When Wolds Collide, Chapter Two

Joe roamed the damp deserted dunes. For reasons besides the obvious he’d left his friends to their own devices, and one was that the letter troubled him still. As far as Joe was aware, nobody by the name of Mini-Flash Pseudangelos had ever lived at his house. Correspondence addressed to her there showing up in his desk was an odd enough occurrence to be going on with.

This fog seemed to swallow every sound. Even the murmur of the waves was far away.

Why did that letter carry for Joe such an overwhelming sense of endings? And why did the idea of endings associated with his house sink him yet deeper into trepidation?

Maybe because he didn’t want endings or change. Things were fine the way they were.

That, our hero wanly recollected, was what Presh had said.

Robin had told him they’d not been talking since the netball tournament. Joe kept trying to help his friend, and it kept going wrong.

Today, for example, might prove to be less than the greatest of help in his patching things up with Presh. Not that Joe would have been able to dissuade gallant Robin from escorting Juniper on her errand even if he’d tried.

When looked at that way, there’d not really been any need for Joe to come along at all.

He’d wanted to be on hand though, rather than miles off in Boston, at the moment the letter was delivered. Just in case. Because try as he might, Joe couldn’t shake the feeling.

He wasn’t alone in these sand-dunes.

Turning, our hero’s first thought was that that explained the mysterious mood of foreboding. He’d never have guessed he was asleep and having a nightmare. Incredible, how real they sometimes seemed. Yet a dream was all it could be, for the surfaces of beaches didn’t rise as though something huge and round-topped were about to burst from below.

Maybe time to wake up. There’d been a few too many of these lately, and this one looked on the brink of getting worse.

Then it did.

No, not this! Not that long-ago day at the indoor play-park which stood near here! It wasn’t that the older children had been too rough, but rather, too imaginative. Too convincing. They’d made Joe believe in their game, so much so that that ludicrous toadstool cased in vinyl and stuffed with foam-rubber had ceased to be an oversized funhouse prop, becoming instead that which even now erupted in front of our hero amid upheavals of silt. It bore its gargantuan red dotted cap above bulging eyes and thrashing rooty tendrils and a mouth like a great rotted gash in its trunk.

None of which was the worst of it.

Because this was no dream.

“You were never destined to hide yourself long,” the creature bawled aloud. “Now face once more the wrath of Crushroom!”

Joe did what anybody might have done, and ran.

Blindly, stumbling over hummocks and winding deeper and deeper into desolate foggy scrubland Joe ran, until Crushroom decreed he should run no further. All at once the furry-fingered flagella were at Joe’s ankles, bringing him down face-first as Crushroom’s gigantic fungal form punched again from the beach.

“You would not be in such haste if you knew what Crushroom knows!” that one declared. “Namely, that your small friends even now are walking into a trap!”

The horror Joe felt at Crushroom’s very existence paled by comparison to what these words wrought. In some obscure way, his fears surrounding the letter were confirmed.

“Then, this Mini-Flash Pseudangelos…!” our hero cried. “You have her!”

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say. Crushroom in a towering rage threw aloft his appendages and hammered Joe flat.

“Fool!” howled Crushroom. “What little intellect you ever commanded has been lost in feeble-minded self-indulgence!”

This seemed a bit much, when less than a minute ago Joe had been minding his own business. He struggled to rise, as Crushroom continued bitterly:

“Would that she were here. Oh, that she were! What peace can Crushroom know otherwise? For the great cycle of propagation stirred to its eternal course when first she was in my presence, and now every fibre and spore of Crushroom pulsates for her without cease! Yet she is beyond my grasp, and so in endless agonies of thwarted desire does Crushroom languish!”

Finishing he glared at Joe, accusatory, expectant, his rent of a maw set in one rigid straight.

Joe, eyes closed, drew in and released what may have been the longest, slowest breath of his life. Then he asked Crushroom:

“What would you have me do about this?”

Between Crushroom and Presh, it seemed to be our hero’s week for putting his foot in it. This time the furious feelers flung him clear of the ground.

“You?” bellowed the beast. “A decadent, delusional weakling, ignorant even as to who you are? It is not you Crushroom seeks! You should be capable of less than I! Do you imagine Crushroom has not attempted to liberate his love himself? She is in the clutches of those so dread that their threat to her is more terrible than any you imagine I might pose!”

In the light of Crushroom’s prior utterances, Joe found this difficult to believe. Nevertheless, and even as he strove to pick himself up, he remonstrated: “I wish to save her, and Robin and Juniper! But – ”

Once more the waving roots slammed our hero to the grit of the dune.

“But?” Crushroom repeated in a scream. “Still the cowering incomplete dilettante? Still you speak as the wretch you have allowed yourself to become?”

“But,” yelled Joe again, “what can I do?”

The tentacles flailed for another strike, and that was when it happened.

Joe thrust both hands before him, not in a puny gesture of defence, but rather because he had had his fill of this. Fire tore forth from his palms, golden in the misty murk, a roaring incandescent torrent that staggered he who cast it. Yet even amid the conflagration a memory rushed back on Joe of having witnessed this phenomenon before, in what he had then thought a dream, but which he was here forced to conclude may have been no more one than this was.

Our hero was beyond words. He stared at his unburnt hands, and marvelled.

The flames had parted about their target like breakers round a rock. Crushroom had known he would not be hurt. Smiling with grim satisfaction, he made Joe the reply:

“There’s nothing you can’t do now.”

END OF CHAPTER TWO