Desperately Seeking Pseudangelos, Chapter Two

The rabble herded and jostled Joe’s company to the edge of the outdoor pool. Yon held court from a lifeguard’s chair at the far end, overlooking all, while the rest of that writhing jabbering crew clustered close at our heroes’ backs. On either side the twisty shapes of waterslides and other apparatus rose into heavens of lead, which by now were alive with thunderous rumblings and lightning-bursts spanning the spectrum.

Down in the square-shaped sheer-walled pit, long since drained of its depths, stood Mini-Flash Pseudangelos with her red and white polka-dot bikini on.

Something in Crushroom seemed to snap.

Joe as good as heard it go, and next second the once-mighty one was rearing to what little remained of his magnitude, jaws wide open in a last roar of rage. He must have known it was hopeless, yet the sight of his love subject to such indignity was evidently more than Crushroom could stand. One fungus had been pushed too far.

“Crushroom, don’t be a fool!” yelled Joe, igniting his fire as he did so for he saw this could go only one way. The cowboy beside him followed his lead and together they locked flaming fists with Xameer and Xuna, nearest of the captors and ever a cowardly pair, who sure enough fled gibbering from the forces they so feared. Nevertheless it was only with foreboding that Joe pressed on, though Crushroom’s straggly tendrils thrashed and the Mini-Flashes strove. None of them knew how sorely the odds were stacked against them, in this place, facing this enemy.

The thunderclouds strobed from searing orange-red to a lurid green-blue. All the colours of a hologram. Which was what these creatures had been.

Twenty-four holographic cards to which Joe had resorted whenever he’d felt like being bad.

Show him one boy who’d never felt like that. Show him one boy who in the course of growing up had never been bad. Yet the urge had sat irreconcilably alongside that desire to save the world, then shapeless and without direction, which had been Joe’s companion longer than he had been able to speak of memory.

His collection had helped him find a way round that.

So he’d done dreadful things to a little girl?

Or her pet?

It was fine. Leafing through his album always put the problem into perspective. Because you only had to look at those misshapen monstrosities to be sure they did such things all the time.

Joe would just join their side for a little while, until the feeling went away.

Here, amid bitter battle and tempest, he who had been that boy tasted what it truly was to live in a land that had never known The Four Heroes’ cause.

Here was the fate to which he’d consigned his friends, by choosing to remain.

He saw his subconscious self fall, plunging the precipice to land with a crash at pool-bottom where Pseudangelos was. The cowboy, like Crushroom, barely had a fight left in him.

Flashshadow was never easy to see, but in a melee you knew that wherever she was, she was helping. Joe glimpsed the usual glimmer of her now, but in the same corner of his eye marked a blob of black, as of some noxious exhalation or oil-spill, belching into being above her shady shape. Nydo! He was a vile thing, worse even than Hamaunji, one whose image Joe had barely been able to look at. No matter which way you turned his hologram, all you saw of him were suction-cup fingers and two peering eyes. The rest was concealed behind what looked like a cloak, but was in fact a wing or skin-fold which flapped about Nydo’s body. Only subsequent to the most shameful excesses had Joe ever contemplated what might go on beneath it.

Apparently Nydo was able to touch Flashshadow. He was doing so now, and his suckers seemed to be draining her. She threw back her head, anguished.

Like a preying bat Nydo steered Flashshadow into the pit and dumped her there. She lay prone, pale even for her, while he wrapped his flap about him again and disappeared.

Claws raked Joe from behind and then there was only the pool’s tiled face scrolling before him. It was over by the time he hit ceramic. The hush from above had already told him those comrades who hadn’t been brought low were subdued. That mob was parading them for Mini-Flash Pseudangelos to see, and this Joe knew from the dismay on her face as she threw her chocolate-brown bunches back and rounded on Yon.

“You have been defiant,” said he. “It has been so since last two of these intruded on us. That does not serve my purposes.”

Joe, even as he tried to rise, heard without astonishment. Juniper and Robin had stumbled on a mere trial run, actuated by the lusts of Lasser. Yon’s ambition had always stretched beyond the satisfaction of simple pleasures, and it was like him to perceive that Pseudangelos’s power over dreams and the imagination here entailed mastery of existence itself. She was the means by which Yon meant to reshape the very world in which he dwelled, and Joe knew him well enough to be sure he would not stop until all was as debased as he.

“Touching, that from the moment we turned you on your friends you should have exhibited such willfulness,” continued Yon. “Now however, those same friends shall be made to suffer if you do not do our bidding. Is it within your flimsy intellect to comprehend?”

“The kid’s hip to what you’re laying down with that chapter-play jive,” Mini-Flash Splitsville snarled in reply as she struggled. “Real tough buddy-boy eyeball, getting a girl who never bucked for Einstein’s rep all tore up on your freaky junk.”

Yon’s next words smoothly addressed Mini-Flash Pseudangelos.

“Your obedience, then…or your choice.”

“The classmate, or the bunny-rabbit?” elucidated sneering Gorm, who held Splitsville.

“Please pick the bunny,” added Hamaunji, his foul caresses all over Robin.

The one gripping Juniper before him by both wrists would have been more familiar to her human-formed, but Joe knew him to be Lasser. Most erected of these spirits that fell.

“Leave me the guest of honour,” he slurped. “Ten minutes or so is all I’ll need.”

“Juniper!” wailed Robin, while she squirmed and kicked in vain.

Sgranes and Skogness, another despicable double-act, hoisted between them the desiccated hanging husk which had been Crushroom.

“This one, though?” laughed Sgranes. “He won’t last long enough for you to make up your mind!”

They flung what was left of him over the rim, where he splattered like mulch. Tearfully Mini-Flash Pseudangelos ran to his side, seized a weakly-waving tentacle-tip in her hands, and wept as one heartbroken over Crushroom’s wheezing demise.

From his throne on high Yon tossed a handful of little white sticks at her head. Still sobbing Pseudangelos flinched and whimpered as they scattered to the ground around her.

“Remain as you are,” finished Yon. “Hands and knees suit you. It will amuse me to watch you ingest the first few from the floor.”

That was when Joe decided he’d heard enough.

Slowly our hero rose to his feet, his alter-ego and prize pupil and others who were his responsibility sprawling helpless about him.

He’d hoped it wasn’t going to have to come to this.

END OF CHAPTER TWO