by Robin Jarvis
“I strike at the diseased heart of the Western enemy!” she yelled, lunging with all her strength.
The Ismus arched his back and swallowed a cry as the wand’s silver shaft skewered him. Staggering forward, he clutched the gleaming tip jutting from his chest and tried in vain to push it back. Behind him, the amber star burst into coruscating flames. They fizzed and crackled along the silver rod and leaped into his body.
The Ismus threw back his head, shrieking in agony. His face frothed and blistered with black mould. Branching growths surged swiftly from his mouth, trying to escape the magick, cauterising fires. But the might of the wand consumed every writhing strand, every pulsing bloom, every ejected spore. They spat and glittered around his flailing form, sizzling and smoking, until every unholy trace of Austerly Fellows had been destroyed.
And because the wand had been brought from that other Realm, where its power was even greater, striding among the smoking carnage of Mooncaster, looking with satisfaction on the corpses of the guards and courtiers strewn around the castle, their Holy Enchanter felt the death blow strike through his own chest. Sparks and flames erupted from his ribs. There was no time to cry out. As his hands reached to clutch the crackling wound, they crumbled to dust and cinders. His stricken body toppled, but was blown away as smoke and ash before it ever reached the ground.
On top of the gatehouse, Arirang surveyed what she had done and grunted with the satisfaction of a mission accomplished. She stared at the charred and burned husk of the man once called Jezza, impaled by the wand that still blazed with supernatural golden flames.
The Korean girl strode round the edge of the gatehouse roof and gazed out across a wilderness of death and horror that would take many lifetimes to repair. By the West Tower, she saw Martin Baxter with his arms round a woman. A boy carrying an infant was running to join them and they held each other desperately.
As her white hair whipped about her beautiful face, Arirang heard countless voices weeping in the wind. Throughout the world, the survivors of Fighting Pax were struggling to come to terms with what had happened. But now their despair and mourning would not be so impenetrably dark. There was light, if they chose to reach for it.
Arirang held her head high. For her, this was merely the beginning; she still had much to achieve. First she would find little Nabi. Then they would return home, where the greater, more difficult mission would commence.
“Hey!” a familiar voice called up from the courtyard below. “Anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Er… I think, ow – I think I busted some bones – ow!”
An uncharacteristic grin, the first of many, lit up her face as she sought the stairs and ran to attend to Spencer.
Snow began to fall.
Free will was re-established across the globe. 2.47 minutes later, the first murder, unrelated to Dancing Jax, was committed.
IN THE YEARS that followed, Grumbles the Conservius trotted up and down the tower steps more times than there were stars in the sky over Mooncaster – or so he muttered to himself. Gazing out over Battle Wood, towards the castle in the distance, he often wondered what had happened to the Ismus, for he never returned, and he thought that was a strange thing.
The unknown answers to many other questions irked Grumbles greatly. Just what had occurred on that night of smoke and turmoil? The ornate bed, with its beautiful occupant, disappeared from the tower that very same night and he found himself sighing wistfully at the remembrance of her lovely face. He should like to look on it again one day, but of course that was impossible.
It was all very vexing and if Them Upstairs knew those answers, they weren’t about to tell him. The eternal game of cards continued as it had ever done and, down in the tower’s bottom-most chamber, the piles of unused decks dwindled daily. The final end was creeping closer and that troubled Grumbles deeply. He also suspected that those diminishing stacks concealed one or two more gilt-edged cards to trouble the world and a growing unease crept over him.
Now, when he stood on the tower’s lofty roof and stared out at the hills and fields of Mooncaster, his horned brows creased with anxiety and he no longer paused to muse on why the White Castle had been painted a different colour, or tried to guess what was happening within its walls or down in the village.
“Some new trouble is brewing, that’s for sure,” he told himself. “I can smell it on the wind and my hooves do itch, which is as certain a sign as any. Oh, yes, some new awfulness is hatching, somewhere, someplace.”
Shaking his head with worry, he hopped down into the hatch and descended the steps. Beneath the great lantern, the four robed players continued the game. A skeletal hand placed the latest card on the stone table.
The Spectre from the Ashes.
11.53am, the Head Office of PlayKing Toys Corp, Chicago
Everyone in the boardroom was keyed up. They’d been looking forward to this meeting for three months. They didn’t mind that their celebrity guest was already fifty minutes late. They had spent that extra time going over the proposal and making sure they were all on message. They also spent a lot of that time discussing the controversy surrounding the new blockbuster movie that had premiered in New York earlier that week.
“So do we mention it, or do we not mention it?” Constance Trask, head of the creative team, asked.
“It’s like a huge elephant in the room if we don’t,” said Brayden, one of the two designers present.
“So we get it out of the way at the start, yeah?” Constance suggested.
Madison Page, the marketing director, tapped her wedding ring against her coffee cup for attention and peered sternly over the rim of her owlish spectacles.
“I don’t care if that elephant takes a two-hundred-pound dump in the middle of this table,” she said severely. “If our guest doesn’t want to talk about the movie, or anything else, we keep our lips zipped – got that? You know how tough it is to even get through to her people? I don’t want any of you to screw this up. This deal is going to be worth a lot of dollars. The company can’t afford to lose this endorsement.”
“No wonder they all distanced themselves from it,” Brayden mused, returning to the subject of the movie. “The liberties they took with the characters…”
“Real people, Brayden. They were real people.”
“I know.”
“Is it true they wanted to make the Lee boy white?”
“As if making him come from Queens wasn’t bad enough.”
“So my cousin named her son after him. She was beyond mad at what they’ve done. She joined the protesters outside the movie theatre and got arrested.”
“That was a pretty violent protest,” Madison observed.
“It was hijacked by a militant denier group. They were the ones throwing tear gas at the red carpet.
“Beats me how anyone can deny all that,” Brayden muttered.
“They’re mostly teens,” Madison commented. “Either too young to remember what really happened or too screwed up to want to be reminded. Hell, who here hasn’t spent the last five years in therapy or woken up drenched in sweat every night? We’ve been close to fighting three wars about it, and each religion blames another.”
“You got to be real dumb to believe it was down to psychotropic drugs and LSD in the food chain though.”
“I dunno,” Constance said. “Wish I could blame it on chemicals and global government conspiracies, ’stead of having these images lodged in my head. I just don’t wanna think about it, period. At least two billion dead, total number unknown. So many cities still like ghost towns and an economy so far down the toilet, it can wave at China.”
“Markets are the healthiest they’ve been,” Olivia, the other designer, interrupted. “They say in three years’ time it’ll get back to normal.”
“Normal?” Brayden said incredulously. “There’ll never be ‘normal’ again. We’re all only here today cos we survived it and we only survived it cos each of us kil—”
“That’s enough,” Madison sna
pped. “That kind of talk is against company policy, you know that. Survivor guilt, murder guilt have no place in the office. Save it for your support-group sessions, in your own time – and keep taking the meds.”
“Yeah,” Brayden said. “Those pharmaceutical companies are the only ones making the big bucks now. I know I couldn’t sleep without my yellow pill every night.”
“You think the rest of us can?”
“So,” Constance put in. “They’re still finding nests of those spider things and other nasties, and that minchet weed still hasn’t been eradicated. You reckon there really are some of those old-time radio gizmos out there? And what about the cult of Austerly Fellows? That Inner Circle is still supposed to be active.”
“You really have to stop reading The Enquirer,” Olivia told her. “It’s turning your brains to mush.”
The boardroom door opened and Elliot King, the chairman, entered. His craggy face was wreathed in his most professional smile as he ushered the special guest inside.
“And here is our team,” he said proudly.
Everyone rose and greeted the celebrity with the most reverential welcomes, as polite introductions were made.
Madison Page studied the slim young woman, with a keen eye to the marketing angle. The brand recognition was impeccable, couldn’t be better. Here was one of those amazing young people who had actually been at the castle site that Christmas Eve, one of the most famous of all those aberrants, and she was the most camera-shy of the lot, building up a huge mystique around herself. Maybe they could hype that Garbo angle and make it work for them.
She looked fabulous. That was at least a 400-dollar haircut, and the shoes alone could bankroll someone through their first college semester. As for the suit, Madison had never seen an Alexander McQueen sharper and better fitted. The Moss Lipow sunglasses dripped class and there was the silver-topped black walking cane that had become such a trademark with her.
Elliot showed her to a seat. The limp wasn’t too noticeable. Might have been a lot worse, considering she’d been trapped under rubble for four days until the rescue.
“Before we begin,” the stylish young woman said, in a firm and businesslike, no-nonsense tone, “let’s get a few things straight, so we can move on to why I’m here. First off, I don’t want to be called Maggie. My name is Margaret, but I prefer ‘Miss Blessing’; let’s not get too familiar, I’m not looking for friends here and small talk is for small minds. This is strictly business. You all got that? However, I can see you’re bursting to ask a lot of questions, so I’ll do a pre-emptive strike. No, I haven’t seen the movie.
“From what I gather, the actor playing Marcus is far too buff, the girl playing me is nowhere near fat enough and they made Charm into some posh stoner. Spencer might have his own movie career now, but back then he looked like a pizza – and the way they camped up Gerald’s character is an offence to his memory. He was never a hissy diva. This is the man Britain changed a law for, so they could award a posthumous knighthood. He should have got a damehood too, in my opinion. He deserved better than to be reduced to some limp-wristed, prancing stereotype that stopped being amusing twenty years ago. Oh, and apparently the guy they got to be Martin is up for the next James Bond; now that really is a joke. The less said about Lee, the better.”
“Hollywood never did let facts stand in its way,” Elliot ventured, not wanting to prolong this. “Doesn’t seem to have gotten any better since it happened. Holding the premiere on the same date as World Memorial Day was a cheap stunt.”
The woman wasn’t quite done.
“Just so you all know, I don’t see the others. After I got Charm’s girls reunited with what was left of their families, I needed to get my head together, far away from all those reminders and the press intrusion. So I can’t tell you any more than you probably know already. Martin is busy running his centres for disturbed kids. I think Emma and Sandra are still working with him, though I don’t know how Sandra finds time to write her novels. Conor is never off British TV and, well, you know about Spencer, single-handedly resurrecting the Western genre. He does look good on a horse – and he’s insured that hat for millions. As for what’s happened in North Korea, I have no way of knowing if Eun-mi, or Arirang, or whatever she’s calling herself now, is responsible.”
Looking round the table, she saw there were questions still aching to be asked. Madison noticed it too and gave the staff a sharp reprimanding glance. She was a tough-nosed, corporate career woman, who wasn’t afraid to kick ass, both metaphorically and literally, if need be.
Their guest stiffened with irritation.
“No,” she told them, predicting those annoying questions with 100 per cent accuracy and firing off the answers with impatience. “I don’t know why they didn’t find Lee’s body, or Gerald’s, or some of the others who died in the castle that night. Could be any number of mundane reasons. What it doesn’t mean is that they were taken to Mooncaster as some sort of reward. I don’t care what Martin’s stepson, Paul, said in the media about that recurring dream he has, or what any number of weirdos have contributed since. There’s no way back to that place, whatever it was – and saying he saw the White Castle painted pink is just wishful thinking. Same applies to the Loch Ness Monster and UFOs. Now can we start?”
“By all means,” Elliot agreed. “Our creative team have worked up a lot of initial concepts for your approval. They’re early stages yet, but we wanted—”
“Excuse me? Concepts?”
“Designs for the plush characters you’re going to endorse,” Constance said, reaching for the presentation folder.
“Wait a minute, I think there’s been a misunderstanding here. This range of toys is my idea. I approached your company. I’m not looking to endorse or promote anything you may come up with.”
There was an awkward silence round the table.
“So you do or don’t want to see the concepts?” Constance asked.
“I don’t. We’re going to use my ideas or I’ve had a wasted journey.”
“Your ideas?”
Madison groaned inwardly. Yet another celebrity who thought they could tell professionals how to do their jobs. Marketing the crap these amateurs came up with wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t enjoyable either. Still, her fame was the selling point so it didn’t really matter how bad her ideas were. They could still shift plenty on the back of who she was and that’s what the company needed most of all. They’d have to insist she wore her George Medal for the publicity though. Everyone adores a hero.
“Even after five years, the world is still grieving,” Miss Blessing said. “So many loved ones lost, and so brutally, so needlessly. What I want to do is help heal those hurts. My concept has been designed specifically to do just that.”
She turned to Elliot and asked him to open the door.
The chairman obliged and was surprised to see an Arab servant waiting outside, bearing a large box.
“Bring it in, Abdul-Sabur,” Miss Blessing instructed. “Put them on the table.”
The Arab came in and took three soft toys from the box, which he placed on the highly polished surface. Then he bowed and retreated to stand against the wall.
The staff of PlayKing Toys Corp stared at the stuffed characters in surprise. They weren’t expecting her to bring in her own samples. But they were beautifully made, the best prototypes they’d ever seen, and unlike other plush designs. They weren’t overtly cute, but they had masses of character and those soft faces expressed a hopeless and forlorn quality that made you want to hold and protect them.
“Neat,” Brayden commented.
“Who are these little guys?” Constance asked. “They’re adorable.”
Miss Blessing nodded. “They’re refugees, like I was once,” she said. “But these are from the happy land of Huggumee, which has recently been despoiled by drought and tempests, flood and forest fires. So many tribes have been displaced from their ancient homes and many beloved family members didn’t make it.”
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br /> To her astonishment, Madison felt a sob rising in her throat.
“I know what that’s like,” she murmured, gazing at the small, imploring faces on those strange dolls, and thinking about things she hadn’t even got around to mentioning in therapy yet.
“These are from the hill tribes of Cubblebub, Pumpleshin and Thrump,” Miss Blessing continued. “Three of the most badly affected communities in the land.”
“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Brayden said, marvelling. “There’s a backstory and everything worked out for these dudes. There’s your marketing strategy, Madison.”
They looked to the marketing director. The usually terse, sceptical woman was absorbed in caressing one of those sad faces.
“Madison?” Elliot said.
Looking round at Miss Blessing, Madison asked, “Who’s this guy? He reminds me of… someone I lost.”
“He’s called Orphan Mewly, and that’s Patch Doosome and she’s Mawny Sal.”
“I… I want to take him home.”
“He needs a home. They all desperately need to be taken care of, nurtured and cherished. It’s the only way to heal their profound sorrow and maybe, by loving them, they can help the rest of us.”
Madison picked up Orphan Mewly and cradled him in her arms.
“Hey there, little buddy,” she cooed. “Think you could be happy with a big grown-up person like me? I could be your new mommy.”
Her colleagues stared at her, dumbfounded.
“Godsakes!” she cried. “Did he just smile at me?”
“Madison, you OK?” Elliot asked in concern.
“It’s the stitching,” Miss Blessing explained, amused. “I discovered a way of rucking the fabric in subtle ways, so when the light falls on it, even slightly differently, it causes an illusion of movement. He didn’t really smile at you.”
Madison shook herself and gave an embarrassed laugh. “Thought I was losing it there,” she said. “Thought I’d have to move on to the green pills.”