Campus Chaos, Chapter Two

As the night-porter turned to face Mini-Flash Juniper, a change came over him. It was akin to the effect produced by inclining a hologram-sticker.

For a hologram-sticker had in the beginning been all that Lasser was.

The porter sported thinning uncut hair, was growing gross about the middle, and wore shabby black with his university lanyard. That which assumed a face-on attitude to Mini-Flash Juniper was a gigantic goblin, horns and armour and oversized head cramming out the confined cell, bulging hideousness lit by its own eerie source of amber and aqua blue. Yet somehow this silent sinister shift seemed more closely related to the bald light-bulb above, as though its glare might have worked the transmutation merely through falling on a new refractive plane.

“Guest of honour,” were Lasser’s words.

Mini-Flash Juniper was all but choking on the hate she felt for this creature.

“Your disguise is a bit of a comedown from your last one,” she commenced. “But I suppose you’ve got to make do when you don’t have all of poor Pseudangelos’s powers at your command anymore. You’re nothing but a residual dreg of those vile candy-sticks, still knocking around in her system. Is my friend ever going to detoxify completely from you? After you drugged and traduced her. So that your leader could try and use her to conquer your world. And so that you could try and use her to…”

She couldn’t finish. Nor would she. She wouldn’t dignify the attempt Lasser had made on her by speaking of it aloud.

“How did you know I was here?” he demanded.

“Let’s just say I read it in a book,” was Mini-Flash Juniper’s prim response. “And now that I’ve come all this way, you may change the habit of a lifetime and help somebody for once.”

“What else is a night-porter for?” returned Lasser easily, then jumped.

A prismatic blur melted into shadowy ceiling-beams and was gone.

Uhh, thought Mini-Flash Juniper, much too slow. Well-deserved birching from Auntie Green. Her thigh-muscles quivered and she jumped too.

Through the timber and tiles of the roof Juniper smoothly slid, pushing her Special Program potential to limits never hitherto tested. Thence she sailed unto starry skies and saw the quad beneath her, Lasser completing his lurching bound somewhere over the far end. Neatly Juniper tucked into a somersault and let her tonnage do the rest.

Knickers-first with cheer-pleats inside-out she made landfall squarely on gasping Lasser’s back, one leg outstretched that the crook of her ankle hooked his grotesque bulbous pate and drove it deep in the lawn’s dirt and turf. Juniper’s dismount was a picture-perfect tumble-turn, for which half the hall seemed spectators.

Interpreting her Intelligentsor visions was going to be a game of Flashball to figuring out why Earth-students made that noise whenever she showed these red ones.

Now, where was…?

Mini-Flash Juniper came about but Lasser’s snarling mud-smeared face already filled her field of vision, while the arm he’d upraised –

Wham.

Then Juniper was making rapid progress to the residential block behind her.

Seriously? Why so slow today?

Oh. Yes. Four pieces of chocolate cake.

A boy and girl in bed, talking at length because they weren’t sure what to do afterwards, hushed up when one of the varsity squad slipped seamlessly through the outer wall, landed with a bump, righted herself and vanished into the ceiling. Seconds later she was followed by a huge-headed hologrammatic ghoul, which told the boy irritably to get on with it then departed too.

“Swear,” muttered Lasser. “Wasted on the…”

Nowhere ahead in the night span that scarlet spot he was bent on pursuing, and in vain did his cavernous flaring nostrils seek a contrail of rubber soles and cheer-sweat.

Mini-Flash Juniper rose from where she’d crouched unseen on the dormitory leads.

This time, her fist was drawn back.

And then…

Wham. Properly.

For several seconds it looked as if orbit might have been Lasser’s destination, but finally he hit hillside and stayed where he was, Mini-Flash Juniper alighting soon after. The dorms below were a pool of lamplight, and farther off in the distance glittered Nottingham, separated from the upland tableau as by a dark ocean.

“You’re pathetic, Lasser,” Mini-Flash Juniper declared. “Alone, and without Pseudangelos to exploit, you’re no match for the Special Program.”

“Listen to you,” Lasser growled from the ground, and spat out a mouthful of earth. “You’ve been indoctrinated into his faction alright. You’re even talking like him.”

Somewhere along the line, he’d changed back into the night-porter. Juniper hadn’t noticed until now.

“Yes, and that’s another thing I was meaning to have a word with you about,” she continued. “Joe is boyfriend to one of my dearest friends. For her sake, you offend me by assuming that likeness.”

Lasser was chuckling, dryly, though that might have been the gravel in his guts.

“Do you ever stop to consider his cant about the so-called creatures of evil?” he inquired. “Funny that when Joe isn’t murdering them, he’s making them. You know he made me. You know he made the one you most fear. Who do you think Harbin looks like, underneath that shadow? It’s all Joe, guest of honour. It’s all Joe.”

There was nothing more, so Mini-Flash Juniper could only conclude they were through.

The books hadn’t given her specific questions to ask Lasser. They’d merely told her to go and hear whatever it was he had to say.

With scrawny arms the night-porter pushed himself up again from the meadow. He was all over grass-ends and dew, not that that could have made those black rags of his any scruffier.

“But you don’t have to go yet,” he told her. “It’s a nice night.”

Which it was. That however usually meant a girl had better things to do, than debate academics with yet another low-level employee who let working at a university go to his head.

In fact, hadn’t there been something especially important?

“You mentioned your reading,” the night-porter pressed on. “Literature student?”

Oh, it was probably nothing. “I’ve read a lot of good books lately,” Jenny affirmed, pleased by his interest.

“And still you find time for cheerleader practice!” declared the beaming porter.

Jenny wanted to laugh. There it was. Somehow it never seemed to take this sort of person long. Although to be fair, it would have been flattering coming from somebody else.

Her two friends on the first floor, for example. She’d liked it when they teased her about being a cheer.

Didn’t they have something to do with the…?

Mini-Flash Juniper’s lips dropped open. It had only just come back, and it was certain to go again, this time for good. She gazed on the night-porter’s hungry grin, his uneven stained teeth.

Then she whirled for the home-lights below, knowing she could no longer afford to care who saw. Lasser was laughing as one in triumph, and shouting things after her, horrible things, that she wasn’t going anywhere, that he’d see her on campus, and not to worry, the spare key to her room was in a place he’d always be able to find it…

Mini-Flash Juniper ran.

Down through the long grass, kicking her sneakers, she ran with every tendon and sinew a straining singing pain. Overtaxing herself in just the way a good cheerleader shouldn’t.

Stop that. Stop with the cheerleader thing, Jenny commanded herself.

No!

Mini-Flash Juniper! Mini-Flash Juniper!

Keep running, and keep thinking of her friends on the first floor.

Not the duty they were doing for her. Them. She had to hold onto them. Keep their smiles and their kindness ahead of her, and everything would be alright…

Hall-lights glowed, and there was the door. She threw it open, thundered up the stairway, and saw them by the banister just where they’d been.

“Pom-poms is back,” remarked the one in sleep-shorts.

Putting on the brakes meant bruised and burned knees. One piece of chocolate cake was wrested from the rucksack, torn free of its tissues, and stuffed. Another followed, then another and another, until Mini-Flash Juniper was sure again.

“Whoa!” exclaimed knickers-and-tee. “Easy there, cheerpants! Lifetime on the hips!”

“And yours don’t need it, pet,” added sleeping-shorts, not unkindly.

Juniper looked up at them, cake-crumbs dotted all around her mouth, frosting smudged on her cheeks and nose. Both her observers were girls, it was true, and non-existent ones at that, but all the same they probably fell in love there and then. Most people did when they saw that smile.

“Before I go, you can help me finish these,” Mini-Flash Juniper promised the glad ones. “You’ll like them much more than those doughnuts.”

THE END