Love Lies Bleeding, Chapter One

Joe had returned home, to his attic amid the dockside dereliction of Boston one murky windswept night. Now the lone figure who had followed him there from another galaxy intended to make sure he never left. Our hero shoved Mini-Flash Pseudangelos to the sidelines and sprang to meet Schiss-Zazz head-on.

Sparks flew from steel, singeing the threadbare rug.

Questions of why it should always be thus, and how it had come about that he and this naked lunatic were commencing their third such clash, and that surely there must have been some denizen of Schiss-Zazz’s own solar system better-suited for such occasions, rushed through Joe’s thoughts as he rode out his first blow and wheeled to deflect deadly blades again with a fiery fist. He and the underclad intruder closed, lone figures no more. The attic’s stark lightbulb threw a single blending shadow as the combatants forged from carpet to floorboards, then were summarily swallowed in golden scintillations which swept walls and windows and Mini-Flash Pseudangelos out of sight. It was the junction between Joe’s subconscious realm and the reality he and Schiss-Zazz had come from. Stumbling out of the luminescent corridor they separated in a single-room apartment, shabby but for its brilliant wallpaper, across whose four faces glittered crystals of gilt.

Not here. There was real urgency in that. One scratch from Schiss-Zazz’s tips upon those sparkling perpendiculars…

The condition Joe’s cowboy alter-ego was in, such psionic feedback would be fatal.

Our hero hurled himself at Schiss-Zazz, suffering the shears that were in his way, though the object of this mad tackle was so unprepared for it that flesh-wounds were all he had time for. Back through whirling gold the pair of them flew, for Joe to bundle his foe to the boards of his one-time residence then thud there himself. During the interval Mini-Flash Pseudangelos had wisely made herself scarce. A lingering suggestion of chocolate cake was all that remained, and unseen at the foot of the stairs was the sound of the door slamming.

Schiss-Zazz’s features contorted uglily and he shot from Joe, low over the attic floor like a jaguar, making for the rail at the far end.

Our hero was up and dealing out fireballs long before the streaking predator was there, and these proved swifter still. One man’s nudity smashed ablaze directly through the bannister, splintering its flimsy white-painted wooden uprights, then twisting and thrashing made comparable passage through the pane of the high arched window beyond. Joe by that time was already giving chase, and on reaching the twin ruptures leapt without pause to plunge unto darkness and gale.

Below him amid falling fragments of fretwork and shards, Schiss-Zazz was rapidly righting himself as he plummeted the house’s west face, scorched and lacerated but apparently all set for round two. Bare feet carefully aimed found purchase atop the alleyway wall and pushed away again, Joe pursuing the same path seconds later, his flaming twin contrails the only brightness along the vault of Boston black. The last stretch of his descent had far more of the horizontal about it, sailing after Schiss-Zazz over gulley and brick, one flank buffeted by winds that sheared straight in off the river. There was little difference left to divide the duellists as they tumbled and rolled one after the other to the pathway by the front of the house, a little off from Joe’s steps, facing each other within the square of electric light thrown by the man next door’s window.

There raging fires and steely scissors locked anew, while behind these and behind glass Joe’s old neighbour presided over the fray, intent on his telephone conversation, oblivious.

Bounded as our hero was by skewed Dalíesque angles, he thought the surrealism complete.

Not that this meant any let-up in the cut-and-thrust, for Joe’s adversary was driving hard, and acetylene impacts of parry and deflection maintained their sizzling showers at pace. Even so, there was in the bizarre backdrop something that could not escape the first of The Four Heroes, almost as if it answered those questions he had asked himself before.

After all, the lurid reenactment going on behind the scenes represented that night Joe had learned life meant to demand more of him than the satisfaction of personal pleasure.

He hammered away with burning blows, countering the murderous points. Schiss-Zazz was never anything but fast, and on that Joe was well-qualified to comment as their steady give-and-gain of ground continued. Tragic epiphanies were nothing to Schiss-Zazz. No fateful night would ever teach him responsibility or conscience. Where better then than here and now, for our hero to do battle with this sneering spirit of desire and bloodlust?

Here in the subconscious, where sweet summer streets thronged with memories of female fellow-humans Joe himself had looked on only as objects?

Here, where his own furtive wickedness had walked and talked and crawled?

Noiselessly the neighbour continued to hold forth. What was – in a manner of speaking – happening now, had made Joe into more than Schiss-Zazz would ever be.

One of the reasons he’d brought about The Four Heroes was to defend against those who didn’t have it in them to learn.

Schiss-Zazz was what Joe, or any one of us, might have become.

A sudden kick lashed out. Our hero was on his feet again in moments but the aggressor was already away, making like a well-aimed arrow for the house he’d lately exited. Joe took off after him, knowing why. On the far side of the porch was a small recessed area, and Schiss-Zazz had glimpsed over Joe’s shoulder a movement in the kitchen window which looked out upon it.

Mini-Flash Pseudangelos must have traversed all three flights of stairs, in hopes of fleeing unseen via the back door. She had reckoned without one madman’s razor senses.

Joe knew there were rusty iron staples in the area wall, should anyone for some reason have wished to climb down, but Schiss-Zazz didn’t bother with these. Nimbly scaling the pointed iron fence he plunged like an Olympic diver straight into the pit, arms outstretched and prongs foremost, shattering his way through.

Pseudangelos had seconds at best. Joe cleared the railings at a single bound, and his header was a worthy follow-up to that of the entrant before.

Who was ready for him.

Perching on the breakfast-bar, having swivelled back round when he landed, Schiss-Zazz greeted the descending Joe with teeth and eyes of triumph. He hadn’t gone straight at Pseudangelos as our hero had anticipated, for that one stood frozen in flight halfway down the long table, gaping with speechless horror. Joe saw it all in that snapshot instant, but could do nothing, having handed the whole of his fate to gravity.

Schiss-Zazz swung his shears before him and Joe’s body slid deep.

Everything then seemed to slow and stop.

Besides the half-grasped knowledge that his trunk was now all but touching Schiss-Zazz’s knuckles, our hero was aware only of the shine on those gritted gleaming teeth.

Then, gradually, that situation started to become another. The puncture itself might have been too early to talk about pain, but that time was well and truly arriving as Schiss-Zazz lowered his rigid arms to point at the kitchen floor with both blades, and Joe began to part company with these inch by inch. Now it was known what agony was. Our hero was thoroughly acquainted with it well ahead of slipping to the tips of those wet and sticky shafts, to fall free.

The tiles hitting his shoulders and head and heels made a sort of sense, or at any rate were expected. Most of his splattering there, however, passed Joe by. Nearly everything was dark.

He’d never known quite what this world was, and still didn’t when it left him.

END OF CHAPTER ONE