Heart of Darkness, Chapter 21 *Not perfectly formatted, but probably legible*

“No luck, huh?” Sarah asked as Visionary returned, scraping thick purple gloop from his eyes. The heavy-set woman he had been questioning stormed off down the hall of the Daily Trombone’s offices.

“Well, I wouldn’t say that…” the miserable man answered, shaking the remnants off his fingers. “This one was almost kind of soothing. At least it washed out some of the mace that the last woman sprayed me with.”

“What is it?” Karl asked, looking over his brother-in-law-to-be distastefully.

“A Boysenberry SloppShake, from SloppBurger” the sorting hat answered helpfully. “New menu item. A large, judging by the remaining contents. Lots of purple dye #483, so you’ll likely need to send the coat back to Mr. Lye’s.”

“Do people throw food on him all the time?” Karl asked.

“First I’ve seen of it” Fleabot replied. “It’s like they’ve been inspired by something.”

“Mr. Jerkson will see you now…” the receptionist behind the desk told them with relief, obviously thankful to be getting the disturbing group out of her charge.

They entered the cramped office to find a large (though reasonably affordable) oak desk with a middle-aged man sporting a bristly little mustache behind it. Behind him were various publishing awards, and a window sporting a stunning view of the greater Gotham-Parodiopolis skyline. Well, as stunning as you can get from an affordable piece of real estate.

“Alright, Mr. Visionary… if that is your real name… You can call of your legal hounds. Not that I’m afraid of them…” the editor told them between gnawing on a soggy (affordable) cigar. “The press doesn’t bow down to any pressure from shady lawyers, whips or no whips. Those pictures could have been anybody in that corset and tutu. But the truth is the truth… at least it is once I write it in my paper. Before that, it’s debatable.”

“Wait… what?” Visionary managed.

“Your little terrorist princess dropped off the evidence for part two of our exposé on corruption in the city’s power elite. I have to say part one dealing with you really sold a record amount of early editions. Thanks for that.”

“Is that why people have been pelting me with food… and less pleasant items… all night? They’ve all read that I’m some kind of sex fiend?”

“We have a wide circulation” Jerkson admitted proudly.

“Well Vizh,” Fleabot noted reasonably, “In hindsight maybe it would have been better had you not opened your questions about Kerry with the phrase “I’m looking for a young girl”…”

“Wait… terrorist princess? So Kerry was here?” Sarah asked hopefully.

“Yeah, she was. Brought the evidence that purple puss here was framed, and of corruption in social services. We’re running it as the lead in the afternoon edition: “Super-Pervert Sap for Social Services Shenanigans”. Came up with that one myself.”

“Slips right off the tongue” Fleabot admired. “So there’ll be a retraction of all the stuff said about Vizh?”

“Mostly. In a prime spot… section D, page 9. Below the fold. What’s that stuff he’s dripping on my rug, anyway?”

“Boysenberry SloppShake. That large woman leaving your office threw it on him. You should probably tell your employees that Vizh isn’t a molester, you know.”

“She already knew” Jerkson shrugged. “That’s ‘Food Finds Frieda’… her glowing review of the Bean and Donut had to be bumped to make room for the retraction.”

“Ooh” Sarah made a small disappointed sound, then caught Visionary’s downward cast purple eyebrows and small frown. “Well, we just don’t get a lot of press... And you did say the milkshake was refreshing…”

“Isn’t it though?” Jerkson noted. “New menu item. My suggestion. I own majority stock in SloppShake.”

“It stings a little” Visionary noted, wincing.

“Ted!” the editor barked into an intercom on his desk. “I want a warning label on every SloppShake cup… ‘For Internal Use Only’. Got it?”

“Got it boss” Ted’s voice called back.

“To be fair, he did say it could have been some left over pepper spray from earlier in the evening” Fleabot observed. “We’ve been following Kerry’s trail for a while now.”

“Ted! Cancel the cup labels!”

“Got it boss” the voice over the intercom answered. “And Janine called from the front desk, chief… Says there’s a coach outside and thought you’d want to know.”

“What do I care?” Jerkson growled back.

“She says it’s being pulled by skeletal horses with flames shooting out of their eyes. Says it’s kind of creeping her out. And it’s double parked in the loading zone.”

“Oh” Jerkson noted, glancing back to Visionary. “Yeah… that’d be for you.”

Great waves thundered over the jagged rocks, sending their spume high into the night air. It was a wild night, a haunted night. It was as if the very elements themselves were tormented by what was about to happen.
The Willingham lighthouse stood like a battered needle in the eye of the storm, it’s faded white walls slick with icy spray. The light was long since extinguished. Now this was the home of Bogdan Vladivock, the Necromancer General; the man who intended to soon be master of this world and the unseen realms beyond.

“He is coming,” he cackled into his scrying orb. “The fake man is coming!”

“Possibly fake man,” Kerry Shepherdson corrected him from her chains over at the sacrifice slab. She’d been working on detonating them but some magic was denying her the use of her pyro-probability gifts. “He’s possibly fake. But there won’t be anything bogus about the butt-kicking he’s gonna be delivering to you, spooky. Haven’t you ever heard of tanning salons?”

“Of course he is coming,” the Necromancer General crowed. “I vowed that if he did not yield to me then I would slaughter you, his familiar, and raise you from the dead as a damned undead slave, forever thrilled to my dark will.”

“Familiar? That better be an occult way of saying really hot house guest. You can’t believe all that crap they printed in the newspapers. I solved that bit of the case, and when Roni Y Avis gets out of the burns unit he’s gonna be telling me more about who hired him.”

Bogdan Vladivock sneered. “The thing is,” he crowed, “I never actually said that I wouldn’t slaughter you and raise you as my undead slave after he gave me what I wanted anyway.”

“Yeah, but who’s not going to believe you’re a grade-A sleazo anyhow? Last time I was gonna be sacrificed it was an A-list occult baddie, not some Christopher Lee wannabe!”

“I am A-List!” shrieked the Necromancer General. “For four hundred years and more I have preserved my life with my dark arts, sacrificing all for my calling. Family, friends, pets, everything! And tonight it will all pay off, as I become supreme!”

“Can you do a maggoty thing with your face?” Kerry wondered. “Only Petar Tyolanh could, and that was pretty creepy. All you’ve got going for you is bad acne and terminal dandruff.”

“I will succeed where the herald of the Fairly Great Old Ones failed!” the Christopher Lee wannabe shouted. “Once the Heart of Darkness is cut from Visionary’s living flesh – or fake flesh, as it might be – then I will control supreme occult power!”

Kerry settled in her chains for a long tirade.

“When the Necronastycon was used to blight your mentor, a fragment of Elder Darkness was placed inside his beating heart. At first Nyarlurkotep, herald of the Fairly Great Old Ones – or FGOO as those of us in the know like to call them – was going to rewrite Visionary’s body as his new flesh. Somehow your bumbling guardian resisted that. So now the Heart will swell until it comes to bursting, and from it shall emerge the elder gods themselves, fresh and potent to rewrite the universe.”

“That’s going to leave a stain,” pointed out Kerry.

“First Visionary, then this world, then this reality shall be shredded apart. But if I am the midwife, what dark rewards shall be mine in the Elder God’s triumph?”

“You’re really going to insist on a cosmic-level ass kicking, aren’t you?” Kerry sighed.

And the thunder crashed.

“Is it bigger than a breadbox?” asked Asil anxiously.

“I can’t tell you,” snarled Urthula Underess, party ghoul, glaring at the innocent Lisa clone with an of-course-it-is-stupid stare. “The spell my uncle put on me won’t let me reveal the whereabouts of his sanctum sanctorum.”

“But the chances are it’ll be bigger than a breadbox,” Ebony pointed out. “I can’t believe I’m reduced to this. Is it painted black?”

“No,” answered Urthula. She was only forbidden to give information about the Necromancer General’s whereabouts, not deny untruths.

“Is it more than two stories tall?” hazarded Miiri.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Aaagh!” aaghed Hallie. “I’m the world’s smartest computer. I have more data capacity than IBM. Bill Gates cries himself to sleep every night because I won’t date him! But here I am reduced to playing twenty questions with an undead Wooster twin!”

“Hey!” objected Urthula.

“She didn’t mean it,” Liu Xi said. “She’s just a bit upset that Visionary has crept off to face the villain all alone, knowing the villain will kill him.”

“That’s why we’re playing twenty questions,” pointed out Con Johnstantine. “Where have we got so far, Chiaki-luv?”

The Psychic Samuarai bristled but checked her notes. “He doesn’t live on a yacht, in a skyscraper, in a really creepy abandoned Scooby-Doo type house, with his mother, on a space station, or in a sewer,” she summarised. “He’s not on the phone, and his house isn’t black. On the bright side, it’s definitely bigger than a breadbox.”

“I never said that,” Urthula was compelled to clarify.

“Yo is thinking you are doing very well,” Yo encouraged the party ghoul. “Keep to be denying things and we will soon be knowing of where to go.”

    “Are you sure about this?” Lisa asked Sarah Shepherdson. “If you do this, there’s no turning back. You’re bound to him forever.”

    “If I don’t do this then Kerry gets sent back to Ireland and into the custody of that Lobotomy Centre for Wayward Pyromaniacs,” answered the worried waitress. “Better this than that.”

    Ma Shepherdson blew her nose on her handkerchief as her daughter picked up the special license. “It’ll be so lovely having a son in the family,” she declared.

    “Hey,” objected Karl Shepherdson, “I’m right here!”

    “She means a useful son,” Shep clarified.

    And she signed her name.

    Visionary walked across the narrow path that linked the lighthouse to the shore. Lightning flickered overhead and the rain pelted down.

    The lighthouse door opened for him, and Vizh went inside.

    Then the door closed.

    “How many syllables?” asked Hallie. “Sounds like fright? Night? Bite?”

    “Tall and thin,” guessed Asil. “A big column…”

    “A priapus?” suggested Liu Xi.

    “Visionary?” offered Con Johnstantine.

    “How many dimensions does it have?” wondered the Manga Shoggoth.

    “Second syllable,” frowned the Psychic Samurai. “Sounds like a very small thing? A creeping thing? A spider? A mouse?”

    “Fright mouse?” wondered Cleone. “It would be scary indeed, being bigger than a breadbox.”

    “Night louse?”

    “Bite douse?”

    Urthula hammered her head on the wall.

    “CrazySugarFreakBoy!” Asil guessed. “Or Trickshot.”

    “Is sounding like fight spouse,” Yo worried. “That is not to be being nice.”

    “Enter freely,” proclaimed the Necromancer General, “and of your own will!”

    “That is so corny,” complained Kerry. “What are you hoping to do, bore Vizh to death? Get a speechwriter, willya?”

    “So you’re alright then,” Visionary noted, hearing Kerry’s familiar caustic tones. “We were a bit worried.”

    “I’m missing my TV show right now,” Kerry pointed out. “And I bet you didn’t set the TIVO.”

    The Necromancer General gestured for his zombies to grab Visionary by the arms. The possibly fake man yelped and dodged aside. He pulled a gun from his pocket and pointed it at his head. “Tell them to back off or I shoot!”

    “Vizh, that’s the wrong end,” Kerry warned him. “That’s the end that goes bang! You’ll blow your own head off!”

    “Exactly!” answered Visionary. “And if I do that then all this Heart of Darkness elder crap spills out and destroys the world. But the Necromancer General there doesn’t get the credit!”

    “Er…” Vlastimil Bogdan hadn’t considered that one.

    “Hah!” shouted Kerry. “See! You’re dumber than Visionary! Hah!”

    “Kill yourself,” threatened the Necromancer General, “and I will wreak my revenge on this wretch of a girl.”

    “What wretch of a girl?” Vizh asked him, pointing to the empty chains where Kerry Shepherdson had been hanging.

    “What? Where?” demanded the sorcerer, casting a locator spell that shimmered confusedly before crashing into the floor. “This tower is between dimensions, in a soft place. I have warded it well against teleportation, summonsing, and transplanar travel. How then could the wench have escaped?”

    “Yeah. Like I’m going to explain the plot,” Visionary scorned. “I’ve been doing this stuff for a while, you know.”

    The Necromancer General turned suddenly, gestured, and Vizh’s firearm rusted to uselessness. “So have I!”

    The zombies shambled forwards again. They didn’t look happy.

“Okay, nice save,” Kerry admitted to Fleabot as they hid a hundredth of an inch tall in a crack in the floorboards. “Now get this hoodoo that’s stopping me using my powers off me and let’s get back to full size and rescue Fake-O.”

“Ah,” apologised the size-changing robot flea. “About that. I can’t do anything to break occult spells, of course. And you know that very limited reserve of size-changing particles I have? The one that usually replenishes itself within forty-eight hours or so…?”

    “Okay, we’ve got the Necromancer’s location,” Con Johnstantine told the sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse. “You’ll never guess where…”

    “The Willingham Lighthouse,” Xander told him. “Yes, I was there before.”

    “You knew?” Liu Xi objected. “Then why did you let us spend all this time…?”

    “Well, it was pretty funny,” the master of the mystic crafts noted. “But also the Shoggoth and I were conjuring up a karmic pathway to take you through the Necromancer’s occult defences. The party games kept you from tracking all over my mystic diagram.”

    “Uncle’s magical protections are formidable indeed,” Urthula warned, “He has had centuries to perfect them.”

    Xander looked at the cluster of angry woman crowding in his shop: Hallie, Miiri, Asil, Yo, Ebony, Liu Xi, and Chiaki Bushido. “I don’t think he anticipated them,” the sorcerer pointed out.

    The Shoggoth did a complicated loop-the-loop in the middle of the diagram he and Xander had been drawing.

“Liu Xi, if you would…” Xander said, drawing an imaginary door with his fingers. “I think the knob should be about here.”

The young elementalist grasped where the mime doorknob was, twisted, and opened the portal. Behind it black winds howled through a twisting tunnel. Skeletal faces screamed from the walls.

“Couldn’t we have just taken the bus?” asked Asil. “I have a saver pass.”

    “You think I didn’t prepare for your resistance?” gloated Vlastimil Bogdan as the zombies piled on top of Visionary. “You think I haven’t prepared my lair against almost every eventuality?”

    “I’m so impressed,” Vizh replied. “I take my cap off to you.” And he pulled the Sorting Hat from his head.

    “Now?” asked the talking headgear.

    “Now,” Visionary answered, reaching into the depths of the hat.

    He pulled out Sjelknuser, the flying dagger Donar had given him, and hurled it right at the Necromancer General’s heart.

The shrieking tunnel through necromantic realms twisted away into blackness. Con Johnstantine struck a match on the invisible doorway and lit up a cigarette despite Cleone’s disapproving glare. “Reminds me of a wet Wednesday night in Cardiff,” he shrugged.

“The way will be blacked by many foul perils,” Ebony warned. “Nighthowlers and woewalkers and ur-gaunts and soulfeeders.”

“Yo does not think they are sounding to be cute.”

“I’m pretty sure people just make up these spooky names on the spur of the moment,” admitted Hallie.

“It is dangerous,” the priestess of the Manga Shoggoth emphasised. “Miiri, come with me.”

The Caphan woman followed in a puzzled manner as Ebony took her to the back of the shop.

“I will go first onto this pathway,” said Chiaki Bushido, the Psychic Samurai, unsheathing her sword. “Let any creature who tries to bar our road beware.”

“I’m with you,” agreed Liu Xi.

“And me,” agreed Urthula. “Possibly a little bit back and to the side, given I know the kind of things uncle hides in these dark tunnels.”

“Enough talking. Let’s go,” Ebony declared, stalking back into the room.

“Where is Miiri?” Cleone Swanmay wondered.

“She’s pregnant. She’s not coming, however much she wants to,” the priestess replied. Her face twisted into a vengeful grin. “I locked her in your bathroom.”

Asil stuck out her chin, clenched her fists, and marched through the portal. One by one the others followed, until only Xander and Cleone were left.

“Aren’t you going?” the swanmay asked the master of the mystic crafts as he carefully closed the dimensional door.

“Oh yes,” Xander assured her. “I’m just waiting for the taxi.”

    “Oh, very good,” admired the Necromancer General, plucking the winged dagger from his heart and dropping it into a nearby birdcage. “I’m actually quite impressed.” He scooped up the Sorting Hat where it had fallen when the zombies had dogpiled Visionary. “If I still had a human heart that would probably have killed me.”

    “He ripped out his heart and devoured it himself in a ceremony back in 1634,” the Hat said, its proximity to the sorcerer giving it access to information about him. “And in 1712 he also ripped off his…”

    “That’s enough,” said Bogdan, dropping the hat into a chest and slamming shut the lid.

    “Okay,” Vish admitted. “I admit I was kind of counting on that to do the trick.”

    “It didn’t.” The Necromancer General gestured for the zombies to drag the possibly fake victim over to the surgery rack.

    “I’m not letting you have the Heart of Darkness. It might be killing me, but I’m not letting it kill anybody else.”

    Vladivock Bogdan gave his captive a patrician state. “It will kill everybody else eventually anyway, unless the rite of nullification is performed upon it. It’ll just rip out of your chest, growing and spawning, tendril and tubes and vast gristly veins burrowing across the land, searing down to the roots of the earth, probing into the flesh of every living thing on this planet…”

    “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Vizh noted.

    “Very much,” admitted the Necromancer. “And now I… Oh, wait a minute. Here come your friends.”

    “My what?”

    The wizard checked his crystal ball. “Your friend and allies. The rescue squad. I was expecting them, of course. They’re coming in along one of the necromantic ecto-vents. Clever. Very clever.”

    “What friends and allies?” Vizh demanded, struggling against his bonds. “Who’s coming? How?”

    “They’re trying to get here along occult pathways,” the dark wizard explained. “Novel, but very stupid.” He reached to his desk, stabbed himself with his athame, and dripped his blood onto a series of skulls. “Let all the forces at my command rise and destroy the intruders,” he proclaimed. “Go, my minions, and destroy them body and soul!”

    “Hey, your fight’s with me!” objected Vizh.

    “Indeed. That is why I have sent every servant at my command to rend your interfering supporters limb from limb. I have things at my command that should give even a Shoggoth pause.” The Necromancer General laughed.

    “Let me guess,” said Dancer. “Nothing can save him now?”

    Bogdan whirled round to see Lisa coiling up her dimensional whip and heading over to Visionary. “Sign these,” ordered the amorous advocatrix.

    “More intruders?” the Necromancer sneered. “How did you breech my defences?”

    “Well, with all your monsters busy with the others there was just a tiny chance,” said the Probability Dancer. “And so here we are.”

    The sorcerer gestured and Lisa and Dancer were suddenly tangled in coils of shadow. “And here you die!” He turned back to Visionary. “But first you can see this pathetic fake fool be slaughtered and cause the end of the world!”

    “I’m a real fool, dammit!” Vizh objected. “Wait…”

    “You can’t do that!” Dancer cried out, struggling against the tentacles. “You can’t.”

    Lisa just held up the papers she’d taken from her briefcase. “Actually she’s right,” smiled the first lady of the Lair Legion viciously. “You can’t have Visionary’s Heart of Darkness. You see, it doesn’t belong to him.”

to be concluded…

Post By Mostly the Hooded Hood, with a brief bit by Visionary Sat Nov 12, 2005 at 02:42:41 pm EST	Subject Heart of Darkness, Chapter 21 Not perfectly formatted, but probably legible

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