The Things we Find, Chapter Five

Nottingham’s Mini-Flashes flocked to the cinema when the advertised hour came. It was a tunic-and-pants convocation on the grandest scale yet seen, and every row and box and gallery tingled in the softly-lit hush. There were people and beings besides Mini-Flashes too, helping crowd the auditorium to capacity, all called to this spot on this night by the prospect of thirty-seven seconds which might bridge that far lengthier duration between then and now.

To one side of the silver screen Dean stood onstage before a full-length microphone-stand. He would supply the narration intended for the half-minute of silent film. Neetra on handing over her finished English-language script had advised him that while she was sure of her telepathic powers, some of the material itself seemed to her a little out-there. In particular it wasn’t always easy to tell what the words had to do with their related visual images. Knowing however that with Dean it was the more out-there the better, Neetra suspected that if anyone could figure out a way to make her translation work it was he.

Opposite the bunches and Bermuda shorts, by the other screen-curtain, Flashshadow was ready with her lyre. The first pair of perfected triple-lensed glasses Croldon Thragg passed to Joe had in turn gone straight to her, that she might view at her earliest opportunity the video recording-pyramid. Our hero had made a point of this, for he knew how much it meant to his misty Mini-Flash friend. That one by now had composed a score to supplement Dean’s voice-over which she would render live, accompanied by faithful Mini-Flash Splitsville who was sitting cross-legged by Flashshadow’s feet with her bongos.

Neetra and Joe were in the booth that housed the projector, to which was hooked up that same ancient recording-device. There they waited quiet as the last seconds ticked down.

Dean knew his craft. No spoken prologue could have met the prevailing mood, so he let the cinema-lamps dip to darkness unannounced. A multitude fumbled to don three-eyed cardboard spectacles and held its collective breath.

The opening notes from Flashshadow’s strings began to play.

Blue. A screen-wide sky with a single star, and a bottom border of craggy black which the audience somehow knew was not hills but the cusp of another planet.

“On this morning, remember the monsters,” commenced Dean.

There they were. The opening clip from the television programme switched to a shot of the wind-up toys, their plastic forms etched dramatically against a luminous backdrop.

“Even those which would do us harm.”

Then the theatre was alive with film and motion. It had been something different even then, stark and grainy, but what colours! Mahogany and ruby and jet, whilst at every window that indelible blue night, and surfaces resplendent with copper-kettle sheen. Never before or since. That palette, those contrasts, were doing it. They were transporting the Mini-Flashes back.

The sequence took up no more than two of their thirty-seven seconds. There was barely time to note details. Yet with every bar Flashshadow plucked and each flickering frame, more returned. Everyone by now was recalling something of what sort of story it had been. Ornate, exotic, folkloric. Exploration, mystique. Had something like a treasure-map come into it?

Joe could tell Flashshadow was weaving in and out of that especial melody, the one the toys played and the beasts themselves had sung.

“For there are monsters and monsters,” Dean went on.

That cavern, black and ribbed, its ridges agleam. Lurid special-effects smoke. There he was, whatever he had been, the villain or wizard or master, grey-bearded and magnificent in painted robes. He was commanding his servant, who indeed was a different breed of monster to those which were their theme. His physis of smooth featureless black showed him for a distant cousin, but he was lithe where they lumbered, a veritable frenzy scrambling and somersaulting over the rocks then next second holding his pent-up energies on the tightest rein.

And, oh, the Mini-Flashes remembered him!

How could they have forgotten so long? They’d never seen anything move as he had done for them that morning!

Don’t try to tell the audience it had only been an actor with black leotards on. His body had brought theirs to life. They had throbbed within from desire to move the way he did.

Exclamations and outspoken joy were by now reaching Joe and Neetra in the projection-booth, and she was not surprised when he squeezed her to him a little closer. He was great at the outward shows, but seriously, she’d have worried about pulling off something like this.

Onscreen the toys were waddling forth on their little legs.

“They walk,” intoned Dean. “They play music.”

A mountainous rockside exploded to crumbling rubble. A clutch of protagonists, viewed from directly overhead, strove fleetingly amid more dry-ice. What an adventure! No wonder it had never gone away. Faint as the enduring fragments may have become, there was still so much that made the Mini-Flashes revert to it still.

Then, an awesome sky. Had those ravishing tints and hues truly been, on that day they were all so young?

“We are nearer the end than we were, but this was foreseen in The Thousand Years.”

“That’s what it says,” Neetra murmured to Joe.

So swelled unto the celluloid glow the one part of the programme our hero had, in a manner of speaking, seen before. The volcano in whose belly the gentle brutes learned to sing. Joe knew from his followers’ correspondence that this was the scene most widely recollected, and could imagine that for most of the auditorium the experience had shifted from sudden analepsis to that almost solemn thrill attendant on the reaffirmation of faith.

That was when Flashshadow and Mini-Flash Splitsville brought it home, hitting at last the monsters’ harmony unchecked.

Could anything have been more evocative? It did Joe’s heart good to know his interpretation of the cause attracted genius such as Flashshadow’s. He’d thought before that the arrangement was a little like Silent Night, though he reminded himself for the second time it hadn’t been Christmas and it was mostly because he’d always liked that one and the position it occupied in his planet’s history. That notwithstanding, strains even akin to those, sounding out over the same pictures as they had done untold ages ago? Joe reckoned there was not one Mini-Flash still in their cinema-seat. They were home again, old habitation-dome holo-monitors brightly abeam, unwrapped gifts arrayed about them.

Hugely the strange script of a far-off solar system spelled out in vibrant toy-package lettering whatever the title of the television programme had been.

“Each sold separately,” Dean concluded.

The cheering and applause began to go up well before the lights did. Joe, his arms still fast about Neetra, looked to her and they shared a smile. She knew him better than anyone else, and this galaxy had never been an easy place to second-guess. He’d been sure he was right. None of which was to say the riotous adulation they were both hearing now was anything less than music to Joe’s ears.

It was only a start. Our hero saw that. But they would unlock every secret the factory held, learn all it had to reveal of that full-length feature his faction must see, and then he would send those same Mini-Flashes and others out upon the galaxy primed with the knowledge they gleaned. No studio, no manufacturer, no merchandising outlet would emerge untouched, had that facility been touched in turn by some manifestation of the prize. Then, when it was at last Joe’s, he would see it safely restored to the ones who were counting on him. Here in Nottingham, not because it was his home, but because it was also theirs. Of that Joe had never been in doubt.

For it didn’t take long to get to know your home. Only a lifetime.

THE END