It came to pass... part III

Part III

It was late afternoon when Sawney eventually woke again; disturbed from his coma-like doze by the sudden blast of a mis-set radio alarm.The band ‘Broken Face’ were performing a trash metal version of “Seven Years Bad Luck” while, outside his window, they were accompanied by a pneumatic drill pounding holes into the tarmac.

Grogilly switching his bed-side multi-media entertainment centre over to its television setting; Sawney caught the closing item of a one o'clock news bulletin.

A silver-haired, perma-tanned but grim-faced anchorman had just concluded a heart-warming story about saving endangered river dolphins when his voice dropped to a sombre key and he began describing the latest tragic finding of a third victim of the "Alien Killer"; her body discovered in a dis-used dumpster on Broken road; then, rising onto the screen by way of an animated computer graphic, Sawney saw the face of Anoushka.

It was an old,badly taken photograph and her hair was slightly different but her face and the strange detached gaze in her eyes were unmistakable.

Sawney sank back onto his mattress and for a moment was gripped by a terrible vision of himself running off and abandoning her alone in that alleyway.

Then a final picture of a weedy, young man in a purple anorak with a photo-fitted face appeared on the screen and the off-screen voice of the news reader said;"Anyone who knows or has seen this man who was witnessed running from the scene of the murder should contact their local law enforcement office" and Sawney immediately recognised his own face; his cropped dark hair; his deep set eyes; thin oval skull and meagre, slightly effeminate jawline; even though they had made his nose much too broad and too long.

For atleast an hour after that he'd stared at the T.V. screen, through a daytime soap and countless smiling advertisments, he'd sat adding up and adding up all the little pieces of this catastrophe; cross examining himself, over and over, on the time and the place and the murder weapon, a 5 billiard blanc note, and, each time, finding himself guilty as charged and imagining how he could ever face his uncle or his aunty or his little sister or his friends; he: a faliure,a drop-out,a pervert,a drug user and now a suspected serial killer, but obviously he had to turn himself in; he had to do something right for once.

The first knock at the door Sawney didn't hear because he was so deep inside himself but the second knock nearly punched a hole through the wood and brought Sawney round with a start.

" Mister Beeen!",an angry voice called from the other side of the door. "It's the poleece! We've come to arrest you,you sicko! We've come to measure your dumb, monkey ass for the electric chair".

This was followed by laughter; not human but animal,terrifying laughter and then more knocking; heavy like a small battering ram; shaking the whole door as it struck.

"We know you're in there,Mister Beeen",the
voice jeered, ‘coz we can smell your stinky
human carcass.If you don't open up then
we're going to come in there and bite you".

For a moment, Sawney thought that he must have slipped into a terrible hallucination. First the news report and now this.

Whatever was outside, he thought,must be some monster coming to punish him; some horrible thing from the nightmare realm; some dark, evil nemesis arrived to pass judgement on him.

Popping a handful of blue psychotropic pills out of their blister-pack,he swallowed them with a tumbler full of pomegranate juice and prepared
to meet his hour of reckoning.

The door burst open with a sudden shattering,
splintering crash; the lock, loose and
swinging back and forth from the force of
the impact. Striding in casually came a tall,
pale, skeletal man with a transparent face
and wearing a dark-green velvet suit; a wide-
brimmed, green fedora and dark sun-glasses followed by a broad shouldered Goliath in an over-sized dinner-jacket with a pyramid shaped skull and one glaring,lidless eye.

Taking a small hand mirror from his pocket, the walking vivisection gazed at his reflection; admiring the prettiness of his insides and licked a long, blue tongue over his colourless lips as if to say, "You look good enough to eat".

Sawney could certainly see the workings of this man's body but his alien mind was as opaque as his dark glasses.Now this window skinned man started to talk.

"I hear that you have been a naughty monkey,Mister Beeen", said the skeletal one; his teeth constantly grinning through the thin film of his see-through skin and showing off his yellow,uneven molars in a way that terrified Sawney. "You have killed three girls and those girls were not your's to kill. Those girls belonged to me".

Sawney's mind could not comprehend any of this. He thought, maybe, he was going mad. Maybe something he'd taken; some hallucinogenic that was visiting all his sins upon him in the form of these monsters.All he could do was shake his head
and ask "Are you here to punish me?".

The tall skeleton and his one-eyed golem laughed like they had laughed outside the door; only this time he could almost feel their laughter on his face and it made Sawney sick with fear.

"I am not motivated by morals, Mr. Beeen. Your human system of values don't appeal to me. I'm only interested in making money," said the skeletal one; slowly rubbing his green gloved
thumb and fore-finger together."That's the one useful thing that your world has taught me; the value of money. I sell girls and drugs and you stupid monkey's with your insatiable desires come to me and you pay me money".

Suddenly the words spoken by this ghoulish walking x-ray seemed to make some sense and both the confusion and the fear that had gripped Sawney seemed to dissipate.These creatures; whoever they were,were not demons but alien crooks,"You mean that you’re a pimp",he asked,trembling.

Sawney felt a burning blow thud against the side of his head from the large cyclops who had finally spoken but with his hammer-headed fist rather than his mouth that only seemed capable of snarling; showing-off a mouthful of bear-trap like incisors.

"Who are you calling a pimp.You dirty, little nonce. I'm a raconteur. An impresario and your destruction of my stock and scaring away of my customers has cost me alot of money".

Sawney was beginning to get the picture now.
He had had too many things crowding his mind
but now he had to think about surviving this.
"I didn't do it. I didn't",he said; looking the skeletal man directly in his cruel emaciated face for the first time. "Anoushka was alive when I left her.Honestly".

"That's what you say",he scoffed. "I say that you've fallen down a rabbit hole. I say you're so crazy that you don't know black from white anymore", then suddenly, the clear-skinned man
thrust his little hand-mirror into Sawney's face and Sawney saw what a nervous wreck he looked; like Donatello's Mary Magdalen on a bad day. "Looks like the face of a guilty man to me. I think that you should do the right thing,my friend. I think you should pay a visit to your local Law Enforcement office and confess to your disgusting crimes; unless ofcourse you'd prefer us to extract a confession out of you .Is that what you want?".

The skeletal man turned away from Sawney now to face the door of his flat or what was left of it. "I noticed that your lift was out of order.That's human engineering for you but, since we have to use the stairs, I thought we might just drag you down them; thirteen flights; see how you like that, Mr.Beeen".

A sharp flick of the wrist from the skeleton was all the indication that the large, silent polythemus required and, bending, he took hold of Sawney's ankles and yanked him, screaming, off of his bed; Sawney's head thudding against the carpet
as he fell.

As Sawney's back slowly scraped along the floor; his arms waving wildly like a crazy, frantic semaphore, knocking into chair legs; he felt as hopeless as a tortoise suddenly placed upon its back to squirm in the hot sun. Above him, the light bulb seemed to move north as he was dragged south and he despaired that it might be the last light that he would ever see.

But then; just as suddenly as all hell had broken loose, it subsided.

"Anoushka! Darling! What a surprise! I thought you were dead.It was all over the telly", said the voice of the Skeletal man; suddenly
ingratiating; suddenly nervous. Sawney; reaching out his flailing arms like an invalid, tried to prop himself up and just managed to catch a glimpse of a resurrected Anoushka standing in the doorway; before one of the cyclops's heavy, size-sixteen shoes kicked him back into submission.

"Dead? No.",she said in that distant,
dispassionate,almost ethereal voice of hers,"My
species sheds its corporeal form every four
months.The police must have found my old body.It was getting worn out but," her voice suddenly became stern and the skeleton who had been
laughing suddenly stopped, “Misty told me that you'd come here. I can't let you do this".

Now the second part of his salvation came to pass as Sawney felt the firm manacle like grip of the Cyclops slacken and let his legs go free, then he heard a large crash by his feet.

Free to move; he feebily dragged himself up by a table, causing an avalanche of books,ornaments and a tulip-filled vase to come down as he snatched at the table cloth.

Now; to his surprise and to his
unconcealable delight, he saw that it was
not he but the skeletal pimp and his brutish, one-eyed accomplice that were on the floor; rolling helpless like overgrown newborns at Anoushka's feet; deranged by some alien enchantment which she possessed.

"What happened to them?",asked Sawney; seeing, for the first time, Anoushka's eyes uncovered and how they glowed like money but with a wisdom and authority that he had never seen, not even in the sagest human being.

"They are back within whatever womb gave birth to them”, said Anoushka, “My ancestors,may they always watch over me, perfected many non-lethal
means of self-defence”.

Sawney was spellbound by her but, like everything else, what had just happened didn't make any sense to him.

"If you have powers like that then why are you on the game? You could be anything you want to be. You should be running the show".

Anoushka looked at him angrilly; her halo-like cornea's giving out an aura of frustration that made Sawney wonder if she might zap him the way that she had immobilised her pimp and his
heavy.She was just agrivated that there seemed
no limit to the supply of stupid,selfish people on this planet but then, she reminded herself, this simian was so much less evolved than she and she should look upon him with kindness.

"The Thrones; my people , shed their attachment to need and desire aeons ago. It is our purpose to help other species do the same. I take jobs wherever people are most sick and in most urgent need of emmancipation. Addicts like you or killers... like him", she said; pointing an accusing index-finger at the skeletal man who was still curled up on the floor like a foetal cadaver, "Poor,little creature. I did not wish to hurt him but, from what little I could see, I could see that his mind was in an awful mess", her gaze lifted from the incapacitated man on the floor and her eyes looked deeply into Sawney, drifting from left to right as if reading through a chapter in a book, "like your mind".

"I know, I know",said Sawney; his gaze falling, ashamedly, towards the ground.

"I can fix it", said Anoushka; and Sawney saw a real,broad,open smile, for the very first time, curling the corners of her sparkling lips.

Outside; the sun shone bright in the clear blue sky like a queen returning to reclaim her throne; to drive out the old tyranny and bring a new order
to the city of Gallowglass and in, through the window of Sawney's bedroom, a shaft of light hit the side of his face and it felt warm and
it made him really happy; while, across the street, the same radiance momentarilly dazzled two of three vermilion eyes in the grey,furry, volpine head of a Tetrapian marksman; making him narrowly miss Sawney’s head by half an inch and, instead, shatter a willow patterned, porcelain pig into a million pieces.

Sawney panicked and screamed as it was his usual instinct to do in moments of danger But Anoushka,
who was a billion seconds swifter in both intellect and reflex than the average homo sapien, grabbed Sawney by the collar and flung him to the ground.

Tetrapian marksmen, famed for their aim within 36 quadrants of universe 1, had a tradition of only attempting to hit a target three times. If, after three attempts, they had failed to kill their
Target, they would usually place the barrel of their rifle against a prominent vital organ just below their third armpit and pull the trigger.

This marksman, who had the pretty, metallic, purple bob of Anoushka within his sights, was a stickler for tradition and so Anoushka had only two more bullets to worry about. Luckilly, her ancestors had long ago considered the problem of being hit by a marksman; 20 assasinations of prominent Thronian heads of state by foreign assasins had prompted them to come up with various psychic mechanisms for defence against sharp-shooting hitmen.

The Tetrapian’s mother waved to him and smiled through the cross-hairs of his gunsights. The marksman blinked and checked again and then, failing to believe his eyes, wiped the two lenses of his gun-sights before re-checking; no, it was no mistake, his mother was now standing where Anoushka had stood and waving her uppermost left hand.

Tetrapian boys loved their mothers, even more than most species, gestating for 13 months and breast feeding for six years; the mother-son bond was a sacred thing and matricide; as featured in the grand tragedies of most classical Tetrapian literature, was an unthinkable sin which would be punished by Armida, goddess of maternity, by eternal digestion within the thirty stomached sin eater, Throth.

Faced with the prospect of such hideous divine retribution, the Tetrapian put his second bullet into the prominent vital organ below his third left armpit and spent three seconds thinking of his beautiful wife and daughter before his senses were engulfed in perpetual blackness.

A few seconds after being flung to the
floor, Sawney was being dragged to his feet again by Anoushka and was beginning to get a little tired of being manhandled and was about to forcefully air his feelings when he realized
that he had just been yanked to his feet by his
late mother.

“Mother?”, gasped Sawney,flabbergasted at seeing his grey haired, pale, sour faced old mother staring back at him with dark accusing eyes, dressed in the same green nightgown she had worn in the geriatric home where she died.

“No, I’m not your mother. I’m Anoushka,remember? It’s just a psychic illusion for defence against snipers; based on the assumption that most species would be reluctant to shoot their own mother. Ofcourse, some people hate their mothers enough to gun them down in cold blood and so it’s a risky strategy but, in this instance, it seemed to work”, said Anoushka, pulling him towards the shattered doorway of his flat.

Because the lift was out of order they had to run down thirteen floors. Anoushka seemed to possess the speed and stamina of an olympic athlete but Sawney was pitifully out of shape and, after about the ninth floor, his heart and lungs were ready to explode but Anoushka refused to abandon him and,picking him up in her strong but slender arms, continued to run down stairs while carrying him and, Sawney noticed, wearing high heels aswell.

The high priest of Mammon, more well known as Cherry Pepsicola , founding father and CEO of the multi-global IPHI-GEN business empire, was waiting for them on the first floor, shouldering a day-glo, tangerine, gyrojet carbine and dreaming about his youth and the imminent godhood he would receive upon pulling the trigger against Sawney’s ugly little melon and her pretty, alien skull.

Mammon would reward him well and yet, he was nervous. He had never faced his victims before . He had been indirectly responsible for billions of deaths through chemical and bacterial pollution from Pepsicola’s many chemical plants on developing planets; through the extermination of indigenous peoples to appropriate their land for grazing Pepsicola’s gengineered supercattle or through selling the most hi-tech machinery of war to greedy warlords and violently disgruntled revolutionaries on quintillion backwater moons but he had never actually murdered someone face to face, even the unwashed that he fed to Mammon wore a dark sack over their heads and he wore a mask with eyeholes.

“Personnel. That’s always been my problem”, he said, as Anoushka turned the corner, now exhausted, onto the first floor, “Immigrant workers are cheap but they are lazy, stupid and sloppy; that’s why I broke the habit of a lifetime and decided to come down here and sort out this predicament in person and, besides that, the rewards that lord Mammon has promised to bestow upon me for killing Sawney Bean are too great to risk; godhood and power beyond all reckoning”.

Anoushka let go of Sawney, suddenly and he fell to the concrete floor with a bump, hitting his elbow in that part that hurts the most. Rubbing his elbow, Sawney whined but Anoushka ignored him, as usual. “Why would your god give out such great rewards for the killing of such a weak and insignificant person? Is he worth that much to it?”, she asked with genuine surprise which betrayed her own low estimation of Sawney’s worth.

“I assumed that you already knew that,angelcake”, said Pepsicola, “Your ‘john’ is The One; the one that the great ‘She’ picked to be the author of the latest, gripping instalment of that
neverending saga called “The Battle Between Light and Darkness”; a new testament for our interstellar age, ‘and lo, it came to pass that, while Sawney was sitting in the crowded
compartment of a homeward bound mole train, his future self did appear to him, in a vision, and reveal to him, the secret nature of Mother Multiverse’ ”.

“Good god!”, said Sawney,hearing all
these things said about him,“Now I know
that I’m hallucinating. You’re all just
figments of my fragmenting mind and,if
I could just wake myself up, you would
all go away”.

“That was how his destiny was supposed to pan out”, continued Pepsicola, ignoring Sawney, “However, now,rather than uniting the cosmos under the banner of one faith, he will be feeding whatever slimy,crawling necrophages live on this god-forsaken, floating lump of crud; and that goes for you too, Scary Magdalen”, said Pepsicola, pointing the barrel of his gyrojet towards Anoushka.

“I feel as if I’m trapped inside one of those cheezy, black and white, gangster flicks with,you know, Edward G Robertson and Laura Bacall”, said Sawney,putting his head in his hands and groaning, “maybe I nodded off infront of the entertainment centre”, but then Sawney remembered something important that might, possibly, save their lives.

“Have you ever heard of Stella Nova?”,he asked Pepsicola.

“Yeah. I vaguely remember her. She’s some old holo-star. She sucked! So what!”, said the high priest, laughing loudly, “The only movie that you’re going to see now is your life flickering before your eyes; so let’s just cut to the chase”, and he was about to pull the trigger of his gyrojet when the door of Stella’s apartment was sucked open,as if by a strong wind and what can only be described as an enormous, opera glove of solid shadow, reached out from inside and, seizing Pepsicola in tapering fingers like tarantula limbs, dragged the high priest; screaming like a geriatric infant, in through the doorway and into the bottomless black at the centre of the living vortex that was Stella Nova.

Getting, clumsily, to his feet, Sawney poked a tentative head into the fathomless gloom of Stella’s apartment doorway. Stella couldn’t blush but you could hear from her voice that she had done something which, to her mind, showed an unpardonable lack of decorum, “I do apologise, Sawney”, she said, “But, if there’s one thing that I cannot stand, it’s a critic!”.