The Inaction Man

by Phillip Donnelly

  Chapter 13

  Salvation

  Through the misty rain and the cold wind they marched on, crossing the Seine at the Pont de l'Archeveche. The lovers’ locks that decorated the bridge would stop their hearts from breaking, according to Illogical Woman.

  They strode into the courtyard of the Louvre Museum. Inaction Man felt a churning in his stomach and his intestines rumbled. He realised that it would end in this place. Somewhere deep in his guts he had always known this. On this very square, under the glare of the Black Pyramid, obsidian shape changers had first banished him from a part of Paris. More and more of the city was theirs now, but this was the first sovereign territory of the dark lords. The Pyramide du Louvre was their main bridge into our world.

  “The end is nigh,” Inaction Man said out loud. Illogical Woman took this as a cue to begin walking on her haunches, which slowed both heroes progress, but both moved onwards, if a great deal more slowly. The two of them stared upwards, mindful of the watchful stone gargoyles perched around the roof of the Cours Napoleon.

  Inaction Man checked if Illogical Woman had noticed the moving statues.

  “The monsters turn animate. Rock grows flesh. While in the city below, humans turn to stone.”

  “Petrification of the human nation

  Gargoyles feed and

  Speed from seed”

  He pointed behind them, in the Jardin du Carrousel, to draw Illogical Woman’s attention to the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who stood guard on top of smallest arc, the Arc du Carrousel. The riders looked to the distant Arc du Triomphe and held their swords in line with the golden eye of the Luxor Obelisk, a focal point and a conduit of dark energy. On each side of the Concorde, the giant dark energy batteries of the Madeleine and the National Assembly hummed.

  For hundreds of years, Inaction Man told Illogical Woman, the dark lords had planned this city’s outline and its geometric patterns, converting it into a trans-dimensional transportation hub. This dark matter server would bring their world into ours.

  “They will be here soon, Illogical Woman. The clock nears midnight.”

  “It’s later than you think

  Close your eyes and sink

  Into the enfant école

  The garden of sold souls”

  Illogical Woman put one hand over Inaction Man’s eyes and used her other hand to turn him around, so that he pointed towards the Jardin des Tuileries. She blew hard into his ear and when he opened his eyes he saw an army of infant spectres cavorting. The park had become their nursery and playground. In corpse bodies, they practised moving flesh in the world of matter – a difficult task for a dark matter creature. Most of the bodies were missing at least one limb, some were mere stumps. Ghoul slaves moved among the carnage, bringing fresh cadavers and ferrying away discarded body parts.

  “They’re here,” Inaction Man said.

  “We’re here,” Illogical Woman replied.

  The superheroes ran to the middle of Cours Napoleon, right in front of the Grande Pyramide. They were flanked on all sides by triangular lakes of dark matter. They stared into the nexus of worlds, the Pyramid of the dark lords.

  A thunderclap tore the sky above the Grand Pyramide and demon after demon spewed forth. They circled above the square briefly before flying off to their allotted rooftop to await the orders to manifest themselves.

  “They will lay waste to this world of men and machine. They only wait upon the order of Lord Lagus. Only we can stop them,” Inaction Man shouted above the sulphurous winds.

  Humanity’s last hope, two incongruous figures shivering in wet t-shirts on a cold November night, saw the murderous future. With eyes wild, both of them stood transfixed at the Grande Pyramide.

  Inaction Man looked deep into Illogical Woman’s eyes and asked for a plan. They were outnumbered thousands to one. An army of filth was all around them and soon they would attack. In the distance, they could see shape changers in the guise of policemen staring at them.

  “The hour is at hand, Illogical Woman. Search deep within yourself and tell me how these Dark Lords can be defeated. For logic tells me we are doomed and all is lost.”

  “Take the future from the past

  In black glass let loose a blast

  Rest brave Symbol in this place

  Funerals end by act of grace

  Deface”

  Inaction Man took only a moment to decode the plan, so attuned had our superheroes become.

  “It is a cunning plan. A brave and worthy plan, fair siren, but where can I find my dearest Symbol now. She fell in battle in Place Monge and must lay in ground unsanctified until the last trumpet call.”

  “Symbol was a Velib true

  And like all good Velibs is made anew”

  Illogical Woman pointed at a passing cyclist and Inaction Man immediately understood what he had to do. He stood in front of the cyclist, holding out the palm of his hand in a signal to stop. Illogical Woman skipped after him, careful as always to avoid the cracks in the pavement.

  The cyclist, who had been cycling quite quickly, braked and skidded on the wet cobblestones and came off the bike. He looked up and saw a wet tramp standing over him. Behind the smelly vagabond, a deranged woman in her thirties, dressed head to toe in black, soaked to the skin, skipping towards him and pointing menacingly.

  He tried to get up but slipped again. Illogical Woman crawled to the back of his head and spoke feverishly, tapping his ears at the same time.

  “Unhand this bike and take mortal flight

  Go pray the world won’t end tonight”

  The man ran away, badly shaken by the fall from the bike and his encounter with what he later described as two deranged drug addicts.

  Inaction Man knew there was no time to lose and followed Illogical Woman’s finger, quickly picking up the bike and mounting it. Illogical woman deftly jumped on top of the pannier at the front of the bike and sat in it. This blocked Inaction Man’s view but Illogical Woman used her index finger to direct him, and to direct the attack on the citadel of dark power. She roused all of them with a battle cry.

  “Onward brave knights

  To fight to fight

  Once more into the breach

  We ride we ride we ride”

  Symbol, a little jealous of Illogical Woman but proud to be part of Inaction Man’s team again, rode on towards the pyramid of black glass.

  The shape changers who bore the uniforms of police officers saw the danger and took up positions to defend the Pyramid. One of them upholstered a gun and pointed it at the oncoming trio.

  Illogical Woman noted the danger and told Inaction Man to make evasive manoeuvres, but he told her this wasn’t necessary, since bullets can have no effect on superheroes.

  Perhaps the shape changer’s leader realised this also because he ordered his officer to put his gun down. He walked towards the oncoming bike, a menacing figure in dripping black leather. At the very last moment, he took out his truncheon and stuck the nightstick in Symbol’s spokes, breaking his front wheel and knocking Inaction Man and Illogical Woman off the bike.

  Inaction Man knew this was a good sign. Symbol was broken once more, so the power of symbolism was restored to him. The holy trinity was now truly complete. Inaction Man, Illogical Woman and Symbol would defend the Earth against the forces of evil.

  Illogical woman took an intense dislike to the chief shape changer’s ears and tried to bite the left one off. His screams and the blood flowing from his ear shocked the other shape changers and they hesitated for a moment. Slowly, with a grim determination, they surrounded Illogical Woman and began to tighten the circle. One officer held a gun, another a truncheon, and a third, a dispenser of mace.

  Inaction Man took advantage of the shape changer’s distraction to deliver his mortal blow. He ran to Symbol, which had careered to the vary walls of the Pyramid. He picked the bike up, lifted it above his head, and with a Herculean effort, smashed it into the pyramid, breaking its glass.

&
nbsp; With this one act of heroism, the perfect symmetry the dark lords needed for their transfer was broken and the spectres were sucked back into the vortex. Inaction Man looked up and laughed as they were whipped back into the rapidly closing holes in space and time.

  The shape changers, enraged by the defeat of their masters, blinded him with chemical sprays and electrocuted him with Taser shots. Having vented their spleen, they carried his frozen body away and brought him in a van to a police station, and from there, they ferried him to a high security psychiatric institution.

  Epilogue

  Shortly after the events described in the previous chapter, Inaction Man lay trapped inside the body of a man called David Vincent. He tried to make David find out what had happened to Illogical Woman and Symbol, but David, filled with poisonous Lithium, refused to listen to him. Inaction Man could not discover what had become of his greatest love and his most faithful servant. Blocked by chemical walls, Inaction Man was shut out of consciousness. Starved of thought, his batteries dry, he came to mind less and less frequently. Eventually he stopped coming up for air altogether.

  David Vincent was pleased with this act of wilful forgetfulness, as was his psychiatrist, who pronounced him cured. Patient Vincent was discharged and his medication was tapered off. Inaction Man became a memory that was never remembered. A suppressed thought.

  But a thought can take years to decompose. Some thoughts stay with us until the grave, till death us do part. Inaction Man grew thin. In time, he withered. He fell in on himself, like a collapsing star. He lay dejected and depressed, in the depths of David’s unconscious mind. Unloved and unwanted, a shameful memory. But he didn’t die. Some thoughts never die, they just get smaller and smaller. They wait, like the herpes virus, in the infinite cocoon of latency.

  The man called David didn’t accept this and pronounced Inaction Man dead and gone. He returned to the world of the office and the life he had rejected. His new job was in a different city, in a different role, in a different company. He changed everything and declared himself to be a new man.

  But in his darker moments he wondered is anything had really changed. David couldn’t help thinking that his new office was very much like his old office. Everyone who worked in it was just a bad copy of someone from his previous office. The same conversations, the same back-biting, the same everything.

  “Only the software updates. People remain the same,” he wrote in a toilet cubicle one morning, but then scribbled over the message.

  Faced with a sour present the sweetness of memory was hard to resist. Inaction Man resurfaced, first in dreams and then in daydreams.

  Recognising his mind to be troubled, David found another psychiatrist. In his first appointment, David spoke of his malaise.

  “Every office is a prison.”

  “You can leave an office,” the psychiatrist said.

  “But you can’t leave office life. What comfort lies in spreadsheets? What power rests in PowerPoints? When you’ve fought demons, why do battle in petty office squabbles?”

  “The demons didn’t exist. You know this, don’t you, David?”

  His doctor renewed David’s Lithium prescription but the world remained grey and insipid. Life stayed black and white.

  David took a break from a rather dull administrative task and searched the internet for a dimly remembered quote about a man who dreams he is a butterfly. Google threw up the Chinese proverb in a nanosecond and David spend seven thousand seconds reading and rereading it.

  “Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”

  Shaking himself free of the thought, David tried to force himself back into work, but he couldn’t concentrate. He grew ever more despondent, his work suffered and he was eventually dismissed. It made little impression on him. He was living but somehow dead inside. Inaction Man told him that he was being turned to stone, and David fought to silence that nagging voice. He must never listen to Inaction Man. If he was certain of nothing else, he was sure of that.

  On impulse, shortly after his dismissal, he returned to Paris and went to the Pyramide. He stared and stared but saw nothing. He felt nothing. He was the quintessential 21st century man. All he knew was emptiness, loneliness and nothingness.

  We will leave him here now, this non-descript man. Standing in a square and looking up at a pyramid of black glass. He once fought spectres and goblins; he was once the scourge of demons and shape changers; he once defeated Lord Lagus and the dark lords. But now he finds himself powerless against that greatest of all the dark lords – Melancholy.

  He sighs, this man of our time. Awake and oh so very tired. He breathes in and looks up. In the distance, a black spot. It grows larger. The spot becomes a blob and the blob grows appendages.

  The sun shines once more. Colours bleed into bubbling life. Voices chime like bells.

  David sees a woman on a bike. Long black hair blows in the wind, like wings flapping.

  She rides erratically, veering from left to right. A punctured bicycle, perhaps. Or something greater.

  The universe cracks but only Inaction Man can hear it.

  The End