The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  The thick metal door cracked open as if it hadn’t been used for years, which of course it hadn’t. He heaved at it and stepped into the room, fully expecting to find a room full of clothing rails stuffed with various costumes, wigs, fake beards and prosthetic noses. It truth, he was quite looking forward to playing with them all for a while and picking out the best ones. He fancied playing the expert in disguise for a while, changing his façade every few days to keep his enemies on their feet. The romance of it all appealed to him slightly, he’d be like Sherlock Holmes, bursting into a room full of familiar faces and having none of them recognise him. He stepped inside the room, slightly excited and full of ridiculous notions of walking into the Sphere headquarters dressed as a beggar.

  He was confronted with a room full of rubber bands on hooks.

  The room was twelve feet long and maybe eight feet wide. It had a dark grey painted floor with white walls and ceiling. He thought that maybe there would be a secret door in there somewhere but there was nothing remarkable about it at all.

  He stopped for moment, looked around, huffed and puffed for a while and then saw fit to wear the facial equivalent of a question mark until his forehead started hurting.

  He walked out of the room, confused, then back in, huffed a bit more, puffed a bit more, furrowed his brow a smidge and then walked out again.

  He went over the instructions that Shoop had given him to make sure that he’d come the right way, pointing his index fingers in different directions as he went along the corridors in his mind.

  “Yip!” he said out loud with finality, he’d definitely got the right room. The directions must’ve been flawed. He went back in the room to check and make sure that he hadn’t missed a huge pile of pirate costumes and police uniforms in a corner somewhere. He hadn’t

  But he had missed something.

  There was a mirror on the wall.

  Why would there be a mirror on the wall? But then, why would there be racks of rubber bands on hooks? None of it made sense.

  Then he noticed that the rubber bands all had lettering on them, indented into the side. He looked at one. It said “Butcher”. He put it back on its hook and took down another one. “Priest”. He put that one back. He started scanning a mass of them.

  “Business man”

  “Clown”

  “Cossack”

  “Geisha”

  “Acrobat”

  “Super hero”

  “Student”

  “Hippy”

  “Nazi”

  “Prince Harry”

  “Lunatic”

  He stopped looking and frowned for a while, rubbing his chin and becoming momentarily distracted at the wild growth that he found there, he told himself that he should have a shave later.

  Eventually he took another band down from its hook to inspect it a little closer. It said “Body builder” along the side. He turned it around in his hands examining it carefully. It looked like nothing more than a flesh coloured elastic band, the kind that you’d find in any average, every day post-office. The only difference was the markings down the side and they were a little thicker and smoother than normal bands. He pondered on it. Then he pondered on it a little more. Nothing occurred to him. It seemed to be a puzzle that had no conclusion.

  After a while he decided that it looked vaguely wrist sized.

  He had nothing else to go on so he slipped it over his right hand and down onto his bony arm. It felt slippery and smooth. It felt the way a snake’s skin looks. As it settled on his arm it made a strange noise, like something small and electrical charging up. It was a whistling whining noise that worked its way up to a pitch higher than human hearing and then it started tightening around his wrist, not uncomfortably though, it was, actually, quite a comfortable experience. It wasn’t so much that it squeezed him; it was more like it joined with him, hugging his skinny arm. It was soft and pleasantly warm but, as far as he could tell, did nothing else.

  He looked himself up and down, half expecting to be magically transformed. There was no alteration that was immediately obvious. He let out a sigh of frustration, frowning and sucking his tight glasses into his eye sockets with the movement.

  “How the hell am I going to avoid death and blood with just a rubber band on my arm for Christ’s sake!” he huffed to himself angrily under his breath.

  He glanced around the room, eyes darting in frustration, which was when he saw it. The mirror.

  In the mirror was a huge, muscle bound, rippling god of a man wearing nothing but a tiny pair of swimming trunks, clearly displaying an even tinier groinal package.

  George swung round feeling his pulse race. “Shit!” He thought to himself, “I’ve been found!” but once he’d turned, he found that he was alone. He turned back to the mirror and the muscle man turned with him.

  George waved his armed tentatively. The man matched his movements. He grinned, the man did the same. He tried bouncing up and down, the body builder did the same, his chest muscles jiggling like a strippers breasts with the motion. He tried looking away and then turning back sharply to try and catch the imitator out, but, to his absolute glee, the man followed the turn precisely.

  George started getting quite excited. The rubber band on his arm had clearly changed his appearance to everyone in the outside world but not to him, internally. He was inside the disguise.

  He ponced around for a while, being huge and egotistical. Pulling various poses that he’d seen real body builders do on the TV, flexing here, straining there, it was all quite comical at first.

  Some time passed and George started feeling a little uncomfortable with his new reflection. He was not a muscle man by nature; in fact he regarded such animals as cretins and morons. He felt a little sick, emotionally soiled and dirty. He didn’t like what he was seeing; he felt panic well up in his thin frame. He pulled the band from his wrist and threw it to the floor, stamping on it and spitting at it in disgust.

  Happily, when he looked in the mirror again, he was back to his usual, if not slightly murkier self. He was happy with who he was. He’d never wanted to be in anything else other than the body he inhabited. If he ever died and came back, he’d want to be as close to the picture in the mirror as he could be, his body reflected who he was on the inside and he liked it.

  He became a little worried, “what if I can’t find anything that suits me?” he thought, “I’ll never be able to convince anyone that I’m a business man, or even a bus driver, I just won’t act like one. People will figure me out in an instant.”

  He scanned the rubber bands, desperately looking for indented letters that would look good on him. Then he saw it, high up on the left hand side of one of the walls.

  “Librarian.”

  He grasped at it greedily, slipped it on his arm, waited for the strange electrical noise and the tightening on his wrist and turned, thoroughly expecting to be completely satisfied with the result. He was, and wasn’t!

  When he looked in the mirror he saw himself looking back, only cleaner and better presented. The reflection looked like he normally did. Clean, no stubble, nice ironed shirt, well tied bowtie and impeccable cardigan. He cursed Shoop’s twisted sense of humour, took the band off and threw it over his shoulder. The band flew across the room and knocked another one from its perch. He went over to pick them up and thought, “What the hell….I might as well try it now its down.” He pulled it over his hand without reading it.

  It was perfect

  He was confronted with a nervous looking, skinny little man. He was wearing a lab coat with a neat row of pens arranged in the top pocket, thick checked brown trousers that didn’t quite reach his brown scuffed shoes, wild grey hair and thick spectacles.

  Looking at the reflection, he ran his fingers through his own hair. It was a very odd sensation. He could feel both his hair and the costumes at the same time. It felt like the touch version of circular breathing, blowing out and sucking in at the same time. His own hair shifted with the movements,
as did the reflections and he could feel all the sensations of both sets. He could feel both sets of finger tips moving both sets of hair down to both sets of roots. In every sense it felt like his soul inhabited two bodies at the same time. He started to feel very uncomfortable. He was emotionally buzzing. It started to feel like his whole being was shaking violently, like he’d just decided to lick a live electric fence. The inside of his brain seemed to be reverberating, sending violently loud humming noises to his ears, shocking the bones that controlled his balance. He found it difficult to stand; the world was on a huge slant.

  He promptly vomited.

  He wasn’t going to give up though, which wasn’t like him, normally he would have sprinted like a road runner at any sign of discomfort or danger, but for some reason he felt compelled to stick-out the nausea. Maybe it was something that the costume did. Maybe the band made people want to get through the sickness, maybe he knew that he couldn’t take the thing off as it would mean ultimate failure for the mission, and they were so close to the secrets of the vessel.

  Whatever it was, he just wouldn’t take the disguise off.

  After some time, and a few more stomach spasms, things started calming down a bit. The shaking and buzzing stopped and the feeling of being inside two bodies at the same time became less violently disagreeable. It would still take a bit of getting used to, the humming in his brain was still there, but he increasingly felt that he could deal with the discomfort more and more.

  He was sweating. He was wet and cold. He decided that he needed to move around to try and warm up and get used to the humming in his mind. He left the disguise room, slamming the hefty metal door shut behind him, and, in a daze, started roaming the labyrinthine bunker. He hadn’t been out of his research room very often over the weeks, only to eat or go to the toilet. He hadn’t realised just how vast the place actually was.

  His walking warmed him and the sweat began to dry up. The feeling of wearing the disguise gradually became less and less unnerving. After an hour or so it actually started feeling quite comfortable, like wearing a fresh clean shirt and cardigan. It made him remember how grubby he’d become and decided that heading back to his research room would be the best plan. Not only did he do all of his work there, but he slept there too. Spare clean clothes draped over various piles of books and papers. They’d be dusty, but a quick shake, a little starch and some ironing would make them feel as good as new.

  He deemed the disguise comfortable enough to take off for a while. He hoped he didn’t have to go through the whole vomiting thing again, but somehow doubted it. He popped the disguise in his pocket next to a few others that he’d picked up from the room just in case.

  As he set off to find his way back to his room he found that he’d wandered further than he’d intended. He was lost.

  The problem was that there were very few identifiable landmarks in the bunker. In fact the only one that came to mind was the main door, which would be hiding behind one of the many smaller doors. The concrete corridors looked very much like all of the others. They were wide, grey, had doors along them with pipes and cables over head. You could walk down fifty different corridors in the place and swear that you’d only been down the same one over and over again.

  He walked almost randomly, zigzagging his way through the deep bunker, trusting mostly to luck as a sense of direction was nigh on impossible in the maze of concrete. He tried numerous doors in search of familiar rooms. It took hours.

  Most of the rooms held surprises. There was a room that housed medieval torture equipment, a room full of a tangle of metal coat hangers and one with only a small clay figure of a gnome.

  The gnome was sitting smack-bang in the middle of the room. It confused George somewhat so he stared at it. He saw, at the back of the room a small pile of bones, some looked animal, some looked human. He stepped into the room with a curious look on his face, head cocked to one side. No sooner had he stepped over the threshold of the room than the gnome sprung to life with frightening speed. It darted up from its sitting position, where it had seemed to be content fishing for non-existent fish, and flew at George letting off a piercing shriek. It brandished vicious fangs and whipped its fishing rod with pant wetting ferocity over its head.

  George stumbled out of the room, kicking the door shut as he fell backwards over the threshold. He heard the gnome smash against the metal door. Then, curious of all, he heard it speak after it had battered itself into a thousand pieces.

  “Bugger!” it said in a thick Devon accent, “Oi ‘ate it when that ‘appens!”

  George swung the heavy lever of the door, sealing it shut before anything weirder happened. He walked on.

  He was a little more reluctant to try doors after the gnome incident but there was no other way of checking to see where he was, so he timidly poked his nose into each room with only the slightest of cracks between the doors and their frames. One of the rooms made him swing the door wide open in loving amazement.

  The room was gigantic and looked like some sort of car park. There was a vast collection of all manner of automobiles stretching as far as the he could see. Every make of car under the sun was there and there was a petrol pump by the door. He roamed through the car’s, stroking them. Apparently none of them had ever been used. On further inspection he began to pick up a common theme. Not one of the cars was over thirty years old. There were plenty from before that, but none from after. There were Jaguars, Ford Capri’s, Morris Minor’s, Porsche’s, Ferrari’s, Rolls Royce, Bubble cars all laid bare, all in pristine condition. None of them had dustsheets, but then, there was nothing around that would cause dust. The room had been perfectly airtight until George had walked in.

  One of the cars caught George’s eye.

  “Ooooh, now that’s the one for me!” He sighed under his breath.

  It was a dark green mini estate with wood panelling along the back.

  George’s dream car!

  He’d been fantasising about owning one of these for years but because he seldom ventured beyond the walls of his library he’d never had the occasion to buy one. He pushed it over to the petrol pump, filled it and sank into the drivers seat with a deep sigh of pleasure. The key was in the ignition. He stroked it lovingly, anticipating the engine popping into life with near orgasmic joy.

  He grasped the key and tenderly eased the choke out, just a touch; he turned the key and melted with absolute pleasure.

  “It’s alive.” He sighed, rolling his eyes back into his head with a grin that was wide enough to touch either side of the car.

  The corridors in the bunker were more than wide enough to allow the car’s width to manoeuvre through them. In fact, they could’ve taken three cars side by side. The drive made George’s hunt for his room a lot more pleasurable and infinitely quicker.

  He found his lair, cleaned up, packed some nicely starched shirts, bowties, trousers and underpants (even with the disguise on, he wanted to feel presentable), threw some sustenance in the passenger seat, and headed south for Edinburgh.

  Chapter 18

  Getting Out Of Singapore

  Shoop was worried. For years he’d kept a great many things secret. He liked secrets. He liked to keep them; it was in his nature and giving them away felt painful. His abnormal abilities like super acute hearing, stealth, unnatural strength and speed had been attributes that he’d enjoyed keeping close. Only George had had even an iota of an idea as to the true extent of Shoop’s abilities and even he was missing a large part of the puzzle that was Shoop Winkle. The last few months had seen him give away more and more of his secrets and he didn’t like it, he didn’t like it one little bit.

  The reason his life had become so difficult was because he’d shown a portion of his powers to the Boss, he’d only given him a hint of his capabilities and because of it he was a fugitive. He’d been forced to use the underground tunnel system entrance in full daylight, in view of a number of sphere agents. It was unlikely that they’d seen him at the time but they
were sure to have video taped it and would be trawling through the footage, looking for some clue as to where he had gone. They may never figure out the way of getting into the underground tunnel but that didn’t matter. The thing was, through Shoop’s sloppiness, they’d gained another clue. They knew a little more about him. This didn’t sit well with him in the slightest.

  On top of all that he’d been forced to give away another secret, this time, he’d had to tell George about his disguise room, the room that contained a thousand different disguises. They worked by projecting a thin film of hard light over the body. The Hard light, as apposed to regular soft light, had the advantage that if anybody touched you while you were wearing the disguise, they would feel the disguise and not you, they wouldn’t get through the layer of hard light to the real person underneath with the exception of very fast, very small objects, such as bullets or knives. They were quite handy in a fistfight though, as they absorbed a great deal of the impact of a punch. Only Dave and Mike had known about those nifty little toys. Dave and Mike knowing about the room didn’t really worry Shoop any more as they were both very probably dead and unlikely to be blabbing to anyone about it any time soon. He hadn’t told the independents about the small wristbands that turned you into different people because he didn’t think that they needed them. They were quite adept at disguise and wouldn’t need any help in disappearing. They were naturals, professionals.

  George, on the other hand, was a snivelling, cowardly little weasel and needed all the help he could get.

  Shoop kept a few elastic band disguises on him most of the time as he never liked taking off his hat. There are only so many disguises that could be adorned while wearing that hat. He also didn’t like wearing anything other than the clothes he’s been living in for years. So the disguise options were limited to basically looking just like himself, but sometimes with a fake beard on. But he hated fake beards.

  The elastic bands came in very handy for him.

  Until a few hours ago Shoop had another a secret, other than the disguise room, that had remained hidden in the bunker and was untouchable by the enemy.