Mist stared at the graven wall. The words didn’t make sense, they seemed somehow wrong. But something else was wrong too. Something was coming. Something very heavy and very big.
Soft at first, but with gradual crescendo, a sound was growing ...oh oh oh woh woh woah woah woah... Throbbing with a pounding determination, the haunting sonance gathered weight as if amplified by proximity with the wall. Yet it was not so much the increase as the intrusion that disturbed Mistletoe; not so much the volume, as the pressure. A heavy, forceful lowing, reverberating, spiralling around her, turning in dense revolutions that gathered above her head.
“IS THAT A COW?” she shouted. She had to shout; not for anyone else of course, but just so that she could hear herself. The weight of the lowing was dominating her thoughts, let alone her hearing. It swirled purposefully as if homing in on something.
“NO! NOT A COW. IT’S A... A...” Oh! What was it? She knew she had heard it before, it shouldn’t be hard, but the pressure in her head, the pounding on her ear-drums; getting painful now, migraines were beginning to muster, harder and harder to think... think! Had she heard it on T.V. before? She knew she knew it. Some kind of cow... horns... long face... Some kind of African wild beast. Wild beast… Wildebeest?”
“WILDERBEAST!” she screamed. “WHAT IS A BEWILDERBEEST DOING IN MY WARDROBE?”
As if the abuse of her ears was not enough, her eyes were now drawn into the siege. Slowly at first, everything began to turn, as if she were looking into the drum of a washing machine, then faster, blending all images and colours together in a clockwise smudge. As the revolutions increased in speed, the lowing sound increased in intensity, the two sensations revolving dizzily about each other. The air was heavy with the assault and all about her began to blur.
*****
Future-Elmo stood in the wet woods, puzzling over what a mess he had made of things! He’d only just got here too! He could not afford to leave any chance of himself meeting himself for a second time: he needed a Plan-B just in case his own unfathomable foolishness found a way of getting himself back to where he now was! He turned his device around, adjusted it knowingly and sent himself back. His plan, he thought, was pure genius. He would go back to the morning, ring Roan: intrigue him, entice him; tell him whatever he had to tell him to get him to come here; his arrival might create enough of a diversion to prevent himself from going on to the confrontation with himself.
Soon, in the convoluted tangle that is time, Future-Elmo, occupying unadvisable past-existence-space, sat with his feet up in Past-Elmo's home, hands behind his head, and an ear-warmed mobile on the table before him, next to his device. Mentioning Rimgumbaldy had been a stroke of brilliance. He grinned in a moment of smug satisfaction: and a moment was all he had, for slowly, but surely, the Exlax of realisation started to take effect on his constipated common sense. Maybe this was what had happened all along. The sound of Holi and Elmo talking outside the front door made him jump, the door knob turned.
“Oh-no!” he cried. Jolting forward in panic, hands flailing, feet flying; in an eruption of bony arms, spindly legs and badly cut hair, he crashed into the table sending the phone skittering off one edge and his device careening off the other. It fell top-first to the floor, impacting the floorboards with a muted ‘supping’ sound and vanished into suspicious air! What happened next was even more startling.
*****
Holi stood in the wet woodland. When Elmo and the rat had been sent into the past, the burst of light that accompanied their disappearance had caused her to turn and stare helplessly at the empty space where they had been. “Elmo?” she had managed to murmur. Future-Elmo had remained for a while, his face full of intent, but a flicker of guilt had appeared as their eyes met. “I used to be like that,” he said feebly. He too had then disappeared with a brief, bright flash.
“You aren’t my Elmo,” she mumbled.
The green midget had come to stand at Holi’s side and was looking up at her balefully. Noticing its presence Holi glanced despairingly down. The creature lightly gripped her leg with a pale, bony hand, opened its mouth and simply said, “Hob,” before vanishing completely. At this, something deep within Holi’s brain, something that had been, thus far, tenuously holding everything together, gave up and went for a well-earned break.
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“Waaaah!” she screamed and set off at a frantic gallop through the trees.
She didn’t know how long she ran and didn’t care where, it was the pure adrenaline of complete abandonment of her senses that drove her. It was actually a relief not to be trying anymore. Giggling manically between screams, she raced on, twigs and leaves tangling in her clothing, moss and lichen in her hair, until eventually, she burst from the tree-line.
She almost pounded headlong into a figure that side-stepped her flight at the last moment, leaving her skidding in the gravel of a deserted B-road. Clawing at the air in hysterical derangement, she brought her momentum to an undignified halt and spun to regard the man before her. His face was hidden by a bizarre mask festooned with wires, tubes and raised spigots and she felt a fresh wave of panic begin to rise as she tried to determine what new menace he presented. His hands, held out before him in a pacifying gesture, made her hesitate - maybe, just maybe this was a refuge, not a threat. Breathing heavily, Holi stepped back a few paces and brushed the hair from her eyes. The figure was covered from head to toe in a faintly shiny, body-hugging suit.
It seemed to be trying to adopt a soothing stance and through the valve-like mouthpiece of its mask, she felt sure she heard it say, "It's okay Mrs Shamra, you're safe. Safe now." It took an exploratory step toward her causing her to shrink further in trepidation. Again, hands held up in reassurance, the figure paused. She struggled to catch her breath, wondering if she might be about to experience some sort of heart attack. Noting her agony, the figure produced a mask, not unlike its own and gestured toward it, suggesting that it could assist her breathing. She didn't like the idea of accepting something so invasive from a stranger, but the figure urged, its voice unpleasantly muted, "Please Mrs Shamra you need to get your breathing under control." How did this person know her?
She imagined the worst and then decided she no longer cared. Fighting for breath, she snatched the mask, pulled it over her head and was startled by a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree viewscreen flicking into life inside the mask. A couple of staccato blips and clicks indicated that this headgear had sound too.
As the visuals resolved themselves before her, she found she was looking into a cool, blue-lit corridor from first-person viewpoint – almost as if she were there – except the computer construct was a bit blocky and the graphics simplistic.
“Virtual reality?” The thought seemed to pierce the confusion that had clouded the previous minutes. “Where is this?” Holi mumbled, to no one in particular. Then, a faceless, suited person, something like a crash test dummy for board meetings, appeared, beckoning her through a sliding virtual door. Holi found herself following it passively. She felt like a thick, mental fog had filled her skull, leaving her disconnected and distant. Through the doorway was a basic virtual office with a table and chairs; Functional, as if detail was an unnecessary bother.
She was helped to sit down and the virtual suit produced a virtual helmet from a virtual box.
“This is just our crossover facility,” she was told, “We’ll soon have you in the main operating system.”
Now this second helmet was placed upon her virtual head and she found herself wondering if she would ever remember where her actual head was, but as this system came to life, the effect was startling. Whereas the first helmet allowed her senses to see and hear a somewhat crudely constructed digital world, this second helmet was much more sophisticated; it was as if she were really there. But where? A laboratory maybe? Someone in a white coat sat nearby jabbing at a keyboard to a computer with three screens. Too much to take in, and she felt so drowsy. What did that sign say? Department of Extratemporal Analysis, Vicarious Virtual Reality and Semi-invasive Dream Therapy?
Half in a dream, she was led by figures in white coats into a clinic room of examination tables; large, green-liquid-filled tubes and portable computer screens. She felt herself swaying woozily as she was led along. She tried to get a look at the faces of her guides, but her head was too difficult to control, it wanted to drift downward, her eyes heavy. The thought arose deep in her mind that she had somehow been drugged - but she couldn’t keep the thought in focus. Caring hands guided her to a technical-looking scanner bed where she reclined submissively. Hanging cables, jointed panels and circular lights beaming up from the floor created an ambience of futuristic sterility. She was fading fast. She heard a voice saying, “Subject is rejecting ‘reality’. She’s in danger of succumbing to an unacceptable degree of dissociative hysteria.”
“Why do you suppose it is, 679, that this one doesn’t appear to accept the evidence of her senses?”
Sleep began to overwhelm her. Holi caught the words, “She’s going to need a memory prune and a plausible anamnesis of her husband if she’s to stay sane. Perhaps we should check what to do. Mr Shamra is inextricable for the time being.”
Holi’s final impressions included an out-of-focus glimpse of one of the glowing liquid tubes - it looked as though that ghastly green midget was suspended inside. It twitched once, but then her view was obscured by a silhouetted figure.
“He’s so small and helpless and weird,” Holi observed feebly.
“We know,” came a soft reply, “But he’s gone, Mr Shamra is gone.”
Then darkness swept in like a big oceanic swell, the words, “Don’t worry, you won’t remember anything about it all soon,” reverberating away into convolving echoes.