The Dastardly Mr Winkle Meets His Match

by Rufus Offor

  George caught the expression on her face as she looked at it. ‘Looks sad doesn’t it!’ He said. Chunt nodded.

  ‘Don’t be fooled, he only looks like that because he’s pissed off that he lost whatever fight he was having. Werewolves hate loosing, its why they’re so dangerous. They’re the spoiled little bastards of the underworld, always throwing tantrums and playing up. They’d be fine if they just stopped being such spoil sports and got on with things. They’re the sorts of folk that if they played football they’d hog the ball! Better off where he is I say.’

  ‘The underworld? There’s more of this sort of thing?’

  ‘You’ll see, now move it, I think they’re gaining on us. One question though, were did you get that nifty little exploding cigarette?’

  ‘Oh, one’s father was a top ranking agent in MI6 and used to invent all manner of interesting little gadgets at home in his spare time. One has a multitude of weird and wonderful paraphernalia at the house.’

  The clatter of feet slipping on grime and running after them was getting louder, every now and then it would stop for a moment while one of their pursuers slipped and fell and tried to pick himself back up. The sights of the random pieces of werewolf did nothing to perturb the Sphere agents who’d seen far worse in their line of work.

  ‘George I don’t quite understand,’ said Chunt as they climbed deeper and deeper, as if they were going into the very belly of the planet, ’The sight of a bunch of dismantled were wolves doesn’t phase you, but you were near wetting yourself back at the graveyard.’

  ‘I’m used to seeing the aftermath of things, the bits and pieces that are left over, I very rarely see how they managed to get themselves into lots of bits and pieces and I didn’t nearly wet myself,’ he corrected her, ‘I just don’t like loud noises, now will you shut up and get a move one, we’re almost there.’

  They clambered down the last few yards of spiral steps, hopping over body parts as they went. George slipped on part of a leg but Chunt caught him.

  ‘Damn that Winkle, I’ve asked him a thousand times to clear up after himself and he never bloody well does. What if the authorities got in here and saw this!’

  ‘Mr Winkle did this?’ asked Chunt.

  ‘It used to be a werewolf den. Shoop found it and now all of its inhabitants are in small pieces, but we haven’t got time for that, I’ll explain it all later.’

  They ran down a corridor and stepped into a high domed hall with a huge stack of bodies off to their right. The smell was dumbfounding and Chunt didn’t waist any time in vomiting violently at the olfactory assault. George ran over to a wall on the far side of the hall while she heaved. Chunt regained her senses and forced herself to acclimatise to the reek and staggered after him.

  George felt around the wall, sliding his hands over the slimy surface as if looking for something.

  ‘What are you trying to…’ Chunt was cut off.

  ‘Ah here we are.’ Said George and pressed one of the stones in the wall. There was a series of clicks and whirs as if some ancient machinery was straining to bring itself to life, then quite quickly and suddenly, dozens of small tubular metallic object emerged from the wall and trained themselves on Chunt.

  ‘Those are high powered lasers.’ Said George, ‘and this is where you have to make a choice. It’s a big one and you’ll have to do it quickly. The choice is to enter my service and never question but one of my actions or orders or, I can cut you to ribbons right now.’

  Chunt face dropped. ‘After all I’ve done for you, you sneaky little f… ‘

  ‘Lets not get emotional Miss Chuntley Smitheington. If you remember correctly there are a large number of very angry and violent men tearing their way down the steps toward us this very second so our time is short. I am safe, you are not so I’ll make this brief.

  ‘I have the ability to show you things that you never believed possible. If you choose to come with me you will be privy to the world’s darkest and deepest secrets; secrets even Mr Winkle isn’t aware of. You will, in effect, learn how and why this planet,’ George paused for a moment to give his next word a little more weight, ‘Exists! But you must follow me unquestioningly and you must decide right this minute.’

  ‘So you’re saying that its death or servitude!’ Chunt scowled at George with helpless venom.

  ‘Essentially… yes, but the servitude comes with remarkable benefits. You have impressed me a lot in our time together and I would prefer to have you on my side rather than in a small lump of diced human meat on the floor of this hall.’

  ‘How can you know that I won’t just kill you at the first opportunity?’ There were audible footfalls in the stairway above them. The Sphere were getting closer.

  ‘You’ll find that that particular task won’t be as easy as you anticipate, and I believe that what lies on the other side of this wall may give you a small taster of the kind of secrets I’m talking about. I rather think that it’ll convince you. Now; decide or die.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ her face showed her to be dejected and beaten, ‘I’ll be your lacky,’ there was a palpable sense of resentment in her voice as she glanced behind her at the increasing noise of the approach of the Sphere agents, ‘just get on with it will you!’

  ‘Swear to me!’

  ‘Alright I swear, Jesus! Just get a move on will you!’

  ‘MEAN IT!’ George’s voice held a weight that Chunt had not heard in it before, it was almost terrifying. She mustered every ounce of gravitas that she could, every morsel of sincerity and said.

  ‘I give my word, as my father’s daughter, that I will serve you as best I can and as long as I breathe!’

  ‘Good enough.’ Said George, the grave resolution waning from his voice and features. He pressed a number of stones on the wall in a very particular order and with just the right amount of pressure and the wall folded in on itself revealing a passage that was just big enough to crawl through.

  ‘Follow me!’ said George and took off through the opening. Chunt did as she was told, bullets bounced off the wall behind her as she scrambled through the passage. The Sphere had found them. She dived for cover but, before she did, saw a swell of men charging toward the hole in the wall behind her.

  The hall filled with agents, it burst at the seams with them. One of them waited at the entrance to the small passage until someone handed him a torch. He pointed it along the long darkness were he’d seen Chunt vanish just a few moments before, checked it for threats and dived in. The passage was big enough to hold the length of three agents and just as the first of them poked his head out through the other side George tapped a stone on the wall and the whole thing filled in with stones with merciless weight and purpose. The agents in the hole were popped like acne. George and Chunt stood back as the men were liquidised and spat out by the closure of the hole.

  On the other side of the wall a metal blast door crashed down behind the last agent entering the hall and the small cylindrical objects that protruded from the walls let a barrage of intense lines of lasers fly through the throng cutting them into bloody ribbons. None survived the slaughter.

  ‘Pity,’ said George, ‘I hate to waist trained men like that but I don’t see that we had much choice really.

  Chunt was no stranger to violence but the sight of seeing a man squeezed out of a wall with such grotesque force had made her feel a little queasy. She gagged a few times as George took off the wristband that emitted the hard light disguise he’d been wearing for weeks now. He rubbed his wrist like a prisoner released from handcuffs and rustled his wild ginger/grey mop into its usual anarchic position.

  ‘Well,’ said George,’ that was quite close now wasn’t it?’ he wiped some of the liquidised man off his shoe against the stone wall, ‘I suppose we ought to get moving really.’

  Chunt breathed heavily and tried not to vomit, swallowing hard as the saliva gushed into her mouth.

  George noticed her discomfort and said, ‘It might help if you stopped looking at that
pile of goo that used to be a man. It might stop you wanting to heave.’ Said George.

  ‘Right…’ said Chunt gulping and gasping, but unable to look away, ‘yeah… look away from the puddle of blood and bone.’ Her eyes were wide, she was a rabbit in headlights.

  Eventually she tore herself away from the horrific gristly splat on the floor and turned around. What she saw upon turning stopped her breath.

  ‘Jesus!’ she coughed as she looked down the seemingly endless tunnel in front of her. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before.

  Usually tunnels were dark unclean, damp unwelcoming places but this was bright and spotlessly clean. It was perfectly cylindrical and swept off to a vanishing point in the distance, its walls looked like a cross between concrete, polished steal and mother of pearl. It gave off a strange dull sheen the likes of which she had no reference for and, staring at it a little longer, she noticed that the entire length of it appeared to have no joins at all. It was one solid length of endless cylinder that stood twenty feet high and wide.

  ‘Welcome to the rest of your life young lady!’ said George.

  Chunt’s stomach could take no more and she puked on George’s shoes.

  Chapter 27

  Counting chickens

  George and Chunt belted along the tunnel on electric scooters, headed for Chunt’s retreat on the outskirts of Edinburgh and set about deciphering the information that they had so narrowly escaped with from Greyfriar’s Kirk. It was a strange time for Chunt. She had to get used to a lot of things, being subservient was not something that she liked. That and the fact that she’d just bolted down a mysterious, millions of year old tunnel of unknown origins, seen various different parts of werewolves in a dark winding stairway, walls had fallen away and reconstructed at her companions will and apparently all of this was just the start of a much bigger picture. Her senses were buzzing and more than once she doubted her sanity.

  ‘I feel like I’m delusional and I’m not here at all. I suspect that I might be in some psychiatric ward somewhere plugged into some sort of machine that’s feeding me hallucinogens.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it.’ Said George.

  They managed to break the codes and figurative languages hidden in Greyfriar’s many gravestones and crypts and made there way to the next graveyard to investigate, and the next and the next, picking up small pieces of the puzzle all the way. For weeks they traipsed around Scotland but before they could do any of that they had to acquire disguises. The Sphere would undoubtedly be looking for them after the carnage in Edinburgh and capture was inconceivable. So much depended on their investigations that George felt that he had little choice but to show Chunt the secret bunker hidden in the highlands.

  It took George a while to find the disguise room again but they both left looking very much like other people. George, having learnt from the conspicuousness of his previous hard light covering and went for something a tad more normal. Anyone seeing him and Chunt would just see a withered old man and his granddaughter and not give them a second thought. Chunt went for a raven haired, frumpy, bookworm teenager; a visage that would guarantee little or no attention.

  They traipsed from town to town over the weeks while George slowly revealed the mass of knowledge that Chunt could never have accepted as fact. Werewolves were just the start; vampires, vicious gnomes, little green men, leprechauns and everything in between were paraded through her mind in a whirl of confusion and she did her best to keep her mind from bending and twisting into a mass of sludge.

  ‘How is it that I’ve never seen any of this. How is it that these things aren’t common knowledge if they’re so prolific?’

  ‘Well that’s where organisations like the Sphere of Influence and the Priory of Sion come in! We in the Sphere have been cataloguing and learning from such ‘other worldly’ nonsense for quite some time. We’ve only just found out that the Priory of Sion have been around for millennia before us, presumably doing the same thing. It looks like they’ve been fighting these things for thousands of years behind the scenes and trying to keep a cap on it all, but there’s more to it than that and I hope that the time is short at hand when I’ll be able to reveal all the knowledge. For now, you’ll have to make do with what I can give you and hope that this mission is successful. If it is; then you shall know more than you dreamed possible.’

  ‘And if its not?’ asked Chunt.

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to start again and hope that that works won’t we! If we’re still alive that is.’

  ‘Sometimes I think I’d have been better off letting you dice me with laser’s in that underground hall.’

  ‘I still can if you like.’

  ‘No thanks, I think I’ll just see where this all goes.’ Said Chunt with a more than pungent scowl of disapproval, but secretly, she wasn’t entirely sure whether George was serious or not

  Chunt’s love of long sentences had vanished. She barely said a word any more that showed George just how tense she actually was. She was out of her depth and was having real problems keeping her head above water. For the most part she sat and listened to George, watched his work and tried to soak in the horrific volume of seaming nonsense that came her way. She’d been used to being the top of her field. No one she’d ever guarded had suffered terminal injury. She was among the best bodyguards in the world but one of the lesser known. She commanded whopping fees but never did anything too high profile. She specialised in obscure businessmen and underground organised crime bosses. She was a shadow for the most part and so were her clients.

  This helped her a little with the wealth of secrets as she’d always been very comfortable with the lesser-known sections of society but she was still a fish out of water, gills flapping violently while her fins tried to grab a hold of evolution and make her into an amphibian. It was a desperate battle for sanity but one that, slowly, she began to win. She reminded herself though that each battle was part of a larger war and that she should prepare herself to be shaken back into doubt and shock with every minute that passed. She mentally crawled inside herself, gritted her teeth and tried as hard as she could to roll with the punches.

  For weeks they travelled and by the time they reached Uig on the North of the Isle of Skye, Shoop and his independents were in Florida.

  George and Chunt hiked up to the side of a large hill on the side of which, half way up on a small plateau was the tiny graveyard that served the dead of the small port town.

  One glance was all it took.

  They walked up a steep grass incline overlooking the grey skied windswept bay and came to a rise. At the top of the rise George caught sight of the graveyard and stopped in his tracks, face wide and aghast. Chunt kept walking for a little way, not noticing that her companion had halted. She looked back after a while to see George standing, his eyes wild and scanning the fenced in gravestones, darting around it wildly and a smile creeping its way slowly across his mouth. He whipped his shoulder bag round to his front and dug frantically in it searching for something. He pulled out a small notebook and started flicking through its pages, his eyes going from it to the graveyard and then back again, fingers tracing the words and drawings. He began pacing from side to side, looking at the book, looking at the graveyard, half excited, half filled with trepidation, his every move saying “It couldn’t be that simple, there has to be a catch here somewhere, it just couldn’t be that simple.”

  ‘Are you alright? What is it?’ asked Chunt.

  ‘Ssh!’ was George’s response.

  Chunt stood there watching for a while as George extended his observations from the graveyard to the surrounding area. His eyes flitted to the book, to the graveyard, to the surrounding hills and mountains, to the bay and then back to the book again.

  Finally he said, ‘My god! It is that simple. That’s brilliant, how did I not see this, oh she is a tricky little monkey!’

  ‘What’s going on George?’

  ‘What?’ Chunt’s words had pulled George from a deep reverie
, ‘Oh! Sorry… forgot you were there for a minute,’ his voice was jovial and excited but held an undertone of deviousness. His tone was a schoolboy smuggling salt out of the kitchen to pour on a poor unsuspecting slug that he’d just seen in the garden. ‘Its not just the graveyards you see, its everything but you can’t see it without the graveyards, they had to be there but when you see the bigger picture they seem redundant, miniscule in comparison, complex next to the absolute simplicity of the map. It was all there all along but you can’t see it without the whole. She is a tricky little monkey that one!’

  ‘Um… George, are you okay?… its just that you’re sounding a little bit like your brain has just broken and haphazard words are leaking from the shattered pieces.’ Said Chunt.

  ‘Don’t you understand? No, you couldn’t, there’s no way you could.’ George’s eyes darted around the area again, a mischievous smile pointing out from underneath his hard light disguise, ‘she has been pointing us at her all along but we couldn’t see it. You have to understand the language. She had a language set into the very land itself.’

  ‘Any chance you could simplify this for me?’ said Chunt absolutely baffled.

  ‘In short my dear, we have her! We’ve done it. I can figure out where she is.’

  ‘She?’ quizzed Chunt.

  ‘Yes, she! The vessel is a she. At least she is this time. She was a he last time.’ Said George.

  ‘I think I’ll just stop trying to understand if that’s okay with you George.’ Said Chunt and pulled out a hip flask full of sixteen-year-old Talisker whisky. She’d found over the last weeks that it was one of the few things that stopped her mind from dribbling out of her nostrils from all of the ridiculous revelations and challenging information that had been building up inside her. She took a healthy swig, breathing deeply, letting the peaty liquid do its job.