Crushroom, Chapter Two

Mini-Flash Splitsville was reclining in the garden with her good friend Mush, this latter never still, but purring and rubbing blissfully at every bare bit.

“I dig road trips, Daddy-O, but after our last exciting chapter this chick could get hip to the domestic life,” remarked Splitsville by way of explanation.

Her sunglasses had made it hard for Joe to tell whether she could see him as he approached. He sat down with her, and Mush at once proceeded to share her boundless love around.

“Never did ask, you get anywhere with the kid?” Splitsville went on.

Joe shook his head.

“As you know, our conversation was interrupted,” said he. “Yet still it appears to me such journeys may be the key to fathoming out her intentions. The psionic imagery with which Mini-Flash Pseudangelos on our first meeting bombarded both myself and my subconscious iteration dealt wholly with childhood. So had I hoped that at the locale we visited, which is old indeed in my recollections, what it is she seeks might have been found. But…”

As he’d said, they’d been interrupted. Mini-Flash Splitsville replied:

“Thing about Pseudangelos is she always was crazy for helping. We’re talking Dear Abby meets Hints From Heloise. Never was too hip to the notion of privacy, but what goes on in that mostly hollow chocolate-topped melon’s guaranteed to be pulling with your pit crew. Just don’t be surprised if she’s not clued-up as to which end of the strip’s the finish-line.”

All this, Joe took in. “And she is capable of great courage,” he told Mini-Flash Splitsville, then proceeded to relate to her how he knew.

For there they’d been, he and Mini-Flash Pseudangelos, deep amidst lonely dunes when all of a sudden the very beach trembled. Whirling to stare on what seemed the epicentre they’d witnessed an eruption cascading palely against the black sky. That which had thrust it there was swelling from damp dark below, its cap a monstrous umbrella which hung heavy over a tree-trunk sized stem. At the base of this body were rooty tendrils to bear the bulk along, some clawing and scrabbling at sand, others behaving like a jellyfish’s feelers and reaching out their hairy tips towards Mini-Flash Pseudangelos and Joe.

Our hero’s first thought was of a Back Garden intrusion. Only that was impossible here.

Besides, this particular gargantuan fungizoid he had seen far more recently than Prince Agaric or any denizen of that distant galactic expanse. Its shape had writhed among other nightmare apparitions visible above the streets of a space-city, when Joe’s companion had turned her powers on the cowboy and Pandora-like made manifest those terrors our hero himself strove ever to shut away.

This thing was from somewhere worse than The Back Garden.

It was the reason that place and its people always made Joe’s skin crawl, not to mention why Draxu had been able to get to him so easily.

Raging fire supplanted starlight as Joe cut loose, using his other arm to push Mini-Flash Pseudangelos behind him. In the red-orange glow he and she saw more of what it was they faced, including vast white spots which decorated the convexity and a gaping hollow maw like a rent in rotting bark, but nothing beyond that did Joe’s burning barrage achieve.

“Fool!” roared an earthy voice. “Long before you first cowered behind those feeble sparks, Crushroom was!”

Tendrils whipped and amid savage sand-spray parted Pseudangelos and Joe, flinging the latter back that he fell prone. Crushroom, having so identified himself, advanced but then all of a sudden held motionless on his own scuttling roots. A glassy look had come over the eyes which bulged from his body a little above his horrid mouth-orifice.

“The…world?” mumbled Crushroom. “Succumbing to me at last? Yes, of course, one of my many plans…yet why do I not recall…?”

In a furious thunder of flagella he about-faced from Joe.

“You!”

Mini-Flash Pseudangelos was bolt upright, pointing one outstretched palm at Crushroom from behind. Even the bunches in which she wore her deep rich hair seemed to be standing on end, and the considerable quantity of bare flesh on show was flushed all over. So suffused was her bikini with the essence of her that it was as if several shovelfuls of the gooiest death-by-chocolate cake had decomposed in those taut quivery cusps. In fact this was still the case, but everyone had been too polite to mention it.

Apparently her powers were capable of more than Joe’s, but not quite enough. Crushroom wasn’t anything so simplistic as a discrete entity with a mind his own. Not even the mind from which Crushroom sprang was quite certain what he was. It was to the Special Program’s credit that Mini-Flash Pseudangelos had been able to gain any telepathic hold at all.

As Joe struggled without success to rise, his senses already slipping away, a second tentacle-thrash swiftly consigned Pseudangelos to that state ahead of him.

Crushroom loomed over the fallen delicacy, his vile mycological respiration hard at it. Her tumbled tresses were like a chocolate sauce-spill behind her on the moonlit dune. Feeler-ends roamed greedily over her still-heated but cooling curves, and thumbed and bumbled at polka-dots and skirt-frills. The visual correspondence between that red spotted swimsuit and Crushroom’s own colouration was apparently triggering ghastly primal cues.

“Never before has a pretty taken such liberties with Crushroom. Now we shall see what liberties Crushroom might take with his pretty in turn!”

Joe heard him gurgle the words, and knew no more.

Story over, Mini-Flash Splitsville commented from behind her shades:

“That freaky fungus shutting down Pseudangelos one-tentacled I can get hip to, heart-throb. Official word is we Special Program sisters are strictly non-combatant. But you?”

Joe shouldn’t have told his tale thus to the biggest B-movie fan in all of Film Club. He might have known she’d detect at once the plot-hole he’d done his best to gloss over. Yet he hadn’t been able to rise. Any more than he had that first night, when he’d knelt frozen and helpless at his old neighbour’s window until Sonica hauled him clear.

“Not the first time since we came I’ve pinned you looking like something was coming the other way made you want to turn your top-end around,” continued Mini-Flash Splitsville.

At last she took her sunglasses off, revealing those ever-keen eyes, which were the same silver-blue as her hair.

“May not be a senior sis like my down girls Neet and Flashshadow, but what I’ve learned from you since that day at the Tablet leaves The Flash Club at the starting-line,” Splitsville declared. “Never seen you back away from a drag, never seen you hit the brakes when there’s some buddy-boy to shut down. First frame of this far-out matinee you ever made like you were scared was this reel. I don’t feature how that’s less than the original five-alarm.”

Joe laid his hand on Mush’s soft coat. She was here. Splitsville however was correct, and so was Sonica. Crushroom and the fen road and the front window were here too.

“New little booper raps like this is Paradise,” finished Splitsville. “I’ve heard of trouble in that real-gone joint. But trouble you can’t face, Daddy-O? If that’s what Paradise is putting down, Paradise better rethink its rep.”

From under Joe’s palm continued the steady vibrations of Mush’s unthinking contentment. He had felt much as she did, back when he was a boy here and this place still existed. The problem was it did not now. Our hero remembered Mush’s passing, in Four Heroes-era Nottingham. It had been sad, but inevitable. She’d reached fifteen human years. What happened had done so the way such things should.

Mush alive at this very moment had nothing to do with the way things should happen. Nor, in truth, did any aspect of the world in which Joe and his companions had found themselves.

Finally, he stood.

“You must not fear for me,” said Joe. Then he left Mini-Flash Splitsville and Mush to their sunbathing, and sought his room.

END OF CHAPTER TWO