The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  He pushed it all back.

  ‘Alright… fine… Peru it is then,’ he said after he’d forced his true will back inside himself. The others remained suspicious but didn’t move on him, that was Shoop’s decision and it looked like it was a decision he wasn’t quite ready to make. For some reason he still felt that Jim had a bigger part to play in this than just being a henchman ‘Peru it is then.’ Said Jim. He managed some joviality in his voice and then added as an after thought ‘What’s in Peru?’

  ‘Nazca you moron!’ said Komodo, ‘It was home to an ancient civilisation. It doesn’t quite make sense though,’ he said turning to Shoop, ‘the Nazca civilisation was long dead before the vessel appeared in Europe. They disappeared between 200bc and 600ad, I don’t see how or why it would’ve been taken there. Its nothing but a flat desert plain with some drawings on it.’

  ‘Maybe, but we’re still going, just trust me, it’s the right place to go.’ Said Shoop.

  ‘She?’ said Shoop under his breath.

  ‘What was that?’ said Jim.

  ‘She! The Aborigine said that “SHE” went to Nazca. That means that we’re more than likely looking for a person.’

  ‘Unless he got confused, I mean, he was a strange man from the outback who said he talked to “The Ancestors”. He can’t be quite right in the head anyway can he?’ said Komodo.

  ‘We’ll see!’ said Shoop and motioned for them to get back into the van. Just before they pulled away from the meeting spot Shoop thought he saw a tiny flash of silver in the air, just like the one he thought he’d seen in Singapore when he was torturing Justin Stain. It was so far off in the corner of his eye though, that when he spun around to try and find the thing he couldn’t. It made him think that maybe he’d imagined it but the pragmatist in him denied this thought and insisted that he keep he eyes good and pealed from now on, just in case something was going on that he didn’t know about. It was too much of a coincidence that he’d seen the tiny spark of metal twice.

  They drove off along the desolate road, no longer heading for Tasmania, they had to find a way to cross the Pacific and make their way to Peru.

  The dichotomy that Shoop had been battling raised its ugly head again, woken by the combination of blind faith in his sixth sense and the questionable metal object in the sky. He’d spent years learning to forget about his sixth sense and trying to hone his other sense to compensate. It had made him practical, efficient and cold. This resurrected sense was confusing him and dulling his ability to think clearly but at the same time seemed to be taking them exactly where they needed to go. He couldn’t stay his course now, but the lack of control that he was experiencing at the hands of his sixth sense was beginning to unnerve him; but then what choice did he have? None! Onward or downward, survival or death; it was that simple.

  In the meantime, he couldn’t afford to let his doubts leek into the group; it would fuel Jim’s already dangerously energetic internal fire.

  Shoop was walking a tight rope and he knew it.

  The Australian borders were still very tight. A small gunfight had found them as they were leaving Melbourne on a stolen fishing trawler. Shoop and his men had managed to silence the attacking Sphere agents before they could call for help and the battle made them all feel a lot better. A bit of violence always cleared out the cobwebs of the mind. They made their way to New Zealand where some more fighting broke out, more intense this time and much more satisfactory, making them all forget the desolation of the Australian desert and the things that it did to their minds.

  Peru, again, was difficult to get into but after a small slaughter they were in, once in, things got a lot easier. All Shoop had to do was follow his sixth sense wherever it wanted to lead him. He became more relaxed about his dichotomy but still couldn’t escape the fact that he’d seen the little flying piece of metal in the skies above Singapore and the Australian desert. He stayed vigilant but saw no further sign of the phenomenon.

  They all started to relax a little as they got used to the ebb and flow of their life on the run, hunting down a thing or a person of unknown origin that might be able to make them free of their pursuers. The uncertainty was so real that they just came to terms with it and rested on the shoulders of the current that dragged them from country to country. Even the woman in the red dress stopped bothering Jim as much, but she would still whisper to him, making promises late at night.

  They found an easily translatable inscription on a huge rock on the Nazca plateau that lead them to Newfoundland off the eastern coast of Canada. After that there was Moscow, Rome, Gibraltar and a string of other destinations. They simply followed their course, completely aware that they had no other choice and accepting their roles in the plan that seemed so much bigger than them. They moved around, pieces on a chess board, someone unseen moving them in directions they didn’t question, trapped on their desolate and hopeless course. They accepted their fate; all except Jim who’s plans to leave them became more and more acute as they went.

  They still had one hope left though; they had George; if George could crack the map, things would change. They’d be able to stop running and go straight to the thing that they’d been hunting for for so long, they could go straight to the elusive vessel and have done with the whole thing.

  By the time they reached Lapland, Shoop had very strong suspicions that someone was having a laugh with them and was visibly permanently pissed off! They found some longitudes and latitudes carved into the side of a reindeer hut that lead them to where they now stood.

  A man in a huge mouse suit walked past Shoop being jolly and animated. Shoop flung a toothpick through the huge cartoon mouse headgear and straight into his brain, instantly lobotomising him. The man in the mouse suit instantly dropped to the floor, removed the head mask, crossed his legs and started sucking his thumb while crying like a baby. There were children all around and they ran screaming in terror as they saw their hero being reduced to a dribbling simpleton. Shoop allowed himself a sliver of a smirk at the scene as Yan, Jim and Dr Komodo stared in disbelief at the huge plastic castle in the near distance.

  They were in Florida and Shoop wished that he’d brought some kind of small nuclear device to put an end to all the joviality that so offended his senses. The land of happiness made him feel distinctly nauseous!

  Chapter 26

  Skulls and Crossbones

  George’s chest had healed up quite well. No matter how tiresome his new companion, the woman known as Chunt had proved to be, she was obviously adept at the patching up of war wounds. On top of that she had proved to be a more than effective bodyguard. Her success in that regard seemed to be in her ceaseless ability to be underestimated. Due to her size and appearance nobody really saw her as much of a threat and didn’t take much notice of her, not until it was too late that is, and they were lying in crumpled messes on the floor grasping the place where their testicles used to be. Because of her competence, George had learned to blot out her incessant babbling; it was all white noise to him after a few weeks, which allowed him to get on with his job without wanting to kill her.

  He’d spent a couple of weeks recovering in Chunt’s house being fed cucumber sandwiches, Pimms cocktails and caviar. His blood thickened and the long deep cut on his chest scabbed over nicely leaving a neat, straight scar stretching from his left shoulder, down to the ribs on his right side. George hadn’t had a scar before. It made him feel a bit manlier.

  By the time Shoop and the Independents were in Australia, George was on his feet again and ready to start trying to dig Shoop out of the whole he was in by investigating the map. He started with a graveyard that had been indicated after breaking through the second level of coding on the map. It appeared that once he’d made sense of the first site, a second would be indicted, then another and another until the trail lead straight to the location of the vessel.

  The first graveyard was in Edinburgh, Greyfriar’s Kirk in the old town and its myriad of symbols proved to be much more difficult
to crack than George had previously suspected. The grounds of the church were chock full of ornate blackened stone crypts and gravestones, each with its own plethora of imagery and symbolism to be puzzled over. The graveyard, as far as George could tell, worked the same way that the map did. At first it looked like just a graveyard but upon deeper analysis a pattern would reveal itself, working like a magic eye picture, at first it would look like a busy collection of nonsense but if stared at and studied enough, would open up and show him a bigger picture.

  His pulse raced as they made their way up Candlemaker Row to the entrance of the famed burial site of Greyfriar’s Bobby, the insanely loyal mutt-terrier who, as legend would have it, sat next to the grave of his dead master until he too went the way of the dodo.

  One of the most prominent symbols in the graveyard was that of the skull and cross-bones. The symbol adorns almost every tomb. It has become the symbol of death in modern times and is commonly seen on the side of poison bottles in cartoons and also conjures images of pirates on the high seas. The symbols real origins are lesser known.

  The Knights Templar, as some conjecture states, recovered the bones of Jesus Christ in the Holy land during the crusades. The skull and cross bones were, supposedly, a depiction of the thighbones and skull of the famous religious, political activist.

  This speculation is way off the mark though.

  It was actually a design created by a Knight Templar called Marylyn Chauvette. Marylyn wasn’t a particularly happy or well-liked Knight. He’d managed to get into the order after his brother, Jean Chauvette, had put in a good word for him with the head honcho of the time, Hugues De Payens. Hugues De Payens liked Jean but was reluctant to let Marylyn on board as he thought he was a bit grumpy and had a bit of a girly name, but came round after Jean brewed him up a particularly rare and tasty batch of herbal tea.

  Marylyn had always wanted to ride around on a horse and buckle some swashes and was very grateful to his brother but he soon found that being a templar was about more than just hacking people up and being celibate. For a start the celibacy thing was just something they told the church, they actually liked a good dirty wriggle now and then which shocked Marylyn as he was looking to be a very serious and pious young chap. Although the Templar’s were all highly trained in the martial arts and were considered to be among some of the holiest people on the planet, they didn’t really go in for seriousness and piety too much and were surprisingly up-beat and chirpy fellows.

  All of the atrocities during the crusades were perpetrated by non Templars, they were committed by strings of nobles keen to make names for themselves on the battlefields of the anarchic middle east, trying desperately to carve their names in the ever shifting bloody sands of the holy land.

  The Templars, under the influence of the Sion, had a much more relaxed view of everything. The healthy sense of perspective handed down to them by the Sion meant that nothing really got them down very easily, that was until Marylyn came along anyway. He was an enigma. He was small and angry and was largely considered in the years to come as the inventor of the Gothic movement. He wore a lot of black clothing, rode around on a horse as black as the middle bit in a black hole and clad his entourage and armies in similarly colored garb. He was pale and pasty and was happiest brooding alone in his tent while writing dark and miserable poetry about how nobody understood him and how painful it was to be unlike the other Knights. He strummed a small harp and sang songs that sapped the will to live from anyone who heard them.

  Generally, he was a bit of a drag.

  One of his other pastimes was embroidery, which also set him apart as embroidery was for girls. He decided to keep one of his favourite nasty little pictures as his standard and flew his flag high and proud while riding into battle. It was the skull and crossbones, white on a black background. The sight of the standard and the black army with their pale white leader put the fear of god into his enemies. This had the interesting effect of him not having to get into too many fights as his enemies would see how scary his flag was and run away, for the most part anyway. Only the most ferocious and bloodthirsty opponents would stand and fight.

  Marylyn was very well trained, which, matched with his natural in built misery and distain for the human race, gave him a hard edge in battle, despite his slight size and he never lost a battle. Even with his track record in war he was still regarded as a bit of a damp squib among his peers. They liked to tease him. It wasn’t that they didn’t like him exactly, just as they didn’t really dislike any other human, it was just that he couldn’t take a joke.

  The Templars continually teased each other, not so much out of disrespect but more out of affection. If a Templar was ever nice and polite to anyone, it was a clear sign that they didn’t really hold much fondness for that person, much like modern soldiers will give each other amusing nicknames and jokily cast aspersions over each other’s sexual preferences.

  Marylyn was cursed with a particularly girly name, which kept the jokes and jibes coming thick and fast and made him more angry, which made his brother regret ever putting a good word in for the miserable little git in the first place.

  The Templars had a problem with non-jovial folk.

  Marylyn died after a battle of titanic proportions. He had faced off an army twenty times the size of his own and through much cunning and hard fighting had won the day, receiving a mortal injury in the process. Few remained alive after the carnage but Marylyn emerged, with very few of his company, limping from the dust and blood of the battle victorious calling for his brother.

  Jean Chauvette made it to Marylyn’s bedside just as he was breathing his last in a tent on the edge of the red soaked desert.

  Something had happened to him on that final battlefield. As he fought through his injuries he began to calm, sensing that the end was near. He started to see the comedy in it all, he saw how ridiculous the world of men and their antics truly was. And so, through his final breath with, for the first time in his life, an honestly jovial smile adorning his face, Marylyn spoke his last word.

  ‘Not bad for a girl eh Jean!?’

  He coughed and was gone, death fixing the smile to his face as he laughed his first and last ever laugh.

  The Templars were so impressed with him that they adopted the skull and crossbones as one of their symbols in loving memory of a top quality joke in the face of death.

  The symbol is still used today. The irony of such a grim standard causing such mirth and celebration never failed to tickle Jill and make her giggle whenever she thought about it.

  The graveyard at Greyfriar’s Kirk is riddled with depictions of the skull and crossbones. Each one is surrounded by a number of other symbols whose precise geometric carvings hold a language that can only be read by the initiated. George was not one of the initiates, which meant that he had a long hard job ahead of him.

  The entrance to the graveyard was tucked in between two rows of old, uneven, eternal looking terraced buildings. Like most of Edinburgh’s old town architecture the buildings were simple and quaintly wonky yet pleasing to the eye in a strangely dour sort of way. History oozed from every stone and every inch of mortar like sweat.

  They entered the graveyard through a simple gated metal arch and were greeted by the rusty orange of the rendering on the small but impressive church. The graves were numerous and very old but, despite their slight blackening from the smog of centuries past, were in good readable order which made George’s task a little bit quicker. Even with this, though, the task would be dangerously lengthy never the less.

  Deciphering symbols on gravestones was one of George’s favourite pastimes; one which he hadn’t indulged in for almost twenty years. He felt like a boozehound in a locked brewery. His elation wasn’t enough to dispel his concerns though. The area was teeming with Sphere agents.

  The Sphere Of Influence head quarters and the underground village were just around the corner and a large percentage of the Sphere workers frequented a number of eateries, bars and san
dwich sellers that surrounded the entrance to the churchyard. He was aware of a number of them who actually sat in the grounds of the church to eat there lunch and read Sphere related paperwork. If just one of them caught wind of what he was up to then he’d be caught, interrogated, tortured and possibly dead before he could get a chance to weasel his way out of it.

  He did have an ace up his sleeve in the eventuality of being caught however, but it wasn’t an ace that he was overly keen on taking out of its nice warm sleeve-like home. It was a secret he’d kept for a very long time and didn’t relish the idea of exposing it.

  His pulse was running high, even with Chunt at hand to protect him his chances of survival without exposing himself reduced with every minute that passed. He knew that his disguise wouldn’t be recognised but this was little comfort next to the knowledge that he looked very conspicuous and suspect indeed. There weren’t too many men in white lab coats wandering around the graveyard and George found himself wishing that he’d thought his choice of disguise through a little better back at the highland bunker.

  ‘No use crying over spilt milk!’ He thought to himself and went about his work as quickly as he could as Chunt sat close by keeping watch.

  After a few hours and having gained access to some of the underground crypts, Chunt had a thought; one so simple that George kicked himself for not having thought of it earlier.