Crushroom, Chapter Three

As soon as the door was closed, Joe took off his jacket and put it on the peg. Then he sat down and looked at it hanging there.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t been able to confront.

Indeed, the minute he awoke in the dunes to find Crushroom and Mini-Flash Pseudangelos gone, he’d made all possible haste. When one of the Special Program was in danger, the others typically knew how and where. It had been so at the Limb Four Incident, and Joe was thankful on regrouping with his friends to discover Mini-Flash Splitsville, as she put it herself, was hip to what went on.

Joe’s powers and those of the cowboy would be no help in a direct assault. The same was presumably so of Sonica’s, for Planet Earth hadn’t heard of high-frequency harmonics in the era of Crushroom, and fungi moreover weren’t troubled by loud noise. Mini-Flash Splitsville’s portals were going to be needed, but these boasted no aggressive application. All of which meant she who our heroes must rescue was also their only proven weapon against the foe.

Bearing all this in mind, Joe hatched a plan. First port of call was the shut-up late-night seafront, to raid a parked ice-cream van and a small kitchen-goods store. After that, Sonica and Mini-Flash Splitsville hit ignition on their space-racers.

Together the heroes plunged through Splitsville’s portal and so to Crushroom’s domain. Deep in a steaming mangrove swamp, lit by the eerie glow of midnight marsh-fires, the ruins of prehistoric wall and pavement marked out a boulder-strewn corner twice as long as it was broad. Here the malevolent mushroom brooded over his lovely hostage, she bound hand and foot to a spit which rested on trestles at either end. As the last topography of perilous rope-bridge and hollow log vanished behind the speeding space-cars, Joe leapt from Sonica’s passenger-side and his cowboy semblance from Splitsville’s. Their boots hit the battlefield, Crushroom’s tendrils waved, and both halves of a divided ego proceeded to work as one.

While the girls circled overhead and strove to keep some of the questing roots busy, Joe whirled into the first that shot at him and bashed it aside with the large ovenproof dish he carried. The cowboy, whose cargo was a large cardboard box, deployed the edges to buffet through a veritable tangle of the same. Joe’s platter served him as both chopping-rim and shield to duel with the living vegetation, through whose snaring jabbing fingers he hacked and trampled until he and himself were through the evil forest to Crushroom’s baleful stalk.

Without hesitation the pair of Joes threw themselves upon him.

Our hero clung with the fingers of one hand and dug his toecaps in, wielding the oven-dish in stupendous arcs which glanced from an epidermis slick like vinyl. The cowboy was gripping with his knees and beating Crushroom about the body with his box. Amid terrible oaths which flew from Crushroom’s bawling cavern the duo bore down, applying their every iota of force to one flank only, until with a final concerted exertion they tipped their enemy cap-over-roots. Thus the inverted one rolled helpless and railing upon his own dome, in motion not unlike a gigantic table-football figurine.

Joe and his subconscious had seconds at best. They ran to where Mini-Flash Pseudangelos was tied horizontally above the ground, and our hero slung his discus down. The cowboy tore open his cardboard box and hefted it ready under one arm, then the pair of them poured their fire on Joe’s oven-dish until it was shimmering and translucent at their feet.

The captive damsel stared wondering as her Princes Charming laboured thus. Crushroom was making dire noises which suggested he wouldn’t be long about escaping his predicament.

Another second, and sure enough, he righted himself.

That was when the cowboy upended his box, loosing a cataract of unwrapped chocolate sticks which rained clattering and flaking to the crucible.

The smell was almost suicidal in its deliciousness. Through a double-dose of Four Heroes heat there was none of of the ponderous process of melting – rather, the landslide sublimed instantaneously, surrendering its solid state in one gasp that a massive miasma rose. Crushroom sprang, just as the vaporous exhalation rushed up Mini-Flash Pseudangelos’s nostrils.

And all the world turned white.

She’d tasted like chocolate never tasted before. Crushroom was left looking like a capsized coracle sinking lopsided in a mire, and while he was dazed there’d been time enough for Joe and his alternate self to free Pseudangelos then flee for the beach with the girls, courtesy of another portal from Mini-Flash Splitsville. Those who weren’t saddled-up had piled into the remaining space-cars, and all roared homeward amid the break of day.

So, yes. Joe had run. He thought of the last words Splitsville had spoken to him.

Battle not with Crushroom though. One of the wise ones, Nietzsche. It was always sound advice, but never more so than where they were.

On which note.

Our hero walked to the door, and took from his hanging leather jacket the envelope Mini-Flash Robin had handed him on his arrival yesterday. It contained a single photograph. Croldon Thragg and his apprentice Thomthar had come up with the goods yet again, rummaging on Joe’s request through the leftover eight-by-tens which had gone unclaimed at the convention. According to Mini-Flash Pseudangelos’s magazine, the high-flying fairy ballet extravaganza’s principal parts had been danced by Mavis Enderby and Marshall LeBurgh. Joe hadn’t heard of either, but there they both were, their autographs part of the scanned print which had crossed constellations to reach him.

Unlocking his desk drawer, Joe produced another envelope. This one contained a letter he’d typed under the assumed guise of an editor, congratulating young Mini-Flash Pseudangelos of Boston on her runner-up prize. Joe had forged the letter-heads of a long-gone Pre-Nottingham Earth magazine publisher along the top of the page, and the envelope was stamped and addressed to his long-gone Pre-Nottingham Earth house, the one which had so resembled wherever it was he now stood.

Our hero was all too aware the recipient’s name would better suit him if he went ahead with this. Nevertheless, he slid the signed photo in alongside his letter, and sealed the envelope.

He could end this. Tomorrow. All he’d have to do was pretend it had come in the post that morning.

For Mini-Flash Splitsville was right, and so was Sonica. There was danger here.

He should end this.

Joe looked from jacket to desk. Then he looked from one to the other again.

Then, slowly, he returned the letter to where it had been, and locked the drawer behind it.

END OF CHAPTER THREE