Swashbucklers, page 11
“Off with your heads!” he growled.
The attack was faster than either of them expected. Doc barely managed to get a fireball off – which fizzed wide and scorched a mural – before the fake chicken drumstick flew through the air and smacked Cisco in the face. Doc immediately saw the red indentations appear in his forehead, akin to all Stickle Brick injuries of her youth, and for a second didn’t know whether to laugh or run.
Then the figure was on the move, waddling around the desks at the back of the room, his open mouth still roaring indiscriminate insults that would have been perfect for a bad medieval movie, but felt completely inappropriate for a primary school. He grabbed one of the tiny chairs and threw it at them. A metal leg grazed Doc’s shoulder, as Cisco only just yanked her out of the way.
“Run!” he urged.
She followed quickly, looking for something to hide behind. Her weapon was forgotten for a moment as she dove through the classroom detritus to put as much distance as she could between herself and the mad king – who was now humming Greensleeves as aggressively as he could.
“Divorced,” the king suddenly rasped at them.
Cisco fired over his shoulder in a panic. The electric wave hit the glass in the door, which exploded outwards into the corridor.
“Beheaded!” the king continued.
Doc glanced back to see plastic bricks reshape themselves at the end of the nightmare’s hand, moving unnaturally in ripples up his arm until he appeared to be holding a broadsword. Her eyes widened.
“Oh, come on!?” she muttered, as he swung it her way. She tucked into a roll and went sliding through a bunch of homework, the sword whistling over her head.
“Died!” the king added, smashing through a desk next to her legs with the weapon. Despite its plasticity, it appeared to have some kind of magical properties that made it far more dangerous than it looked.
Because of course it did.
The desk split into two clean pieces as Doc slid away on her bum, pushing herself back with one hand, while the other raised her blaster.
She fired so many fireballs she lost count. Yet the Stickle Bricks rearranged themselves in an instant, expanding to form a doughnut-shaped hole through which the discharges passed harmlessly before turning the stationery cupboard in the corner into a bonfire.
The sprinklers erupted.
“Ciscoooooooooo!” she called, as the king grinned at her and brought the sword down again to bury itself in the floor between her legs. “Where the hell are you?”
Cisco appeared, leaping through the spray and smoke with wild, crazed eyes. His blaster was still clutched tightly in one hand, but they both knew his electric pulses would probably kill them all given the water now pooling across the floor. So he’d leapt for the king to engage in hand-to-Stickle-Brick combat.
It was the smartest, bravest, and quite possibly most foolish thing she’d ever seen him do.
The king saw him coming, however. He disassembled himself – avoiding the attack – then reassembled behind Cisco, grabbed his legs and threw him straight through the doorway to the next classroom.
“Divorced,” the murderous school project rasped, continuing the little poem that most children in the country had been taught about the bastard king.
Doc pressed herself back against the arts and crafts drawers, feeling desperately around for another weapon. Something useful against… whatever this thing was.
“Beheaded,” the creature breathed on her, putting his plastic beard against her face.
Then her fingers felt something she recognised. Something all kids remembered from primary school. Something that could actually help.
“Survived,” she finished for the king. Then pulled out the triangular glue bottle, popped open the lid and squeezed as hard as she could.
The ooze spurted out all over the plastic menace. Enough to cause him to pause and wonder what the hell she’d just done, as he looked down at his sticky hands and discovered the mess dripping down his being.
Then he looked up and laughed. Literally raised his head to the ceiling and laughed and laughed and suddenly Doc realised that it wasn’t his laugh. The noise was coming through him, but it was clearly coming from somewhere… someone… else.
It was a laugh she recognised from the very depths of her nightmares over the years. One she had clearly blocked out. But now knew exactly where it came from.
Deadman’s Grin.
Anger wasn’t the feeling she expected to be hit with. Panic, maybe. Terror of hearing his voice again. Fear of what was going to happen next – that she’d never see Michelle or Cecilia again.
But anger was what flooded through her in that moment. Anger that she had forgotten just what he had once put them through. Anger that she had let Cisco carry the burden of memory all this time.
Anger that the pirate was trying to kill them all again.
Her boot shot out. This time the king wasn’t ready, still too busy enjoying her poor efforts to subdue him with glue. He partially collapsed, falling backwards. He reassembled himself almost immediately, but it wasn’t as quick as it had been… the glue made sure of that.
It was enough to give Doc the space she needed to scramble to the side, back through the debris, sliding through the puddles in the carpet, until she was far enough away to know she was safe to do what she was about to do next.
She raised her gun and fired.
The king was slow to reassemble. He got most of the way out of the shot, but left sticky strands of the glue across the gaping hole he’d tried to make. Strands of glue that, despite the water spray around them, happened to react badly to the searing heat of her 8-bit blaster fire.
Within seconds the monstrosity was alight, the fire racing across his bricks, the little plastic prickles curling as they melted. The king’s face roared with anguish and frustration as his body began to fold in on itself. He reached out the arm with the sword, but the weapon sagged harmlessly as its molecular structure collapsed in the heat.
Even as the sprinklers continued to flood the room, the monster burned fiercely, slowly fading away before her eyes.
Until, quickly enough, it was just a heap of burnt plastic on the floor, into which the king’s face melted and had time for one last scream before his red eyes rolled backwards, disappeared and became slag.
Doc crawled to her feet, her soaked suit sticking to her skin in every conceivable place. Her boots squelched as she trod towards the plastic mess, before stepping over it and heading into the next classroom where she could hear a kerfuffle.
“Cisco?” she asked.
But he was motionless on the floor. The noise was instead coming from Jake, who was hanging from the ceiling suspended by paper chains wrapped around his wrists, while being slowly strangled by tinsel.
The toilet roll Christmas angel that was trying to kill him turned in surprise to see the visitor and exploded in a puff of shredded paper as Doc blew her away.
Jake immediately dropped to the floor as the last of the dark magic faded away with the monsters.
Doc offered her hand. He took it gratefully.
Then both of them surveyed the carnage, as Cisco began to groan nearby.
“You OK?” she asked Jake, as he continued clutching his neck.
“Got in a bit of a pickle for a minute there,” he replied weakly.
“I hurt everywhere,” Cisco complained from the floor.
Doc shivered in her sodden clothes, feeling the bruises from the fight begin to burn across her entire body. Clearly they were all too old for this. But at the very least she knew a little more now about what exactly this entailed. Because that pirate laugh had brought some of her past back to her, blowing away a few of the cobwebs of what had happened that Halloween. It had given her a sense of what the four friends had once fought and would have to fight once more.
If there was one bright spot to this absolute garbage fire of a day, it was that.
She believed again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Date Night
Belief was a bitch, it turned out.
It was all very well having some of her memories back, Doc decided. But it turned out some things were best forgotten. Like the ability of inanimate objects to be possessed by evil and animating themselves into a killing frenzy. Or the fact that underlying all the horror was the knowledge that someone… or something was behind it all. Squirming fingers of darkness creeping into their world from a place beyond, through the devil pirate himself.
Or, perhaps, the fact this was the second time in their lives they’d had to deal with it.
That part was especially unfair.
Even after they had left the primary school, hobbling and holding each other up, trying to ignore the hundreds of little faces pressed to the window of the gym – and the horrified looks of the teachers behind them – Doc had tried to reconcile what this meant for her. For her life. For Michelle and Cecilia.
Unfortunately, the Stickle Brick king had changed everything. There would be no going back to a time before she remembered this was all real – a time when she saw the bad stuff in the world being solely man-made. Evil, yes, but fixable. Now it included some undisclosed menace and dark magic wreaking havoc from the underworld.
Worse still, the knowledge of what they faced meant Doc could no longer allow herself to be snarky about any of the crap that had happened since Cisco’s return. She loved her friend, always had, and she’d missed him something fierce over the years. But there had been a part of her in the last week that wished he hadn’t come back.
Now she had to fight that thinking. Because he wasn’t the catalyst for turning her world upside down again, she had to remind herself. All this shit would have happened regardless. It would have rained hellfire upon them all and without Cisco they would have been totally unprepared for it.
In bringing himself back to face the humiliation that had once driven him away, Cisco had done a brave and honourable thing. Making sure his friends and everyone else weren’t going to have to face it alone, without the benefit of hindsight.
She had to give him that.
Giving Cisco a begrudging look of adoration as they arrived back at Jake’s car, she saw the pain etched on his bloodied face from being unceremoniously thrown through that door by King Henry VIII. She helped him in, giving his arm a little squeeze as she did so.
He looked up, through the mass of dark hair plastered to his head with sweat and sprinkler water. The graze down one cheek crinkled as he gave her a wincing grin.
“Good to be back, huh?”
“You bet.”
He looked like he was going to say something else, but was cut off as an alarm in his pocket chimed repeatedly. Slowly, wearily, he slipped his hand in and tapped his phone off. Then rested his head back on the seat and closed his eyes.
“It’s time,” he said with a sigh.
Doc didn’t need to know what the alarm was for to understand his reaction. Neither did Jake. They simultaneously checked their watches.
Three pm.
The school run.
If there were indeed thin places between worlds, portals from this Earth to another, then this was the parent equivalent. The moment where the day’s freedom ended and the transition to chaos began.
For the briefest of moments, she looked back towards the primary school and envied the melted mass of plastic that had slipped back into the darkness from which it came.
“Are you absolutely sure you want to do this, Cisco?”
Michelle stood at her front door, dressed up far nicer than she’d been in months – perhaps even since before the pandemic. Dorothy was still inside, just putting on her shoes. And Cisco stood framed in the soft lamp light of her house, trying to shoo them both away.
“I’m serious,” Michelle said again. “Cecilia is a bit of a handful at the moment. The full moon, the wind… you know how kids get. Are you sure you can cope with both her and George together? Why don’t I just stay home and let you and Dorothy go out and catch up some more?”
“Not a fucking chance,” Dorothy muttered as she slid past Cisco and linked arms with Michelle. “Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve been out together, just the two of us? Cisco offered and we accept. In fact, we take his offer and we run the fuck away to the pub with it as quickly as possible. That’s how this works. Don’t question it now, I’m begging you. I’ve earned this date night.”
It was two days after the incident at the school and, after what Dorothy had told her, Michelle was partly glad she’d missed out on the near-death experience and partly envious the others had gone to relive their teenage adventures without her. But she couldn’t help wondering now if somewhere during the fight Cisco had banged his head and lost leave of his senses. He had barely managed to take care of himself lately, let alone George. Babysitting for other people seemed a stretch too far, surely?
As if sensing her doubt, or perhaps seeing it transparently written across her face, Cisco tilted his head. It gave him the look of a dad embarking on an admonishment and to her surprise it helped settle her nerves a little.
“I’m not a complete loss to parenthood, Michelle. This is the least I can do for you two. Doc told me the last time you went to a restaurant and I’m not going to lie to you, even I’ve been out on a date in that time! Trust me, you need this. You deserve it. And I can survive for a couple of hours, no problem.”
“Yes, you can,” Dorothy confirmed. “You’ve got my number in case of emergencies, right?”
“Of course. Have you both got your consoles in case things go tits up and the tarka dhal gains sentience and tries to kill everyone at the curry house?”
Michelle laughed, only to realise he was being serious.
“Just for once,” she said with a sigh, “I would like to have a regular conversation with you.”
She turned on her heels and walked down the garden path, although not before hearing her wife dash back into the house.
“What?” Dorothy said innocently, as she popped the backpacks containing the War Wizards in the boot of the car and slid into the passenger seat.
Michelle scowled and started the engine.
They got lucky, as it happens. Not only was the Indian restaurant only half-full – lessening the anxiety Michelle had about dining inside since the Covid lockdowns had lifted – but she was delighted to find nothing remotely deadly try to kill them for the entire meal. Except for the vegetable jalfrezi, which was so hot they both felt like they were bleeding from their eyes.
Even then, it was fun to be out. Although maybe fun wasn’t quite enough to describe it.
No, it was freeing.
Michelle and Dorothy were able to sit back in the booth, drink, eat, drink some more, and not have to worry about guiding someone else through a meal or feel guilty they were actually talking to each other as partners while Cecilia played a game on one of their phones.
They talked for ages in between bites. About everything and nothing. Kids, politics, work, kids some more, and especially the return of Cisco. Neither of them had seen his marriage lasting, but they’d both been disappointed to see their fears borne out. Although Michelle could see behind Dorothy’s finely honed barbs about their friend’s aptitude for relationships and knew she was secretly glad he’d returned.
They’d been close, those two. Always scheming, occasionally with Jake in tow. The three of them had been in the year below Michelle at school, and although she hadn’t given them the time of day for much of their school lives, somewhere along the line she had joined their merry little band of trouble.
Somewhere in a car park, she thought suddenly. Had they gone bowling? Why was she suddenly picturing a splodge of blue ectoplasm smeared against a shitty carpet?
She shook away the thought. Whatever, she was sure it had happened around that particular Halloween. An event in her life that caused her, even now, to fidget in her seat. Uncomfortable about what had happened, even though she couldn’t rightly remember much about it other than the stories of the gas leak. Plenty before it and plenty after it, just not those few lost weeks in the autumn of ’89.
Why was that? Cisco had always insisted it had been real. He’d remembered the most out of all of them and obviously that was the reason he’d come back now. But even Jake and Dorothy were beginning to remember bits and pieces of what they’d gone through – as though reliving what they’d apparently done as kids enabled them to recapture the memories they’d lost.
What was wrong with Michelle that she still didn’t remember as the others did? Had they held onto their childhoods tighter than she had? She definitely had fun back then, in those endless summers, playing out from dawn to dusk, enjoying those first burning crushes that chewed you up and spat you out, and the faintest fumbles of love in the shadows of the roller disco. But she’d never felt as strong a connection to that magical moment in time like they did. Childhood had just been a means to an end for her, a stepping-stone to the best bits that were to come.
Like the wonderful life she now shared with the beautiful woman opposite her, which she knew she wouldn’t trade for anything long since gone.
Dorothy, whose eyes, like dark pools, were busy soaking up the view around them, a frown creeping across her flawless brow.
“Do you remember what this place used to be?” she asked.
She did it in such a casual way that Michelle initially didn’t notice the importance of her tone beneath the words.
“Um, not really. We’ve been coming here for years, haven’t we? Since way before Cecilia?”
Dorothy nodded but said nothing. Michelle suddenly panicked that this was some kind of test. Had she forgotten their anniversary or something? Was this where they’d first gone on a date? Shit, should she have bought a present?
She tried to think, staring first at the bar near the front where a customer had rushed in for his takeaway, then to the window beyond which spanned the entire façade of the restaurant.
And that’s when it happened.
Something came back.
A moment in time that jarred in her memory. An image like a shadow emerging from the darkness. Not quite tangible or distinct enough to grab onto, but enough to know that there was something important on the edge of her vision where before there had been nothing.
