Love Lies Bleeding, Chapter Three

So Joe set off, step by shaky step, clutching his wound. Funny that the same road which had led to Nottingham through those sparkling pinewoods should then have taken him to the stars overhead, only to wind back upon itself and end at the very place he’d started. To think that all along, its final bends should have been these. So mundane a course as past the telephone and through the hall and up the stairs to the first floor landing of the house Joe had grown up in.

Trailing blood all over his mother’s beloved shagpile, one arm still encircling himself, our hero grasped the stair-rail in his other hand and pulled.

That was the first step.

Another pull, another step. And another.

Joe’s feet and hand were more of a help here than his fading eyesight. It was a good thing he knew this staircase. And that he didn’t have far to go.

One more step. His teeth were clenched.

The greatest struggle was trying not to think of Neetra any more than he had done. He wished he’d had the chance to see her again.

He would. Soon.

For he’d not been wrong when he spoke to Sonica of that which you couldn’t outrun, and it may have been that ever since Draxu, Joe had known what was waiting for him.

All this he saw as he hauled himself the final few steps and swung onto the landing, where Schiss-Zazz and Pseudangelos played out their last tableau. There could be no escape this time, for she was down and pleading, and he stood over her with one deadly arm drawn back.

From the head of the stairs Joe confronted them, keeping his back to the closed living room door.

Journey’s end on that dark windy day he’d run all the way home.

Behind which door, there his parents had been, outstretched and cold.

Schiss-Zazz snarled and turned, ready for the fight, ready for the flame-burst. If proof were needed he was crazy, it was in his conviction that Joe had more than a match-head left in him.

But one thing a hero always had was a choice.

Joe dropped half-falling on the door-handle, and as he hit the floor he threw the living room wide.

This void to end all voids would have been better termed a vortex. Joe didn’t look at what it was he’d unleashed, for there was no need to do so, but he felt the electric friction as it dragged him back along the carpet. Schiss-Zazz meanwhile, staring straight into the maelstrom’s maw, was wearing an expression of unaccustomed horror. As well he might. Neither he nor Joe were made of such matter as was ever meant to survive this.

Mini-Flash Pseudangelos, though?

She was Special Program.

Mini-Flash Juniper stayed awake on road-trips Joe never made, and Flashshadow freely used female changing-rooms. Those stretches of the realm unreachable to our hero posed no hazard for his girls.

She’d be safe.

Schiss-Zazz’s bare feet were lifting into space. He howled and contorted as the suction caught him up, but nothing could halt his flailing flight which carried him to the living room’s threshold and past the end of the world. True, Joe had had justice more in mind. But for what Schiss-Zazz had done to Sonica, and what he’d tried to do to Presh and Petunia and Mini-Flash Pseudangelos, and for the sake of all the other victims outside our hero’s ken, this couldn’t but feel the fate he deserved.

As for Joe, he laid down his head at last, and shut his eyes in readiness.

His demons were welcome to do with him as they would. When it was over, he knew where he’d be.

END OF CHAPTER THREE