Quickshift

QUICK- SHIFT

QUICK-SHIFT is the opportunity for writers to do intense and interactive writing online in realtime during the weekend of 26-27 January 2002.
The event runs from 5:00PM GMT on Saturday through MIDNIGHT GMT on Sunday. The 31 hours of timed, responsorial writing online are divided into 20 shifts of 90 minutes each and a final "RUN TO GOAL" round in which all writers are invited to participate.
Each shift has 4 writers who gather together in a chatroom and who take turns writing in response to the previous text.
A writer is given a maximum of 7 minutes in which to write (and proof-read) a piece in response to the previous segment before speaking up in the chatroom to "pass the baton" to the next writer.
There are no restrictions on genre.
QUICK-SHIFT is co-managed by Andrew Oldham and Everdeen Tree.
copyright © the authors, 2002

Living in downtown New York, the scrapers push east, west, north and south, and the freaks, well the freaks push everywhere, my friend. Gatecrash any joint and you’ll find city bankers, whizz kids, tech guys slouched over tables, supping back Buds and dissecting their secretaries’ sex-lives: how and where they do it and why they never get to score with them. Real bitter individuals, they are the antithesis of ladies that do lunch and boy do we have those. Snorting coke in the rest rooms, giggling like school girls at the table, pinching the ass of every waiter and senator that passes, ordering banquets and sending it back to the kitchens in trash pails. It gives you a warm feeling in the tops of your toes and the bottom of your gut. So, NY people don’t really bat an eyelid at the strange. Shoot, you can be axe murderer on 42nd and they think you’re from a show. Godzilla the movie? Get real, if Godzilla crashed out in Manhattan, no one and I mean no one would give a fricking damn, sure they might try to rent their apartment out to the guy but run screaming, no, put him on TV, no. A lizard doesn’t have much of a demographic compared to Brittany Spears. That’s the way it is. That’s why I can be a dwarf in Brooklyn and no one runs, now I’m not going on about the size thing, I’m not one of those height challenged people that get on Montel or those freak kids that cry on Oprah. No, I’m a dwarf, the Grimm kind, the kind that likes gold, sings about it, dreams about it, mines for it, gets hot for it. And, I’m not alone, no way, the big apple, is riddled with dwarf mines, honest to God, come with me.

I may be a dwarf, but I have interests that would surprise you.
I've been known to sneak into the basements beneath the MET and listen. Sometimes I play bocce in Central Park.
And I've got my library here. Sure, I admit that I use sacks of gold coins for bookends. But why not? Safer than a bank and I can pour all the coins out on the oriental rug here and roll in them. Did that just the other night, in fact.
What did I do then?
I took my favourite volume of Kipling off the shelf and sat down to read.

And suddenly I was back in |my home town of Leicester. It was New Years Eve and my daughter-in-law was in a foul mood. She'd bought a wide screen telly and I'd bought her perfume indstead of a DVD player
So when I asked her if I could take my Kipling back she flipped.
"I have never borrowed your Kipling. I don't know why you say I had ever borrowed Your Kipling."
My son say "Oh Dad, you're confused.I think Ethel is more likely to be right on this matter , than you, don't you agree.
Well I didn't agree but I played the part anbd apologised and she said I di didn't know how much I'd her her
Then ten days later and guess what,.., An abject son phoned."This is so embarrassing, Mum"

When I came to I had a gold piece wedged in my ear. Another trip to Leicester, eh? I must remember to mention that to my therapist. Yes, even down a mile below the heaving streets of the Big Apple, it's possible to find psychotherapy at a price. Not that I ever needed it before my occasional 'trips'. I've always kept body and soul together a damn sight better than some of my fellow New Yorkers.
Perhaps that's because down here, underground, I can be a visitor. A casual observer. One who jumps in and out of situations for his own entertainment. I visit coffee bars and watch the beautiful people on the big couch talk about nothing but still be amusing. I watch the financial institutions going frantic over the price of beans, cocoa and and cow parts. I go to Central Park, take in the atmosphere, go over to Strawberry Field and remember to always Give Peace A Chance.
It's only when my mind slips away and I find myself in Leicester do I begin to question my sanity. It's not right for a dwarf. Especially a New Yorker Dwarf. I have no business in Leicester anymore.

I'm questioning my sanity here, being torn between a rock and a hard place is bad enough, but when I wake up in Knighton Fields clutching an economy class ticket, I know I've been shafted, I know that I'm going to have to talk some serious talk with my shrink. This isn't on, I'm a hip dwarf, I'm with it, I'm cultured, I'm in Leicester. Can someone tell me what the hell is going on in my life? My mind is split by Kipling, it's like a drug, I'm being shafted by the bear from the Jungle Book, I'm married to the snake, I have goddamn kids - in Leicester!
This is bad, now I spend my days hanging with the bears and the beasts down by the town hall, huddled with bums that write letters to no one and the students that throw detergent in the fountain - foam city. My youngest, Massive, or as I call him, Gerald, very embarrassing for fourteen year old, is pushing his spotty face up against my beard, come on! You'd think the kid would notice that Mom, and I say "Mom" has a beard and a baritone voice but teenagers, well teenagers, they're not all there are they?
He comes up close, opens his ugly little yap and utters the one line I don't want to hear:

"What good is gold!"
My heart nearly stops. I grasp my chest with my right hand and stagger backwards. "It's the big one, Elizabeth. I'm coming to join you, honey!"
And I collapse into my big overstuffed red velvet wing chair (courtesy of an um "underground connection" to the public libary storage facility).
I sit there and just stare at Gerald.

"Gerald" I said "Do you remember the soldiers three?"
"My favourite bit of Kipling" my old friend replies
"Why? I ask
Because they're bolshie and don't let the bosses grind them down."
"Righht, I say and that's how we should play it. We don't have to be bottom of this shit pile. Let's go "
"Ok " he says but bags I be Ortheris"
"We'll start of by getting ourselves into a ball game." I tell him

"...and what do you think" queries my shrink, drumming her claws together, "is the significance of the ball game?"
I looked at her, bemused as ever. How the hell would I know what the significance of the ball game is, I don't understand any of this! Why Gerald? Why the snake? Why the bear? And why is my therapist a cat? What in the name of the 14-carat bookends that grace my library was going on here?
This was getting to me now. I used to be a happy, well-adjusted guy. But now there's all this. Can't anybody exist in this goddam city without major mental issues?

You see, I'm getting in to the line that two things are going on here, that my body is my body, that it's somewhere in Manhattan with a Jewish shrink jacking me off on Freud and barring me from talking about Jung, that isn't the mensch thing to do. And my mind, well that's just pure sick, it's dancing around Leicester with four kids and a snake. Now, I'm being asked to pitch ball for the NY Yankees, what's next the Tigers? Am I going to be forced to play ball and be a hooker? These are questions I should be asking my shrink, but she's in the outfield by Dorothy Perkins, the shop, not the person, saying that I've never met a Dorothy Perkins, a J C Penny, sure, even a Ronny McDonald but a Dot, for shit. Which is how I feel, there's a ball in my hand and Gerald is hanging on my coat tails, screaming like five year old with acne.
"Ah, Mom, buy me the shoes?"
Did Joe DiMaggio have this kind of crap from Monroe, did Babe Ruth wake up in the morning to this crappola? I think not. And to cap it all my shrink is in the outfield heading for the bleachers shouting:
"Loser, loser...go Stealers...go tigers..."
This is demoralising, this isn't Freud, this is a destruction of the id, this is idiotic.

Up on the street, Lara stands. She keeps looking at the map (photocopied at the public library back home in Little Rock) and then up at the street signs, muttering under her breath.

No way. I can't be this far from the hotel. I'm sure I turned the right way from the bus station.

She doesn't notice that the traffic is dimishing, that people are no longer crowding the sidewalks around her.

I close my eyes, take three deep breaths. I amunderground, graffiti trains whizzing past,
I amgoing to a ball game, i am in reality, Beside me Gerald's eyes are glazed. I shake him
"Ortheris" I say come back.
He looks at me.
"Ortheris " I say "Where were you last"
"Watching Lara" he says
I nodf
"And so was I"
"Now don't tell me that's a coincidence. We're not mad. We're not on drugs we don't know we have taken. Someone is doing something to us. "
I drag my friend to a seat by the wall.
"Let's swap weirdies. Did you see a shrink?"
He nods
"Like me, and where would we get the dollars for a shrink?
We have to figure this out?"
"We're flipping from mind to mind?" he suggests
That rang a bell.
"We were given orders," he says tentatively
"Of course," I remember now. We need a rest if we are going to-

to, to... where was it again? The shrink? The dermatologist to sort Gerald out once and for all?
"The Ball Game!" beamed Gerald. I still doubted the boy's existence but he seem quite insistent that we go watch baseball. I'm not a great fan of sports, but charged with the care of a teen, real or otherwise, I relent. At least I can sit somewhere comfortable, chow on a hot dog, drink some beer and try to figure all of this out.
As the train bumped its way along a the subway, I heard a gun being fired further down the corridor, followed by a scream. A woman's scream, she ran through the carriage, collapsed at me feet and said -

They are moving into buildings, the streets strangely devoid of pedestrians. Only the four wheelers reign. I thought I was lost on the curbside, so I ran into the Carlton, where Lara lives, but only...
I am done in every time. Especially in elevators. Why does everyone fart when in the company of a short person? I get into this elevator; everyone turns and looks up at the changing floor lights, nonchalance writ large at one end and dragon breath at the other. Is it just me? And when I go brrrroom who dies? House flies?
And Lower Manhattan is full of the tall and the flatulent.

She said that she knew the man with the gun. She told me that he was a short man, a man encrusted with gold jewellry who seemed to have some resentment against the world because of his height.
There was panic all around me as the guardsman shouted for a doctor or a nurse or anyone with medical experience. Her voice became quieter and I had to bend to listen. She told me that they had met in a lift in Manhattan. He'd been angrily complaining about people's lack of consideration for short people. She had been the only one who had listened to. I tried to make her stop talking, I felt that she was wasting her rapidly disappearing energy when she told me, just an ordinary person, a tale that she should have told the police. But she insisted that she needed to tell someone, anyone before she died.
She went on with her tale ...

It all began in bar off Broadway, the Dublin Bar. It was long and dark but with the cleanest toilet you could imagine. I was there one day hoping a guiness would numb my pain and that the dark would hide my soul. Or so I told myself. And the doors were flung open, admitting no light but grungy New York rain. This guy barged in, all wild hair and wrinkled suit, yelling 'They called me Felony Bob' and he swung his leg over the nearest bar stool. I watched his back, and he turned and looked at me and smiled, a toothy rotten grin. I saw flecks of gold glinting in the cavern of his mouth.

Normally, I wouldn't have given Felony Bob the time of day.
I'd like to think I can blame the Guiness. But I wasn't nearly drunk enough to justify what I did next.

Felony Bob and me go back some ways now. We left, and worked our way through the streets of cars, I ran in a clipclop, skippetty skip, manner that people with thirteen inch feet are capable of; the gold jingling in reggae backbeats, chains flashed in the slight sunshine, hit my nose and my arse. Boobbo takes long looping strides and then short hops to allow me to catch up. We do this marathon tango all the way to Strawberry Fields.
We enter through the hole in the hedge at the narrow end of the tear drop, and run over the pavement inscribed with the lyrics of Across the Universe. Our feet run over a restless rain, a million suns, letter boxes and Indian chants and reach the centre where there stone bench.

We flung ourselves down on the bench and I adjusted my swinging jewellry so that it did not hit good old Felony Bob in the eye.
When we'd started breathing at our normal, non-running rate, I told Bob that I had a plan. I drew a notebook from my pocket and showed him my calculations for using fool's gold to produce expensive designer jewellry which would trick all the fat cats into parting with their money. I knew a rich seam of fools gold and was sure that I could find enough to use.
Felony Bob hesitated - he needed to think this through but I could tell he was tempted at the possibility of making himself into a fat cat.

"We need to think this through," I said. "It's no good, all this rushing around. I have an overwhelming urge to get to a ball game and I think that's an urge we should follow."
Bob looked at me, his one good eye full of bloodshot and brimstone, and fool's gold.
"If there's anyplace to find fool's gold," he murmured "it's at a ball game. And I have me a hankering for some serious moolah. Lookee here," he whispered, and I leaned closer, to see him pull a dark shape from inside his olive suit.
"A gun?" I asked.
He smiled and his teeth were like gravestones.
"I should have known," the girl whispered, before the train cops arrived and pulled me away. Known what?

Bob and Gerald were usually in cahoots with each other, from their times in playpen, and they stayed that way right through penitentiary. The number of times I needed to bail out my massive first born, I would Bob too. This time we were running to get Gerald out from the deepest dunghole that he had dug so far. If we mistimed ourselves there, we might loose the ball game, and all hopes of ever becoming a fat cat, as Bob would have liked, or a tall cat as I would have. Only Gerald, basturrd of my loins remained the cool cat in the face of all adversity.
He was in the know, not us.

Gerald always knew the right people to talk to. If we could get him out of this then he could help with our plan. I called him on his mobile and told him that the girl had been shot.
He asked "Did she talk?" and I had to tell him that I didn't think so. Her last words were "I should have known," but there had been no mention of what she should have known.
Gerald told me that she should have known, she should have known that she was at risk, she should have known to keep her mouth shut, she should have known that their relationship was doomed from the start.
It sounded as if he had more to say about the girl but I cut him short. I needed to know how to help. I needed to know who Felony Bob and I needed to talk to get him out of the hole that he seemed to have dug.
"Call Lara," he said and then a voice said "Put that phone down" and the line went dead.

"There's no need to call me," she said, clutching a map in her hand and looking a little stressed. "I may be a country girl but I know when I'm needed."
"How? How did you know?" I asked. I was confused. The train cops seemed to have disappeared, and in fact everything was quiet, so quiet Lara whispered when she answered.
"It's that big booger Gerald," she grunted. One minute I'm right outside my hotel and the next, well, let's just say I've been summoned.
"Now," she muttered, "Is someone going to tell me exactly what's been going on here?"

I looked at Lara. No one would ever expect such a fresh-scrubbed face to hide one of the most cunning minds in the business.
I heard a rumour once that Lara was the one who got the fat cats in Omaha out of that jam with the IRS.
She did something that no one had ever tried before.
She managed to hide off-shore profits on-shore.
But our Lara wasn't one to tolerate wool-gathering in any of her associates.
Her voice cut into my dreamy admiration of her....abilities.
"So, are you going to clue me in on what Felony Bob is up to?"

Gerald and his mates, different from Bobbo and his, would meet in the park and chew the shit as they made plans, from the grandiose to the grand guignol. And in the not infrequent messes they made, they always got Lara to sort things out. One of their spaced out wankers had, for a free toke told this Quentin guy about Lara and her day job, and the arse made a movie out of it. Lara had to take care of him. They are holding a Tarantino retrospective now, right back at the Odeon, next to the Carlton.
Lara was looking out for Bob, he was on the lam this time and not from the law.

Lara called Bob. He said he'd meet her at the Odeon.
She saw him through the crowd of Tarantino fans. They were a weird bunch. There were probably about a thousand different realities going on in that one crowd. She pushed her way through, past the outlandish outfits and artificial American accents, past the gun toting criminals and the spaced-out cops.
When she was within touching distance of Bob she grabbed his hand and pulled him towards her. He bent down so she could whisper in his ear.
She told him of her plans to get them out. It wasn't going to be easy. Her idea spanned the globe, from New York to Leicester, from Liverpool to Hawaii. She had the plane tickets in her pocket and false passports in her bag. Bob looked back unhappily at the crowd going into the cinema. He loved Tarrantino.

It's lucky then that I was there. Being less than four feet tall has its advantages (when not in Lower Manhattan elevators). Lara and old Felony Bob had absolutely no idea I was there. It was easy as pie for me to reach into the pocket of that crazy old suit and swipe those tickets. Those babies were floating in the nearest puddle of Manhattan's finest rainwater come liquid exhaust before Bob could blink a bruised eye. It was time for him to forget about Tarantino, about fools gold and ball games. Lara would see to that.
"But Lara, honey," he whined, "I been lining up all day for these tickets. Just one show and then I'm yours."
"Baby," she said, "there was never a time when you weren't mine" and she pulled the empty linings of his pockets out like elephant ears.
The neon from the sign glowed in her eyes as she whispered "Leicester here we come" and I hung on Felony Bob's coattails for all I was worth.

I stood right under Lara, looking up I could see several realities under her leather skirt. But I kept my mind from that. While there she was, doing the strong-arm on Bob, here I was, right behind her, standing between her, and turning as she turned. I looked up once again. She was armed: a switchblade stuck into one garter strap, and a derringer laced into her underwear.
I was armed too. So I unholstered and pointed up, winking madly at Bob, put my gun to my lips, sushhhing him silently. Bob saw me swaying between the pair of infinite legs. I wondered what my Magnum would to someone shot from this end upwards. Bob did not look particularly relieved at that.

i heard a noise behind me, looked back and quick as a tiger she leant over and knocked the gun out of my hand; i could feel her breath on my cheek and her hand, strong as she hit me, and she hit me again, and my breath was coming hard and fast as i saw the pavement coming up to meet me, curled up with my hands over my face and the blows coming faster, seeing blood on the sidewalk and thinking 'that's mine' and wanting to get my handkerchief out and clean it up, mop it and save it, precious, not enough to spill so...why did i get into these situations when i knew any cut cou;ld be the death of me..scrabbling in my pocket for the tablets and the sound of a siren and suddenly the blows stopped and i rolled over and groaned, saw a tooth on the road beside me and no more feet in my field of vision, empty, wheels drawing up and a kind voice and a blanket and ..

that was all for a period of time which could have minutes, could have been hours. I woke in a room which was full of golden light. There were dust motes floating in a beam of light which shone from a high window. The walls of the room were painted white, but thrown into shadow as there was only the one small high window. The door was closed, and I suspected it was locked. I listened. Far away - below? - was the sound of traffic noise. I could hear sirens, horns blaring. Familiar comforting noises. But they were too far away. And the pain in my head was deafening. I listens for footsteps, voices, but there was nothing.

Without holding out much hope, I quickly patted myself down. No, they'd taken the gun.
"Anyone have an antihistamine?" I cried out.
At least, I'd intended to cry it out. You know, something glib and pithy to demonstrate my total lack of fear at the situation. Sadly, though, I really DO have allergies, and my devil-may-care utterance came out a raspy honk that even I couldn't understand. Dusty in here.
Craning my head back, I cursed. Window's too bloody high to reach.

It was too bloody high for any one I'd ever met. Four of me end on end couldn't reach it. Money bags, that's what I needed, for leverage. And tissues.
The light got brighter and I could see a chest of drawers beyond the mattress on the floor. Then - all of a sudden I saw it. This was no ordinary dust. This was gold dust - masses of the stuff, coating the walls, floating up to the window, catching at my throat.

i stared at each mote, glistering, sunlight hitting each one in a thousand different ways, time slowed down, i could see a universe in each speck of gold spinning there, my head feel to one side, the effort of keeping it upright too much for me, a speck of foam peeking out the side of my mouth, my tongue upside my mouth, mouth open, eyes glazed, gold glinting specks of dust in the sky, aware of the window and not aware, happy to be here, happy to stare at the air and the walls and the window and the dust in front of my eyes, dust, devils, whirling in dervish circles around and i knew this was the moment of moments, this was what life was all about...i was happy for the first time in my [short] life..sun hitting my retina, gold and gold and settling on my skin, skin specled with gold, me becoming precious metal, one with it and seeping into my pores and in my veins and vessels and heart, my heart turning to gold and slowing down, thick gold slugging my heart to a standstill, midas organs, midas, midas GOLD!!!!

I tried to wiggle my fingers, and then my toes. Nothing. I couldn't tell if there was movement because the feeling had gone. Numbness. and it was creeping through my limbs like a screensaver, in waves. Like water soaking through sand. My lower arms gone, my calves, thighs.
I was turning into a statue of gold. I could feel the gold dust settling in my lungs, settling, lying, transforming my living flesh into cold pure yellow metal. I was soaring on a cloud of happiness higher than I knew possible. I could feel the goldrush moving up towards my brain. I thought of Harrison Ford turned to ice. This was to be my moment. My time.
Nothing could stop me now.

Wait.
Harrison Ford?? The absurdity of myself as a Ford-sicle snapped me out of my reverie. The important thing now was to get out of here. I rubbed my hands together, trying to work some feeling back in. Gold doesn't spend if you're dead.
So, since looking around hasn't presented me with any ideas for escape, I decided to try another tack. Closing my eyes, I listened.
Muffled traffic noises. Not many honks, or screeching of brakes though...guess we're not in New York. Wait, a voice! Calm, placid female voice - sounds as though she's repeating something...It must be some sort of announcement.

I strained to hear. She was very calm for such an announcement.
Please leave the building in an orderly fashion. This is a security announcement.
Then, slightly agitated.
It's a bomb for chrissakes - just run
I summoned all of my Harrison Ford qualities. I already had a better beard than I'd ever seen that guy wear.
My fingers were warming, becoming supple. They bent in strange shapes and carried on slipping, sliding to the floor. I was in meltdown, glooping all over the place, golden, molten, smooth, slinky.
Fluid enough to slide right under the door.

i could move like mercury, slipping under and round corners, reminded myself of the terminator in that film...uh...terminator..all around people were running but didn't seem to see me sliding along the lino like a puddle of humanity...my new found power was amazing me, i looked at my hand and it was 3 feet behind my foot..
a siren started to belch out...WARNING!!!
better get outta here...and FAST!
i slurmed in the same direction as everyone else..at least they knew where they were, the fuckers, squelched over the doorstep and dripped down what seemed to be the front steps of some sort of school building...kids everywhere, screaming..
What the Fuck!!?????

Something had fallen over the top of the stairwell and the way was blocked. I turned to the lift, but the light was flashing on the thirteenth fllor. There was no way down. I looked at my hands, my feet. Shining gold and smooth as mercury. There was only one thing for it.
I went back thirty yards down the corridor to give myself a good run up, and then I started pounding the floor. My legs moved smoothly, oiled and powerful, like a srong machine. There was no effort in the movement. And when I reached the window which stretched across the end of the corridor, I leaped through it as though it were tissue paper. Through the air, I felt my body shape cgange, dissolving. An armorphous changing shape, falling in slow motion above the City. I landed in a lump, spreading across the sidewalk. But I pulled myself together.

There is a dwarf lying here. There is a dwarf lying here, who has a respectable beard and bloody fingertips. This is by far the most interesting thing I have seen, since I died.
You who followed the progress of this dwarf are probably perturbed at my sudden intrusion. I say, if YOU had to lie in the same spot for years embodied as a discarded human tooth, you'd probably want to take any available chances for conversation as well.
My name is Junia. I was killed seven years ago, and I've been sitting on this curb ever since. The monotony of it is beyond belief, unless you've been there. At least, until now.
There's quite a bit of excitement on my street at the moment...klaxons blaring, people screaming...I wish I could look up over the curb to see what's going on, but as you probably know, human teeth are not equipped for mobility. All I see is a slightly rusted sewer grating, currently covered by a semiconscious dwarf.
"Please stay here with me" I beg him with my nonexistant mouth. "Keep me company."

What a dwarf! All shiny with leftover metallic edges. We could have lots of things in common. I know a thing or two about metal - filings, grey jagged fillings. They wear out quick. Give me a good piece of gold any day. That's what speaks class in a mouth, to a tooth.
I smiled as well as a mouthless tooth can.
"I can tell you a thing or two about the gold. Put me in your pocket and I'll show you."

i saw his eye open and stare at me with some kind of recognition..maqybe he thought w were related soehow...i don't know ..but in any case his hand stretched out towards me and touched me gently...his mouth, dripping bloody spit opened and moved somehow forming words only he knew...only he knew what he meant to say, smiled and the fingers closed around my enamel and metal self and i was nearly home...
the ride in the van was bumpy but i was wrapped in a sweaty hand and safe for now...the change in tempreature was good and i wanted to be there for ever..but the way this dirty world is it stopped in the end and i could feel the air grow cold again, and fresh

The van had stopped and we were out on a verge. A grassy verge. Me and the dwarf. The thing was, that everthing was different. Everything. The dwarf was different. His gold edges had gone. He was flesh and blood with a quantity of purple bruising around his face and neck, and he was holding on to his left leg as though in pain. In between grimaces he was throwing me evil glances, and I knew he recognised me from somewhere.
And when I looked down, I saw myself. I mean, really SAW myself. I had a body. Legs, feet, arms, fingers. The whole lot. Just the way they used to be when I was alive. There was even the scar aross my ankle from when I spilt the kettle as a kid. Except that i was made of liquid gold. Fluid, moving, holding my shape like water in a bubble. Junia the Gold. Junia the Gold. Hell, I'm sure this is not what they wanted, but I'm happy as larry. I can walk and everything.

My body again...GREAT! Of course, along with it there comes the requisite headaches: carrying around a history (the scar from my appendix removal, the fillings of which I was just moments before even more of a part of, the MIND and it's attendant phantasms...well, at least I was flesh again!).
The dwarf smiled at me. It seemed that, slowly, the bruises were receding; what was purple stain across his face was now drawing back, melting into pure pink flesh. He was a little chubby, and still missing a few of his teeth, but, despite these flaws, could almost be handsome, if I squinted (and I could squint!)
"You're probably wondering why I brought you here," he said, the smile growing broader and warmer.
"No, I'm wondering how you accomplished that 'adding-a-body-to-a-disembodied tooth' thing first," I replied. "Once I get that down, I'll worry about the rationale behind our little trip."
"You know Felony Bob?"
"Felony Bob...Felony Bob..." I mused, scanning all the faces in my past. "Not the most savory of names...I'd have to say, no, don't know a thing about this Felony Bob person you speak of."
"He sent me here to find you, to take you to this place. This is quite a special place, and we have an offer for you, a small task we need performed by just someone of your qualifications. Have you ever heard of Bame?"
"Well, let's see...I know a Bain, and a Bam-Bam, but no Bame, as far as I know. What's with all these recogintion questions, anyway? You'd think we went to school together or something."
"Bame is a terrible presence. It lives on the outskirts of the city, feeding off all the negative energy urban living brings with it. All murders, all avarice, are the domain of Bame. "

BAME.
the word crashed through my gold-edged, steaming, reborn human mind. Bame ... the edges wavering, spinning off dark backwash, already I was conjugated, implied. Was I new born of another black momma's desire?? or was I new altogether? (but my tooth ached like a premonition). A superhero, reconstituted only for this? Could I be THE ONE? I had often wondered, in my pristine existence before the gutter, but the evidence had not been there...

I sat in wonder. What should I do next. My thoughts traveled back to the woman who was shot at the subway. The words of Kipling flowed through my head like a steaming waterfall.
“ The strength of twice three thousand horse
That serve the one command;
The hand that heaves the headlong force,
The hate that backs the hand:
The doom-bolt in the darkness freed,
The mine that splits the main;
The white-hot wake, the 'wildering speed --
The Choosers of the Slain!,” the poem streaked through my mind. Had I that kind of strength? What was I going to do next. I cried out “Can anyone hear me?”

A voice boomed out: "Good afternoon, my name is Yasmin. How can I help?"
Startled I dropped the book and looked around me. I could see no-one. I whispered "Who ... who's that?"
"I told you. My name is Yasmin and I'm here to help you in any way I can. I roam the earth, listening for people like you who call out for my help."
There was a whooshing noise and Yasmin landed beside me. She was a tall woman, about 6ft 7, wearing a blue sari, edged with gold. She gave me her hand and helped me to my feet.
I began to tell her the story. It began with the dwarf and it travelled the world, through time and space. When I got to the tooth she said "A tooth? A tooth?"

"Yeah, a tooth! What's so amazing about a tooth? Seems like it should be the most banal and ultilitarian of things..."
"Well, you've got to admit, it is a bit unusual..."
"Well, I suppose, from the Aristotlian standpoint, it does stretch believeability..."
"So does the sudden appearence of a six-foot-tall woman in a blue sari! Why are you here, exactly?"
"Becase you called me. I told you, I roam the earth waiting for those who call."
"So you're kinda like a fairy godmother?"
"Well..no...you see, I can't exactly intervene too much...that would disrupt the believeability factor tooo much, and that's a big cosmic no-no."
"So you're just here because I called?"
"You were confused..."
"Will you be able to clarigy things here for me? Will you be able to help me in my quest to meet up with this BANE character?"
"Oh, no, not at all. I'm here to give you the illusion of comfort."

Out in the suburbs, licking the edges of the metropolis with a sultry tongue, SOMETHING smiled. As Jefferson kicked a lamppost in a hangover reverie, he almost checked it. Not, though; not at all. That almost was to gather meaning for Jefferson in the fortnight he was now broaching.
It was a fresh Sunday morning. He was tired; his feet ached. The lemon he had eaten as he left the house was still pricking his brain.

The sun was covered with grey clouds that threatened to rain. Jefferson walked slowly down the empty streets. It was early. And he had no umbrella. He wandered awhile, looking for the dwarf. A chill blew past him and he felt as if the spirit of Lara had passed through him. "Lara? Where are you?" he wispered to the wind. "I'm here." "I can't see you," he said. "Am I dreaming this? What is going on here?" He looked around the streets and ran down the alley. "Lara? Where are you?"

Lara appeared at the end of the street. She ran towards him with outstretched arms. He held his breath as he waited for her and then gasped in surprise as she ran past him and into the arms of a man built like a 10 foot gorilla behind him. It wasn't Lara at all.
He put his head down and kicked a stone. This was what drinking got him. A sore head and hallucinations in the street. And no Lara.
He remembered when she left. She'd told him he had to stop drinking. Well, he'd tried. He'd been dry for nearly 3 months and then, last night, he'd seen Felony Bob and Gerald again. They'd invited him for just one drink and he'd promised himself. He'd have one and then he'd go back home and try to find Lara. But one drink led to another and then another and here he was, back in Hangover Hell again.

"Right here!"
With a cataclysmic thud Yasmin hurtled to the pavement next to Jefferson.
"You're not Lara!" Jefferson exclaimed. The previous night's liquor was fuming through his pores; sweat stood out in translucent beads across his forehead.
"Um, no...but you were in doubt."
"I used to be in love..." Jefferson mummbled.
Lara, Lara...the sweetness of her face, haloed by sunshine, always (even at midnight). The sight of her in Jefferson's mind made his heart clench. What happened?
"Yes, Jefferson, what happened?" Yasmin blinked inquiringly.
"I was wrong...it, it was the drinking...she said I became someone else when I drank, that I wasn't myself..."
"You were abusive, perhaps?"
"I don't know...I don't remember the bouts with drink. Not at all."

He was struggling, now, to gather himself - his dismembered consciousness; sparkles in the gutter; Yasmin's ear-rings - who was this monstrous woman? Why had he not understood before that his internal fragmentation was so far advanced? Why now?? where WAS he, the real Jefferson? Who, why?? Did Lara represent his better self, or was she a receptacle for the distress oozing under the threshold of his self-deception?
SOMETHING smiled at Jefferson. The sparkles in the gutter suddenly reflected in the sky, as the sun yawned out from behind an immodest wisp of cloud. Jefferson turned his face to the sky, and smiled back. He was going; he would buy the ticket today. Anywhere. The real world.

He walked to his car and drove to the airport. He had no luggage. No travelor's checks. Just the clothes on his back. He walked up to the well kept lady-in-blue behind the counter. "A ticket to anywhere," he said. "DO you have any luggage today sir?" the women asked, with a curious look on her face. She glanced down at the red button to the left of her. Above it were the words "security." She held her finger near it. She looked at his unkept apprearance. No Luggage....She slowly pressed the button. Suddenly, Jefferson felt the cold clasp of a security guard on his neck. "Down on the ground NOW!" the guard screamed. People began to panic and run. Jefferson fell to the ground, his face splattered blood and everything turned black.

Where was Yasmin now when he needed her?
The guards marched him to a small room and did a full body search. Then he was frogmarched through a hidden door. As he entered the room, he thought it was empty as all he could see was a very large desk but, as he got closer, he realised there was a small man with thickset features sitting behind the desk.
"Jefferson? Is that your first or second name?" As the man spoke, the sunlight streaming through the window glittered on his gold tooth. Jefferson felt dismay flood through him. A dwarf, another bloody dwarf. Hadn't he got enough on his plate.
"My name's Jefferson ... Jefferson Jefferson."
"Call me sir!"
"My names Jefferson Jefferson, sir!"
The man nodded then looked down at his papers. "And what the hell do you think you're playing at?"

Yasmin shook her head slowly, sorrowfully and turned to her companion.
"you know, BAME, i thought we were on to a winner there - i'm not so sure he's going to be the one we were looking for though.
she swished her gold flecked sari irritably, "it's all so distressing. i invested so much time in this, and he goes and gets himself picked up by these pigs"

BAME grunted what could have been agreement, or sorrow, or threat, or maybe just spinechilling nothingness and slowly dissipated over the urban spread, riding the wind, scurrying up gutters, searching, searching, searching. knowing he would recognise it when it was found

The dissipations clouds Bames mind but clears his psyche, He can feel Jefferson's pain the knife cuts of his need for Lara. Knife, Has lara still got it? Where is Lara. Come in Lara.but he has dissipated too far and rises higher the airconditioning blowing him gently away from the scene.
I too can feel Bame/s pain through Gerald

They don't call me "Massive" for nothing. I mean I am EVERYWHERE!
Look at Lara, over there. No idea how many people are looking for her while she diddles around at reception while the sun falls. Better hurry, girl! Dad's getting near you with that toothlady and I can't think he's got anything pleasant in mind. I'm telling you, it's a full count and 3 on base, time's a wasting!

That Lara thinks she's got it all. Legs as far as they go, power up to her elbows. That's only 'cos she carries that knife around all the time. Still, I've seen her use it. She knows how to carve and I'm not talking tree-trunks.
She's never given me a second glance. Never will until I get a beard as long as my Mom's. Mom/Dad it's all the same to me. Not worth the genes they give you.
It's Felony Bob who's got it made. He knows what's really up. But I'm the one holding the cards now and that's what none of these shits out there know. I'm MASSIVE. A BIG BOY. Geddit? I'm on the way up, even if it means digging down. You see?
There's a mine still churning out the stuff and they haven't got a clue.

digging. that's what i should be doing. enough of this riding the wind. so i borrow a thermal for a moment, and ride to the site of the mine. blast. there's people all over. thousands of them, yelling and stamping, eating dogs and drinking cola, and out on the diamond, the yankees are running to home.
so i hover, waiting my chance. knowing that just beneath that close cut pitch, there's a thread of the purest fool's gold ever known to man.
then i saw her, in one of the boxes. visible because she was immobile in a vast moving throng, (and of course the being made out of liquid gold thing) the toothlady. ah, Junia, my Junia. you cannot seriously believe that you will be able to get to the vein before me?

Suddenly I remember Kipling again and know where I went wrong. I let Gerald be Ortheris and of course he is Mulvaney. I an Ortheris and how could I forget that Learoyd is Juni or rather Junia is Learoyd and we are all the reincarnation of lady Lara.
Keep that in mind and we can rescue Bame. It will take longer to re-incarnate some of the others of course, but we will get there. One for all and all are one.

This is really something, thought Junia as the car sped along towards the hotel. I'm supposed to be helping some sort of all-encompasing urban nasty by being greedier than the next Joe, when just a few hours ago my life consisted of memorizing the pavement.
"Hey, um, dwarf-guy"
He grunted, bobbing as they barrelled over a rough patch.
"What do I call you? I mean, what's your name?"

I looked across at her (at least I thought she might be a "her", could be a "he") and could only smile. I have lots of names of course. If anyone's looking for the all encompassing being there's really little point in delving any further.
Or is there?
Delving further is what dwarfs do best.
It's what I've tried to drum into that young toe-rag of a son. Or what I've told you about the son. You really don't have a clue, do you?
I'm Lady Lara and I'm circling above your head? I've got my hands on the wheel and I'm going to steer this car into a steel-inforced wall.
What do you do? Oh, Junia - what do you do?
Do you turn and tell me of your loves and your desires? Do you have the desire to save yourself? Do you know how to show a dwarf a good time?
And will Lara strike you down for it?
"Guess," I said, in the most calculating tone I could muster.

"guess?" i concentrated on driving the car, avoiding a steel reinforced wall that came up out of nowhere, changing gears, spinning wheels, and back onto the road.
"okay, then, i'll guess"
i searched my mind for clues. what did i know about him? well, obviously he was short. that one kind of hit you in the gut. he had a connection with gold the like of which i'd never seen. he had some sort of fairy godmother being dressed in a sari, and mumbled the name lara frequently under his breath. not a lot to go on really.
then, inspiration hit and memories of childhood i thought were long gone rose unbidden in my mind. i cleared my throat, "um, it's not by anychance, er" i looked a little embarrassed, "Rumpelstiltskin?"

And of course it would be Rumpelstiltyskin. I remember when I thought of that - but I must keep from melding back. Don't these idiot bits of me know that if we meld it's back to original chaos and we/i have to start the big bang again for diversification so Jefferson, Lara, Junia, Gerald, Catlady from Egypt, diverge diverge and play in the four corners of this tiny planet - but why stay here time and space are nothing. On to the next galaxy I say

Devixinytl was nonplussed.
Sitting on the corner of his voomer, he had suddenly been consumed by images of a strange parade of bipedal pink beings, arrayed over a green surface into which a four sided series of connected lined had been cut. It seemed to him as though some of them were engaged in an activity, but some were throwing a white thing about while others sat, and still others ran as fast as they could, apparently holding to the pattern of lines.
There were many many of the beings sitting around this display, and devixinytl could swear that just before he had come back to himself, he had heard a tinny roar, and though he shouldn't have been able to understand, he knew that a "grand slam" had happened.
Flopping his pseudopodia in confusion, he started the voomer and resumed course. Bame would know what to make of this.

BAME - as BAME preferred to be known - always and forever obeyed - was out there in the Itxymus galaxy pool lying back on an inflatable bed.
This was the life. So much better to control things from this vantage point.
It wasn't all twiddly knobs and bright buttons and spaceships and high-neck polyester suits. One day someone would get truly original.
Devixinytl was the ultimate man for the job. Especially if he added a superboomer to his voomer. The next planet was their's to take.

Bame sat sipping his drink. From the corner of his eye he saw a bright light forming to the left of him--a bright blue sphere that appeared from nowhere. From it came a small figure with a large bag on his shoulder. It was the dwarf. He had come from New York to fetch Bame. The dwarf had a plan that made no sense to anyone he knew. But if he could keep from turning to gold for a few more hours, he might be able to find out who killed the woman at the platform at the subway station, find a way to rescue Jefferson, bring Lara back to New York, make his fortune and still be home in time for supper with Gerald.
"Bane," he said in his gruff voice. "We have a job to do."

BAME whipped around, unnerved by the sound.. Bane?? Bane?? he had once crossed the pustulent path of that horror. BAME himself, his noxious abilities notwithstanding, could not hold a guttering corpse-candle to the force of Bane.
"Sorry, Bame" said the dwarf - "a slip of the tongue, that's all, sire."
BAME glimmered and poured another drink, blowing moodily on the puddle left by his spillage of the first.
"Tell me, Ortheris, tell me then..." he murmured. "Have you matched the tongue with the tooth? Or Yasmin?"

The dwarf smiled in an obsequious way. "Well, I've got the tooth, as it happens," he crowed. "She's sitting with me in back of a car right now, trying to get to Lara".
BAME smiled. "Well that's some progress, at least. Well done, little minion."
The dwarf shuffled his feet about a bit...seeming distracted. Finally he looked up at BAME again, "Um, sire?"
BAME was displeased. He had just been musing upon the imminent cosmic event, which would certainly happen once tooth and tongue were joined in the presence of Yasmid.
"Well spit it out then! What is it?"
The dwarf hung his head, abashed. "Well, it's about gold, you see..."
Oh, brother. Here we go again.

"When this whole mess is cleaned up, what are we going to do with the loot?" the dwarf said as he sheepishly glanced up at the large beast. "You will get what you have coming to you, little man," said Bame. "Don't be getting greedy on me. There will be plenty to go around." Bame got out of the pool and grabbed a towel. He loped toward the dressing room. His legs were covered with long purple hair. His back was covered with scales. Though he had just bathed in a perfumed pool, he smelled so bad that the dwarf held his nose and turned away.
"Wait here for me, wretch," Bame said. "When I get back we'll start on our journey---if I feel like it."

Jefferson stared gloomily at his toes. He didn't have the nail-clipper with him. Damn hangover!
What was he going to do about Lara? Maybe... he could get a message to her. Seeing the dwarf had made her memory sharper; maybe she was tied up with this dwarf, somehow. lara had always had a nose for gold; and dwarves were the city goldkeepers; he knew that, not many did. He looked up at the sky, turning purple outside the barred window.
Through the bars, SOMETHING grinned at him in delight, wrapping its complacency round the orange street lamps and whispering invisibly.
Jefferson still had no idea.

Suddenly, a foul smell assaulted his nostrils. His eyes watering, Jefferson gasped and sat heavily on his extra-firm cot. An evil greenish haze wafted in through the window, and coalesced into the figure of...something.
It looked somewhat human, but for the purplish fur...but no human gland ever manufactured the kind of putrescence that fought to overcome Jefferson's consciousness.
"Hello, Jefferson", rasped the source of the malignant odor. "I've got something to tell you."
"Who are y--oh, damn - hup, Blaaaaaagghhh" Jefferson gagged, his hangover ill-equipped to deal with such foulness.
"I'll take that as 'who are you'", muttered the being, stepping back to avoid the puddled bits of sausage roll. "As to that, you should know already...I am BAME."
The creature squatted to meet Jefferson's still-watering eyes. "What's more important is who are YOU- and that my friend is simple. You are the Tongue, and I need you."
Jefferson reeled. As soon as the creature had said the word tongue, he heard a booming voice, a voice reciting something he felt sure he should know:
"To the Heavens above us
O look and behold
The Planets that love us
All harnessed in gold!
What chariots, what horses
Against us shall bide
While the Stars in their courses
Do fight on our side?"

I didn't mind sitting in the car for a while.
I didn't even mind spending time with the dwarf. After all, I had him to thank for my new body.
I looked down at the rippling rippling gold that I now was.
Then I frowned.
But I did mind being called the TOOTHLADY.
Sheesh. You'd think I had been a dental hygenist in my former life.
Instead of an operative for the C.I.A.

Jefferson looked up at the ugly creature, which in his mind was more, a pestilence than an omniscient being.
"What do you want with me, you vile, repugnant beast?" Jefferson fought back the urge to vomit. "I'm not going anywhere with you?" he screamed. "Someone! Anyone! Get me out of here!" Jefferson searched the room for something to throw at Bane. He picked up the chair and walked toward him. Bane bellowed a laugh so loud it broke the windows. Jefferson looked and took a giant leap toward the broken shards of glass. He hit the pavement and rolled, and then he bolted down the street.
"You cannot run, mortal" Bane snarled. "Ready or not...here I come"

Reeling as he hurtled upright along the sidewalk, Jefferson leapt from the curb. He was free, and that was how it would stay ...
"Hey!" It was a low and gleeful voice; "hey! Jeff!"
He stopped, stockstill. The car had pulled over to the curb, blocking his path. A door opened , and a young woman leaned out. She looked oddly familiar, and at the same time completely strange.
"Get in! We'll get you out of here!" she warbled.
Jefferson suddenly recognised the voice. It was Junia!! He hadn't heard from her for five years, it must be ... since she went for that root canal work..
She was certainly looking well. But there was something about her... she was shimmering, she was golden! All gold!
"Junia! What.. where have you been?" he gasped.

How could I explain that? How could I tell Jefferson that I'd been lying in a gutter for seven years?
How could I tell him I had the dwarf to thank for this new golden body.
I couldn't. I just couldn't.
Not after all those hours we had spent together that last summer. Not after all that splendour in the grass.
And the hayloft.
And the back of his Chevy.
I looked at his eyes. I remembered how he had looked at me then.
To have him imagine me lying in a gutter. NO!
I slammed the door shut and shoved the driver's right shoulder.
GO! GO!! GO!!!

Jefferson grabbed at the door. "No! No! You can't leave me! Not NOW!" He was undaunted. Jefferson clasped the bumper of the car tightly and hung on for dear life. Slowly, against the wind, he pulled himself onto the trunk of the car. He pounded on the window. "Junia! Junia! Stop the damn car!"
"Oh my God!” She screamed. "Stop the car," she said to the driver. What had she been thinking? "I'm being so selfish, again," she said to herself. As the car rolled to a stop, a purple cloud loomed above. Junia screamed. The car door slammed. Jefferson yelled "Keep going! Don't let him catch us!" The driver turned around with a grin--a golden grin. "Well master, we've got them both," the dwarf said from beneath his cabby hat.
"Dwarf!" Jefferson exclaimed. "Well done, minion," the cloud bellowed.

"Can someone please explain to me what the HELL is going on?" asked Jefferson in a small, plaintive voice.
The dwarf grinned.
"Sure thing, buddy. Here's what it is. You're the tongue and the golden girl beside you is the tooth. Together you make it possible to achieve Kiplings dream, so we can all get rich and rule the multiverse."
"Wha- Kipling? Teeth? Im the WHAT?" Jefferson stammered.
"The tongue. The tongue" chided the dwarf. "I mean, obviously you're not the Brain, right?" He cursed suddenly, and Jefferson piled into Junia as the car swerved."
"Damn cats" muttered the dwarf. "Anyway, Kipling was a planar mage. Actually, he was THE planar mage. There's power in his words that few suspect, but only when the right people use them."
He grinned again, winks of gold out of his beard.
"That's where you come in."

Maybe being a tooth in the gutter wasn't so bad after all.
I tried to take advantage of Jefferson's bulk. I snuggled between him and the back of car seat. Anything to get away from the dwarf and his stare.
Was the dwarf drooling?
I hid my face against Jefferson's shoulder. What a comforting place that had always been!
He still used the same after-shave.
Oh.

The smell took me back...long nights beneath the stars, under the ragged roof of Jefferson's Chevy...the memories bubbled up as thick as a scrim of late January frost on a windshield.
The dwarf was leering, the car swung back and forth.

"So let me see if I'm with you so far." Jefferson deadpanned. "Junia and I are some kind of lightning rods to change the universe by spouting a sonnet, and you're going to get rich from this somehow while that horrible smelly cloud-person gets to be King of Everything. Does that about sum it up?"
"More or less" rumbled Bame.
Junia squished farther behind Jefferson, her eyes tightly closed.
"I think this is my stop, driver" Jefferson declared. "You can let me out at the corner."
"Me too, please" Junia squeaked, then looked surprised that she had spoken.
"Oh, and driver?" Jefferson added
"Yeah, what?"
"Quit looking at her like that."

When Jefferson spoke to the dwarf that way, I melted. He still cared! Oh, joy joy joy joy joy joy joy
All the years of lying in the gutter seemed to vanish.
It was just yesterday that Jefferson and I were driving in his old Chevy, making a break from the hot concrete and the tall buildings of the city. We were pretending we were back in high school and we were going to find a lake or a pond and go skinny dipping.
But then the sky grew dark. The clouds turned almost purple.
I frowned. What HAD happened next?

Misfortune, of course. As has always been the case in my life, the greedy greasy thumb of misfortune barrelled down and affixed itself to my happiness.
The cloud was chortling. It was disgusting to see--all that fat purple cloud matter rustling and swinging, like translucent fat on a very obese tycoon. The dwarf had fallen silent after Jefferson's rebuke, and held the wheel steadily. I could almost see the line of the road mirrored in his eyes, miles and miles of nothing until...
"I'm afraid, Jefferson..." I whispered to my old friend.
"Oh, it'll be okay, Junia. I'm thinking about a way out of this..."
"It's all my fault, Jefferson..."
"Your fault? How could it be your fault?"
He DID still care! The way he stopped just now, the way I could see the escape path was halted to cradle my concerns...
"Jefferson...I was in the gutter before this...I had nothing...You don't know how bad it got...I didn't even have a body..."
Jefferson smiled. "I know, Junia, I know."

Devixinytl was concerned.
He should have been elated. Filled with excitement now that he had finally upgraded his voomer with the superboomer all his friends had. He should have been out racing on the Maga plains, showing off his newfound speed.
But the strange visions were happening again. Even when he put his pseudopods over his eye, he could still see them. Little pink things squished in some kind of alien voomer, jabbering in a language he shouldn't know, but did.
Bame was there too, though not solid. The time was drawing near, then. Soon voomers wouldn't matter, not even superboomed ones. The Glitch would change it all.
From what he could understand of the conversation the pink things were having, they didn't understand their own importance. Imagine that, being a Kipling's Tongue and not knowing! Why, his cousin had been elevated above First Globulate just for the possibility that he was a Tongue!

I didn't see how Jefferson could know. How COULD he know what had happened? I didn't even know how I ended up in the gutter.
The last thing I remembered was driving into the country and then then there was this big purple cloud and we thought it was going to rain.
My eyes went so wide, they HURT!
Jefferson had driven his Chevy convertible under that big tree. He never did like putting the top up--even when it rained.
It had gotten darker and darker. Then there was this big flash of light.

Voomers emitted huge flares when they accelerated. Devixinytl liked this most about them; the flash quickened his heartrate (if he could be said to have a heart, being as amoeboid as he was), pinkened the vessels beneath his skin. It was an edgy thrill he savored, quick as it was. Sometimes his whole day was spent in achieving that acceleration...even on low enegry days, he would use his psedopods to mimic the motions of voomer acceleration...
Bame, too...ahhh, would there be a flare like that when the tongue and the tooth came together? When the sonnet was finally spoken? The tongue had been soggy and drunk once....Devixinytl had no idea how he knew this, why these images of these two very important persons were replacing the pink things that flickered between his eyelids and his ocular orbs....
Jefferson smiled. "I know a lot more than you think, Junia..."
"But you...you weren't there...you were farther away from me then than you've ever been?"
"Do you remember that day in the Chevy, under that big tree?"

"How could I forget?" he replied, a bit tartly. "You kissed me, and then took off and stranded me there!"
"Oh, right." Junia was silent a moment. "I actually meant before that part. Remember, when we were looking at the clouds, and we started getting lyrical? What was it we said?"
"'To the Heavens above us'" Jefferson murmured. "Yes, what was that? We both seemed to know it..."
They were suddenly thrown against each other again as the car screeched to a sideslipping halt. Jefferson was just thinking how right it felt to be touching Junia again as the dwarf turned his head to glare at them both.
"Now listen, you two," he spat, with a warning glance towards the cloud riding shotgun. "None of that, now...not yet."
"None of what, you stunted little ridiculous person" Junia shot back, "We're just catching up!"
The dwarf heaved a surprising sigh, rolling his eyes upward. "Fine. Wonderful. Peachy-friggin-keen. Remenisce all you want, but none of the Kipling in here. We're not ready"

I couldn't believe my ears. Kipling! What did KIPLING have to do with it? This wasn't Mrs. Nielson's Senior English class.
I frowned. No. It wasn't the English class senior year. It was the graduation card from my grandfather. What did it say?
"If you can keep your head..."
Well, that left me out of the running! I hadn't kept my head. Or any of the rest of my body!
Just the tooth.

Junia and Jefferson stood there ridiculing my taste in gold jewelry. My chains jingled a I shudered and raged, anger brimming deep down right down to my knees. not four inches off the ground. I pulled off several chains and threw them to the ground. They sliced the sand easily and were sucked down, down to the something nothingness. Junia and jefferson anly laughed.

I'd been acquiring gold off and on for years. When gerald was born, I'd fantisized about having a golden crib for him to sleep in. I didn't know then how big Gerald would grow up to be, nor that I would forever remain diminutive and docile.
But the ridicule rankled me. How dare they? Didn't they know they were only tools in this game that was BAME's and BAME's alone? That after this was all done, BAME would crush them, toss them aside like paper drafts skittering by on a hot wind...
In any case, i couldn't have them reciting the words yet. The words would come later, when the cloud eclipsed all...

I pulled the car around and started towards the hotel again. They were mumbling to each other in the back, but I think I scared them off Kipling.
What the-
Oh well. The cloud was gone. I guess Bame's got a lot on his plate right now, so I shouldn't be surprised he couldn't stay. I wonder if he's gone to find Lara? No, couldn't be...we should be meeting up with her any minute now. Maybe he's gone to make sure Bane doesn't mess this up...after all, if Bane got hold of Kipling's dream it'd make for a pretty ugly multiverse.
I couldn't help but shudder, and the car swerved a little. Bane doesn't give a damn about gold.

FUCK! those eejits. what did they think they were doing?
as the car swerved, they had managed to open the back door rolling body over body, clinging to eachother, down the embankment. I slammed on brakes and rode a skid, causing mayhem in the late afternoon traffic, uncaring, knowing that i had to get back and stop them. who knew what would happen if they were allowed to wander this planet together without guidance. i mean, for allah's sake, last time, they were just necking by a pond and managed to destroy the inter-galactic trade agreement by reciting one line. and it had taken BAME all of seven years to rebuild a tenth of his empire after that little escapade.
i loped back up the hard shoulder, looking for the place they'd fallen, trying to think what i'd say to BAME if he realised what had happened. thank Pan he'd popped off for a minute.

"Oops." Junia sqeaked. "was that you, Jeff?"
"huh!" Jefferson gasped under her weight. "what happened?"
"I was reaching for your belt and then you shifted your weight and then..."
"I heard a click" Jefferson sat up and looked around. People were rushing by, noone was noticing, and there was no sight of the dwarf's car.
"It was more of a rip, I thought" Junia was trying to get her hair together; her heart thumping.
"I THOUGHT IT WAS MORE OF A CRACKLE, MYSELF" boomed a voice in their stomachs. They winced.

Even as Jeff and Joon belted themselves in, keeping a wary eye all round, presumably for me, I read the signs.
Bame worked in mysterious ways. Spitting and chanting, licking fingers to check the breeze, keep tabs on the progress of entropy. The universe was in decline, and the decline was seen in its denizens. Kipling seemed to be waking.
Akela walked alone.
Shoot.
Something had it in for everyone. I knew. I got mine at birth. And then I got mine at the childbirth of Massive Gerald. And I got mine in taking time with Lara. Now I could go with the flow, getting farted at in elevators, or I could change it.

they sat up in the long grass, looked at eachother, looked at their stomachs, and screamed.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHH!
it was a long and satisfying scream, it made them feel good in a way neither of them had felt for a long while. and then they started running. unsure where to, unsure why, just knowing that running was the only thing that could really happen with any certainty at this stage.
so they ran.
and they ran.
and they ran.
and then they stopped. out of breath, out of pocket, out of ideas, they leaned against eachother, and then against the wall.
The plaque next to them gleamed a dull gold in the purple light:

Dr. Mulvaney Learoyd. Dentist and Orthodontist. by appointment only
they looked at eachother briefly and then of one accord entered the building.

Where are they, where? Oh, rats and limousines. I'll never find them now. Never. First off, they start to know each other, as if they've not seen a washing machine in months, then it turns out I'm the one who's surplus, and then what? They decide to go for a roll in the coal, for a romp in the swamp, so to say!
One has to have nerves of copper, and guts of rope. I wish I had my spade in the trunk where it belongs. And where did Bame think he was going?

I could not wait any longer.
Keeping the two firmly in my sights, I reached in for the key. There’s gold in parts of me you can’t imagine. But let that pass. I reached in with nimble thumb between molar and premolar and pulled out the key. Gold? Naturally. I screamed AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHH! Dr. Mulvaney Learoyd. Dentist and Orthodontist: by appointment only had inserted it in my gums.
I was the keeper- made so around the first time I bailed out Felony Bob for breaking and entering the dentist’s clinic. The lock was in the boot of the limo. Deep inside, under the spare tyre. This was the counter to Bame. Not even Jefferson, who prided himself on keeping his car in the spick, knew.

Felony Bob was sweating bullets. He knew he was in for it now. He never shudda gone after that siamese cat and her pink ruby collar. Ethel liked pink rubies but he shuddn't a had to fight a cat for them. He wasn't sure Ethel was worth all this trouble. Sure, she kept on about how someday when the dwarf croaked she'd have all his gold cuz Lamonte was so stupid. Well, at least Lamonte knew enough to call the dwarf DAD, not like that half-wit brother of his. Massive Gerald was stupider than a stone. He'd be handy now though, no doubt 'bout it. Massive Gerald could just break that door down with one hand.
For once, Felony Bob was sorry he left Massive Gerald locked in that car trunk.

He looked up at the buildings around him, sure that he would recognise the one he needed soon. it had been somewhere in this vicinity, he was sure of it. Yes, past that grifitti covered hoarding, nod to the hooker in the doorway, turn left, then right, then left, climb the wall and bingo, the alley way containing the back entrance to the dentists rooms.
Felony Bob took a gold toothpick from his pocket and knelt in front of the door. With any luck, he'd be the first one here. Sure, stupid Gerald hadn't realised the significance of the dental appointment card on the mantelpiece. and that dwarf, well, what did he know. if it wasn't to do with gold he wasn't interested. but the other two, that Toothlady and the mad Jefferson Jefferson. where did they fit into it all? and really, the colour of that cloud was truly disturbing.
Aha, the lock gave a satisfying click and swung silently inwards.

"WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING?" the door rattled.
Felony Bob didn't have to turn his head to feel the ice-cold bells chime in his temples. Instead, he dashed in through the opened door and slammed it behind himself, propping it with his back just to make sure.
"THAT IS A NICE TRICK, ISN'T IT" mordored the cloud, or was it a clog of smog, which, Felony Bob realized not without some hiccup, was hovering just in front of his frontal lobe.
"I HAVEN'T TRIED IT IN YEARS" shattered the small window at the top of the door. "I MUST SAY I FEEL A BIT WINDED."

Massive Gerald shifted in the boot.
In this stage of hibernation, he moved around a lot. His restlessness scraped the edges of the interior and made scratching and susshhing sounds that Jefferson had always heard but never quite figured out. The car was heavy to maneuver, he knew that too, but he blamed it on the construction of the fifties. Carrying Gerald around, without his knowledge was one way of keeping him away from the world. I had the key, yes, but only to use as a last resort. As I watched Felony Bob one thing I knew: Letting Massive out was like waking Kipling. But he was going to awake anyway. And Jeff would face it, if he woke in the locked boot.
All this time, Gerald dreamt, eyeballs behind shut eyelids rotating rapidly. Bob could smell his familiar breath.

Felony Bob cowered as the glass fell around him. His eyes darted around the room. They felll on the cylinder of laughing gas. Maybe that would do the cloud in.
If it didn't, he'd never see Ethel in her nightie again.
He couldn't lose either way.

Junia and Jefferson crept stealthily up the stair in complete darkness. feeling their way, clinging to each other and then froze as a deafening crash reached them from the back of the building in front of them.
Junia swallowed compulsively, Jefferson tried to comfort her, taking his own small comfort from that simple act.
They strained to make out the words that were being spoken, muffled through the carpet and walls:
MI MAFEM'T MFRIED IMF IN FREYARS. MI MFUSM HMAY MI PHREEL N MFIT MHWINDHED.
what could it possibly mean?

Dr. Learoyd was quite cheery this morning, or was it night? He never knew what time of day it was anymore, not since he fixed himself a flat right above the cabinet. Since the curtains were always down - he needed the fluorescence to pick up on the little specks hiding in his patients teeth - and the nurse only came in every other day, he didn't even know if it was Monday or Saturday.
This, let us call it morning, at least that was the way he felt after a sound sleep and a good bath just now, well, this morning, he was humming a little tune. He liked to hum. It helped him concentrated when he was making a filling or pushing the syringe up and sideways into the gum to give an anaesthetic. It was a nice little hum, this morning. Something like...
BANG BANG BANG.
Someone was trying to break in the cabinet, Dr Learoyd thought, as he stooped over the armchair to get his smock.

While the good doctor reached out for his smock, he turned the switch on the NO2 inadvertantly. The gas slithered and gurgled out of his clinic, into Lower Manhattan, past the Odeon, raced through Strawberry Fields, out the teardrop gate and emerged from Gerald’s sleeping nostrils- coalescing in puffs of Morse, small and big-dit dah dit dah, and wrapped around Bob silently, like a silk necktie. The cloud changed imperceptibly- now cable like, and pulled itself taut. Gerald’s breathing changed: louder, in rhythmical drones, like Buddhist incantations. Bob felt calm. He felt the cloud’s soft caresses like Ethel’s nightie, and heard her soft purrs in Gerald’s snores. And the cable tightened.

The cable tightened to a viscous grip.
"Ahhhhh..." Bob sighed. "Good ole NO2! I remember this! Back in the joint..."
The drone of Gerald's breathing deepened. It took on a tone that resonated with depths of amber. Bob, thinking of Ethel, thinking of her nightgown as soft as gas itself, was reverberating right along with Gerald's snore. The doctor peered into his mouth.
"What's with the platinum grill, Kid?" he sneered. "You look like a Cadillac..."
"Old Chevy convertible was what I was going for..."

In the old chevy, yes, concentrate on that, breathe deeply, concentrate on being safe and warm in each others arms. That had been a good time. and that song they had discovered, that seemed to suit their mood. what was it?
Jeff wrinkled his brow with the effort of remembering. But anything was better than hearing that dreadful purple voice that clutched at the stomach and wreathed around his throat. He mumbled softly to himself: "TO the Heavens above us, O look and behold"
Junia snuggled further into his arms. What was this stuff she was breathing? it wrapped nicely around her golden lungs. she heard Jeff's voice, as if through a fog and answered him without thinking: "The Planets that love us, All harnessed in gold!"
The silence was deafening.

"All thought, all desires,
That are under the sun,
Are one with their fires..."
    The song shuddered through his skull with a power he'd never felt before. He hadn't had a drink in HOURS, and he felt fine, really fine, but the gas was swirling into Junia's lungs, pickling them with their mauve touch, but the song, the song! He was safe there...
That purple voice, eating the edges of his thoughts, embedding itself into the space between his skin and Junia's gold flesh, winnowing, harrowing, plowing trails through his thoughts, their thoughts. he tried to shake the voice out of his skull, tried to concentrate on the song, the song, the song!!!
"All thought, all desires,
That are under the sun,
Are one with their fires... "

I loved it when Jefferson sang to me. His baritone voice went so perfectly with his broad shoulders. He could have been another Perry Como if anyone listened to music like that anymore. But why was he going on and on about the sun?

Devixinytl strapped his pseudopods down, it was the only way to avoid the pain. Those irritating pink beings, running backwards and forwards, speaking directly to his consciousness. why? what were they trying to achieve, and now, all he could think of was driving his SuperBoomerVoomer directly into the sun, all thought, all desire, concentrated on the all consuming fire, making it one with his being.
He opened what passed for his mouth in his amoeboid, pseudopodded body and groaned, "NO" he whispered fiercely, "I will not do it, I will not do it, I will not do it, lest the stars in the courses fight on my side, give me horses, or chariots, or superboomervoomers i will NOT DO IT"
and he passed out.

Jefferson grimaced. What was this? He kicked at it. It was soft, almost translucent: not cloudlike, but like a cloud in its fleshiness. What was it doing here? He had been musing over Junia, the way the purple voice crowded between their bodies and pried them apart, and suddenly this THING had slumped over from nowhere and crumpled at their feet.
He sighed. "Oh Lord...why me?"
Suddenly, a crash split the gassy silence. "You rang?" a golden but somehow hoarse voice queried.
"Oh, it's YASMIN!!!" Jefferson buried his head in his hands. "And I suppose you haven't brought us any hope, have you? I suppose you can't even tell me what this thing is?" He kicked at the amorphous lump.

"Now why would you care about that ole thing?" Yasmin purred and moved closer to Jefferson. "All these facts just clutter up your mind and interfere with living." She leaned down and breathed huskily in Jefferson's right ear. "I have a MUCH better idea of what we can do." She licked the curve of his ear and they both vanished in a cloud of pink and blue smoke.

Junia lay slumped on the stairs, vaguely aware that she'd lost something. but this was how she felt most days, wasn't it? body. yes, she'd lost a body and she was now a tooth.
an endless second passed by.
wait, that was wrong, she had a body now. a beautiful golden body. so that couldn't be what was lost. she rolled over and her hand whent through a squidgy purple mess of something lying next to her.
"yeuch" she thought. and fell down a few steps to get away from it. it was kinda icky.
she sat looking at the, the thing. it couldn't have any other name. maybe, she dredged up her school biology, maybe amoeba would be the best description. now, what was it that she'd lost? she looked around fuzzily, "Jeff?"

Yasmin squirmed on Jefferson's lap. "You know, gold may be very pretty, but the magic of the kama sutra is one thing i was thoroughly trained in back in fairy godmother school."
jefferson was still trying to shake the pink and blue smoke from his head. "Kama...kama...kama...chameleon?"
"Oh," Yasmin squealed breathlessly, tracing a steaming finger over Jefferson's face. "You come and go?"
"Whoa!" Jefferson jerked up, spilling Yasmin onto the floor, which he just noticed was littered with balled-up ink-drenched balls of stiff paper. "You went to school to learn how to do this stuff?"

Yasmin pulled herself up to her very tallest height. "I did! I have a diploma to prove it." She pulled Jefferson over to behind the desk and pointed to a framed certificate. "Pinnaculae University! With Honours!"

The Tarantino Retrospective came to an end, it was early morning. That dark time, just before dawn, when the birds are still trying to catch another few minutes with beak under wing and the sun isn't sure it should really bother to go to work.
Lara stood out on the pavement. She had a map in one hand, tickets out of here in her pocket and she felt sick to her stomach. Something, somewhere was going horribly wrong. She had felt the dimensions shift, and she knew that that bastard BANE was involved somehow. But this map was 7 years out of date, she had lost her telepathic link with Jefferson, the dwarf had disappeared down a highway and now that bitch Junia had her body back.
She fondled her switchblade ruminatively. Perhaps Yasmin could help?

Yasmin kicked at the crumpled balls of paper. "How DARE you suggest that fairy godmothering is anything but a science! A hard, hard, hard science..." Suddenly, her voice softened, as if she were remembering something, coming back to something after a momentary lapse. "Sooooo...I know all about...BIOLOGY!" She slid a warm hand under Jefferson's shirt.
Jefferson's brain was swirling. He could still taste the Laughing Gas in the back of his throat, and a vague outline of a woman was tracing itself across his memory. A golden woman, whose touch invoked tranquility in a Chevy convertible under a gorgeous shade tree...

Yasmin smiled. She knew she was getting close, close to what she wanted. Her hand began to rub round and round in circles overlapping circles on Jefferson's chest. Soon he wouldn't be able to remember that goldbody anymore than he could the years he spent in Panama.

Yasmin couldn't believe it. She knew that feeling, that dreadful sucking of the soul, down the aeons of time and back, unable to do anything but answer the call.
"Damn, not now, not noooooooooooooooooooooooow"
she landed on the pavement outside the odeon and scowled at Lara. "what do you want?" she flicked her exquisite sari over her shoulder and brought herself up to her full height.
Lara was unfazed, "shouldn't it be 'good afternoon, my name is Yasmin, How may i help?' she mimicked.
Yasmin merely scowled back
"Allright, then, enough of the chit chat, bitch" Lara spat at her, "i want to know what you and BANE are up to. There's dimensions overlapping everywhere here, and if i'm not doing it it's gotta be the two of you"
Her foot tapped impatiently on the NY sidewalk, her finger against the soft leather of her skirt, revealing the sinister bulge of an automatic weapon thrust casually into the top of a stocking.

That suggestion wasn't lost on Yasmin. "What makes you think I know anything about BANE?" she smiled sweetly.
"Don't give me alligator smile, girl. I know you and that cloudhead are up to something."
"Dimensions overlap. It happens. It's nature."
"Not this way!" Lara shrieked. "The blob has broken through! Broken through, I tell you! Voomer-boy is alone in an undisclosed space with the golden girl! You know what I mean?"
"No, not at all. And I'm a graduate."
"UUUGGGHHHH!!!!"

Well, I knew for certain that when Yasmin was about, something was usually up. In fact, more than likely that something was bad enough to be SOMETHING. Someone was in trouble. I was beginning to get the distinct impression that this time that someone was me.
Sure enough, there on the street corner, or was it the corner of my eye, or just the dog-eared downturned corner of the page....there lurked SOMETHING. It was smoosh it was spewling and it murkled under the trump. It was gurlishious and it humungled and I watched it slampher like some raw flapping sliver of sushi-slight. There, before me...stood (or slithered).......SOMETHING that could be little other than the collective unconscious of several dozen writers.
Boy had that BAME got something coming to him when THAT thing got unleashed. But for now, it was myself I had to worry about first.

Yasmin thought quickly. She had to distract Lara. Before it was too late.
she crumpled helplessly on the pavement and started whining, "why would i have anything to do with the Purple Wolf? I'm not my own person anyway, always being pulled backwards and forwards through time and space" she sobbed, fairly convincingly she thought, "I don't have the power to cause inter-dimensional rifts"
"Crap" said Lara, and her hand crept closer to her weapon. The murkling was getting stronger and Bastet had deserted her, she took a deep breath and faced the collective unconsciousness as squarely as she dared.

Meanwhile, Ethel was getting in a more foul mood. If that was possible. First, she'd blown half her Christmas budget on her mother-in-law. A beautiful, wide-screen tv. And what did she get? Perfume! Like she didn't smell good enough to be in a house in Leicester. Like she still smelled of the gutters of New York.
Well, she had had enough of that. If Lamonte's mother wasn't going to buy her a DVD player, well, she'd find someone who would. And she didn't care if she had to be in a horizontal position to earn it either!
A little attention like that wouldn't be a bit unwelcome.
Ethel glanced at the braclet on her left wrist. She liked the pink rubies, but the leather band they were set in was a bit odd.
And now Felony Bob had gone on the skip!

I'm not really sure what it was that set me off. Perhaps it was the sight of SOMETHING, or maybe I wabs still harping back to all that Kipling in the car. But a whiff of something reminded me inexorably of Leicester, the boys...and...well, if I was honest the insufferable Ethel. Plots and car-chases I could just about stand, but Ethel brought me out in a rash of adjectives.
It was simply no good, I was well beyond the re-assuring materialisation of the chick in the sari, I had to get back and see my shrink. And when I got there all she could do was wash behind her ears. I was beginning to become suspicious.
'Being a shrink', the shrink thought, 'means never having to think of yourself as a shrink'. She twitched her whiskers and raised a paw in what I took as an invitation to talk.
"Do you actually have any training at all?" I asked her.
"Don't be ridiculous," she replied. "You don't train cats to do anything. The concept is absurd. You simply find out what it is they like doing and then...stand back and let them do it." She purred, "and then you admire it."
"Riiiiiiight...." I said, edging out of the room. "Be back, shortly, " I added, somewhat superfluously, but she always seemed to appreciate the joke, and it gave me time to make my getaway.

I shut the door softly behind me and stroked the polished name plate that read, "Dr Bastet - Cata(na)lyst"

Bastet. Bastard. Bastuuuurd of my loins. where was the dratted boy. And why weren't we at that ball game yet?
I pulled myself together and stumbled down the stairs, if I could just get my mind together, make some sense of all these visions, and people who came and went, throwing me backwards and forwards across continents.
"Hiya cutie pie" the words came on a husky breath from a secluded doorway in the alleyway, "wanna see a good time?"
I looked in disbelief, screwing up my eyes to make it all go away, "Ethel?"

Dr Bastet - Cata(na)lyst?
It couldn't have been. Not in a million years.
Ethel would have fore-warned me if she knew.
But what did Ethel know? She knew mostly nouns,
as if she were a noun of herself. There was
a catch in this, as if Ethel would be pleased
at my loss for words. I looked down the long
narrow hall-way and through the window, I saw
SOMETHING. It was Some-thing alright. Some-thing
one can never forget when it comes right down
to it. Was I dreaming? Was I on the table for
another one of Dr. Basket Case's Analysis's?
I must keep track of where I am. I must know
who something is and what something is not.
For when I awake, I may regret what I speak
of the SOMETHING I see in here.

This was possibly my worst nightmare.
I relived the events of the weekend so far. No, that was stretching even the suspended belief of the collective imaginations of the SOMETHING a little far. Plenty worse than this had happened already. But I wasn't easy about my son's wife cosying up to me like this. And I was worried about Gerald, really worried now. I hadn't seen him for ages.
I high-taled it out of Dr Bastet's lair and headed home. Home to Leicester. I realised that despite everything I still thought of it as home. When I got back to the house I sat Gerald down. No easy job when the lad towers over me so.
"Gerald..." I began.
"Mum, cut it out...how many times do I have to tell you, it's Massive, call me Massive..."
"Okay," I replied, "just as soon as you start calling me Dad. Anyway, listen, man-cub, there's something I've been trying to tell you about. No one else in this city seems to want to hear it like it is. I want to tell you SOMETHING about the mines. So, even if you are just some woolly back figment of my imagination, some product of a virtual Leicester that I've created for myself, I'm going to tell you how it is down there."
All this time we've been chasing round a variety of towns after this and that I've been longing to talk about the mines and the gold. And so I talked. About the mines. How it was scrabbling for nuggets with my fists gloved over to avoid the scratches, prospecting deep beneath the ground.

Gerald/Massive twitched convulsively in the trunk of the car. His eyelids flickered, his Tongue cleft furrily to his Teeth and he tried desperately to break from the trance. Mom/Dad was visiting him again, talking about gold. what was it with this guy/girl? Mines? under the subway?
And then he was back in what, for now, we'll call his reality. Locked in the trunk, trussed like a pig about to be spitted, waiting dumbly for the click of the opening lock that seemed to be a galaxy away in time and space.

It was worse than I expected, I woke up in a dark room
and I heard the doctor laugh at me, and Ethel was
standing beside him with a a tear in her eye.
I knew I had been saying things that I ought not.
Ethel hated when I talked about the something. It was
the something that she and I knew that others should
not know. I was betraying Ethel again. Not like she
didn't deserve it. She wasn't really my sister anyhow
why should I care. The Doctor interupted my almost
feeling sympathy toward Ethel by saying you must
not now do the things that I have instructed in order
for you to survive. The galaxy will depend upon it.

Gerald's mouth felt like mush, but he finally felt as though he was getting through to his parent, had found a voice, although, he wasn't clear how or where the message was getting through. He tried to think straight and think positive to avoid any further manifestations from Yasmin or BAME.
"Mum, it's gross! All this stuff you keep doing. I really don't mind the facial hair - even though the other kids tease me about my beardie mother at school. I don't even mind you writing, if you must. But why do you have to believe it? THIS is your real life, here in Leicester, keep your feet on the ground. Don't go drivelling off into the gold mines of New York."
It was about the longest speech I'd ever heard from Gerald. But there was more...
"You paretnts sit at the PTA meetings, going on about how we kids spend all our time on the computer, surfing, but you're the one whose totally lost it. Lara Croft isn't REAL you know, nor's the tooth fairy. Stop going on about it all like it is. And there's SOMETHING else I should tell you as well...."

"This obsession you have about mines. It's unhealthy. I know it's hard for you. It's hard for a lot of people round here. Most of my friends, their Dad's used to work down t'pit. They all lost their jobs when the pits closed, same as our Dad did. lots of their brothers too, uncles. OK, not all of them got so down as Dad. They didn't kill themselves. Mostly they manage, on the dole, in admin jobs, sweeping the streets. But you. You're just not coping. Hormone tablets, facial hair, it's not going to turn you into the man of the family. I don't even know why you want to be. It's not as if women are in the position they were forty years ago. You can be yourself. It's Ok. And it's OK to admit you need help. Maybe you should try and get some counselling."
I looked at Gerald. At Massive. How could he have so many words inside him? He didn't understand.

I examined the words carefully. turned them inside out and thought about them. down t'pit? down t'pit? how dare he call my beautiful gold mine a pit? did the boy understand nothing?
I slid slowly down the wall, preparing to crumple in a heap on the pavement and sob like a small thing with no hair, but before i could really embrace this role, i felt a slithering and slurrying, a sliding of the sidewalk, it shlurpled and purpled, and sidled till it was everywhere. SOMETHING.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a small cat walking by itself. I followed.

The cat was spooked by my presence as if it knew I was following
it to where it should not lead me. Where would the leads be that
might be followed some-where, if I could find that some-where, I
would also find that something that I have been searching for.
But to follow a cat in your dreams is not a good thing. Cats do
not take you places where you want to go. Never follow a cat in
a dream. It's in one of my dream rule-books. Ethel underlined it
for me, because I tend to disobey this rule. What if I am the cat
in this dream and I am not following myself, but I am something
and am following the cat who is me. It led me to a cave. In the
cave were Lions, 3 floors of Lions, and they were behind bars,
except for one. One lion was free to roam, and the little cat
then dissapeared, or the little cat that was some-thing was
really a big Lion. I felt a breeze light upon my shoulder.

The breeze was no more than that. Just a whisper, just a breath, a small hope. Nothing more than the faintest smear of SOMETHING I'd been harbouring as a hope for so very long.
I think the thing that I found hardest was the fact that he seemed to believe that I could replace Elizabeth, in some way actually be his mother. But he seemed so completely certain that suddenly I wasn't sure myself any more. Gerald wasn't over yet, either.
"Look at this."
He flopped an old Liquid Gold, Building Society book down on the table. What table? I silently moaned in the gutter.
"Say 'the Leeds' and you are NOT laughing. We need more than a little X-tra help now, Mum. We're penniless."
I looked at my son, trussed and gagged in the boot of a speeding car and I wondered what I had done to him. Despite his condition he managed to articulate quite clearly.
"There is NO money in writing. No gold to be mined."
He paused, wrestled with the bindings a little more
"You're not Terry Pratchet, you're not JK Rowling and you are MOST CERTAINLY NOT Stephen King....forget it. Give it up."

I was about to answer him when I heard the mumbling coming from behind. it was low at first, like a growl. many growls. The sound of hundreds of lions waking. But gradually I began to work out what it was. They were singing.
A Wimowe a wimowe
I thought of the Liquid Gold. Was it them. Had they ever done that song, back in the eighties before the pits closed.
Gerald was calling to me from the boot of the car. Even through locked metal I could hear him. He was warning me.
"Mum, Mum, RUN!. The lions are waking, dawn is breaking. If you don't get away the dream will be broken and they'll all be set free."
I looked to the eastern Sky and could see faint lines of pink and gold shooting through the darkness. Gold. Pink. Rubies. This was still the dream. I wasn't worried anymore.

After all I am the cat who walks alone and all places are alike to me
Of course I am also the mouse who is chased by the cat who walks alone
And I AM Terry Pratchett JkRowling and Stephen King. I f I tell a lion to to stop it will stop.
It has stopped and poor thing it is holding up its Paw. It has a splinter and of course I am Androcles.
The lion will come to my aid in the next arena

And besides...as I looked into the gem-studded skies, I realised that something would soon be breaking. It would hot-foot it translucent pink over the hillsides (of New York, Leicester...who cared at this point). There would dawn a new day, a new screen, a new page. There would be SOMETHING there, something in it.
Even if Gerald didn't understand about my need to tell the stories of Lara, Felony Bob, Yasmin and Jania, I knew. I wanted to write the first really good exposé of life in the gold mines of New York. It was no good making a documentary. People just weren't interested. You had to spin them a tale. Make it seem like....seem like....similes were escaping me, but luckily stupid old song lyrics weren't....something Golden and New.

I was dreaming these dreams, but a noise was intruding on my happiness. Two noises. There were the lions behind me. Their chant was getting louder. And one of them had started wailing, or singing. 'In the jungle, the quiet jungle....." It was intrusive, but i wasn't going to waster any healthy fear on a bunch of lions. Especially when I'd pulled a thorn from the soft pfootpad of their leader.
It was the other noise that really bothered me. It was a loud knocking and it was coming from the boot of the car. It was Gerald. The car was an old ford Capri and it was parked right out front of the hotel. Gerald was shouting.
"Mum, help. You have to let me out. There's not air left in here. Please Mum."
I knew that if I did, the whole dream would fall into pieces at my feet. If i didn't my son would die. This was a dilemma I didn't need.
"Mum, please!"
His voice was getting fainter. I walked over to the car and stood staring at the dented yellow paintwork.

Should I open the boot/trunk and rescue my son I didn't really want to sacrifice the blood of my blood but when would I next get a chance to see a suffocated body? They do say you should write about what you know. And I haven't seen a suffocated body so far. The colour tinges- I need accuracy.
I just wish Gerald would stop shouting while I make up my mind. It is quite an important decision I have to make here. I don't think he realises all the nuances. So selfish my son.

I stood staring at the chipped paintwork of that boot for a long time, just watching the ruby pink dawn dawn.
"Massive..." I called. There was no reply. "Can you hold out in there just a little longer? I'll be back. I won't leave you."
Silence.
NOTHING.
I hammered on the boot. I could really use some help right now.
A glint of gold caught my eye. Then the air before me turned from pink to blue, filling the horizon with the switch of her hem.
"Yasmin, " I whispered. "I really could use some help right now. Please?" I was forgetting of course that Yasmin, for all her smart Pinnaculae education, never helped anyone. Ever. I was going to have to do SOMETHING for myself.

And the only person who could possibly help me now was my son. I yanked the boot open. Gerald was lying on his side, shaking slightly. As the cold morning air rushed over him he took a deep shuddering breath that racked his body. It was such a small body. I remembered when he was small and had whooping cough, the spasms which would convulse the whole tiny form. Elizabeth would hold him tight and murmer into his hair.
"There, there my dear. It's OK. Mama's got you."
And he would wrap his tiny arms arounbd her neck. I could feel their imprint now.
But there was no time to lose. I wormed my arms under his body and yanked him from the trunk. Yasmin was close behind me, and Gerald eyes were flickering. He could see her. I was going to have to explain something to him. How come a giant woman in a Sari was bearing down on us in this lion filled Leicster street.
But the sun was coming now, over the horizon, filling the air with liquid gold

And now courtesy of Puck of Pooks Hill, (does anyone read that any more) we are into the grand historical
The people are cheering in the arena
The lions are racing forward.
The arena, I was right. The castle was built on the site of the arena here in Leicester. Why don't the archeologist excavate in the right places?
No I don't need all these lions. Just one will do. The budget can't stand more than one lion anyway
There just one good fieresome lion. A beautiful ruff - or was it a lioness - yes a lioness, I think but they are more dangerous. Discard that ruff.
Now, lioness, time to stop roaring and come over to lick my foot
Gerald stop moaning. I am in the middle of being creative. Why can't people let me be when I have an idea

Yasmin strode across the amphitheatre. The glints from her hem nearly blinded the pride that padded, hopeful for a taste of dwarvish blood.
My mind went blank. Padded...I thought...padded...play for time. Write up the lions a little maybe. Document their unswerving loyalty to Dr Bastet. She was the key to this whole thing. Not Felony Bob, nor the wretched BAME, and why had I ever introduced Devixinityl, when I couldn't even remember how to spell him.
Gerald was right. Well, he was right about SOMETHING.

"Mum, Mum, look the other way"
I was still carrying him over my shoulder in a firman's lift. Difficult. He took after his father and was two feet taller than me.
"Mum, stop looking at that Sari woman. Don't look at the gold."
Don't look at the Gold!? He hasn't a clue. Gold is the only think worth looking at. Without gold, where would this story be? And Yasmin. Well Yasmin, she does gold very well. And all I wanted now was to touch the hem of her garment.
"Mum. Stop it! Turn away. Look at the other side of the stadium."
Well, he was making me curious, I had to admit. And sometimes it pays to listen to your children. Sometimes they might even be right. Though it was very unlikely on this occasion.
I turned my head away, and as I did I saw a snarl on Yasmin's face. but I soon forgot it. Because there, sitting quietly on the other side of the arena, watching, was Bastet with a balm smile on her feline face. And next to her, sitting within the curl of her tail, was SOMETHING I had never seen before.
"That's right, Mum. Keep your eyes fixed on that, and we'll be OK."

I fixed my eyes on the glittering, glassy , gaseous thing I had never seen before.
"Its a voom,", a quiet , slinky voice informed me. "The most up to date voom the aargiates could aford and they afforded it for me. I am Devixinityl by the way, the alter ego from Alderban (did you know that was an Arabic word). an alter ego, I repeat. I find a need to repeat when speaking to people from your galaxy, of your son Gerald here.
Would you mind very much if we transferred the action a bit nearer home. I can't stand the planets in your galaxy,, there's a time forsaken quality about them and just lookn at your solar system not a matching planet amongst them. I can't bear the untidiness. Take a lift with me my voom is really most comfortable. Oh you people prefer to call it a vloom Ok Vloom it shall be but please hop on and lets make it to Alderban before chooktime

"Mum, don't listen."
Gerald was whispering. I wasn't quite sure how it had come about that my son had become the wise one. He knew more about what was going on than I did. I mean, who was I supposed to trust? This alien with the unspellable name? Bastet? Yasmin? And who was that disreputable creature lurking about behinf us. Dishevelled, and unmistakably American. He looked like someone from a hard bolied crime novel. Or even a Tarantino film. He was saying something.
Something like "Where's Junia, you fucker?"
And we don't need language like that. Really.
The alien with the name like strong disinfectant kicked him in the shins.
"Shut up Jefferson. Or I'll send you back to the Airplane."
"No, no. Not that!"
Gerald was whispering. "Don't listen Mum. Pay know attention. Keep your eyes fixed on SOMETHING and keep walking. Breath deeply, right into your lungs."

Into my lungs? Breathe deeply into my lungs... was the kid crazy, who trained him?
The last time I'd felt breathing, deeply or otherwise, I'd been living half a mile past rural in my head.
I've spent the greater part of my life attempting to avoid the fumes the my fellow dwellers have spewing out of every mechanical orafice they own. It'd be healthier breathing deeply in an opium den than on this street; at least there I'd inhale. Christ, that Chevy alone would give asthma to half the kids in P.S. 13.

But this was no time for internal monologues. Things were happening fast, and I needed to act.
"Gerald, listen to Mummy. Are you listening? Right. What we need to do right now is run, very fast towards the blue light. Okay?"
"Why?"
"Because otherwise we're in trouble"
"What kind of trouble?"
Gerald's school reports always praised his 'enquiring mind', but at times like these it was frankly a pain in the arse.
"Because Mummy says so. Right. On the count of three...

"ATTENTION K-MART SHOPPERS."
Joyce had becomm practiced at enunciating around the two sticks of gum she habitually chewed during her work day.
"THE BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL ON AISLE THREE..."
Joyce glanced down at the sheet of paper of the featured items for that afternoon.
"...ACTION FIGURES FROM THE LORD OF THE RINGS, INCLUDING ALL DWARVES, ELVES, AND TROLLS. GET THEM NOW. 30% OFF FOR THE NEXT TWENTY MINUTES."
Joyce set the microphone down. It was a boring job, but at least she was better off than her sister, Ethel. She wasn't lumbered with a husband like LaMonte.
Or even worse, a lover like Felony Bob!

Joyce noticed this woman carrying an outsize boy in her trolley whooshing down the aile. Was it one of those grab all you can in five minute promotions and the manager had forgotten to tell her?
No Joyce it is i Devixinityl and you are all boaringb my vloom. I reaklly don't want to miss chook time.
OK all set
and here we are. I told you it was a good vloom, the best in fact.
Quietly now so we don't disturb the chook.
It's tide rolling back on the menu today and that always gives the seermages difficulties
R$ight now here is where it starts
Living in downtown New York, the scrapers push east, west, north and south, and the freaks, well the freaks push everywhere, my friend. Gatecrash any joint and you’ll find city bankers, whizz kids, tech guys slouched over tables, supping back Buds and dissecting their secretaries’ sex-lives: how and where they do it and why they never get to score with them. Real bitter individuals, they are the antithesis of ladies that do lunch and boy do we have those. Snorting coke in the rest rooms, giggling like school girls at the table, pinching the ass of every waiter and senator that passes, ordering banquets and sending it back to the kitchens in

The kids screaming and so is my head.
I wanna, I wanna; you know what I wanna? I wanna get the hell out of here without dropping you; without smashing that bug-eyes, posturially challenged receptacle for gum in the face and, most importantly at the moment, without laughing hysterically at the thought of taking 30% more off of dwarves. Whats that gonna leave me with? Less cellulite true; but only half of my right arm and one third of my ass. Maybe not such a bad thing after all.

My nostrils are filled with the familiar sweet chemical smell. Suffocating fluorescant light. Inexplicable anger. is this what they call trolley rage? I elbow my way through a gaggle of tracksuited, gelled teeneagers, no doubt planning their next minor shop-lifting offence, and hurl myself towards the till.

I've built up so much momentum, pushing this trolley with 52 pounds of action figures in it that I barrel past the till, knocking over the candy stand, spilling chocolates and scattering packs of gum and go straight out the plate glass window at the front of the store.

Well I told you, you'd be better off sitting here in chooktime watching it all happen in sllow motion. I mean going through a plate glass window hurts, man! And both police and admin are going to have to something to say about that. I mean that window was supposed to keep back a jeep, man, and a mere trolley goes through it. The regulations that have been broken here. Now watch it in slow motion. the trolley hits. the 57 action men fly out, the mother/father dwarf, 30% missing flies forward and so does Gerald but none of them crack that window. O hippiepink bottoms it s the vloom of course. I left it in first gear and it retraced the route in chook time Man, am i Stupid or what?

Pop always told me to leave the thing in neutral.
"Boy", he'd say; "ya girl, ya. You think you're gonna get the hang of this by the time you grow up?"
Then he'd look me up and down, laugh - in an 'at' kind of way - and tell me to go help my Ma with the lanterns on the porch.
It was my Ma's job to polish the lanterns pa used when he was mining; women weren't allowed near the fuel at that time so she couldn't fill 'em. This was what you did if you didn't dig, and no kid wanted to get that job. Not if he wanted to get picked for stick ball the next day.
Pa was tough, nothing new there, all dwarves are; but he was mean too. Ma used to say he was well balanced, chips on both his shoulders.

Maybe that's why I was so hard on Gerald sometimes. Shit. Gerald. Shards of glass spewed all around me. The twisted remains of the vloom - erm - trolley. Somewhere in the distance a siren. Where was Gerald?
"Gerald? Gerald!"
A silver sliver twisted into my palm as I pushed my self upright. The sun shone straight into my eyes. Everything was glaring, blazing, throbbing. I forced myself to concentrate. No time for pain, disorientation. The priority was finding Gerald.
"Gerald!" my voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.

They'll chuck me out of chook time for that. Bad enough having to do roll backs and re-incarnations for the mess they make themselves in that galaxy without me and my vloom creating more damage.
Well better get that ambulance in on forward time, but let's not have a rerun of all the Casualty episodes there ever were. So OK - in hospital out of hospital , only 18 hours on a trolley that time. The National Health Service is improving- or was K-mart in France? - OK no trolleyb time there and bandaging at once. Oh, I forgot. May we see your bank credit before we provide treatment please? Think that might apply to US as well come to think of it. These quaint customs. The body count is just getting higher and more work still for chooktime. What happens to casualties in Japan, New Zealand and Mali? Must find out.

Maybe Gerald will know.
I've spent more time worrying about Gerald today than I did throughout all the hours of vloom training we shared in the mines. He'd never actually got himself from point A to B on the thing, but he did seem to enjoy watching me. He said he did.
"No, he didn't actually articulate it", I'd tell his mother; but I knew. So screw her and screw the NHS... we're getting out of here with or without the vloom/trolley - damn thing never parked well anyway.

"Psst, oi, psssst," someone was making cartoon noises in a desperate bit to get my attention. All I could see were bits of vloom and hot tarmac and a large over-filled yellow dustbin next to the curb.
"The eagle has landed!" said the dustbin, in a stage whisper.
Gerald. At long bloody last. The useless git.

What had Gerald done to himself? He didn't look like Gerald at all.
A red curly wig, stockings and suspenders. This was no time to be clowning around when there were vlooms to be repaired, dwarfs to reconstitute to their full 100%.
Honestly. There always has to be one joker in the pack.
"This isn't bloody Dan Dare," I gruffed at him.
"And it's not the circus either. And why are you kitted out for standing on street corners? I brought you up for the mines, boy!"
"Put your hands in the air like you just don't care and turn around, dwarf!"
Lara. The bitch. She'd sorted the map out finally. From gutter to gutter, dustbin alley to dustbin alley, she'd come for me.

Gerald whimpered behind me.
There was only one thing for it ...
I blessed Scnitzelquitl for the low centre of gravity - and the chains!
Glancing up at Lara's vertiginous legs, and her huge nipples (well, a dwarf can dream..) I began to revolve. Faster and faster I span, dragging the chains off my neck and out of my pockets, spinning them, faster, faster, I was a golden blur, laughing and spinning:
While the Stars in their courses
Do fight on our side?

I heard it, words humming in the chain's heft...

Why do birds suddenly appear....? And they have appeared, but from where; and why is my ass cold?
Shit. The chains again. Everytime I pull out my Wonder 'From Down Under' Woman Spin it happens. It takes over. I developed it - let it grow out of my fathers love for gold, and my mothers former pole dancing career. This symbolized the best of my parents working together - but, just like them, everytime I spun it, I spun it out of control.
Birds suddenly appear when you fall on your ass on the cold pavement and putting my hands in the air "like I just don't care" leads only to cracking my head on the curb.
I think they're swallows - or tits.

The dwarf was having a change of heart.
"To act in the interests of others without reward for myself would be the definition of altruism, " he mused. He'd never been honest with himself or anyone else for that matter. What was happening? Shivers galloped down his back. His legs quivered, he was emotionally knee-capped.
"Bugger it" he exclaimed to no one in particular. "It's a dog-eat-dog world. why am I worrying?"
And carried on regardless

"So you were Wonder Woman, you split your head on the sidewalk, and then what happened?"
The Bastet cat woman was on her throne. I was on the dustbin eating marshmallows. Feeling altruistic I offered her the packet.
She waved them away, showed me her teeth - razor-sharp incisors. "Too sticky," she said.
The bang on the head had something to do with it. Words floated like that gold dust used to do. The Shrink knew more about incarceration than she was letting on. Licking at her paws in an arrogant yawn.
"Pay attention!" she snapped. "There are pseudopods popping out of your ears and you'll get a little further if you click your fingers. Thus."
And she was gone. Bastet case. Leaving me sitting on a rubber ring, alone.

They don't get it do they? Gold. Gold. That is all. New York is the city that never sleeps becasue it cries out in pain. The city is dark, my heart is black, gold will bring me the light. Felony Bob, you're a true friend. And Bame. I will crush you.

Spinning... spinnning
the whir and jankle of the chains increased in my head, ---
that was partly because an earring was caught, making the whole operation even more acute and not for the first time I thanked Schitzelquitl for the double-jointed Atlas vertebra common to the Stiltskin lineage.
...Nipple nipple, nipple ...... knees!
Now I had her!!!
The chains snickled and caught! YES! YES! short, maybe, but I am DEEP!
Lara murmured dumbfoundedly, gasped, snickered and crashed gently to the ground. She lay across the sidewalk, her face in a small heap of parmesan that had blown into the parking lane.
She began to chant.
Across the road, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the back view of a black panther..
"Run, Massive!! Let's get outa here!" I yelled furtively.

Both of us were with the trick cyclist then. She'd appeared again grinning from ear to ear like the proverbial cheshire cat.
"Click your fingers" she ordered.
"I can't, but I can whistle with two fingers in my mouth."
Gerald looked staggered.
When I push my fingers against my teeth, I can whistle to a loudness of 75 decibels," said the dwarf.
"But there are a few things that I need to ascertian. First.. Why am I sat on a rubber ring. The only piles I've got are of gold, not enough, but I'm working on it.
Secondly, what is a pseudopod?
And thirdly"..And here he raised his fingers to his Teeth and whistled loudly, Watch out for these teeth." The teeth flew into the air as the high pitched sound reverberated throughout the district. A white swan ten feet across the wing span flew down from a cloud. BAME was back? Had he been summoned by the teeth or the whistle?

Laura is history, thank God. A woman with attitude. Who hates dwarves. Like they all do. Schitzelquitl, Junia, Yasmin - you all dispise me. I know. The gold will bring me what I want. My final revenge is with Bame. You are all; everywhere and nowhere. I will find you. Come.

And with that I began to drift. It was bad this time. I had already begun making lists, that was a sure sign it was getting too much for me. Perhaps Gerald was right, after all, and I really was losing the plot?
I found myself slipping away into some quiet still place within myself. I needed help and Dr Bastet certainly wasn't it.
Yasmin popped up — like some irrepresible, tacky little advertising window — much as I thought she might and handed me a small wooden cube. "What's this?," I asked.
"It's a block. A writer's block," she said slowly, as though I were an imbecile. Who could blame her.
"And this helps me?"
"Oh, no, not one little bit. But it might give you the illusion of comfort to know what's going on. Take some time, think it over for yourself."
I sat and stroked my beard. I pulled the links of my chains round and round on my wrist, like worry beads.
Well, okay. I've got a voice. Or at least, there's Junia the tooth and Jefferson the tongue. That's practically a voice, isn't it? Now, what about all this about Devixinytl stuff, the science fiction link. Maybe that's a genre to far and I should cut that bit?
I was working diligently on this hypothesis when the sound of a voomer disturbed my reverie.

It hasn’t always been like this for me. I was happy once. A dwarf, but not always poisoned. I have to shake those memories. They are dust. To all the people who have hated me, you will have cause to hate me more. The gold is stored. My time is now. Revenge draws near. Watch.

Every guy needs a revenge bunny, bit like the everlasting kind, I knew where to find mine, in the Irish bars downtown with the drunks, the bums, the hobos, the hooch and the goddamn leprechauns...okay, you're sat there thinking, lepies, they're cute, they're wholesome, they're fucking Tommy Steele in a well with Fred Astaire and Petula sodding Clark, singing look for the rainbow and here's me pot of gold for thee! They're nasty bastards, they have bad manners, they have bad teeth, bad breath, serious bad attitude, they run the gold in the Irish bars, they run the booze, the numbers, the prostitution, so the Irish aren't fond of them. Being a dwarf in an Irish bar is like being a black gospel singer at a KKK meeting, sure for the first ten seconds everyone's staring and then .5 seconds later your looking down from the hunk of wood you've been nailed to. This is America, land of the free, the freaks and hammer whirlers.
But this was the only place I could find my kind of revenge guy, the one that looks you up and down, sucks through his teeth, and waits, waits for the wad of dough you slap on his thigh, the crisp dollar bills, the nickels and cents, the IN GOD WE TRUST motif jangling through his casah register.
This was Llano Estacado, a mixed up crazy mick with three parts latino in his veins.

And who did I spy, sat in his lap, supping a foaming Guiness?
Lara. Cute and feisty as ever, perhaps a little cheese-covered but, heck...you have to allow a chick that, once in a while.
After making a positive ID though, I rather sank into making slow loopy doodles for a number of minutes. Seven minutes to be precise.

Lara had fallen in love with two of the aforementioned Llano latino parts but the third got her so fucking angry she had been seen by more than a few leprachauns to foam at the mouth without imbibing her usual flagons worth of Guiness.
Hadn't realized the doodles were going to get me in trouble, for Christ's sake, who knew the bartenders sister was in the circus - animal acts never did it for me anyway. You get to the stage somedays where you think you got all the bases covered... and even then you know, somewhere in the back of your head, that the mutha's gonna come in and butt kick you to Jesus. Covered bases or not.
Seems to me Lara was just covering her bases. Wish I had. Say what you like about the girl but even when she lands hard, she's always checked out the padding below.

Laura...you are nothing. In this whole goddam sleezy town of nothing people and nothingness, you are not worthy of my hate. The punk latino Llano Estacado, gets it first. Slow death in the gullet, he’ll sqiurm a while before he hits the mortuary slab. I can see your blood now. Red with olive skin. That's cool, beautiful even. It flows like a lost soul in the river. My revenge muscles are loosening. This is the beginning. A trial run. In this City of punks, pimps, whores and low-lifes you are all my practice runs. My revenge is waiting. This is the beginning of the bloodlust I have waited for these long 20, 30 bitter twisted years. Punks, low-lifes, and the whole goddam citizenry. You will notice me now... and you will follow me. Heed my commands. Now is my time.

This kind of fantasy is getting me down, so my shrink says, she stands there all five foot one of her, beating a Freud book on her chair, telling me about how there are good and bad fantasies. Fantasies about women are deemed erotic, these are healthy fantasies, fantasies about men, mean I have issues about my father, fantasies about breasts are concerning fear of my mother. I ask her real or fake breasts, she asks does it matter? I tell her in this day and age you want to know, just in case your next to silicone betty on a long haul flight, hit 60,00 feet for eighteen hours and your looking at DVT and silicone pie exploding in your face. She asks me if this is a fantasy, I say, sure what the hell, she tells me this is direct reflection that I have issues with my childhood dog. I don't know why, dwarfs eat them, what kind of issue do you have with the main course? She says this is obvious a fear of food, you can't win with shrinks, that's why I have to make problems up, half the family I tell her about never existed, except for Laura.
Yeah, Laura, that came as a surprise didn't it? It sure scared the shit out of me when I found out, there she is in the lap of Llano, Laura and Llano sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. I have to tell her the truth, I have to say.

As I start to try my field of vision hazes over. Turns golden. I remember why I set out on this. It wasn't the fantasy, it wasn't the plot, it wasn't the cheap-shot gags. It was the miners. My dwarf brothers and sisters. How could I have strayed so far from my own truth?
I look at La(u)ra's body. I try to say exactly what I need to say, just as I did to Gerald. And then I go and spoil it all, by saying SOMETHING stupid, like.....

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Not exactly what I was aiming for; true I was looking for a reaction, but the fact that I now stink of the cherry goo she was drinking wasn't even close to being in my target range. Seek and yee shall find, true, just seems whatever I seek I always find myself in shit.
No more, I'm gonna wash that crap right outta my mouth. Go back over there, tell her I'm sorry; I might even ask her if she's seen the old man. And I won't look at Llano when I say it, hows that for mature? That'll show her I've grown, matured; I am in control of myself, my life and my world.
My world is shit. Do I really want to admit control of that? Even I can feel how ridiculous it looks when I straighten my shoulders and stand tall, but thats what I'm doing. Can't help myself. Stand tall and say yeah, I'm a fuck-up, but I'm back and I'm gonna make it right. We've all been bitching about those chains tied round us, but that had to have been put there for a reason right.
I'm thinking to follow 'em. Maybe they lead somewhere; or maybe, if I get down in the mines - to a spot nobody knows - I can use 'em to pull myself back up again. Either way, like the diva says: its all good.
And speaking of Divas....

BAME was real pissed. and a semi-omniscient being who is that angry AND under the influence of alcohol is not a good thing to be near. Consequently Yasmin, diva or no, was quaking in her elegant blue and gold ensemble.
"WHERE ARE THEY?" yelled BAME "look, bitch, i want them back, i want them together, and i want them singing. if you can't do just that one simple thing, i might just revoke you fairygodmother powers, what's left of them, and believe me, you don't want to piss me off anymore than i am already"
he glowered in his purplishly hazey kind of way and yasmin continued to stand, nibbling delicately on her little finger, lost in thought.

If only she hadn't lost Lara... She had seemed a key to Jefferson's chains.
So, who was there? Yasmin twitched a smll toe, undulated her shoulders, widened her eyes as she looked quickly first to one side then the other, and took off.
"Ruddy Bharat Natayam" muttered BAME dissolutely. "Never had problems like this with Savitri."
The sun glimmered inequitably over the Belgrave Mela and the Colossus from Rutland as Yasmin glided in, still snapping her pupils from one end to the other of her orbs.
Leicester prickled at her approach.
She skidded gracefully to a halt in the back garden of 43 Belgrave Crescent, behind Ethel's green wheely bin.

This is one of the last places that they'd had had a drink together. Initially the drinking forays took place in the cocktail bar at Harvey Nichols, but no one is in a position to pay those extensive tabs anymore. Certainly before Gerald had been born, there'd been more of eveything for everyone. Well, at least more of something - for me.
If memory serves, Lara had buried two hash joints and a fifth of Makers Mark underneath the bird feeder - for emergencies. Well if this wasn't an emergency, what was?
And Leceicester was a prick - regardless of who was approaching. Speaking of which, that can't be the sound of my footsteps on the gravel.

"here i go again" said yasmin. "well no more mrs nice girl now", spat the fairy god mother. Or was it hairy Dog mother?
under her sari she felt a curious change come over her. A rippling. she looked at her feet. no longer feet, but paws. A pause for thought. Her lips felt odd, slabbering, more the word.
Her nails, the ones she'd been chewing so delicately, now claws, dew claws even.
What was the side to side motion coming from under her petticaot? A tail wagging?
She stopped to pee pee against the wheely bin. Pee mails. Who's been here before, she wondered. I'd recognise that smell anywhere.....

Ethel. Ethel of the cheap perfume and the gloomy scowl. the fur on her back rose and her tail fluffed out.
Maybe they'd been looking at this all wrong? Maybe La[u]ra was just a decoy, and it was Ethel they should have been looking for. Afterall, how many cheap hookers can afford to buy widescreen tv's for their father-in-law, pay for expensive psychoanalysis to convince him he was losing it, and then casually catch the next red-eye flight to New York to hustle on 7th Avenue?
Yasmin/Bastet twitched her tail, in much the same way she would a sari, if she was wearing one and padded silently down the crazy paving pathway. Settling down just beneath the birdfeeder she started to wash her face, all the time keeping her ear's pricked and her nose twitching for Ethel's return.

If that was not the sound of your own feet, then whose could they be. I thought I recognoised the echo on the gravel but then lots of people have the sam kkind of tread. But this was a man's footfall not a woman's, so how can the echo belong to hers I wonder. Whatever happened, I never really had a chance to find out to whom the footsteps belonged because there was a knock on the oak front door. The person knocked at exactly the centre between the left hand and the right hand steel studs. I recognised the dull thud. When someone knocks there the door always makes that dull heavy echo, as if a body was being dumped on the floor. There I hear the sound again, definately a man has knocked on the door. I'm sweating now, feel too nervous to open the door. Leave me alone, go away. But the man won't go. What does he want. Wait a minute! Perhaps he is a policeman, no can't be I didn't recognise the step sounds. I'll have to open the door. 'Oh no not you, not after all these years. What do you want?'
Well that's a fine way to greet an old friend, I must say.'
'I thought you were dead.'
'Well are you going to let me in or not?'
'You have to say the password first'
'What is it then I can say it'
'Guess.'
'Whatif I guess wrong'
'You don't get to come in.'
'If I don't get to come in, you wpon't know the news.'

"Jefferson, come on; you remember, I know you do. I have to do this in June. The air is thick with Hindu demiurges, a girl has to take some kind of stand."
"It has to be worth the plane ticket, to see you again - here, at last - in Leicester."
(and I thought it was Parmesan, but what am I, a mere scribe)
"OK Junia."
"Give it to me ...NOW, Jefferson."
"it has to be ... KIPPLE"
The skies opened as he ducked in beside me.

I was never sure if he liked me rubbing up against his leg, but he'd never stopped me. Come to that, he never stopped Ethel either.
I like to rub up againt things, always have. I heard once that some miners get like this, they're so used to rubbing up against the shaft that they aren't comfortable unless they're rubbing something on top of the world too. Could be genetic; maybe the whole family is like this but they just won't say.
They just won't say anything. Except Laura and she just lies. It was her who said that Ethel had really been a Kennedy baby who had been born to ugly and left on the steps. We all knew it wasn't true, but it didn't stop us from throwing it at her every chance we got. Dime a dance Ethel, sure - as long as you're givin' change!
So how come he didn't stop Ethel? I knew why he didn't stop me.

He ducked in beside me. But I didn't like that so I kicked him out of the seat. I didn't laugh to see him land in the aisle because he never rose. Frightened, I half bent over him and whispered, 'are you allright?'
'I'll give you all right, Tossing me out of my seat in an aircraft. What d'ya think you were doing.' I backed off, but he grabbed me.
'Let go you're hurting me you bully.
By this time the immediate passengers were smiling and laughing and enjoying themselves. Then the air attendants approached and asked what was going on and would we b=get back in our seats.
Red faced, I rose, he did too. But just as he did so, the plane lurched and threw him forward, sideways, he grabbed hold of a seat to steady himself. And the light'fasten seatbelts' lit. Poor chap couldn't fasten his because he was shaken. The stewardess helped him into the seat next to mine, I grimmaced at her. She ignored me and said to him. What would sir like to drink?

I ordered a scotch - needed to steady my nerves. As if this flight wasn't bad enough the purpose of my journey gave me jitters only an islay malt could calm. Sadly all they had on this flight was some dodgy blended crap that would be better used for cleaning car parts.
I looked out at the chaos in the cabin - the pilot had managed to stabilise the plane, but the attendants weren't having as much luck stabilising the passengers. The slightest bump on a flight, the slightest look of suspicion on a passenger, any little thing could spark hysteria in the average air traveller nowadays.
I settled back with whatever it was they gave me to pass of as scotch, looked out over the landscape below and pondered events to come.

Soon felt dozy. But looked out the window and saw Junia on a vloom. She was liquid gold and waving madly. She seemed to want me out of the plane, but how could that happen? How had she got the vloom. She must have stolen it. She looked wild, and I knew that something impossible was about to happen. I glanced around at the other passengers furtively. Junia was gesticulating to me to jump. I had to do it.

I could no longer remember what had distracted me, maybe it was some spontaneous outburst of Kipling, but the sight of the v(l/r)oomer brought it all back. The Science Fiction sections — I was going to cut them all. I could probably edit them in situ while none of the other characters were looking.
Devixinytl, predictably, protested at this. "You most certainly will NOT. My sections stay sunshine. You won't get far with just a voice, a handful of disparate characters and a few universal themes. A writer needs SPACE to write."

What happened, I don't know but by the time the journey ended we were not on speaking terms. How we would go through customs as if we didn't know each other I didn't care. Anyway I hung back and soon found my suitcasee because I had personalised it beforehand, so that I could recognise it straightaway. So I grabbed the case and waved goodbye and I haven't seen him since. Perhas he got stopped at customs. Well, he would go through the I have nothing to declare, the green bit, when he should have gone through the declare bit. Anyway, I have everything to declare but my genius and everyone knows that, so I declared. The customs man was so nice too. He ignored my whip, I never go on holiday without one, you should remember that. They come inuseful and you can lhavce lots of fun with a whip. Mind you you need to wear the right clpothes. Just imagine what the poor customs officer must have thought. I saw his face redden. He must have seen my er leather boots,

Meanwhile, back in Dr Bastet's office in New York City...
I lean back in the armchair as she spouts philosophy after philosophy, quote after quote, meaningless psychobabble after meaningless psychobabble. She was doing her best, God bless her, but in no way was this helping me.
"Where were you going on that flight?" she asked, staring deep into my soul with her piercing jade eyes. I thought back to the flight, the reckless piloting, the worry at one point that I would become just another air crash statistic, the drink, the argument...
where indeed was I going?

"Okay, " I said slowly.
"Let me tell you something, I keep wanting to tell people and people so rarely want to listen."
And I did. All about the gold dust, the dreams, the impossible things. How it was for me. How it shone and we dug. Hands, ground smooth with it, fingernails rimed with it. I told her and watched as the sun, entered her office in the afternoon and its light rose and set in her eyes. She was everything it said on the door. I wished now that I hadn't walked out of her office so hastily earlier.
Whatever the alchemy going on here. Bastet was, truly, my catalyst.

When I bought this new car, they told me it wouldn't need a catalytic converter. I was annoyed to find out otherwise. In this state you can't drive a car without one. I do wish the transport geniuses would invent those cars that hover just above the road. We would have clean air then all over the world because all vehicles would be electric. We would have ultra fast and effiecent trains that tilt sideways on long journeys. The world would become smaller still. In times like those there would be no cars, no body would have a need for them. We will use taxis which are computerised and you board the vehicles and state your destination. If the vehicle breaks down then you call up an space shuttle engineer who will fly down to your rescue. That hasn't happened to me yet, because we are still in this century, I don't suppose it will happen to me. But what acomforting thought that one day the world will be cleaner, more quiet and pleasen even to live in. Well I can daydream I suppose. But None of that cancels out the need for a catalytic converter. I am really stuck because I can't afford to buy one. So I guess I will have to think up a way to earn some money to buy one and then I will be on my travels again. I can't sing...

But now Bastet was leaning forward towardsme across her desk. Her eyes had a different gleam in them. People always say cat's eyes are green, but they're not. They're yellow. And Bastet's were gold. Shining and beautiful with that almond slit in the middle. I gazed into her eyes. She had me completely. And I knew for certain that she was the catalyst. Without her we'd all be stuck back in the mines. Worse still, the pits. I knew now that she was the one with all the answers. And she knew I knew.
She was inviting me to question her, I knew it. But I didn't know where to start, and I wasn't sure if I was up to dealing with the answers.
"Where is my son?" I asked. "Where is Gerald?"
And she shook her lovely head slowly from side to side.
"When will you learn?" She purred. "He is not Gerald anymore. He is Massive. That is what he has chosen, and you must respect that."

I scratched my head as I often do when faced with such confusion. Gerald is now Massive. Well, good for him. Who the heck am I then? I looked to Bastet for answers.
"You're troubled. I see that."
Wow, she's good. How could she spot that? My ever-decreasing hairline? The worry lines that have overpowered my once dashing and youthful looks? I could go on, but I fear that sarcasm would also overpower me and render me bitter, old, and ugly. I nodded politely, and felt the strangest of sensation. A tear rolling down my face, bumping over my worrylines.
"I don't know who I am anymore." I sobbed.

All I knew was that I was going short. Perhaps it was my own fault, maybe I had sold myself short. Who knows.
I reached out and absent-mindedly began to stroke her. I think it was the eyes...or the soft fur. Or the way that her collar glinted...gold...with.....what were those? Pink rubies?

I am going through some changes here. I am loosing focus. And I realize that only occasionally, like now. If not for Bastet I would have slumped into a schizophrenic haze long ago. I turn, and things change. Did I turn? Who's Bastet? The hound form the Sherlock Gomes stories? I feel like a constanly rebooting computer, who keeps loosing all unsaved data.

I suppose you would feel a little confused son, agfterall you have been through quite a lot of trauma. Do you know where you are now? You're in Wisconsin home for the mentally ill. And to make it worse you are in the Lock up ward. This is your cell. You can choose a different colour for your padded walls if you like. Any colour but the colours of the rainbow. The full spectrum that is. Why not choose yellow, the brighter the colour the better the result.
'Really.'
'Oh yes, didn't your general practitioner tell you about colours for the psychologically ill?'
'Psycolologically ill? Wh is I'm not.'
I just couldn't fathom out how to work the darn thing and you calll me a mental case. Well I won't have it do you hear, I won't have it.'
'Come alnog now there's no need to get excited. Your new room has central heating, come along.'
'Don't you patronise me you old crow.'
'A crow amI. Hmm doctor Rook.' I called out to my colleague.

I need to get myself out of this persona. Wards, mental illness, delusions - all cheating mirrors of the ultimate delusion. So the son and so the spirit and what does that make me ? No I prefer an infinity of guises to just three.
If it has to be three I'll keep to Ortheris, Mulvaney and Learoyd. Why does that puusycat woman keep calling Mulvaney, Massiv - sizist I call that, She put the desire for the name there- and then oh so prissy "you must respect his wishes,"- Bloody social worker

ok, so maybe i have a problem. But then again, maybe its not a problem. The way i figure, If i enjoy my insanit, why wish to be sane? Sane cretures are boring, allways discusing ways of improving them
selves,but I, I have nothing to improve upon. So to hell with sanity. Ofcourse,there might be an alternative. Maybe i dont have to be sane, or insane, Maybe theres another dimmension, three personalities,
but am i supposed to figure it out?

I sat despondently on the floor and looked at the padded yellow walls. There was a scratching. I thought it was a scratching, but then, I'm supposed to be mad, what would I know about scratching behind yellow padding?
scratch.
scratch.
scratch.
tear.
tear? torn? what?
Felony Bob sidled through hole in the wall, "OI! little guy. yes, you with the beard. what are you waiting for? follow me"
I looked at him with mistrust. I knew him - but was he just another delusion of grandeur? then I looked again and realised that grandeur had nothing to do with it. Was he just another delusion then? I shrugged, what the hell, delusion or no, I was sick of this yellow. I followed him.

I shake my head and am surprised at my lucidity. Its as if the fog has lifted along with the suddeness of bob's appearence. I follow him, thoughts whirling through my brain like gold chaind. i keep thinking, Gerald, this is Gerald's doing. Who else could punch a tunnel through masonry ten feet thick with the precision of a watch maker. I look beyond stinky bob's shoulder. the light at the end ofthe tunner has a Voomer afloat, flashing blinklights. And Gerald, basturrd of my loins is sitting within, grinning madly.

The mining equipment We cutn through to here to recue you and guess what, on the way we found the gold lode right under the old Atlantis I've got the team digging out now. We were wrong about NY.
The thing is we need to raise Atlantis. All we've been through, the persona all the ploy of that cunning Atlantean and her mates from Aldebaran. to get us to raise Atlantis. It's a worthwhile project though and we keep the gold. Call in Lara. Tell her to stop tormenting Jefferson

In my head I question his reliability, should I trust him?
"really? there's gold under this place?"
"yessiree, and lots of it, ofcourse, as i said before, we have to
get to it first."
Should I help? I didnt know

Lara sat in the Irish bar, drinking guinness, wondering where it had all gone wrong. Damnit! She'd had Jefferson on a ruby studded leather leash, but he'd somehow managed to slip away. Probably gone back to that faux-gold Toothlady. Huh, she'd show him. Throw her over for a two-bit hasbeen in dental mastery?. Not bloody likely.
She brooded, throwing evil glances over her shoulder at anybody unwise enough to approach her or offer to buy her a drink. She sat. She drank. She thought. She wept. She answered her mobile phone, "hello?"

As I dialled Lara's number, I got thinking: the problem with Lara is that she has no desires. Not for gold, not fer nuthin’. She only has drive, a relentlessness that propels her further and further, down the path to Atlantis or Hades. To her it doesn’t make much difference. Getting her to help. Asking her to resurrect the City of Gold. You have to catch her attention first. And then, just to be safe, when she turns to you: duck out of sight.
Nothing is worth much if she catches you first.
"Yes, its me.We need you."
"You and who else?"
"Massive, Bob and me."
Lara hung up.

They stuffed his mouth with gold
Ok Kipling whose mout? I must look it up but he'd looked to south and North firts hadn't he?
but if we can get Atlantis back it will be worth the mouthful
So heave everyone heave and up she rises, heave heave and there she is, her white walled gymnasiums draped in sea-weed-so get scrubbing and make her new again. Toothwoman toothman your home at last and the gods return to earth but there is a fair way to go before the golden age returns but it is on its way. Midas we need your help.

up came Atlantis, she was beautifull, sparkling, brilliant.
We all stood in awe. Her radiance inspired us, heave, heave heave
I felt as though a brilliant light were upon me, something,
sure as hell i dont know what, but something made sense

Atlantis. It made your heart sing with gladness. Unless, of course, you were a semi-omniscient excuse for a god from an intergalactic suburban depot with purple furry legs and a penchant for superboomervrloomers and their riders. In that instance, all you would think about was stealing the gold and destroying the planet to avoid taxes. True to form, BANE thought of nothing else. But while he was doing that, SOMETHING began to move on the edge of consciousness and began to make sense.
SOMETHING crept into Junia's consciousness, and made more sense than the whole preceding seven years.

The city rises white on the outside from plinth to arcoterion, and gold slides in between the flutes, in the triglyphs, and the painted metopes. The dentils are sharp tacks of yellow. They always come in threes. And the columns rise only to be banded by gold echinus, sitting on study pillows of Arrium.
When you have so much gold to deal with what do you do? Go at it with a pocket knife? Junia wondered.And all around her, like seawater dripping off an upraised monument, SOMETHING gathered in several puddles of uncertainty.

yes, indeed it was something. It felt as though
it was somethign i had known for a long time, i just
couldnt place it. In it i know was something about
Lara, something about Gerald, something about more than
just SOMETHING. What ever it was, there was an urgency to it
I needed to know

Bame knew about Atlantis. He knew and he was on his way. He hated the thought.
One of the puddles of uncertainty was what BAME would do about it. But there were others. Would the plan work? Could we take the gold from Atlantis or would Atlantis fight us?
And why wasn't Lara here? I needed her to be here. Not in some bar drinking Guiness and weeping.
Yasmin/Bastet arrived but she could do nothing. Never could, whether she was psychoanalysing or fairygodmothering. Who could help us now?

No one helps those who don't help themselves. Charity begins at home. All those things. You can sit on the edge of Atlantis for an eternity, staring into puddles of uncertainty but where will that get you? This story spans the globe, spans time and spaces and it seems crazy to sit here worrying, Bane reminded himself. He closed his eyes and summoned the courage, the courage he needed to do this thing.
And as he took a deep breath and steeled himself, in another reality Lara watched condensation form on a fresh pint.

Bame moved his voomer in, swerving around the new/old island that had risen from the sea. Atlantis now caught the midsummer sun. Bame had to come in with the light , things were so bright that he might just have overshot and landed in Leicester, or crashed straight into the temple of Hera, sending the vestal virgins this way and that, trying to kep their bosoms in. While the others watched with concern he did land the voomer, and SOMETHING, right on schedule came a-licking at his stern.

BANE climbed from the voomer and walked over. Even he was impressed at the sight of Atlantis. His mouth fell open. Everyone else closed their mouth and held their noses.
Others were arriving. Yasmin flew over clutching Lara under her arm - Lara clutched her Guiness in one hand and a Kleenex tissue in the other to wipe away her tears. Llano Estacado clung on to the golden edge of Yasmin's sari.
Suddenly, the light no longer glinted on the gold of Atlantis as the great bulk of SOMETHING blocked out the sun.

Yes,some quick thinking was required. unfortunately this was not bame's strong POINT. Shit, he thought,when you say 'shit', said yasmin, what exactly do you mean? are you referring to he present hole we're in, or is it some other matter. look,Yasmin, stop psychoanalysing me, i'm sick and tired of your pschoanalysing me, first you send me a singing hamster, and now you want to psychoanlayse me I sick of it.
Meanwhile Lara sat in a snug in Dublin on her fourteeth Guinness, she had completely forgtten abuot the expedition to Altantis, she had been in Murphy's for several days, she had a large stain of clothing in her Guinness. Just now, she was standing on the table removing her strawberry on white patterned Knickers for the umpteenth time. The public were getting bored.

But the sight of her well worn knickers was never going to do the trick. This was a seasoned audience, used to the sight of young female flesh of an afternoon. What this bar really needed, she decided, tucking the knickers into her handbag as she removed her mobile phone, was some young men.
She keyed the number in.
"Gerald? You there? You'd better get over here quick, I've a job for you"
Meanwhile, in Atlantis, Bame and Yasmin were still quarreling, as the golden sunset was increasingly obscured, a halo emerging like the final stages of an eclipse from around the edges of this massive mysterious missile. Behind them, the gold of Atlantis dulled.

Yasmin and runs up the fight of stairs to the main temple. Athena stares down at her, her elder cousin and warrior. She is plated with gold leaf. Yasmin is the colour of mocha. Lara is tall but only reaches the statues knees. She places her head on Athena’s lap and sheds a tear.
She is home.
She is free. Of all the messes she has had to straighten out, of all the people she had to take care of , of them all,: she is free. No more day job, no more Dublin, no more Guinness, she thinks. And enters the megaron.
In its darkness, she finds her light.

But as Yasmin finds her light, BAME loses his as SOMETHING towers over him. BAME stands in shadow blinded by the halo of light around SOMETHING. BAME is afraid, he is very afraid. He knows that SOMETHING has a greater power than he. He has no weapon to fight SOMETHING because he knows nothing of SOMETHING. The watching group hold their breath, afraid of what might happen (and sickened by the smell).
Athena gently lifts Yasmin's head from her lap and walks down the steps.

Whatb the hell are you doing here,Lara?, sneered Yasmin. Ssssh, can't you see we're dealing with Athena, the great god of Pan. I think Bame has lost it. I mean he's just sitting... Shuttup!! said Athena, you worms, what exactly do you want, you worms, i'm sick and tired,, what do you want. I don't understand you, I'm sick of puling puking humans Arggghhghjghgghgh!!!! Suddenly, Athena took her Samurai sword and slashed off Yasmin's head. The beautiful ponytailed orb of flesh and make-up, bounced down the bakelite steps, anmd came to rest at Lara's feet. Argggarr5gfthrhrrhhjrrhg! screamed Bame and Lara together, but there was no time for that. They had to get off Atlantis and fast.

Because there was no more time left. The monstrous something that was blocking the sun from Atlantis bore down on them. Bame and Lara looked up into its spherical outline to see themselves reflected, the fear staining their faces.
"It's gold!" Bame screamed as Lara grabbed his hand and pulled him after her.
"But it's gold," he continued to scream and Lara knew that he was drawn to it, the way fools always are to its sparkle, smiling open jawed at the pretty colours.
She turned and grabbed him, held his head to her neck in a tight embrace and whispered "Look away". Her hair blew around her as the monstrous nugget of gold hurtled its final few feet toward Atlantis.

In the golden half light of the Atlantean evening, Athena begins to shed. Plate by Plate, buckle by buckle, the armor comes off, the shield is thrown aside. The helmet placed at her feet. She keeps her lapis lazuli eyes on SOMETHING, and gives it pause.
Then she reaches up to her breast and unfastens her chest piece. It falls with the clash of a thousand thunderstorms, and sends the outsiders on the island racing for cover. Later, as Lara and Bame turn they see that the gold has gone, Now Athena stands in her marble nakedness, facing off the nebulous nascence.
Bame stands amazed. All thoughts decapitation shot out of his mind by sight of this eternal vision. Athena lifts her sword again, and raises over her head, now she is angry. And Bame, poor Bame is a gibbering lily. Lara gets to her feet, shakes off her amazement and runs to him, pushing him aside as the sword cleaves the air, the golden meteorite, and the earth of Atlantis in two, like an open book, like a cracked egg.

Atlantis in two halves, held together only by the fact that Athena has a foot planted in each half.
BAME, pushed to the ground by Lara, is too scared to move. Yasmin's severed head lies several inches from his attached head. They are nose to nose. They are eye to eye. This is the first time in BAME's life that he has been so close to another nose without it being wrinkled in disgust. He smiles at the pleasure of the closeness of another. Even if it is a severed head! Reader, we have to admit that BAME HAS lost it.

What the hell do you mean you left the gold in Dublin, you stupud cow, good god, I should have married the shrink, Jesus!! we have to go all the way back to get the gold, no wonder she's pissed, ah forget dublin,you asshole, this is now! Athena stood over them snorting red flame you chickens, what the url do you mean, coming into my kingdom right, god, do you think I would just roll over and die!
Grrrraur5uryuryryrysyfrydfhyuhshe!! She gave a mighty roar. the cavern split in two. Just as Athena was about to cleave Bame in two, they heard a soft voice "just one moment please, goddesse." they turned to see a diminuitive, man framed in the doorway smoking a pipe, "yes, you miss with the sword. hold it just one minute."

"Now, I think this has all been a terrible misunderstanding." The dwarf cast his eye calmly around the arena of destruction that had been Atlantis. "You've heard no doubt about the practice of turning base metals into gold."
Athena paused, arms raised above Bame's quivering body, soiled now with the blood of others and the salt water seeping across the rent ground. "Alchemy it is, you know, and it's the practice of fools, I'll grant you that. But give me five minutes alone with that loathsome piece of flesh there, that malignant heap, and I promise I'll return to you something so precious you'll never know how to repay me?"
Athena thought for a moment, the salt water lapping at her mighty feet.

Bame kisses Yasmin’s lips. They are blue and cool. In the heat of the cleaving, this is strangely comforting to Bame. In his lifelong search for companionship, Akela had never been this close to a woman. Yasmin stares at Bame, forever. Bame is lost deeply into eyes that will never meet a body. He reaches out to kiss her again. At his touch, Yasmin’s hair slides, and she is dislodged off the top step, and rolls away from Bame’s helpless clutching hands, down the steps, splitting skin with every impact, bruises cross hatching on bruises, welts upon welts, bounces off the marble nosing, and falls with a splash no louder than a whisper into the new canal that Athena has made, and is carried away slowly into the sunset.

Her head disappears beneath the waters with a soft splash. BAME lets out a wail which curdles the Guinness still clutched in Lara's hand.
Then suddenlt, Lara drops the glass, and the dark liquid runs down the stine steps. She dashes over the the headless body of Yasmin which is lying prone. Her sari has been blown aside in the wind and beneath it there is a pouch hidden in it's folds. Lara grabs at it, tears it away from where it is fastened to the sari.
It is made of ruby-coloured silk, with a drawstring top. Lara yanks it open and removes a rolled up scroll of parer which she unrolls and reads.
"It's a party invitation."
She pulls more from the bag.
"There's loads of them. One for us all."

Lara hands out the neatly folded squares of vellum, upon which sparkles gold leaf writings in an elegant hand:

"You are cordially invited to attend the Festival of Everything.
Doors to open promptly at 5, by invitation only
Buffet opens at 6:30, Featuring the song stylings of Tooth and Tongue
RSVP attn: Athena
#221 Gods' Alley
Olympus District
'DON'T MISS OUT ON THE LAST PARTY IN THE UNIVERSE!!!'"

"What time is it?" asked Bame
"Time we moved. We're late already, come on" Lara crumpled Yasmin's invitation, and dropped it silently onto the ground at her shadow-side.
Bame's eyes were already red-rimmed with grief, unless that was how he always looked. Lara didn't want to upset him any more. Love at first sight was one thing. Locking said gaze with a corpse wasn't usually part of the bargain.
Bame, she surmised, could do with a drink, and so could she. Lara found she had suddenly gone off Guinness, as she watched the last of her drink fade into the mottled stone of the temple steps, mingling with the blood still oozing from Yasmin's neck.
What do they serve at the Table of the Gods, she wondered, and grabbing Bame by the elbow, shouted at a passing taxi to pull-over to the kerb.

"Where too?" asked the driver over his shoulder.
"The party of course,"yelled Lara. "And quick, we're late already."
"OK Lady, calm down," he turned and grinned at her.
She gasped. It was Massive, the dwaf's son. The dwarf was scrabbling into the back of the cab next to Lara. She looked at him with a sniff.
"Does he have to come?"
"Yes, he does. He has an invite like the rest of us." Massive shook his own vellum scrap with his gear hand. "And anyway, be nice to him. He's my Mum."
"Right!"
Lara looked at the beard which sprouted from the dwaf's chin.
"Too many hormone pills," explained Massive.
"How do you know the way to the party anyway?" asked Lara.
"Easy. Where are all the best parties? New York City." Massive swerved the cab round a corner, and the towers of the City came into view.
BAME sat in the open boot of the cab (the others couldn'r bear the smell) weeping silently.

The waves danced. Yasmin's head rose from the sea and gently floated until it hovered over her recumbant body. Then a great rush of wind from the west and her sari was fluttering fluttering again and Yasmin was whole.
"Now." Yasmin smiled as only a graduate with honours from Pinnaculae knew how.
It was time.
Atlantis had been raised.
Yasmin looked down from her great height and saw where Junia the Gold, Junia the tooth, was floating on the Amoeba of DeLay, ever nearer to Atlantis.
Yasmin frowned. Where had she left Jefferson? The two must be brought together. And soon.

The cab was screaming along so fast that Lara could only see a blurred blur out the window.
"How far IS this party, anyway, Massive?" she asked.
"It's not about far, you bloody eejit," he retorted, favoring her with a brief glare before returning his gaze to the road. "Bloody ignorant fools pestering me while I have to come clean it up, running about like some bloody footman when any one of these divine bums could just whisk us wherever," His gravelly voice was on a rampant crescendo to a furious roaring that had Lara covering her ears and BAME banging stridently from the hood.
"Bloody rat in a bloody maze is what I am!" he screamed, "well where's the cheese then, is what I want to know, WHERE'S THE BLOODY CHEESE!!"

Bame raised his head, and his voice, from his seat in the darkness of the boot of the cab.
"No use looking for cheese" he said "Fact of life, people always move the cheese. Take poor Yasmin . . ." and his voice was swallowed by a great sob that shook him so hard the cab rolled.
Massive swerved violently to the side, and braked hard. The smell of burnt rubber was quickly masked by the familiar stench of Bame.
Lara wiped condensation from the nearside window, and looked out in amazement. The lights shining from the edifice at the side of the road were almost blinding. As she opened the door, sounds of laughter, music, glasses chinking and oddly, a telephone ringing, assailed her from all sides.
She stepped out of the car, careful to keep her knees gripped together as she swung her legs sideways. A thousand flash-lights added to the avalanche on her senses. She ducked her head down, and scurried along the red carpet leading up the steps of possibly the biggest building she had ever seen.
As she ducked through the enormous gilded doors, a small man in a white tuxedo handed her a telephone.
"It's for you"

Hello, hello," Lara barked into the receiver. "Lot of background noise. Speak up can you."
She shoved a finger in her other ear and turned away from the crowd. She could just make out a drawling female voice on the other end.
"So. thoght gt rid v me dd you? You can't do that. I mm mmoartal. Immoratl. Immortal you moron."
"Sorry," a camera was flashing in Lara's face. "Sorry who is this?"
"Who? did you say WHO. t is I. I ysm...."
The line went dead. Lara shrugged and gave the phone back to the little man. Something rushed by her and she turned to see Massive running full pelt up the steps, yelling "let me at the Leicster."
BAME was creating a channel though the crowd, like Moses parting the dead sea. People fell back holding their noses.
"Oh, my Yasmin," he wailed. "My little EDam. My Gorgonzola."
The dwaft was trying to blend in with the crowd.

Lara chased after BAME. It wasn't hard at all really, what with the wake of indignant revelers staining their tuxedos and clutching nostrils closed.
"BAME!", she cried, "BAME, will you come back here and listen to me!" She couldn't make herself heard above the din of chatting, dinner music, and occasional vomiting.
"BAME!!" She pushed by Massive Gerald, wrinkling her nose slightly at the sight of him looming over the buffet table with his arms in cheese to the elbow.
"It's about YASMIN!!"
BAME stopped dead.
"Finally!" she panted. "BAME, she's alive!"

Yasmin smiled. Yes, everyone would soon be where they needed to be.
She deserved a little playtime.
But not her incarnation as the dwarf's shrink. She really wasn't in a Freudian mood.
Well, not that sort of Freudian mood, anyway.
Her smile took on a bit of Dr. Bastet's eaten-the-canary curve.
Jefferson. Yes, where had she left Jefferson.
Her sari billowed with winds, pushing back against the scrapers from the south and the north and the west and the east.
Ah, yes, there he was! In the Algonquin. Drinking.
Ah well, it may be time to lead him to culture.
Yasmin put on her best Dorothy Parker face and tucked the volume of Kipling under her arm.
A scotch-rocks just now would suit her fine.

Jefferson's eye were level with the meniscus on his gin. As his glass was nearly empty, this meant resting his chin on his hands, and his elbows on his knees, to bring his mouth down level with the edge of the table.
Now where was he?
He blinked, but his vision blurred more. His head jolted downwards, as he pulled his right hand free to grasp his glass, smacking his chin against the table in the process.
He got hold of the glass, surprisingly, with his first grab.
As he brought it slowly to his lips, his eyes focussed.
Shit. His eyes moved upwards.
He was being regarded with more than a little disgust by a statuesque blonde in cashmere and pearls. She carefully placed a slim volume down on the tale in front of him.
"Is this seat taken?", she asked.

"NOhsatall" replied Jefferson, smoothly enough he thought. "be gesht.." his sweeping arm somehow returned his tray table to its locked and upright position, sloshing gin all over his pants.
The blond merely grinned in an oddly familiar way and perched on the seat beside him. He noticed that she carried a large, leatherbound book. (Or two, he wasn't quite sure)
"Tell me," she purred, leaning closer to stare into his bleary eyes, "Are you a fan of Kipling?"
The plane rocked.

Junia surveyed the ruins of what was Atlantis. Such a Shame. that beautiful, beautiful city. she shrugged. no time for sorrow. no time for regrets. There was a party to go to and a prophecy to fulfil.
She carefully felt around in her mind for the right words, took a deep breath and chanted:

To the Heavens above us,
O look and behold,
The Planets that love us,
All harnessed in gold!
What chariots, what horses ...
it worked. immediately a golden chariot materialised in front of her, with a team of 4 perfectly matched horses, grays, stamping and snorting, waiting to be driven hard.
Junia leapt in, golden body gleaming and turned towards the party. It was time to find Jefferson.

Jefferson was doing his best to focus. This Kipling business sounded familiar all of a sudden. He surfed the alcohol of his brain.
"That's the bloke - eksheedingly good cakes."
It was too much for Yasmin. She shook him.
"Think again. Think again."
Jefferson located 4 gray horses, crashing over a wave of synapses, linking, blinking, chugging.
"The writer fellow ... and there's a rhyme ..."
Yasmin flicked at the edges of her sari.
"You'll do for me. You'll do for me. Just keep that slur hidden as much as you can and we're getting places. Hold on tight! We're heading on in."

The party was interrupted.
Celebrants, bystanders, schmoozers and deities alike looked up from their napkins and martini glasses, as a clarion call rose above the discussions of art and elitism.
"To the Heavens above us,
O look and behold, "
The ballroom began to shuck and jive, bits of plaster raining down on the cheese. Massive Gerald did his best to shield the huge wheel he was disembowelling.
"The Planets that love us,
All harnessed in gold!"
A brilliant golden light suffused from the broad hourglass marble staircase. Lara quickly pushed BAME over to the bannister, her eyes wide.
"What Chariots-"
And she was there, astride a gleaming golden chariot. Junia the Gold, Junia the Tooth.
"Yasmin!" she cried, "Bring him! I know what to do now!"

The eye of the bull glowed red. Aldebaran circled around itself -- twin star of power -- gathering strength.
Devixinytl flew down between the skyscrapers. He hovered just outside the Algonquin at fifteen feet above the ground.
As she stepped over the threshhold into the stret, Yasmin dropped her Dorothy Parker guise. She grew to her full height and grabbed Jefferson.
"Not yet. No, not quite yet, my pretty."
She pulled Jefferson in with her and said to Devixinytl.
"Barbados. Now."

It was odd. She could swear that last time she was conscious she was lying on a subway platform, riddled with bullets, full of pain and pinning it all on a short guy with jewellery. Afterall, that's what she'd been paid to do. She thought. Note to self, she thought, Never do business with a god, it's simply not worth it.
She seemed to be on an island of some sort now. No, no, not really an island. But lots of water. And surely that was a minor deity, re-attaching body to head over there? She squinted through the light. There was lots of it.
Someone was chanting. Ugh, it felt like the molecules around her were realigning themselves and thank Pan she didn't have any dilithium crystals in her pocket - they would have shattered by now.
What was that? a chariot? and, HORSES!?
Painfully slowly, she crawled on hands and knees and tucked herself under the platform, hanging on for dear life (who's, she wondered briefly). The chariot began to move.

There were plenty of chariots mowing their way up and down the aisles of K-Mart. Ones with child seats attached, the usual metal trolleys with misaligned wheels.
Joyce was chewing. She would win that biggest bubble competition if it suffocated her. They had much better offers on at the department store across the road.
In her lunchbreak she wandered over there sometimes. Yesterday, cheese had been the big thing. They had hordes of people in - edam, gorgonzola, brie, parmesan (especially that one). You name it. People bought such exotic things these days.
Joyce had picked up a nice piece of Red Leicester, got to the check out and was pleased to find an offer was attached.
Buy this. Free entry to a Party
Great, she thought. That's a sale.
Gum splattered over her face. She'd better do her hair and makeup and get on over there. She remembered the small guy and the bigger boy in the trolley from before. She hated this store, downtown lousy job.
Breakout. Chariots of fire. The great trolley dash.
She shattered through the plate-glass window into fresh air and freedom.

Felony Bob grumbled. He'd poked his one good eye on the purple umbrella in his coconut cup, and the tears were messing with his view of the tropical sunset. All he really got was a vague impression of gold.
"They can all go to hell," he muttered into the coconut. "There's no gold but fools' gold anyway." At least, he mused, the sun was nice and warm.
Until a shadow got in the way. Blinking tears out, he could have sworn that the silouhette in front of him had light peeking out in a neat line across the neck.
"Oy!", he cried, "What's with the neck?"
The silouhette heaved a sigh, and was joined by two others.
"Bob." The shadow did not sound pleased. "What are YOU doing here?"

Yasmin and Jefferson walked into the 'rologer's.
It seemed to be a run-of-the-mill, make that rum-of-the-mill, island bar.
They found a table. The waitress approached from the bar.
She had that real sing-song chant.
"My name's Ethel. I'm your waitress. What'll ya have?"
Yasmin grimaced at the northern accent, scraping across this southern island from east to west and back again.
"Rum punch. Bring us rum punch. Three glasses each."
She paused.
"And two towels."

Ethel grinned widely, "two towels, sure, no probs"
stupid idiots, she thought to herself. reverting to her normaly gloomy state of mind. what do they know, wandering in here, ordering cocktails and wanting towels. did they think this was a laundromat?
She loaded up her tray, pulled two towels from under the bar and sashayed back to the table. All the while scanning the crowd for Lamonte. Had he followed her here? she deposited the drinks, managing somehow to caress Bob's manly arm in the process, and walked away. Almost time for her break. God, she really needed a cigarette.
Ethel walked through the kitchens, out the back, into the carpark and leant against the wall, She took deep drags. She closed her eyes. That was a mistake.

Pallas Athene stood in the halflight of Hell's Kitchen, "so, she said, "you thought you could get away with me gold, did you? you and bob and bame and bane and massive and gerald and lara and ethel.. i'm ethel. of coutrse you are! who are you you're not Ethel, you're a fraud. Do you think I was born with two heads in fact, I was was born with twenty. To Hell with it, where's that Dwarf, I want me gold back you've got five hours or I'll set off my nuclear clock here. goodluck."

Junia and Jefferson received the cocktails and, with one mind, stood on opposite sides of the round table. Yasmin presented the towels ceremoniously, bowing her head carefully in it's still precarious attachment. They took a deep breath and started singing.

Though terrors o'ertake us
We'll not be afraid.
No power can unmake us
Save that which has made.
Nor yet beyond reason
Or hope shall we fall—
All things have their season,
And Mercy crowns all!
their voices crescendoed through the building, forcing the other diners to stop and cover their ears with their hands or any available cushions. In a puff of purple breath, the dingy interior was changed into a trendy, hip, hugely successful business venture. Ethel, walking back in with fag ash on her apron, stood aghast. It was her dream. She really was a successful restarantuer.
Junia, Jefferson and Yasmin downed their rum cocktails and got back to the chariot. Next stop. Hell's Kitchen.

Junia and Jefferson arrived in Hell's Kitchen to find Pallas Athene with an eye on the nuclear clock. Ten minutes they had, ten minutes to prevent the ending of the world. They presented all the gold they had and said "That will have to do." Pallas Athene was not impressed, this was not the riches she had hoped for. Jefferson patiently pointed out that destruction of the world would render all riches worthless and with that, she accepted the bag of gold, turned of the clock and disappeared forever.

They let out a sigh of relief, it was all over. At least the threat of destruction of the world as we know it was over.
But were things ever likely to be the same again? Jefferson looked around, staring up at the nuclear clock, realising how close they had come. Pallas Athene had gone off with the gold, what were her plans? Who knows.

But that was not the end. Every one seems to have forgotten the third dimension. ~Which comes to light once every two thousand years. The light stretches from deep space, through our atmosphere, finally to earth in one searching beam. The beam reaches to all spaces and atouches everything within and without it's path. When you have been washed by this bright light you are rejuvenated. All else is forgotten and another life begins yours, mine, theirs. All children born after this light touches humans never grow up to be evil. There is no evil. The light is all pure and all powerful and omnicient. All present, everywhere. There is no cruelty in this new world. There is no barbarism but there is everlasting peace.

It was Quickly Shifting toward closing time and rubies were the only thing on Ethel's mind along-side a buzz from drinking up the customer's drinks. The bathroom hut(s)-plural out-back was a fabulous idea she thought to herself. How long had she been doing this? Drinking up the profits that other people left behind. The red punch that Ethel's last customers left behind facinated her, she looked deep within and phantasized as if it were a big red sea and she would board the galaxy ship and sail from this new island home at atomic speed as soon as she was settled in. She would need bring along her most important belongings that she kept secluded in stow-away, she would need be ready to embark on a short journey, one that would leave BANE behind, and one that would find SOMETHING right where she always knew something was. She reached under the bar and took out a black-velvet purse, carassed it, and unwound the red-satin ribbion. She looked around making she was safe from other's perceptions and she reached inside her purse swirling her fingers around and around in the center of her multifaceted universe. The jagged edges of her fine-cut stones pleased her to no beginning, and when she closed her eyes, and she was there again. Ethel had a feeling that she might remain here for a very long time.

Junia and Jefferson slunk back into the party with Yasmin trailing behind. At least they tries to slink, unnoticed, but it was not to be. The crowd were waiting for them, and at the first sight of Junia's liguid shining skin, a cheer went up. then the chanting began again in earnest.
To the Heavens above us
O look and behold
The Planets that love us
All harnessed in gold!
What chariots, what horses
Against us shall bide
While the Stars in their courses
Do fight on our side?"
The words span through the air, taking on bodily form. They swirled in a whirlwind towards the pair. They clung together.
And as the words began to reach them, something strange happened. The gold of Junia began to spread across her lover. That wasn't all, it was solidifying. It was slow, but sure. They were turning solid.
"Quick, to the Park" said Yasmin. "Time's running out"
I looked across at Gerald, my son. Massive. He was staring as if he couldn't believe his eyes. Realisation had come to him.
"Oh my god," I heard him say. " I had it wrong all along. It was trees not cheese. I want TREES. Trees trees. This is what it's all about. Fuck Leicester."

And then, toward that gold and foolish crowd, whiRRling terribly out of somewhere over the orange street lights at the borders of consciousness came SOMETHING,
I looked up and screamed. “Gerald, Massive! My son! My son, my dearest …”
It was Bane. SOMETHING had been Bane, even in the twilight before the lamps
Bane, suppurating, screeling still, hovered like stone over MY BOY.
Junia’s mouth was open
And I saw it, I saw him.. I heard him changed for ever....“Trees! Plant forestss, plant trees everywhere” shouted my brave lad, as slowly, slowly, pore by pore, his skin split down, weeping pearls and pink rubies of dewy light, he tore, he pustulated and molten fell intwo, apart, with Bane upon him all ratbagged and crapridden, pungent with amorce.
Bane continued to shriek, bubbling, sliding and finally farting away, dripping then peacably along the cracks in the floorboards.
And they arose.
That was the birth of the Twins Massive, the golden, and Gerald, the pink....
born then with branches for hands and cork at their hearts.
I fell to the ground. (not far...)

And oblivious to all around them, Jefferson and Junia sang on:
"The waters have risen,
The springs are unbound--
The floods break their prison,
And ravin around.
No rampart withstands 'em,
Their fury will last,
Till the Sign that commands 'em
Sinks low or swings past."
"Right! The Sign!" came a muffled squawk from under some rubble near the buffet table. Felony Bob arose, reaching into his plastery jacket.
"There you are!" cried another voice, less muffled. Bob spun to face Llano Estacado, who stood not far away with an evil-looking knife cocked to throw. "You know, Lamont knows about you and Ethel," smirked the nasty little chicano. "And she's paid me more than enough for this..."
"Bloody hell." Muttered Yasmin. With a quick jerk, she uprooted her head from its still-tender moorings and hurled it into the fraw as her body toppled.
Faster than the eye could follow, the head snatched the knife in somehow still-moving teeth, and with a blinding spin returned it to its owner, with interest. The mexican mercenary fell with a gurgle, and Yasmin's head rolled to a battered stop, to face Ethel as she peeped, shaken, from the doorway.
"Mercy crowns all" gasped the head, and closed its eyes.

I found the tears on my face quicker than I could have imagined. All because of quick-thinking Yasmin. She really did want to be everywhere, helping out. If only she had been given a wand she could have kept her head on her neck and carried on with her fairygodmothering, whirlwinding ways.
Her job was probably done though. We needed her. I needed her. The shock got us all out on to the street, chasing that Felony Bob, and that's when it all really became clear.
The light, the bright, shiny, whiter than whiteness of it all. Athena hadn't gone and dumped us; she hadn't simply run away with the money. That was her cover. While I was staring proudly at Gerald and Massive, the great Goddess herself had transported all the best bits of Atlantis to New York. Over the Hudson, Central Park - you name it.
The gold was taken and in it's place something richer.
I heard the cheer from the crowd.
I was the only one who watched Felony Bob make his exit. He took that Chevy. I knew he had gold he still wanted to hide.

But Gerald and Masiv have their eye on Felony Bob. They chase after him so I turn back to Yasmin's head
and something is happening
It is stretching, elongating becoming transparent,
rising to the sky, A crystal roof rises, rises , rises and I hear Yasmin's voice farewell my love and welcome to the dawn of the golden age.
My memory boards have been fixed and I the Tower of Babel once more work as my makers intended. From now on all humand and gods can communicate without error. all humans will understand each other once more
My eyes misted as the human features I loved disappeared for ever in smooth glass.
I turned
New Love! True love!
Best go look for a new love
The dead they cannot rise, an you'd better dry your eyes,
And y'd best go look for a new love

Aldebaran calls.
Aldebaran always calls.
And I must follow.
And he must follow.
And I must follow.
Yasmin is no more. Yasmin is no more.
But Yasmin is forever.
Swift as light returning to the stars.
Yasmin is forever.
And as Yasmin rises to be reunited with her own truth, to be joined in the fires of Aldebaran.
I hear her voice one last time.

All thought, all desires,

That are under the sun,
Are one with their fires,

As we also are one:
All matter, all spirit,

All fashion, all frame,
Receive and inherit

Their strength from the same.

There are chariots that ride above the city, white, over Wall Street they throw out pamphlets for Atlantis, for the forgotten myths and songs and the waves dance on the Hudson. Lara sits in the Irish bar, downtown, drinking her twentieth Guinness with Bane, slurring his name Bame, Bob and Billy but they don’t care, they have cigarettes between the lips, this is chooktime and the city is so white beyond the glass.
The cars swerve a little to miss the unicorns on 42nd and Felony Bob has gone, there were gold parts of him you couldn’t imagine, Athena showed him, she showed us all the way and he left the city signs.
Junia and Jefferson have crept stealthily up the stairs in darkness, in the tower that has grown in Central Park from the lode we found at Atlantis. They are lovers now, wound together like serpents around the words that protect us all from ignorance, they gently envelop each other, their lips forever meeting, their bodies joined, frozen in the moment of ecstasy.
The trees have reclaimed the streets of NY and they’re spreading across the US and soon they’ll hit the Atlantic and then the Pacific and they’ll keep going, that is the story, that is the myth. My Gerald had done well, split in two like he was by Bane, now Massive, now Gerald. Last I saw of them were Gerald striking out west and Massive running east weaving through the city traffic, seeding the asphalt, letting the trees rise up behind them like the surf.
The city rises white tonight and everyone sings the old songs, songs they never knew until last night.
There are plenty of chariots mowing their way up and down the aisles of NY and the Gods are in the pitching in with the Yankees, it seems this year, that whatever happens, NY is going to win.
And me, well, that shrink of mine, isn’t so bad, she’ll be okay, it was hard for her to understand, infact she went mad for awhile, goblins and gimps mixing at the opera is something she’s yet to feel comfortable about and I’m not even going into the experience she had with a centaur down in Queens.
Devixinytl is counselling her.
Ethel has opened the largest multi-dimensional restaurant in the known universe, business is good but the Gods piss her off.
And Yasmin? I still cry for her, the memory of her but we have learnt as NY fell, that there is hope in the world, that in the darkness, there is light that she found for all of us.

Normally, I wouldn't have given Felony Bob the time of day. I'd like to think I can blame the Guiness. But I wasn't nearly drunk enough to justify what I did next.

The smell took me back...long nights beneath the stars, under the ragged roof of Jefferson's Chevy...the memories bubbled up as thick as a scrim of late January frost on a windshield.The dwarf was leering, the car swung back and forth.

Felony Bob cowered as the glass fell around him. His eyes darted around the room. They felll on the cylinder of laughing gas. Maybe that would do the cloud in. If it didn't, he'd never see Ethel in her nightie again. He couldn't lose either way.

I loved it when Jefferson sang to me. His baritone voice went so perfectly with his broad shoulders. He could have been another Perry Como if anyone listened to music like that anymore. But why was he going on and on about the sun?

Yasmin pulled herself up to her very tallest height. "I did! I have a diploma to prove it." She pulled Jefferson over to behind the desk and pointed to a framed certificate. "Pinnaculae University! With Honours!"

Yasmin smiled. She knew she was getting close, close to what she wanted. Her hand began to rub round and round in circles overlapping circles on Jefferson's chest. Soon he wouldn't be able to remember that goldbody anymore than he could the years he spent in Panama.

Normally, I wouldn't have given Felony Bob the time of day.
I'd like to think I can blame the Guiness. But I wasn't nearly drunk enough to justify what I did next.

The smell took me back...long nights beneath the stars, under the ragged roof of Jefferson's Chevy...the memories bubbled up as thick as a scrim of late January frost on a windshield.
The dwarf was leering, the car swung back and forth.

Felony Bob cowered as the glass fell around him. His eyes darted around the room. They felll on the cylinder of laughing gas. Maybe that would do the cloud in.
If it didn't, he'd never see Ethel in her nightie again.
He couldn't lose either way.