The Unhappy Medium 3: Wretched Things: A Supernatural Comedy, page 46
‘Excellent,’ exclaimed Homer, opening the precious ivory casket and cradling the relic within as if it were a family cat. ‘Be patient, my final hero,’ he whispered to the wood. ‘Soon, you will be with us again.’ He turned his dead eyes to Andronicus. ‘Is the colonel general still in his room?’
‘He is,’ answered Andronicus. ‘That last bottle of spirits did for him. He’s out for the count.’
‘Good. Less likely to resist, then,’ added Homer.
‘Dima,’ ordered Andronicus. ‘We won’t want to be disturbed. Lock these dreadful females in one of the bedrooms. And keep an eye on them. If they give you any trouble, you know what to do.’
‘Da, Comrade Boris,’ replied Dima. ‘Will be my pleasure.’
*****
‘AGAIN!’ boomed the Bonetaker, jabbing his finger in the direction of Gabby’s distress. ‘CLOSE!’
‘How close?’ yelled Valenti, pushing the throttles forward.
‘LOW,’ demanded the giant, pointing downwards. ‘GO LOW!’
‘Oh man,’ exclaimed the pilot, looking out of the window. ‘That’s one hell of a sea mist down there. Is he sure?’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Newton.
‘SURE!’ insisted the Bonetaker, slapping the metal floor so hard it made the wings flap. ‘DOWN!’
‘In that?’ gasped Newton, spotting the fog.
‘Hell! You heard the man. They’re down there in that crap.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ wondered Newton. ‘It’s like soup.’
‘Yup,’ said a grim-faced Valenti, pushing down the nose.
The Dakota dropped, the rippling clouds of murk rushing up to meet them.
‘Going low and slow,’ shouted Valenti. ‘Gotta rely on the big guy. Get him to concentrate and lead us the hell in. I’m gonna be a hundred feet up. Any less, and we’ll be slap in the drink.’
‘Goodness,’ said Bennet. ‘How very exciting.’
Outside the cabin windows, the fog bubbled like a sulphur pool as the old transport stooged above invisible waves.
‘He’s pointing away to the left a bit,’ yelled Bennet, watching the Bonetaker’s outstretched hand.
‘What o’clock, dammit?’ demanded the pilot.
‘Eh?’ asked Bennet.
‘Think of a clock,’ shouted Newton. ‘Nose is 12 O’clock, the tail is six.’
‘Ah, gotcha,’ replied Bennet. ‘Then that would be 10 o’clock.’
‘Right,’ said Valenti, adjusting the bank.
*****
‘What do you mean he’s too drunk?’ demanded Andronicus, looking down at the inert body of Viktor Nahrapov, face down in his cot.
‘That’s what I’m sensing,’ replied the frustrated Homer. ‘I can’t prepare his body for possession if he’s already awash with spirits. You can smell it on him! He smells like an oil lamp.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ sighed Andronicus. ‘Do we ever get a break?’
‘We’ll just have to wait until the morning,’ suggested Homer. ‘He’ll have to sober up eventually.’
‘I bloody well hope so,’ said Andronicus. ‘I don’t want to stay in Russia a moment longer than I have to. That meal they gave us earlier. What the hell was that? Upon the saints, I’ve never eaten anything so utterly disgusting. What was that? Cat?’
‘I’m just glad I couldn’t see it,’ replied Homer. ‘Root vegetables for starter … and main course. These people are savages.’
As they looked down, a mournful wailing began, a rising and falling cacophony that had them rushing out of Viktor’s bedroom to find Dima in discussion with one of the colonel general’s junior officers.
‘What in the name of Zeus is that godawful noise?’ demanded Homer.
‘They’ve picked up an unknown aircraft on the radar,’ explained Dima, as the officer departed.
‘Eh?’ replied Andronicus uncomprehendingly.
‘It could be the Purgs,’ continued Dima. ‘The colonel general’s men are tracking it now. If it comes too close, they’ll blow them out of the sky.’
And it was coming closer.
Floating through the murk with both flaps and undercarriage in the ‘down’ position, Thunderbird 2 was homing in on the last known position of Gabby’s anger.
‘VERY CLOSE,’ boomed the Bonetaker. ‘SLOW DOWN!’
‘Slow down?’ gasped the pilot. ‘I’m already on the verge of a stall! Any slower, and we’ll be fish food!’
Then the green light on the dashboard-mounted warning box … came ‘on’.
‘Uh oh,’ shouted Newton. ‘Someone’s tracking us!’
‘Lights,’ said Valenti, pointing. ‘Dead ahead. Looks like a beach.’
Onto that very beach rushed Andronicus the Terrible and Dima, peering up into the gloom as the twin engines of Thunderbird 2 began to make themselves heard above the modest surf.
‘There!’ exclaimed Dima. ‘Hear that?’
‘I do,’ confirmed Andronicus. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a plane, Comrade Boris,’ replied Dima, looking puzzled at his ignorant employer. ‘And it’s coming right at us.’
Behind the dacha, a SAM anti-aircraft battery was spinning above its tracked mounting, turning its three missiles to face the still invisible Dakota.
‘Oh crap,’ said Valenti, as the humming console began to morph into a worrying wail. ‘They’re locking on to us.’
The light turned from a disconcerting green to a horrible and alarming red.
‘Buckle up!’ ordered Valenti, simultaneously raising flaps and undercarriage, slamming forward the throttle.
Behind the villa, there was a loud whoosh and a sudden explosion of light. A nanosecond later, the first missile shot over the roof of the dacha, heading out to sea, leaving a trail of white-hot smoke and dancing sparks.
‘Wow!’ marvelled Andronicus.
Valenti slammed the controls hard left, veering away from the missile as it propelled itself towards them through the fog. The missile, programmed to expect such things, anticipated the move, turning abruptly to cut them off.
Valenti reversed the turn, heading directly at the surface-to-air missile as the gizmo on the dashboard began to crackle and pop in a desperate attempt to baffle the missile’s homing mechanism. Racing towards each other at a sickening closing speed, Valenti held his ground, playing his deadly game of chicken. Newton’s hands rushed up to cover his terrified eyes.
‘Come on!’ snarled the defiant Valenti. ‘Let’s see what ya got.’
Through opening fingers, Newton could see the missile clearly. A black cross silhouetted against the glare of its own rocket; it tore at them, mindlessly bent on their destruction.
‘NOW!’ Valenti threw the Dakota first to the left, then so hard again to the right that Newton could clearly hear the twisting aluminium all around them.
The missile took the bait.
Veering to its right, then far too late to its left, it shot past the Dakota and exploded, much too late and much too far away to bring them down.
‘Goodness!’ said Bennet, seeing a ragged hole appear in the fuselage beside him. ‘Too close! Faaaaaaaaaar too close.’
‘Gotta get lower,’ yelled Valenti, pulling the Dakota around in an arc. ‘Where’s the other one? There’s gonna be another!’
The plane dropped, Newton alarmingly seeing the waves through the murk for the first time.
‘I see,’ gulped Newton. ‘That low.’
Almost as he spoke, a second missile shot directly over them, unable to make a lock, disappearing back into the grey before colouring the darkness with its futile detonation.
‘This is fun!’ growled Valenti, slamming the throttles forward.
‘WRONG WAY!’ yelled the Bonetaker.
‘I know!’ replied Valenti, taking them back out to sea. ‘I’m gonna bring her back round. Barlow … try and fix where we are.’ He slipped a hand inside his flight jacket. ‘Here, … use my phone. Pin is 289167. Google maps.’
‘Right,’ said Newton, as Thunderbird 2 began to bank sharply, its left wing horribly close to the wave tops. The phone came to life, his hands frantically tapping and scrolling. ‘Got it. … We’re north-east of Krasnodar … no big towns, just a few coastal villas.’
‘Anywhere to put down?’ asked Valenti. ‘We can’t do much good up here. We gotta get on the ground. Look for a field.’
‘I’m not seeing any airfield,’ replied Newton after some intense screenwork. ‘But there are some pretty straight roads.’
‘That will have to do,’ answered Valenti. ‘Gonna wreck the old girl, but there ya go. That’s showbusiness. Let’s head inland and see what we can find.’
‘Hey, you’re the captain,’ shrugged Newton. ‘Take us in.’
The Dakota levelled again, engines roaring, headed for lights glowing along the shore.
Sadly, it wasn’t the shore.
It was the Black Sea Princess, looming massive out of the fog, her navigation lights luring them into disaster.
‘Holy crap!’ gasped Valenti.
Pulling back on the controls, the American dragged the old transport up way beyond its comfort zone. Burning off its modest momentum, it reared up … and then nearly over the superyacht, clipping her radio mast with its port wing. Only just shaking off the impact, Thunderbird 2 escaped into a fatal airspace, far too slow and unmanoeuvrable for what came next.
The last of the three-missile battery left the rail, scorching over Andronicus and Dima, bound for the Purgatorians. With the aeroplane wallowing in the air like a tired swan, the inevitable began to unfold.
The missile tore up to the Dakota at lightning speed … and exploded.
Thousands of ball bearings, each the size of a cherry, ballooned out to embrace the Dakota, tearing into its grubby skin, its engines, its fuel lines and hydraulics.
Instantly … there was fire.
‘Gotcha!’ yelled Andronicus, leaping up and down like a child, as the spectacle burst in the sky before him.
Newton wasn’t anywhere near as enthusiastic. The impact was everything he thought it might be and more. Whole sections of the transport’s skin were peeling back then flying away as he turned in horror, looking back down the cabin to see boiling flames, surging clouds of shrapnel and structural unpleasantness.
Then, once again, he began to sense time slowing. Just as had happened when he’d been kicked off the cliff just days before, it was as if someone, or something, was turning down a dial, slowing the pace of his own destruction.
Looking to his side through the small cabin window, Newton could see the starboard propeller moving from a blur to an almost merry-go-round rotation. The flames pouring away behind the engine switched from writhing manic torrents to gently waving sinews of red and yellow, like kelp in a gentle current.
Newton swung in his seat, glancing over at the pilot, frozen in a fight with what was left of his controls.
Then, it hit him.
It wasn’t Newton that had slowed at all.
Everything else had.
Newton lifted up his hand, looked at it suspiciously, then shook it. The hand didn’t move slowly; it moved fast … normal fast, though it left behind it a thin wisp of contrail in the still air. But Valenti, beside him in the cockpit, wasn’t moving fast at all. As Newton stared at him in disbelief, the pilot’s jaw began to open at an agonizingly slow speed, the beginning of a drawn-out swear word that looked like it might take days to finish.
‘GGGGGGGGGGGOOOOOOOOOOOODDDDDDDDDDDDDDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM ….’
The cigar gripped in Valenti’s teeth was no longer gripped at all. As Newton looked on in amazement, it began to float free, sparks dropping from the end in a slow-motion trajectory.
‘Balls,’ he muttered. ‘This isn’t good.’
Newton unbuckled, throwing himself out of the seat to charge back into the cabin. The same rules applied. Trapped in the slowest of motions, Bennet wasn’t even in contact with the floor. Moving almost imperceptibly, the vicar was between his seat and the ceiling, just where he’d been when the blast had thrown him upwards, but utterly unsupported, his face locked in horror. Likewise, the Bonetaker. Arms outstretched, the giant was frozen in the act of grabbing frantically at the fuselage walls for support.
Unnerved, Newton walked delicately around them towards the tail, sheets of flame and clouds of evil black smoke billowing at a glacial pace all around him. Equally fascinated and appalled, he put his hand out, resting it upon a ball of flame, then pulling it rapidly back again as the heat hit him, just as if he’d placed his hand on an electric ring.
‘Bloody hell,’ gasped Newton, ‘I’m dead.’
Chapter 36
Heroes
Everything about the cabin was wrong.
Flames and debris, ripping across the fuselage as the plane was chewed up and spat out by the missile, had paused in mid-air, barely making any progress.
Newton’s time had seemingly switched off.
Ever the scientist, Newton’s fascination inevitably kicked in, overriding the far more human emotions of bewilderment and terror. With the point of his finger, the only scientific instrument available, Newton moved slowly around the cabin, edging between the frozen body of Bennet and the once-tumbling mass of the Bonetaker, testing the heat of unfurling balls of flame or looking for momentum in the rigid clouds of razor-sharp shrapnel.
‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’ came a voice.
Newton spun, looking for the speaker. There wasn’t one.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Time’s arrow,’ continued the voice, a growling East Coast American drawl. ‘In our everyday lives, we take its inexorable path for granted. How strange then, indeed, when it slows … and stops.’
‘Who’s there?’ demanded Newton, looking around him. ‘Who’s talking?’
‘Are you sure you don’t know, Dr Barlow?’ asked the voice. ‘Have a think about it.’
‘I recognise your voice, yes,’ confirmed Newton. ‘Hold on … are you …?’
‘I am,’ said the ghost of Carl Sagan, manifesting himself at the rear of the eviscerated cabin. ‘And how unlikely is that?’
‘Wow,’ marvelled Newton, amazed and star-struck in equal measure. ‘I’m a HUGE fan. Does this mean I’m dead?’
‘Dead?’ queried the esteemed TV scientist. ‘Er … no.’
‘What’s happening to me then?’ asked Newton, gesturing to the blazing plane. ‘Help me here, Carl. I’m trying to join the dots here.’
‘I guess you’d know it as a near-death experience,’ explained Carl Sagan. ‘I know you’ve had a few recently, but this one is a lot nearer than the others.’
‘We’ve been hit … by a missile,’ stated Newton, pointing at the sheets of flame and the ripped fuselage.
‘Exactly,’ agreed Sagan. ‘Death doesn’t get much nearer than that.’
‘You said “near-death.” Does that mean we get out of this?’
‘Well,’ replied Sagan. ‘I am not at liberty to explain the future, near or otherwise. However, I am at liberty to explain why we are here with you at this important moment. We … are here to upgrade you.’
‘We?’
‘There’s a few of us here,’ said Christopher Hitchens, replacing the manifested form of Sagan. ‘They say you should never meet your heroes, I know, but we thought this was probably the best way to make you understand. We didn’t think you’d believe anyone else.’
‘Hitchens?’ gasped Newton. ‘Holy cow. I always wanted to meet you. Your lifelong battle against mumbo-jumbo was just … amazing.’
‘Yeah?’ shrugged Hitchens. ‘Pity I was wrong, and they were right then, wasn’t it?’
‘We all were,’ continued the spirit, changing abruptly into the unmistakable white-bearded features of James Randi, the renowned sceptic. ‘It was all rather … embarrassing.’
‘No kidding!’ agreed Newton. ‘None of this should be happening. As I keep trying to tell everyone.’
‘Sadly, that is a wasted effort, Dr Barlow,’ said Carl Sagan, taking the manifestation back over. ‘You need to understand why.’
‘I do?’ asked Newton.
‘Yes,’ said Christopher Hitchens. ‘And that’s precisely why we’re here.’
‘It … is?’ Newton flopped down on one of the metal seats.
‘Yes, Dr Barlow. It really is,’ continued Sagan, pushing Hitchens back out of the body. ‘You see, Newton, we’ve been watching you, witnessing your struggles and confusion from … well, you know, the “other” place. We’ve felt for you these last months; we really have. Your battle with reason and reality is exactly what we, too, have struggled against since our deaths: the contradictions, the absurdity, the outright madness of it all. However, for us, these crazed revelations came after death. We, too, faced this traumatic reversal in our paradigms, but we had the advantage of being dead while it happened, in the company of each other. You don’t. You face these mind-bending truths alone Dr Barlow and our hearts go out to you, they really do.’
‘Exactly,’ agreed James Randi, making his second appearance, ‘So we’ve been weighing up how we can best make things easier for you. Poor boy, you’re clearly having a hard time digesting this insanity.’
‘Just a bit. So, it’s an advantage, is it?’ asked Newton. ‘You know … being dead?’
‘Hell, yeah,’ replied Christopher Hitchens. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to have been proven wrong like that while I was alive. Cocksure Hitch gets a bloody nose from the great beyond. All those smug clerics, can you imagine?’
‘I can imagine,’ agreed Newton, glancing over at Bennet’s theatrically posed body.
‘But for us sceptics, it was never going to be easy.’ explained Sagan. ‘We knew we were right, you see, just like you. But … we simply weren’t.’
‘So the Purgs keep telling me,’ sighed Newton. ‘Actually, it’s all they tell me, now I think about it. Is that what this is then? Are you finally going to tell me more?’
‘Apparently,’ said Sagan, ‘we can.’
‘And that’s because I’m about to nearly die?’ asked Newton.
‘Not entirely,’ put in James Randi. ‘We’ve been discussing this for a while, actually, regardless of today’s exciting events. We could see how you were suffering, how you were so traumatised and, well, unhappy. So, we dead scientists decided to put a little pressure on the powers that be.’
