Chapter Two: Everything goes Slightly Insane
Colours. Lights. Spirals.
Flying armchairs?…
Stars. Explosions. And rubber ducks….
Whoa! Is that a talking grandfather clock over there?
Adela didn’t even have time to breath. The ground had just…got up and went. Simply vanished beneath her feet, swallowing her whole, along with an entire freaking house. And there she was, twisting and turning endlessly like a porcelain dancer on one of those, y’know, twisty turny thingies with the wind up key thingy that provides infinite hours of amusement. Well, only if you’re three months old.
Get to the point, you damned narrator!
Oh yes. Sorry Adela.
And so you should be.
Her grey trench-coat flapped around everywhere as she spun and spun and spun, red hair flailing like a whip.
Everything I saw was just a huge mess of colour. Odds and ends from the arse of the Universe slipped in and out at light-speed, pieces of time and space cut themselves, ripped into shreds and merged back into each other like regenerating confetti, an effect that reminded me of how schools of fish swam. It was freaking insane; so insane and wild and full of insane and wild things that I had to check that my eyeballs were still in their sockets. I recall a surfing duck and a candyfloss trebuchet as some of the many anomalies that popped up from time to time, but I forget most of what else was there. Probably worse stuff than a surfing duck. Look, it was pretty nuts, O.K?
Twisting turning twisting turning twisting turning twisting twisting twisting turning spinning. Adela began to think that she had been put in a tumble dryer. And then, out of the blue like some huge big blue thingy came something she could at least put a name to.
It was a cat.
A cat with wide, watery eyes that were looked just as dazzled as she was. Thick, straggly, damp, corn coloured fur was pasted over it like a bricklayer had spread it onto its body. Don’t worry, its ears and paws were in there somewhere. It just takes a bit of effort to point out exactly where…
“Here kitty, kitty…” Adela cooed in mid-air, surprised to find her voice had taken on some kind of drunken slur. The cat replied with an exhausted, “Mewww….” and flopped lazily into a large pocket in Adela’s coat, curling into a little ball of warmth and happiness.
I couldn’t help wondering where I had seen the cat before. Had it been outside that house when the ground went BAM?
Oh yes. Now I know. I had bent down to stroke it, lost concentration when I got up and tripped over a stone, somehow triggering this crazy place.
And now I was aware of something large, heavy and house-shaped making an ever-accelerating beeline for the cat…
“SH-”
She threw herself with all the little might she had to the side, just hoping and hoping that people were able to swim in space time. The cat slowly unfurled from her coat pocket, drifting towards the house, making confused, “Mao…?” noises.
“Good riddance, you crazy feline! Piss off!” Adela exclaimed, shooing away the cat as furiously as she could. “You’re responsible for enough as it is!”
“Maaaao!” it wailed, slicing at the pretty colours with its paws as the image of the house welled up in its huge pools for eyes. The elv spun around as fast as she could, ignoring the fact that she was on the verge of vomiting so much that it could flood the universe, and, after seeing the amount of crazy stuff she had witnessed popping up here, she wouldn’t be surprised if she did flood the universe.
I paused. I really did feel as if I would vomit over the entirety of space. Never before in my life had I believed so strongly that the worst could really happen.
The Doctor Pepper slogan came very vividly to mind.
“No!” Adela wailed. She had to stop spinning, because she knew it would happen. In this place, stuff like that did happen, and as long as she stopped herself thinking about it, it wouldn’t. She wouldn’t give Logic an opportunity to create a separate parallel dimension where it would.
Crud.
She slapped herself on the forehead. By just thinking about not thinking about it, it had probably already happened. Would the same apply to the house and the cat?
She noticed the house had decreased in speed, and the cat was curled up nicely on the ‘Welcome Home’ mat outside the front door, snoozing as if it had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and then drank five litres of mulled wine. Either it was too stupid to notice how odd its surroundings were to be scared by it, or it was desperately pretending it wasn’t there by ignoring it. Adela was too frightened and bemused to care.
And then everything stopped.
The house stopped, the cat stopped, the surfing duck stopped, the talking grandfather clock stopped, the flying armchairs stopped, the rubber ducks stopped, the robotic erasers stopped, the chocolate rakes stopped, the ballerina marionettes stopped, the clockwork tombstone stopped, the gangster mice stopped, the regenerating confetti of time and space stopped, the titanium daffodils stopped, Frodo from Lord of the Rings stopped, the Swahili dictionaries stopped, the crystal windows stopped, the paladins dressed up as pencil cases stopped, the colours stopped, the lights stopped, the spirals stopped, the candyfloss trebuchet stopped, the eucalyptus leaf stopped, Sky News stopped, Big Ben stopped, the llamas dancing the tango stopped, even the author (briefly) stopped. Time stopped. The thing that stopped Time stopped.
The only thing that didn’t stop was me. I knew that because I blinked in surprise, which only surprised me even more and I blinked again in surprise. I could get up. I could walk. I could breath! I could throw up if I wanted to! I could dance to Michael Jackson and no one would care or notice! The whole crack in the rift in the space-time continuum had apparently got bored of the idea of freaking me out and decided to give me a break. I could walk as if I was on the footpath along the row of houses that was there before the universe went cuckoo; in fact, the feeling below my feet had a similar texture to tarmac…
Experimentally, I put my foot out to the side, where I had seen someone’s garden before I fell. Indeed, it had a sort of grassy feel to it. Wow! It was as if I wasn’t quite in the original world, not quite in the next, but here I could interact with both. To confirm this, I reached out further into the garden where I recalled there had been a Frisbee.
Eureka! There, in my hands, was something circular and plastic; I traced my fingers across the embossed picture of a surfing duck on it.
I halted. Where had I seen a surfing duck before…?
Before something silly would happen, I flung the Frisbee in any generic direction. My action was answered with the harsh, smashing sound of something brittle and invisible. A window! The world was now my clamshell, or whatever the hell the crustacean used in that saying is!
There was still the small matter of the house and cat that was exactly to my right, back in alignment with the footpath before this all occurred. No doubt I was supposed to enter it, otherwise why the hell would it appear as the only visible figment of reality in this place? Walking cautiously up to the porch, I noted the cat, frozen in its eternal slumber. Should I knock? The metal numbers, ‘42’ on the front door beckoned me in a way that nothing else had ever done before in my life, or indeed probably the universe, and I gave the door a tiny tap –
And then everything exploded.
The house exploded, the cat exploded, the surfing duck exploded, the talking grandfather clock exploded, the flying armchairs exploded, the rubber ducks exploded, the robotic erasers exploded, the chocolate rakes exploded, the ballerina marionettes exploded, the clockwork tombstone exploded, the gangster mice exploded, the regenerating confetti of time and space exploded, the titanium daffodils exploded, Frodo from Lord of the Rings exploded, the Swahili dictionaries exploded, the crystal windows exploded, the paladins dressed up as pencil cases exploded, the colours exploded, the lights exploded, the spirals exploded, the candyfloss trebuchet exploded, the eucalyptus leaf exploded, Sky News exploded, Big Ben exploded, the llamas dancing the tango exploded; Time exploded. The thing that exploded Time exploded.
Amazingly, the author didn’t explode. Believe me, if she did, this page would be plastered with blood and body parts and brainzzzzzzzzz
. No, not pretty. The only explosion experienced by the author in this story is an erratic creative explosion thingy that spurred her to write all this nonsensical prose in order to amuse you lot. Oh yeah, feel the overwhelming gratitude.
What about me?
Adela’s perception of reality splintered and crashed and burned and danced and died with its arms and legs sticking up in the air like a little dead hamster right in front of her, flailing about with the rest of the rift, and she saw the fabric in the space time continuum tear and unravel its threads as if it was actually fabric. Darkness consumed the colours and the house and the cat and then vomited it back out again, spewing Adela with it out God knows where, and the last things she could recollect were the horrible collapsing sounds of someone’s house, the cat’s terrified shrieks, an agonizing pain in her back from being slammed into some sort of metal wall and a Swahili dictionary open at a page explaining the future participle of the verb anapika…
AN: The author would like to clarify that no houses, cats, surfing ducks, talking grandfather clocks, flying armchairs, rubber ducks, robotic erasers, chocolate rakes, ballerina marionettes, clockwork tombstones, gangster mice, regenerating confetti of time and space, titanium daffodils, actors from films depicting the events of a popular fantasy novel, Swahili dictionaries, crystal windows, paladins dressed up as pencil cases, colours, lights, spirals, candyfloss trebuchets, eucalyptus leaves, news channels or news readers, famous British landmarks, llamas dancing the tango or authors were harmed in the writing of this chapter. Ahem. Now review, dammit!
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[Adela Leafshanks]
© Becky Creighton 2007. Steal any of my work without my permission, and I shall sue your ass.
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