we haven’t got it.’

  ‘Whatever!’ Shoop finished the bottle and gestured for another, Jill had anticipated Shoop’s massive appetite and brought forth another bottle.

  ‘So after they killed you on the cross you simply reincarnated yourself?’

  ‘Oh no, the crucifixion didn’t kill me. I was only up there for three hours and crucifixion takes days. No… my mate Mary came into the crypt with healing balms and patched me up. The whole resurrection thing was all blown well out of proportion.’

  Shoop was, by this point, feeling a little overwhelmed by everything and drooped further into his chair, not able to argue against the seemingly ridiculous stream of nonsense leaking from the woman’s mouth.

  ‘So… what do I call you then? Jesus? The Vessel?’

  ‘Jill will do just fine for now.’

  ‘Jill?’

  ‘Yes… Jill.’

  ‘I can’t see today getting any weirder!’

  ‘That’s because you haven’t let today finish yet.’

  ‘Oh Christ!’ Shoop sighed and slumped a tad further into his chair, putting his hand up to his face in despair. The prospect of things actually getting weirder was not a welcome one. He’d expected to get to the Vessel, tap into it’s power and blast all his enemies to dust. Living the rest of his life without having to answer to anyone, free to walk the Earth and kill anything even vaguely weird that crossed his path. Power beyond anything he’d ever known. Freedom above any freedom he’d ever dreamt of. Instead he was broken, battered, facing certain death and listening to a tiny little black tea drinking hippy spout a world of verbal bollocks at him.

  At least he had a bottle of gin in his hand.

  He could die pissed, that was all he could hope for.

  ‘Anyway, after the crucifixion I decided to go back to India. I lived a long happy life, then another, and another, and just as I was about to head off and leave the planet, I started hearing about some strange and peculiar things, stories of monsters were being reported, creatures were coming into existence that shouldn’t have been. Goblins, were wolves, vampires, vicious gnomes and the like. I got curious and started sending some of my followers out to investigate the stories.

  ‘It seemed that Babarus had managed conscious reincarnation, he was still alive long after I’d been crucified. A hundred odd years after and that didn’t make any sense. He was mortal and should’ve been long gone.

  ‘It turned out that he’d been experimenting with some of my methods, but his twisted need for power had warped his experiments into hell-bent unwholesome beings who’s sole purpose seemed to be the destruction of everything that I had tried to accomplish. His experiments and his mind, it seemed, had gone somewhat array.’

  ‘And what has all this got to do with me?’

  ‘Haven’t you figured it out yet?’

  ‘Enlighten me!’ the sarcasm and exhaustion in Shoop’s voice was palpable. He clearly couldn’t care less and was just simply enjoying a bit of time with some gin, that and a slice of time off the manic sensations that had been raping his every molecule since Florida.

  ‘I stayed because Babarus had upset the natural course of the planet. We’ve been trying to find and destroy each other ever since. For two thousand years we’ve been trying to find each other, to stop each other.’

  Shoop’s eyes were bleary now, tired, starting to feel the sweet release of alcohol and ready for sleep. He was only half listening to Jill.

  ‘Again… what the fuck has this all got to do with me?’ he drawled.

  ‘Don’t you get it? You are one of Barabus’ creations! You are the creation. You’re what he’s being trying to achieve for two thousand years Shoop. You are the monster that found me!’

  Shoop took his hand away from his face and looked up, jaw heading southward as far as it could go and a questioning in his eyebrows that has not been rivalled before or since.

  He was
suddenly more awake than he’d ever been.

  ‘Had you not thought about why your “sixth sense” had been acting up so violently the closer you got to me? Hadn’t it occurred to you that your irrational hatred of everything odd was so venomous?’

  ‘No…’ Shoop shook his head as if to clear it of cobwebs, ‘no… I hated strange things because of something that happened to me… years ago… when I was a child!’

  ‘You mean the dream! The one where you lose your hamster.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Think about it, what happens in the dream?’

  Shoop’s eyes darted around, searching for reason in the memory, ‘There was a séance, they summoned something that shook the room up and my hamster was thrown across the room…’

  ‘Really? Or did the room start to go into disarray when you started to mock the séance leaders voice?’

  Shoop scanned his memory with fresh perspective. He wandered around the memory and to his horror and surprise, he found that she was right. He’d never thought about it before but she was right. In the dream, as soon as Shoop started mocking the woman’s voice, saying “is there anybody there?”, that was when the room started spinning, not because of the bloody hippies. It wasn’t the crazy misguided ether believers that had brought about the death of his hamster, had brought the strange spirit into the room, it was him!

  The strange things hadn’t started happening until he had opened his mouth. Before he had piped up they’d been praying for an ethereal reaction for hours. It was him, he’d made the strange things happen.

  ‘You’ve always hated the strange Mr Winkle, you just used that memory as justification for your hatred. You never saw he truth of it!’

  Shoop’s head was a whirlwind. Everything that he’d based his life on had been turned on it’s head in a matter of seconds.

  It dawned on him that he’d hated weird things before the séance.

  He’d hated the séance before it had killed his only childhood friend… Barry the hamster.

  He realised that he’d hated his parents long before the séance, solely because they were odd, strange and unusual. He’d hated everything even vaguely abnormal since his birth.

  It all clicked into place.

  He’d spent his entire life attracting the weird and peculiar in a way that he couldn’t explain. Strange things always happened to him and he had no idea why until now. What could be stranger to someone obsessed with protecting the norm than a being who’d been around since the dawn of life on Earth? What could be more worthy of destruction than the idea of a being that went against all human experience. A being that laughed in the face of everything that human’s took as fact, that spat at all human reason and religion, that pissed on the human races ideologies from such a great height.

  The more he thought about it the more sense it made. He had been designed to find this woman, this Vessel. Everything that he hated and hunted had been pointing at her for his whole life. He was a programmed machine of destruction.

  He thought back to when his sixth sense had subsided, those lost and troubled years when his sense of destiny had become so rancidly lost. He’d been jaded, when he stopped hunting so vigorously, when he stopped caring about what he was doing, his sixth sense had subsided.

  It had taken that small sniff of a trail to the Vessel to wake up his true vemon, his ultimate malice. As soon as he’d seen the seal on Bunty Auntumn’s belt in that dark alley in Edinburgh he’d felt it. A trail had started. The sixth sense had been designed to find Jill.

  He’d been built to find this person sitting in front of him, to kill this person. He was a pawn. Nothing more than a pawn in a much bigger game.

  This didn’t sit well with him.

  ‘Wanker!’ Shoop spat. ‘Who the fuck is this piss-ant and where can I find him?’

  ‘We have other hurdles to hop over before that Mr Winkle… for starters, when I release this hold on your sixth sense you will turn into a rabid homicidal maniac. You will kill me and then you’ll be exhausted. You’ll have little or no strength left.’

  ‘It’s the Boss isn’t it? I can find the strength to kill him!’

  ‘It’s not the Boss Mr Winkle, he’s as much a pawn as you and you can’t find the strength to kill him. You’ve been programmed to freeze when you try to, there’s nothing you can do about that, it’s built into your genes.

  ‘No… one thing at a time. Firstly, you’re going to kill me, throw me out of the window at the men down below as a distraction and hopefully you’ll have enough strength and time to slip past them. After that, you’ll come and find me in Iceland.’

  Ben shifted uncomfortably inside the cupboard at hearing this.

  ‘Sorry… but that sounds like a terrible plan. Firstly, there’s no way I’ll just “slip” past the Sphere, and secondly, what the hell makes you think that I won’t just want to rip you apart when I find you again?’

  ‘Once you’ve killed me, your sixth sense will be your own. I’ve had a lot more experience at this than Babarus and I’m pretty sure that killing me will stop your manic desire for my destruction. You’ll still attract the abnormal but you won’t have the unreasonable powers that you’ve shown over he last few weeks. You’ll be free to use your senses at your own discretion. You’ll have the choice to kill me again or not. You’ll be free Mr Winkle. As for escaping, there are factors that will become clear soon enough. I’m farely confident that you’ll make it away from here with your life but there’s always the outside chance that you’ll be captured. I can’t guarantee your safety but it’s looking like a possibility right now.’

  This sat somewhat better with Shoop. It was why he’d thought he’d started this whole thing. To be rid of the Boss and the Sphere of Influence. To live his life doing everything that he’d always wanted to do, to be free to hunt down the oddness of the planet and cut large lumps out of it all. Grinning maniacally as he did so and without the hindrance of anyone else.

  ‘So what happens if I do get away.’

  ‘You come to work for me.’

  This was not an idea that Shoop relished, it got in the way of his need for independence.

  Jill saw the look of discontentment on his face.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’ll only be for a short time. You’re only chance is to hunt down Babarus and help me stop him. Once that’s done, I will leave and you will be your own man. Free to clean up the mess that Babarus has made. It should keep you busy for quite a long time. Luckily, because of the way you are made, you should have somewhere in the region of three hundred years in which to keep fighting.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Your genetic make up will give you exceptionally long life and you’ll need it to do what you have to do.’

  ‘Three hundred years!?’

  ‘Yup!’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘No… Jill!’ She chuckled a little to herself while Shoop showed the normal amount of distain for such a groan-worthy Dad joke.

  ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘Well… in a moment I’m going to release my hold on your sixth sense,’ Jill reached into one of the drawers in her desk, ‘and you’re going to shoot me with this. I don’t mind dying, but it’s always nicer when it’s quick, so just plug me between the eyes and we’ll be done here.’

  The door to the cupboard burst open and Ben flung himself out, darting across the room, grabbing the gun and, standing between Shoop and Jill, pointed the gun at Mr Winkle.

  ‘NO JILL! You can’t do this, I won’t let you… I’ll kill him first I swear! I’ll… how do they say it in the films… oh yes… I’ll blow his tiny little brains out!’

  Shoop hadn’t moved.

  Normally he would’ve snapped the silly little pillock in half by the time he’d got half way across the room but something held him fast, kept him calm.

  ‘Ben, this is Shoop Winkle. Mr Winkle, this is Ben, the boss’ brother.’

  ‘Boss’ brother? Oh that’s just perfect. Well done… that
means I’v got a hostage, if not, at least another distraction.’

  ‘I’m sorry Mr Winkle but Ben’s time isn’t here yet. You’ll have to deal with the Boss without him I’m afraid.

  ‘Now… Ben… look at me.’

  ‘No! You’ll just try and stop me and I refuse to let this twisted little cretin from doing you any harm. I don’t care what you say I just can’t handle it… I can’t let you go!’ Ben was weeping now. The desperation in his voice dripped over the room as he pointed the gun at Shoop and started to squeeze the trigger.

  Jill spoke calmly and with compassion.

  ‘Ben,’ her voice soft and enchanting, even Shoop felt it’s effects. ‘look at me.’

  Ben resisted but the pull of her voice was too strong. Sobs wracking him he turned slightly, still keeping the gun trained on Shoop.

  ‘Please Jill! For my sake… don’t do this!’

  ‘Look in my eyes Ben.’

  He matched her gaze.

  ‘You’re stuck Ben. I understand that you don’t want to be lonely eny more and that you found a companion in me but you will find another companion. Different but the same. Your life won’t be over just because Jill won’t be in it,’ it shocked Ben to hear Jill talk about herself in third person but it made him begin to realsie that he had attached himself to a incarnation, not the true being.

  ‘Your stuck in what you want Ben, and it’s not letting you move forward. We have to move forward Ben. It’s the only truth to it all and believe me… I know! Change is the only constant.’

  Ben heard the words and knew them to be true but battled against it anyway. He couldn’t fac being alone again. Not again! He’d been alone for so long and the thought of doing it again, even for the briefest time, made him feel physically sick. The despair was acute.

  ‘I can’t Jill… I just can’t!’ His voice a pained whisper.

  ‘Jesus! Grow a set of balls will ya!’ Shoop spat out. He could never understand bleeding hearts. They made him feel angry. No damn self control.

  Ben raised the gun a little, pointed it at Shoop’s face and fired.

  To Shoop’s amazement, the bullet stopped right in front of his forehead, hovered there for a moment and dropped to the floor.