You Know Where You Sent Her, Chapter Three

So Mini-Flash Pseudangelos wept, setting down to it in earnest this time, and Joe was happy to wait. This was what her situation required. When she stopped, they’d leave.

There was the man next door, switching on his front room light so he could use the telephone. Through the attic window Joe glimpsed that square of illuminated footpath, far below the realms of windy dark, its bright borders moving as the shrubbery tossed. Our hero had just been starting to wonder what was keeping his old neighbour this evening.

It wasn’t that Joe would ever find amusement in reminders of that long-ago day, but now the real emergency was over, these illusory remnants of an earlier prior one distressed him less. They were even starting to make a sort of sense. Joe had intended the letter to end things, and the place in general surely couldn’t be expected to know any other way in which to end. This was how it had done so before. It wasn’t even the first time it had spun these hits since Joe and his friends came, and he was doing better than he’d done then, when Sonica had had to save him.

As for the letter, that by now was making sense to Joe too.

All the more so now he’d had time to survey the devastation in front of him, and confirm a theory he was working on. It had very much occupied him during the drive over, while he’d been trying hard not to think of anything else, and the other magazines thrown open at various features and articles all along the floor now supplied such material evidence as Joe’s conclusion barely required.

For comics and suchlike in those days had always printed the winning work in their art contests, and just imagine the outcry if Mini-Flash Pseudangelos really had won. It was after all quite true she hadn’t made even a token effort to follow the directions, and how would her win have been fair on all the little girls who’d striven their hardest to design a proper fairy frock for ballerina Mavis Enderby? The magazine office would have been inundated with tear-soaked correspondence from these subscribers, never even mind the far angrier salvos of parents threatening to sue. Joe well remembered what Pre-Nottingham Earth had been like in that regard, the suspiciousness and paranoia of its populace, everybody ready to accuse everybody else. There’d been so little good to go around, Joe supposed, that it had seemed almost natural to jealously guard your own scanty share. But at any rate, only a publisher desperate for a self-inflicted gunshot-wound to the foot would have done anything so stupid as confer first prize on Mini-Flash Pseudangelos’s efforts.

So Joe hadn’t left his subconsciousness any choice. Of course it had had to transfigure the letter. Consistency was the watchword here.

At this, Joe sighed.

Couldn’t the realm have bent its own rules just a little? None of it was real. Would it truly have hurt to let this one girl win?

But no. Joe knew that couldn’t ever have been. Not even for the sake of seeing Mini-Flash Pseudangelos smile. The subconsciousness was like that, inflexible, inviolate, and maybe Joe had hit upon the answer to one of his many bleak questions of the day. Because as far as places like this one went, you had the happiness it represented for you, but other people’s happiness didn’t get much of a look-in.

The trick was not to go there. Cherish it always, but remember the joys that counted for something were only ever ahead of you.

Joe held Mini-Flash Pseudangelos and listened to the eerie gusts about the eaves, feeling the attic shift slightly under him as it had always used to do in high winds.

Yes, he was doing better than the last time, or rather the last two times.

Nor however was our hero completely at his ease.

On that distant day, the man next door had been when Joe knew for certain something was wrong.

Another question he’d asked himself back at the barnyard was whether he’d covered everything. It had been just before a hundred other problems came up. Was there still something, then?

What was the one last crucial point Joe had managed to neglect?

The attic door flew open with a bang.

Outlined in its frame was Schiss-Zazz, leering and nude, his eyes manic. Joe and Mini-Flash Pseudangelos leapt up, as deadly dual shears on the intruder’s wrists sprang open. That was it. Less than an hour ago, Joe had assured himself in so many words of that one’s impending rendezvous with the attic, knowing he would speed there to make his escape the moment this world began to betray signs of its demise. Now here Schiss-Zazz was, punctual to a fault, and Joe had thrown more than his own life in the path of those perilous prongs.

For more heart-chilling even than our hero’s cataclysmic forgetfulness was the knowledge written on Schiss-Zazz’s grin.

Mini-Flash Pseudangelos was the reason he had come to this realm.

Not Sonica, not Presh. They had been mere anticipatory games, and Joe was now in a position to conclude that Schiss-Zazz and Pseudangelos must have met, subsequent to the latter’s flight from Flash Club Headquarters. There could only have been some incident since, after she and several others of the Special Program had fallen under 4-H-N’s tutelage. Then, the killer will have fixed his sights on the lone girl trembling with terror by our hero’s side.

4-H-N must have kept it a secret.

And now it was too late.

END OF CHAPTER THREE