by Rufus Offor
Shoop walked over to the man and raised his knee as hard as he could, sending the man’s genitalia up into his body. He went bright pink and slowly slipped to the floor, his legs failing to keep him upright.
“HOW LONG!” roared Shoop directly in the man’s ear. The man just squeaked.
“Anybody else?” Shoop looked around the remaining standing men, “I can make life very difficult for you. What I just did to this poor sod is a fleck of snow on the top of the tip of an iceberg compared to what I’ll do to you if you don’t give me an answer!”
They all said in unison, “If it’ll make you feel better, you just go ahead, I’m sure we’ll be just fine.”
Shoop’s face dropped. He didn’t have time for this. If they were anything like Bunty, Jeeves and his two pupils, they wouldn’t give anything away, even under extreme torture. Shoop had used all of his truth serum on Jeeves back at the school, which ousted that option.
“Sod it!” Shoop gestured to his thugs, “tie them up and stick them over in that corner. Feel free to go over and smack them about when ever you feel like it.”
The men were tied and lightly beaten. All they said was “You should try some of that tea, it’s very relaxing, maybe it’ll help unblock your chakras a bit. They look a bit clogged up at the moment.”
After that Shoop soon gagged them, wrapping duct tape around their heads, mummifying them from the mouth down to the nape of their necks.
“Right George, take charge of the packing, I want anything they’ve got on the Priory Of Sion and any related organisations. If you spy anything else you fancy help yourself but make sure we’ve got enough room for all the important stuff.’
They set about their work while Shoop had a dig around for a drinks cabinet. He hadn’t had a drink for hours and he was beginning to sober up. That just simply wouldn’t do.
Chapter 8
The Boss Gets Annoyed
It was dark in The Boss’s office. He liked it that way. He liked sitting in the shadows with his fingers knitted together dreaming up dastardly plots and thinking of new and interesting ways of making the people of the world a little more compliant and controllable.
The Boss had had a hand in the majority of initiatives that lowered the thinking power of the average person. His influence spread over the entire western world and had been worming his way into the east with greater and greater gusto. He spread like a cancer over the world, all in secrecy, always under the surface with his underhand manoeuvring. He had most politicians under his control, along with giants of the media world. There was very little on the planet that had not been influenced by him. His every move was designed to stupefy the populace and bring them under control. He had dreamed up Reality TV, poor children’s entertainment, tabloid newspapers, the legalisation of hard-core porn in many countries, the unprecedented spread of gambling, lobotomised education systems, the lot. He even had a big hand in making sure that George W Bush had made it into the Whitehouse, arguably the single most moronic president in American history.
He loved power, but he loved the chase of acquiring it more. He always made sure that there was some kind of challenge that would tax him. Surprisingly, he had little desire to be absolutely powerful; that was the job of another man. If the entire world danced to his tune, where would he go from there? The answer; nowhere! Life seemed a bit dull when there was nobody to scheme against. That was part of the reason why he hadn’t killed Shoop years ago, that and the fact that he was extremely useful and that The Boss was secretly terrified of the man.
The Boss had dispatched Dave and Mike, the founders of the Sphere Of Influence, many years ago and had come to realise that the lack of an adversary was somewhat boring. He considered getting rid of Mr Winkle, but things were much more interesting with him around. The Boss would do infinite things to get on Mr Winkles nerves and vice versa but neither of them would show their distain for the other too openly. Neither of them wanted to give an inch of ground, neither could afford to let the other know what he was truly capable of. At least, it had been that way until Shoop had stepped into The Bosses office earlier that day. After the events of that meeting, everything was different. He could not allow Shoop to live after his little display and yet he found himself saddened by the necessity to have Shoop destroyed. Winkle had been one of his favourite amusements for decades. He had lived with the masked conflict for so long that he was going miss it when it was gone. Yes, he’d definitely miss Mr Winkle when he was dead.
He liked the sneakiness, the conniving, the planning to bring him down, the thrust and parry of mind games and strategy.
Shoop had been an excellent opponent. He had been extremely mysterious and could play the strategy game as well as The Boss could. The Boss didn’t know the full extent of Shoop’s powers, which had kept him curious about the man; it had kept him interested in the vicious little cretin for so many years, but when Shoop had made his move earlier in the day, The Boss finally knew that he was facing someone who had the capacity to bring him down and he couldn’t afford to have someone like that running loose.
He loved to play games, but only if he was assured victory. He absolutely needed to be the smartest man in a fight and always had.
Thirty years ago The Boss had been called Trevor Brinkley. He had been the top of his year in Cambridge, was a world class chess player, had never been beaten at risk and was a grand master in an organisation that he’d founded called the Masters of Eberron. It was a dungeons and dragons collective from his university years. He had a fine brain on him but he wasn’t the best-liked person in his youth. In fact, that could well be considered one of the largest understatements of the last hundred years. He wasn’t only disliked; he was feared and hated as well.
His parents had been decent hard working people. They had two boys, of which Trevor was the youngest. By the age of five the entire family was terrified of him. He was small for his age and skinny, he always had been, but he had darker talents than the obviousness of brute strength to instil fear in people. Being big and strong only scared people to a certain point, Trevor was capable of much more. He had an acute talent for utterly destroying anyone who crossed him, not physically but mentally. It was a talent that was evident from the most tender of ages.
When he was three he accidentally threw his Frisbee into old man Hooper’s garden. Old man Hooper didn’t like children very much and no imploring, even from Trevor’s parents, could make Mr Hooper return Trevor’s precious disk; probably because he’d taken great pleasure in watching it melt into nothing on his bon-fire.
Trevor tried sneaking into the old man’s garden late at night to get it back, not knowing of it’s destruction. Engineering a covert Frisbee saving operation is no easy task for a three year old toddler at the best of times, let alone in the pitch black of a cloudy night but he tried none the less. He found the melted remains of his toy on the bonfire and vowed that he would have his revenge.
A year later old man Hooper was jailed for interfering with small boys, namely Trevor.
It was all completely fictitious of course but Trevor had done his work well and the poor old man spent the remainder of his life suffering in jail; being beaten and abused in despicable and unnatural ways simply because Trevor wanted his Frisbee back. The boy’s malice was horrific.
His abilities were far beyond his years. He was disgustingly malicious and vile and a fine actor. He had managed to convince his parents, his brother, the police, the world at large (including a number of news papers and TV reporters) and even a gaggle of child psychologists that Mr Hooper, in truth a kind yet eccentric old man, had been guilty of unheard of behaviour. Such a lie enforced with such expertise from a child so young spoke volumes about the kind of man he would grow up to be.
When the poor soul, Mr Hooper, had been sent to jail the whole family breathed a sigh of relief. They believed that their tormentor had received justice. In truth, their torment had just begun.
Trevor’s parents came into his room one da
y to talk to him about possibly seeing someone who could help him deal with the awful things that Mr Hooper had done. Trevor looked at them from under a sneering smile and simply said that there was no need for him to see anyone, as Mr Hooper was innocent. The parents were aghast at this revelation and when they started to become angry, he coolly suggested that if ever any one outside of the room were to hear about his confession, he would come after them next.
The child’s stare was so chilling that they had no choice but to believe him.
The child’s words and manner were an H-bomb and it was to be the bomb that broke them. They were completely emotionally shattered. They were mortified and horrified to their very cores. How could they, decent god fearing, hard working people have managed to give birth to pure evil. It just didn’t make sense. It just wasn’t right or fair.
For months they cried themselves to sleep over the anguish of it all. They were well aware that they had no way out. They wouldn’t be able to convince the police and the child psychologists that they’d been wrong all along and, even if they could, how could they live with themselves if they set their five-year-old son on a course of life that would see him shift in and out of various hateful institutions. They were backed into a corner and their life became one long painful chore.
Trevor had played his game very well, diabolical as it was.
His teenage years saw him grow worse. He was stingy, selfish, cruel and bitter. Both of his parents, shattered by their sons evil tendencies, turned to drink and were chronic alcoholics by the time he was twelve, mostly through fear of him, and he administered frequent beatings to them while they were laid out, dead drunk in their room. He was too skinny and gangly to beat them while they were awake so he did it when they were comatose. When they woke, covered in bruises and sometimes bleeding he made them believe that they’d beaten each other in their drunken stupors. He tortured them in so many cruel and inhuman ways that neither of them held out much hope of living for very long. In fact, they both spent many hours quietly praying for the sweet release of death, for freedom from their devil child.
Their lives played heavy on them. Eventually they simply gave up the will to live.
They were dead by the time he was eighteen, which was just as he’d planned. His parents had been very wealthy and Trevor planned on using his inheritance to see him through university and start him on the road as a successful businessman. He wanted power. He wanted it so badly that the need for it oozed from his pores. He stank of vile ambition.
He had no contesters for the will as his older brother had run away at age sixteen. Nobody quite knew why he’d gone, as the family kept their dirty little secret, namely Trevor’s evil nature, hidden as best they could. The truth was that His brother, Ben, had feared for his life for many years. As soon as he was old enough to be employed, he left the cursed house and his poor suffering parents to their fates. He simply vanished one night and was never seen again.
Trevor sometimes wondered where he was, whether or not he was planning revenge somewhere out there. He truly hoped so. Trevor loved adversaries. He had engaged many private detectives to hunt his brother down, but he was too well hidden. There was not the slightest clue as to where in the world he was.
Trevor sailed through university, terrifying people as he went, and one day, years later, while sitting in a little pub in Bury St Edmunds, overheard a strange conversation.
A clean, wealthy looking man was talking to a strange looking individual wearing a trilby and an old fashioned brown suit. He looked like a detective in a film from the thirties. Like Humphrey Bogart in the Maltese falcon but younger, more bitter and with far more life etched on his features, if that can be imagined. He had young skin, but the deep chasm-like lines of a man who’d spent several lifetimes being pissed off with everything.
Trevor over heard some ridiculous notions of little green men, werewolves and sloth’s that fell from the sky in busy London streets. Ridiculous as they were, they seemed to be intriguing the wealthy looking gentleman, which made Trevor curious.
Trevor followed them unseen to the car park and saw that it was all true as the man in the trilby showed the businessman what he had in his car. Among other things there was a werewolf in the boot, a little green man in a suitcase and even a fairy in the glove box.
Trevor hated anything that was even remotely strange. Strange things were wild cards and had the threat of irrational behaviour behind them. Strange and irrational things were not predictable and were seldom brought under control and Trevor thrived on controlling his environment and the people in it. Even with this distaste for the strange though, he felt oddly compelled to follow them as they drove away. For the first time in his life he went with the spur of the moment and despised every last gut wrenchingly unpredictable second of it.
He lost them on the road to the Lake District. He didn’t know how the driver of the car, the man in the trilby hat, had managed it. One minute they were there, the next they weren’t. They had been on a vast motorway with no exits in sight and very few cars to hide behind, but gone they were.
He became obsessed. He couldn’t forget about the strange things he had seen in the man’s car. If there were things out there that defied explanation, then he had to find out what they were and have power over them. “Just imagine the possibilities”, he thought to himself, the secrets to be had, the powers to enforce, the adversaries to be destroyed, the power, the power. He couldn’t let his mind rest until he found his quarry. It was what he’d spent his whole life waiting for. He could feel it in his bones. He tingled with excitement every time he thought of it. His bones felt like they were rattling when the possibilities flowed through his mind. The tingle felt like a sixth sense that he couldn’t hold down, it was a compulsion, like running from the sound of gunfire.
But he’d lost them. He’d lost his chance.
Then one day, as he was working at tearing down an old family company and building his first office complex over it’s still warm corpse, some builders found something. There was a graveyard under the foundations of his new building. A man came to investigate it. He said he was from the government. It was the same man he’d managed to loose so many years ago; the very same man that kept werewolves in the boot of his car and little green men in his suit case.
Trevor couldn’t believe his luck. For years he’d hired dozens of men to try and track down the man in the trilby and his business-man associate but to no avail, and now, suddenly and without warning, there he was, wearing the same dirty brown suit, battered hat and sporting the same startlingly weather beaten features. Trevor’s bones rattled like they had done that first time in Bury St Edmunds. Since then he’d wondered if the tingling sensation had just been a figment of his imagination but was now proved wrong. He felt the clattering of his sixth sense quite distinctly.
He wasn’t going to let him get away this time.
Trevor weaselled his way into the man’s confidence and the rest was history. Some time later the man, Shoop Winkle, was working for Trevor. After he managed to learn everything of value from the businessman, he made him disappear, conveniently and without trace, along with his associate Dave.
Trevor had sent Shoop out of the country on a mission as his plans to take over the organisation came to fruition. When Mr Winkle returned, The Boss managed to convince him that Mike’s and Dave’s disappearance had been nothing other than a freak fishing accident.
Trevor took over the business, gave it the secret name of The Sphere Of Influence, took it underground and Shoop was happy to let him do it.
But the end was near for Shoop now. He had made The Boss feel fear and nobody, nobody, made The Boss feel fear without paying for it.
It was time for Shoop to die.
The Boss sat in the dark, knitting his fingers together and plotting as the door opened. A man tentatively stepped into the room and peered into the bleakness.
“Hello? Boss?” said the silhouetted figure.
“Is he dead?�
�� the man gave a start as The Boss spoke from the shadows.
“Um, well, the thing is, well, he got away!”
“Shit!” hissed The Boss under his breath. The man waited in the doorway to be dismissed. The Boss opened a drawer in his desk and pulled something out. He shot the bearer of bad tidings with a taser gun, just for the hell of it.
Chapter 9
Big Men Hugging
Shoop was sitting in the clutter stuffed living room of Jeeves’ country cottage with his feet up while squinting with distaste as he tried to gulp down a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafitte. According to the Guinness book of world records he was idly flipping through, it was the single most expensive wine in the world.
Shoop preferred gin.
George rushed into the room and blurted out, “Looks like we’ve found something!”
“Is it gin?” Asked Shoop dryly, making revolted smacking noises with his tongue and swirling the wine around his glass.
“No Shoop, it’s not gin. What’s the matter, the wine not doing the job for you?”
Shoop glowered at the glass in his hand, “I think it’s gone off, besides, it’s bloody French isn’t it, I feel violated, nothing good ever came out of that bloody country.”
“The battery is a French invention you know.” ventured George.
“Piss off George, when I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.”
“Right, sorry, anyway, I think you should come and have a look at something.”
“Give me a minute.” Shoop walked over to the front door and stuck his head out, “Everything alright out there?” he shouted.
“Fine! Could do with a beer though.” Jim’s voice floated down from the roof where he was keeping watch.
‘Here, try this,’ Shoop corked the wine and hurled it at Jim, ‘Tastes like piss to me!’ he said. Jim deftly snatched the bottle out of the air, uncorked it and took a huge gulp without thinking, ‘I’ve got to go down stairs for a bit, let me know if you see anything.”
