Роберт Грант - The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

Gemma, Troy and I quite easily rocked out of its path, but poor old Guuuurk barely escaped being sliced in half!

‘Sorry, what did you say?’ Troy asked Gemma. ‘I was distracted by that indoor lightning bolt.’

‘Oh, you mean the one that nearly bisected me?’ Guuuurk raised himself from the floor.

‘What was that you said about the route through?’ I asked Gemma.

‘She said,’ Guuuurk condescended, ‘head forwards and take the first right—’

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

Another bolt ricocheted around the mirrors, leaving Guuuurk’s hair smouldering slightly.

‘Wow!’ Troy enthused. ‘I thought it never struck in the same place twice.’

‘Wait! Nobody say anything else!’ Guuuurk dabbed at his singed hair with his hand. ‘It seems to have some sort of verbal trigger.’

‘So,’ Troy mused, ‘you’re saying that a special word makes it happen. Right?’

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

Guuuurk nodded. ‘Right.’

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

This last bolt actually sliced the end off the cigarette in Guuuurk’s holder. He narrowed half his eyes and motioned for us to be quiet. ‘Shut up! Shut up! Yes. I see it now. Troy, you understand what word you mustn’t say?’

‘No.’

‘Well, obviously I can’t say the word, or I’ll set it off again.’

‘Oh yeah, you’re right.’

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

Gemma and I had resignedly ducked before the bolt had issued this time.

‘Ow!’ Guuuurk yelled, beating out the flames on his blue spotted silk pocket handkerchief. ‘How does it know where I am ?’

I decided to bring some sanity to the proceedings. ‘Troy – as long as nobody says it again, we’ll be all—’

‘Ah-ah!’ Gemma warned. ‘Careful.’

‘Sorry!’

Troy was still baffled. ‘So – what’s this word we mustn’t we say?’

‘The word,’ Guuuurk said carefully, ‘is R-I-G-H-T.’

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

‘For the love of sand!’ Guuuurk frantically doused the collar of his protective suit. ‘The wretched thing can spell !’

‘But I can’t,’ Troy pointed out. ‘I still don’t know the word.’

Guuuurk pulled out a scrap of paper. ‘Anybody got a pencil?’

I gave him mine.

‘What are you doing?’ Troy asked.

‘I would have thought it was obvious even to someone of your level of cognitive inanity,’ he drawled. ‘Since I can’t say it, I’m going to write—’

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

‘ Ow! That’s not even spelled the same!’ He scribbled frantically before the flaming pencil burnt away completely, and handed the note to Troy. ‘There! This is it – see now?’

Troy studied the scrap of paper for some considerable time, concentrating as hard as I’d ever seen him. ‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘Yes. Yes.’

‘You see what the word is?’ Guuuurk twinkled.

‘Not really. It’s very long.’ His lips tried to form the letters one by one. ‘Rrrigggiitee? Rrrrigghuhurtt? Arruggitta?’

‘It’s Right! The word is Right! Right! Right! Right!’

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

ZZZKKKKOWWWWCRK!

Multiple bolts forked around the chamber like flights of deadly flaming arrows. They ricocheted back and forth through the gallery of mirrors, blasting them into clouds of glittering shards.

When we picked ourselves up off the floor and pulled out the tiny slivers of glass from our clothing, only one mirror was still standing intact.

‘Well, my brilliant ploy worked rather superbly,’ Guuuurk crowed. ‘Now we can see our way clear to the exit.’

‘Your… foot’s actually burning like a log fire’, I pointed out.

‘Yes, I meant it to do that,’ he lied casually, trying to pretend it wasn’t hurting quite a lot.

‘Here,’ Troy offered, ‘let me stamp you out.’

‘Thank you very much!’ Guuuurk winced, pretending it wasn’t hurting even more as a size 14 boot smashed his toes repeatedly.

‘We’ve wasted too much time already,’ I warned. ‘We need to move now.’

Guuuurk began limping towards the exit, Troy followed, and I hopped after them, realising after a moment that Gemma wasn’t with us. I turned round to see where she was.

She was rooted to the spot, staring into the single remaining mirror.

Her ear was rotating…

The Rational Scientific Journal of Dr. Gemini Janussen, Sunday 6th January 1952 (Again)

So that’s what I looked like.

And that’s why I’d banished all mirrors from my bedroom.

I’d thought, at the time, it was merely to avoid vanity, which is a foolish waste of effort and energy. But the truth was I had simply been avoiding looking at myself. Because I didn’t like seeing what I saw. It made me anxious, inadequate – unhappy, even. And feelings like that are best locked away, safe inside where they can be ignored. As long as I was fully wound, they’d stay there, and I’d be safe.

And yet, hadn’t Brian said he thought I was beautiful? Of course the lovestruck always think the object of their desires is beautiful. Beautiful I wasn’t! There, I’d finally acknowledged those feelings, and now that I had – somehow I realised they were completely irrational.

I looked over my features again, but more calmly this time. True, I wouldn’t win the Miss World Contest – and frankly who would want to? – but the inventory wasn’t too depressing.

My hair was thick and healthy enough. Eyes were a warm hazel colour and rather clear. Skin fairly free of blemishes. Lips not exactly Rita Hayworth, but not Boris Karloff, either. I wasn’t fat or thin, just normal really. Actually, I quite liked how I looked.

Of course the worries of inadequacy hadn’t gone away, but they had been tempered by fact. I was, in truth, quite presentable. And that was good enough for me.

And if Brian wanted to say I’m beautiful to him – who was I to stop him?

I though he was rather handsome too, between you and me, when he stood up properly and stopped wittering on and forced a smile… There he was behind me now, with that lost puppy dog expression. What a useless lump! But quite a cutie, though, if you ignored the—

‘Gemma! Please – come on!’ he was urging.

‘Good grief! We need to go!’ I wound up my ear in a flash, grabbed his hand and we scooted off. In spite of the urgency and the peril we were in, just for a moment it felt to me as if we were a couple of schoolchildren happily running the three-legged race.

The Daybook of ‘Jenkins’ Jenkins, RQMS Royal Fusiliers (very confused), Sunday the 6th of January, 1952

We’re shoring up the cellar, as per instructions.’Course, I already knows the so-called ‘intruder’ was only Brother Nylon inspecting the cellar for ancillary site safety purposes and allied management misconducts, but I carries on the charade anyways.

I’ve just finished stacking the last of the slow-motion gas cylinders, taunting the attack penguin into a bloodlust frenzy, and replacing the ball bearings with exploding kumquats from the Farm.

This Prof’s not too pleased to see what I’m doing when he comes back from looking through the other Prof’s latest notebook.

‘ Slow-motion gas? Killer attack penguins?’ He dodges its lunge and goes to pop a kumquat in his mouth, but I stops him in time. ‘ Weaponised fruit? And as if that weren’t enough,’ he smacks the notebook with the back of his hand, ‘now he’s trying to gain access to dangerous alien technology to retrieve a hopeless situation, using experimentally modified human replicas like himself! Is there no end to his god delusion? Is there no end to his hubris? Is there no end to… my nose?’