Crushroom, Chapter One

Mini-Flash Robin and Presh were sitting outside in deck-chairs. It was dusk, and the back yard of Joe’s house was shadowy and warm.

“I know one girl who’s so horrid she deserves the works,” Robin declared. “And since old Auntie Green’s not here, maybe I’d better spank your bum myself!”

“You probably couldn’t even spank my bum,” retorted Presh contemptuously. “Anyway your precious Mini-Flash Juniper deserves it more. Easier target for you, size of hers!”

Suddenly from the other side of the garden came the sound of several space-cars pulling up. Next second the gate clanked open to admit two Joes, one in black leather jacket and hat, the other in trenchcoat and Stetson, plus three barefoot girls with their swimming costumes on. Like holidaymakers back from the beach they were all weather-beaten and sun-scorched, and none of them being short-haired, seemed as one to be scattering sand from their locks.

“Oh, that’s totes a relief!” cried Robin. “You were gone overnight!”

He and Presh jumped up at once and ran to greet their friends, Mush the joyful gambolling tabby leading the way. Mini-Flash Splitsville in her beige bikini knelt down to the grass, and Mush was ecstatic to push her purring face on a pair of bare ankles and hands which she knew.

“One swinging cat,” said Splitsville.

All proceeded together through the small conservatory and into the kitchen. The sky was giving forth that colourless light which immediately succeeds sunset, and there was still enough of it to see by. It looked to Presh and Robin like the last thing the travellers would have wanted just then was the glare of electric bulbs.

“Where have you guys been?” exclaimed Presh. “I don’t know what you can have been doing to get into that state!”

“And you girls with just your bikinis on,” Robin put in.

Presh rolled her eyes.

“All shall be explained to you, but first we must rest,” decided Joe. “You in particular, my friend,” he added to himself. “I can but imagine how this misadventure will have taxed you.”

Joe’s cowboy self agreed, and exited the kitchen right away with Mini-Flash Splitsville. Our hero suspected they weren’t planning to go straight to sleep, but at least he’d said his piece. They were obediently followed by the new duo of Minis, about whom Joe had comparable doubts, and after them Mini-Flash Pseudangelos who walked as if she was dozing already. Thus the only ones remaining below were our hero himself, and Sonica.

Her swimsuit was pink all over, the same as her hair, and it wanted neither ruffle nor bow. Despite this, the look with which she fixed Joe was formidable.

“Misadventure,” Sonica repeated. “Nice word.”

“You alone among our party were with me when we discovered one of the boundaries of this realm,” our hero began, “and learned it is impossible to venture further, so to speak, than the incident which ended this period in my life. To deploy that same metaphor, Sonica, surely you understand my desire to explore in the opposite direction? Having ascertained there is a point beyond which we cannot go forward, it was imperative I determine whether the same held true for going back. We needed to know what was there.”

“Well then,” came back the reply. “Now we know all sorts of things about what’s there. Thanks for that experience. You do keep coming out with them.”

Joe was about to speak again, but Sonica held up her hand and stopped him.

“I promised I’d keep quiet about what happened on our first day,” said she. “And I was OK with it, because it looked like the only danger was to you. That, quite frankly, I can live with. Never more so than now. But the Mini-Flashes are my friends, and the other you saved my life. One more trace of danger to them, and if you don’t tell everything you know, I will.”

No-one rose especially early next day. The sleepy girls had gone to bed with their swimming costumes still on, and weren’t in any hurry to shower or change. This was conspicuous about the house all morning. Joe pictured his mother, and dreaded what she’d have had to say about her well-kept home turning into some student dive.

Presh, fidgety to find out everything that had gone on, was beguiling her curiosity with her new action figure when the cowboy came upstairs to the attic and found her there.

“Oh, wow!” he exclaimed. “I never did have that one!”

Presh at once placed the figure in his hands for him to have a proper look.

“I’m dying to know,” she added earnestly.

So the cowboy smiled back, sat down facing her on the rug, and began.

The sun had been high as they struck out from Boston, a strangely intent Joe taking the lead in his crimson-coloured space-racer, though at that time it had been beyond his other self what trouble he imagined they might run into here. Nevertheless, he’d kept to the tight defensive formation on which his consciousness insisted, flanking that one in his own rusty rod while Sonica’s cerise saloon with speaker-stacks brought up the rear, and the two Special Program classmates in Splitsville’s black steed rode abreast of him on Joe’s opposite side. They took up both of the lanes above whose surface they soared, but this wasn’t a problem for fellow motorists. Not because there were none, the cowboy explained, because there always had been and that was how this place worked. Here however, those gliding misty daytrippers going in either direction were somehow able to get by the procession with no difficulty at all.

So on, through rolling summer vistas of green meadow and blue sky. Presh listened rapt, as though the very idea of natural beauty was new to her.

Now, the narrator went on. He’d blinked into existence not so long ago in Presh’s own galaxy, as he and she both knew, and strictly speaking had never laid eyes on Earth of any era. That being the case, it might not be quite correct of him here to start talking in terms of memory. And yet…

He gripped the action figure.

These, the cowboy declared. Not just the toys, but the comics and cartoons too. If Presh had only seen that bend they came to in the countryside road, overhung by leafiness through which brilliant sunbeams filtered down to the dewy day, then maybe she too would suddenly have been back there. It must have been just this time, said he, gesturing to take in the whole of the attic. Had a friend from school been with Joe, another little boy who’d shared his mania for the franchise? The cowboy had more than a feeling there’d been such a one. How they must have pored over the latest issue, turning its pages one by one together on the sunny back seat, and feeling they were on their way to comparable wonders come alive. That their destination promised not only sea, but there the majestic domed aquatic cities beloved of print and screen, where swooping knights on seahorse-back battled leviathans in a world of youth and adventure without horizon.

They’d known they were nearer than they were when the crumbling verges began to disclose not earth but yellow sand, some of it spilling into the roadway that the space-cars scattered it beneath them as they sped. Not long after, the hazy dividing-line between golden cloudscape and undulating wold was seemingly all at once supplanted by a broad band of dark, and the cowboy felt like raising a cheer. Joe always had, on such warm early evenings long ago when he finally sighted the sea.

A change came over the last leg of the journey once the sun had doused itself in the ocean and disappeared. Rambling hilly lanes so levelled-out and widened that the four cars of the convoy were able to motor along side-by-side. By now the silhouetted skyline hinted at chalets, and yes, Presh had seen their like on the present Nottingham’s coastal edge. It just went to show Joe hadn’t discarded it all. Glowing windows blurred by, affording glimpses of television screens and tomorrow’s weather forecast. Yet only when these lights lay behind, and headlamps fell on black crashing waves and a deserted night-time beach, did Joe at last signal for the company as one to ease their weary vehicles to a halt.

They were there.

“So,” concluded the cowboy, handing back that which he held to its rightful owner. “You’ve made a good choice. He’s a little piece of something precious, Presh.”

The look she returned was one of wonder.

“Not that it turned out to be exactly a pleasure-trip,” her companion went on. “But that’s beside the point. I’m proud of Joe, Presh. He’s done great good. But in seeking to create his utopia – and what started him down that path was an event more terrible than you know – he elected to see only pain and suffering in Pre-Nottingham Earth. Of course, for most people pain and suffering were all it had to offer, but Joe was happy there. Sacrificing that happiness was the price he paid for Nottingham. Yet maybe here he can find it again, now that he’s led his people once more to a land of his own making, this time one which never knew The Four Heroes’ cause.”

Not once throughout had Presh ceased to listen.

“And this land,” she asked in a murmur. “Does it go on forever?”

The cowboy said that for all he knew, it might. Presh replied:

“Then it’s where I’ve waited my whole life to be.”

END OF CHAPTER ONE