“Oh,” said Bruce. “Sorry.” He peeled off his accomplice mask. “Bruce Steel,” he said again. “F.B.I.” There was a polite gasp from the bystanders. “I’ve been undercover for longer than you’d think. Deep undercover. At times...almost too deep. Sometimes it’s like...it’s like it’s the disguise that wears you. I know you know that, Red Herring.”
“You don’t know anything about me!” And with that, Red Herring tore off his own Nixon mask. The room gasped once again.
“I...” Bruce Steel waved his bank robber mask awkwardly. “I already know what you look like. Meetings, remember?”
“Oh! Right. Now I’ve done it too. Hang on...”
With some effort—because it was really well stuck on—he peeled off his Red Herring mask.
“You don’t know anything about me!” The gasp from the room was less enthusiastic this time.
“Jacque Flaneur,” said Steel, not a hint of surprise in his voice. “Once Broadway’s finest actor, now reduced to a life of crime. You have no idea how closely I’ve followed your story.”
“Oh, but I do. Because...” Jacque removed yet another mask, his French accent suddenly morphing into an Irish brogue, “it was me who put you on the case, boyo!”
This time, it was Steel’s turn to gasp. “Director O’connell!”
“’Tis I!”
Steel dropped his gun. “But...why?” It was the question everybody wanted to ask.
“For one reason. One reason alone.” He took a step forward, closing the gap between himself and Steel. “Because you...are the real Red Herring!” Gripping Steel’s chin, he suddenly pulled the skin upwards. Except it wasn’t skin—it was latex.
“So. You’ve got it all figured out, then, don’t you?”
“Indeed I do, lad. Right down to the fact that you...” he peeled another mask from the Red Herring, “really are Jaque Flaneur!”
“Mon Dieu! Can it really be? Can you really have pulled so many threads, yet not realised the great truth behind it all?”
“No,” said O’connell. “I always knew that there was more. But I think it’s time you gave us the truth.”
“You don’t want the truth, my friend. You won’t like it when you see it.”
“No. I think it’s time I saw your real face.”
“Very well.” Jacque—the real Jacque—began fumbling for the edge of his mask. “The truth is that I...am your brother!”
“That’s impossible!”
“Is it now, boyo?”
“Yes,” he said, with true feeling in his voice. “Because I...” he peeled off his own mask and shook out his hair. “I am your daughter—Priscilla O’Connell!”
Director O’Connell’s long-lost brother laughed. “Now that really is impossible.”
“Why?”
He peeled off one last mask. “Because I really am Richard Nixon. And furthermore...” he peeled a mask off Priscilla, “you are an alpaca.”
“What?” said the bank teller.
“Pwaa!” bleated Priscilla.
Putting on his Red Herring mask once more, Richard Nixon picked up a large bag of money and left the building.
“Okay,” said the man in the queue. “That actually was quite impressive.”
26
Her Sunken Dream
*Challenge #12: Write a story which takes inspiration from the lyrics, songs or motion picture career of David Robert Jones, aka David Bowie. It must include at least 10 made-up words (a maximum of 1 per sentence). The story must feature two different significant changes experienced by the character(s) during the course of the story. The story must span a period of five years or feature a lapse of five years. It must also include all five senses.
“Now, you’re a cannish guy. Know how I can tell? Because you’re here! Everyone else is either skreeking out into space or digging down as far as they can go. But you...you know how to think outside the box! No point digging a massive bunker if some snaggly bomb scores a direct hit. No point running off all the way to Mars only to starve when you get there either. Yessir, the sea’s the place to be! Far enough from the bombs to be safe, not so far that you’re stuck there when the danger’s over. So.” Esteban smiled and took the expensive pen from his pocket. “Shall I put you down for the basic package, or will sir be upgrading to the deluxe?”
***
Five years later, Esteban Mosquera was no longer so enthusiastic about his underwater habitat. Living beneath the waves had been quite a selling point before the war—and still hadn’t lost all its novelty—but the structure itself was a god-awful small affair. To begin with, if he was honest, it had just been a money-spinning scheme. He could let rooms out to saps looking for a little extra security, and if worst really did come to worst, he’d be safe himself. Thing was, worst had come to worst, and now he was regretting cutting some of those corners during construction. The place was hardly shoddy—he was no conman—but it certainly wasn’t lavish. The narrow hallways always had pipes overhead, and there was no decoration anywhere. Just metre after metre of the same flupping metal wall to stare at all day every day. Worse still, there were no windows. Truth was, at this point he was quite aware that he might well be housing the very last little pocket of humanity in existence, and they definitely weren’t doing as well as they could have been. The money he’d made before the war was no consolation at all. He was no longer a businessman: he was the guardian of humankind.
***
The girl with the mousey hair was not old enough to properly remember the world on the surface. All she had ever known was Seatown, with its faint smell of zinc that nobody ever seemed to get used to. She had never heard a cricket; at night, she could listen only to the ceiling groaning under the weight of the water. She had never felt grass between her toes; only the thick blankets of algae that grew where the floor was wet and the lights shone strong. She had never tasted a sour blackberry, picked by the side of the road—only the pale, mushy apples that grew in the hydroponicarium.
The girl with the mousey hair didn’t particularly care that she could never come up from the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t that the surface didn’t matter. It was just that it didn’t matter any more. The things that had been up there had all been burned, or irradiated, or simply blasted into tiny little atomlets. All that was left now were stories and pictures, and it didn’t particularly matter that she didn’t have any of her own. She was happy just to watch the viddies. She had seen most of them ten times or more.
But then she saw the film about the chubbly little men who get shot out of a cannon and land on the moon—right in its eye!—and she began to wonder about Mars again. People always spoke sadly about it. They talked about how some big piece of the city there—something absolutely, positively inscrimpable—had been blown to pieces with the last rocket that was due to leave, and the place had failed. But on the moon in that viddy, the little black-and-white men met some peculiar space people who went “fwoof!” when struck with an umbrella. That made her wonder: was there life on Mars? If not the people who took their city with them, then someone else who had been there all along? And for the first time, she wanted to leave Seatown. Because for the first time, she thought there might be somewhere else to go.
27
The Return
“Welcome to the Triassic Experience! Would you like a map?”
“Actually, I was here just yesterday. I only came in to return this jigsaw puzzle.”
“Okay. Do you have a receipt?”
“Nooooo...” Brian breathed in through his teeth, grimacing. “I actually didn’t get one.”
“Ohh.” The gift shop cashier winced. “I’m afraid we do require proof of purchase for all returns.”
“Uh-huh, yeah, I get that. It’s just...I literally bought it yesterday. It’s not even been opened. See?” He pointed out the cellophane still on the box.
“Hmmm. Can I just ask...why do you want to return it, anyway?”
“Well, it was for my daughter. She’s a bit unde
r the weather at the moment, and when we came on our family outing yesterday, she had to stay behind with her grandmother. I thought this would cheer her up a bit, but one of the dinosaurs on it scares her. It’s, uhh...” he pointed, “this one. Right here. You can kind of see what she’s on about, right? You know. Grrrrr!” Brian made his free hand into talons.
“Haha. Yeah, it is a bit scary.”
“So, um...” he checked her name tag, “Vicky. Do you think you can help me out?”
“Sorry. I can’t actually get the money out of the machine without a receipt. There’s a code you’ve got to put in.”
“Oh, so it’s like a mechanical problem?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“Well, could you maybe do an exchange then?”
Suddenly, a dinosaur’s head burst up through the floor. “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!” it said. “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!”
The two other people in the gift shop immediately fled through the big glass doors, screaming. Brian would have too, but the dinosaur was blocking his only escape route. After years of merely being annoyed by the shelves and shelves of tourist tat cluttering up every attraction anywhere, the problem had finally become life-threatening. He’d always known this would happen.
The dinosaur, scrabbling at the lino with its tiny little arms, managed to squeeze itself up into the room. It was a T-Rex, or an allosaur. Something big and carnivorous. “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!” It said again, before sniffing around the stacks of merchandise.
Brian couldn’t think of anything to do about this, so he just stood there, tightly clutching the dinosaur puzzle (ages five and up) that he’d been hoping to get rid of. The dinosaur swished its tail angrily, knocking over a rack of key rings. Then it kicked a pile of soft toys. After that, it tried to knock all the books off a bookshelf, but its arms were too short and stubby. “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR!” said the dinosaur, headbutting the shelf instead.
Just then, Brian remembered something he’d seen in a movie once. “Stay perfectly still,” he said to Vicky, the cashier. “They can’t see you if you don’t move.”
“Who said that?” demanded the dinosaur. It turned to look at them. “What have you done to my house?”
“Uhhhhhhh...” said Brian.
“What?” asked Vicky.
“My house!” The dinosaur bobbed its head up and down. “Did you do this? You monsters! You absolute brutes!”
“Just...um...just slow down. What happened to your...um...your house.”
Brian was genuinely impressed by Vicky’s control of the situation. He was still just trying to take it all in.
“I don’t know what happened to my house, that’s the point!” The dinosaur stomped back and forth a few paces. “I was only gone for ten minutes!”
“Well you definitely weren’t here ten minutes ago. I think I’d remember.”
“Okay. Maybe it was more like twenty.”
“When you say you were gone...gone where, exactly?”
The dinosaur gestured with its tiny little arms. “The basement! Where else?”
“I’m just going to come right out and say it.” Vicky put her hands on the counter. “I don’t think there have been any dinosaurs around here for about 66 million years.”
“Well...” the dinosaur tried to scratch the back of its head, but couldn’t even get close to reaching it. “Maybe I sorta lost track of how long it had been.”
Brian finally thought of something to say. “What were you doing all that time, anyway?”
The dinosaur shrugged. “TVtropes.”
28
The Kingdom of the Wolf
Long, long ago in a time none now remember, there was a city, ringed round by walls of stone. But these walls were kept more for tradition than any particular need. The barbarian hordes had been scattered long ago, and no foul beasts dared to stalk among the herds of that fine place. But though the citizens of this great kingdom were safe from foreign harm, their very king came to threaten them.
This king had grown cruel with age, and now cared nothing for his subjects—only for himself. Long had it been known that he was wont to bend his will to wealthy men, and often would he lend his royal guard to aid their work. This was known, but rarely spoken, for the king had servants to keep watch in all the streets.
But as the kingdom’s walls did nothing to protect it from its gravest threat, so too did the king’s spies prove wanting. For in the darkness one quiet night, he woke to find a wolf standing just inside his door.
“Guards!” he shouted, “Guards, protect me!”
But the wolf caught his words like fowl and devoured them, so they never left the room. “Hear me, Majesty,” it said, “before you speak.”
And the king did not try to call again, for he could see that this was not some creature from the wild, but an apparition. Its eyes shone with their own green light, and the skin about them was red and blistered, as though they burned like coals. “Speak, horror,” he said, “and tell me what you will.”
“For nine generations, I have watched this place, and all its kings. And for nine generations, I have not shown my face. But your greed forces me to act. Change your ways, Majesty, or in one year I will return.”
And with that, the black beast left. Immediately, the king called in his guards, but though their search was swift, no intruder did they find, and all the palace doors were still locked tight.
The wolf’s speech left the king deep in thought, and he resolved to return to his old, good ways and tend his people. But within a month the gifts of merchants overwhelmed him, and his heart was hardened once again.
“What right has a beast,” he asked himself, “to confront a king?” And so he sent horsemen out into the fields, and all the nearby woods, to slay this creature if they could.
But one year on from that quiet night, the wolf appeared again.
“You disappoint me, Majesty.”
The king looked on in horror. Where before the flesh around the wolf’s eyes had only blistered, it now sloughed wetly from its face, hanging from its jaw in gory threads. He tried to cry out, but terror robbed him of his voice, and so he could only listen.
But the wolf had little more to say. “Change your ways, or in one year I will return.”
And so for nearly two months this time, the king refused all tribute, and sought to act only in the interests of his people. But once again, the lustre of gold banished the wolf’s dire warnings from his mind.
“What mockery is this?” he thought. “How will my rule be remembered, if I bow to this vile beast?”
And so rather than refuse the merchants’ gold, he resolved to spend it. Doubling his force of horsemen, he sent out a hunt that would slaughter all the wolves in the wilds of his nation. And lest the creature cowered somewhere in the city, he doubled also his spies. Yet somehow, still, a rumour spread that some fevered madness had claimed the king.
But despite his great efforts, and his great expense, the king’s black wolf appeared again. The king stared on in horror. The heat had spread beyond its eyes, and its whole head was now consumed by ethereal flame. Smoke poured from its nostrils and rose from its hide.
“And once again I must appear!” The wolf advanced upon him as it spoke, and with each word a jet of flame escaped its mouth. “Can you not see how much this pains me? How much I have sacrificed to bring you these portents?”
But though spies and horsemen had all failed, the king had one last measure of security. Snatching the dagger from its place beneath his pillow, he plunged it through the devil’s heart.
The green coals of the wolf’s eyes seemed to lose their heat. “Yield, Majesty,” it breathed. “Yield, and you can yet be saved. Persist, and ten thousand wolves shall take my place.”
But the king would never yield, for he knew there were no longer any wolves to take the place of his tormentor. And to celebrate his victory, he held a masquerade the following year, on the very night the wolf would have returned, had he not with cold steel
quenched the fires of its eyes. No expense was spared in providing music, food and wine, and guests from all across the kingdom were invited to share in this great merriment.
“A toast!” the king announced. “To glory, to tradition, and to the honour of the kingdom!”
But there was no applause. Somewhere in the crowd, someone threw down their wine, shattering the glass against the floor. The gesture was repeated, again and again, all across the room.
“Arrest those traitors!” The king looked to his guards, but there was no response.
Slowly, the crowd began to gather around the king. There was a chant, potent and angry, but there was chaos in the noise and so he couldn’t hear the words. Too late, he realised that he had only slain a ghost. Through his cruelty and misdeeds, the king had bred his ten thousand wolves: each one living in the heart of a courtier. And with a howl, the circle closed.
So as virtue is its own reward,
Corruption has a cost none can afford.
29
The Pen Laughs at Structure
Challenge #13: Write a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not in that order. The beginning can't be first, the end can't be last, and the middle can't be in the middle.
“I don’t mean to alarm you, Paul, but I’ve turned into a horse.”
“Not to worry. I’ll just turn this dial back a little, aaaaand...”
“Now I’m two horses.”
“Okay. I’m going to stop fiddling with this thing now.”
“Please do.”
There was an awkward silence. Dave tapped two of his front hooves nervously on the hot, sticky tarmac of the car park.
“So...um.”
“We should get going?”
“Yeah. Which way?”
Paul looked around. “Well, the sun’s over there, but I don’t know what time it is, or where we are, or where the crystalline elixir would be.”
“I thought you said that thing was going to make our job easier.”
“The device isn’t perfect, alright?”