You Know Where You Sent Her, Chapter Two

Joe hurried upstairs, only to discover questions and answers were going to have to wait. He’d known his alter-ego was perilously low on energy, but found that one barely conscious, Mini-Flash Splitsville tending to him at his bedside. Joe had had no idea things were so bad. Not wanting to trouble his student with an additional crisis, he confined himself to earnestly commending Splitsville for her efforts and then set off alone.

There had been so many. Sonica incapacitated, Presh and Pseudangelos threatened, Juniper nearly the victim of predations all too similar to those she had suffered at the hands of Joe’s son...and now the cowboy too, yet another on whom this place had taken its toll. Joe by now was firmly of the opinion that the sooner they were out of here the better. Still he struggled to comprehend why an artifice of one of the happiest times in his life should have worked nothing but unhappiness on so many.

Down in the hallway the front door was standing open, and Joe’s first glimpse of what lay beyond it stopped him short.

The sky hadn’t been as black as that when he was outdoors five minutes ago.

All those clouds surely couldn’t have amassed so swiftly. The wind had picked up too.

It seemed suddenly to be turning into just the same sort of day as –

Which was the last thing Joe needed to be thinking of just now. So with great determination, he did not. Instead he ran across the blustery barnyard to his crimson rod.

Save the weather forecast for when he was finally done misplacing members of the Special Program. It was the second time with this one. He seemed to do little else.

Jokes. Always an encouraging sign.

Our hero put the space-car into gear, as rising winds strove to outdo the howl of its engine.

Mini-Flash Pseudangelos was fast when she wanted to be, as Joe had learned when chasing her across an alien city’s rooftops. Of course, her depleted powers may have prompted her to hop on a bus instead, but either way our hero had a fair idea where she was headed. The attic at his old house was where the magazine was. He pulled out of the farm gate and motored in that direction, while grass verges thrashed and overhead the restless deep raced by.

Soon Boston’s small straggle of buildings was near, standing feebly in the teeth of a gale which ravaged every surrounding acre of nothing.

Joe gripped the steering-wheel.

In a moment or two this lane would be connecting with the fen road.

Along which it wouldn’t be the first time he’d hastened, under conditions identical to these.

The trees started buckling to touch the turf just as Joe’s prow broached that fateful junction. Right on time. Our hero marked it, and it filled him with dread.

Joe parked at the reverse of the house, by the railway bridge, as Sonica had done that first time. Under the circumstances it seemed if anything more important he stay on the safe side tonight.

Above the alleyway the uppermost window was lit. As Joe gained the foot of the attic stairs and proceeded slowly upwards, the yellow glow of that same single bulb was predictably ghastly to him. Boston’s shoddy electrics had ever strained in the face of the elements, and sudden plunges into darkness spelled fear for Joe from formative memory all the way to when last he recollected this. His subconsciousness seemed to be bombarding him with imagery of childhood terror, and it was taking all he had to remind himself it was nothing more.

Joe drew a deep breath, and gave the attic door a push.

Mini-Flash Pseudangelos was cross-legged on the rug, disarray all around her. The many upended boxes and baskets she must have kicked over in blind rage. As for the magazines strewn about, Pseudangelos had presumably flung them there while scouring the stacks for her nemesis. This lay in the Mini-Flash’s lap, open at the fairy ballet competition.

From her eyes, her face, and the flexing motion of her fingers, Joe saw she was on the verge of ripping that page to shreds. Thus might she punish it for its failure, and thus might her will stand supreme. Something however seemed to be stopping her, even as she sat in the one weak light which might any minute die. Perhaps it was a memory of what those words and pictures had meant, the dream and the excitement and the wild yearning hope. Once the magazine was destroyed, only hate would surge to fill the emptiness where once these treasures had been.

Joe stood in the doorway, awed, watching as every principle he had wished to nurture in Mini-Flash Pseudangelos battled with those which would have led her to The Foretold One.

No wonder the galaxy was afraid of these girls.

When a likeness of this attic had been Joe’s dwelling-place, he never imagined such a matter would fall within his responsibilities.

Now here he was, witnessing the Coming Conflict in microcosm.

He stepped into the arena of fate, knowing well the sound and feel of its floorboards under his boots. Picking his way carefully through the detritus he sat down beside the girl.

Amongst Joe’s scattered belongings, a thing he remembered was to hand. It looked like a plush yellow tennis ball, with two goggly eyes and a mouth that took up about half of it. He’d brought it home from the seaside one day, in that faraway time when a trip there had meant grab-a-prize machines, rather than gods and monsters.

Joe picked it up, and unable to think of anything else to do, opened and closed its soft maw at Mini-Flash Pseudangelos.

He pretended it was biting her.

She started to giggle, as one unable to help it, just because it was all so silly. Halfway through the giggles, the tears began.

A moment of destiny, or a girl who’d never truly had it in her to rend the magazine? Joe didn’t demand answers to such questions as those. True, his life hadn’t exactly been short on the former, but having lately been taken on a long and comprehensive tour of what the world would have been were it not for the one which had taken him away from this attic in the first place, our hero was content to go on stepping in where it looked like he might be needed. Here and now it was enough to behold Mini-Flash Pseudangelos’s once-hooked hands resting tenderly on the competition page, and to know her hatred was vanquished.

Joe put an arm around her and let her weep.

END OF CHAPTER TWO