A Land Where All Things Always Seemed The Same, Chapter Two

It seemed at first a quiet sort of place to Mini-Flash Juniper as she clanked down the iron exterior stairwell. A winding path led her by a play-park, devoid of children in the deepening dusk, and presently the reception office now dim and somnolent following its busy day. In pleasant surprise at how little her enemies’ very den had thrown at her thus far, Juniper dipped with the lane into a tunnel which ran underneath the road by which she and Flashsatsumas had arrived, to step out again into the lights and landscape of the body of the camp.

There she stared, feeling this time as if her stockings had slid all the way to her ankles.

It was like something out of the primordial past of planets from the farthest-flung arm. In Mini-Flash Juniper’s galaxy halogen streetlamps were much the same thing as flaming torches anyway, and she was left in nothing but agreement that the surging shouting cacophonous exodus of Earthlings her apparent age suited the illumination to a tee. Initial impressions were of savages set on ripping her apart. Striving to marshall her memories of Boston Mini-Flash Juniper then identified garments which spoke of a later stage of human development, marginally at least – Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirts, baseball caps, if she remembered those names rightly. Nevertheless, Juniper was white even by her standards as she did her best to slip along innocuously amongst the riff-raff, and nor did the fiberglass totem-poles or other approximations of Earth-primitivism help greatly to alleviate the atavistic mood.

Those details weren’t what frightened Mini-Flash Juniper the most, though they certainly made it onto her leaderboard. First place went to the sere sugary smell which rose to her nostrils like a tide, so different to what had touched them earlier that day.

Candy-sticks.

A glance in the shadowy amber relief was enough to confirm these were passing by the bundle from hand to grubby hand. Then there was also something new, little multicoloured potent pods which seemed if anything more antagonistic still to Mini-Flash Juniper’s senses.

These had to be some recent, rarefied distillation. Nothing else could explain the prevailing rowdiness and rawness, nor how heightened seemed this lawless ghostly horde of thralls.

What obscenity were the creatures in charge going to come up with next?

A girl alongside Mini-Flash Juniper caught her looking and glared back. Attached to an elastic strap on her forehead were five light-emitting diodes, winking red and green.

“Got one here who reckons we’re at school,” she scoffed.

“Your headband reminds me of the cyborg revolts I’ve read about in history lessons, if that’s your meaning,” Juniper returned superbly.

“You what?” flung the girl, hostile now.

“Give over, Maureen,” rumbled the shape of a boy behind her. “Here,” he added to Mini-Flash Juniper, and thrust at her a heaped-up handful.

Juniper, though she couldn’t but hesitate, put out forefinger and thumb and took a candy-stick. Even the pads of her digits longed to recoil from the slight adhesive tackiness of its slender shaft, and she did everything within her power to bring the thing nowhere near her nose, let alone her lips. No amount of loathing however would change the fact that information was what Mini-Flash Juniper needed just now, since the very presence of these sinister sweets suggested she was on the right track. So, with what she hoped were unspoken assurances she’d enjoy her treat later, Juniper fell into step with her new friends as the raucous riot romped on into ever-mounting dark.

Past chalet hoardings swarmed that mass, and overgrown grass-banks black against a sky from which for a time they were all but indistinguishable. Then however the rosy-flaming bulbs which had lit the way thus far started to become less frequent, and Juniper’s eyes steadily grew accustomed to the blue gloom of a mid-August night. Her companions, who somehow seemed easier to get along with in this shady state, told her with pride that their little brothers and sisters were in bed after the cartoons by now, while late nights at the theatre proper were one of the privileges of age. This was the first year Maureen had been allowed to go. Mini-Flash Juniper strove to keep up.

When there was a feel they might at last be nearing their destination, a sudden clamour on Juniper’s flank brought her about to face a freckle-blotched boy. His eyes were wild, his teeth glinted, and his skin fairly sang from the surplus of spun sugar he’d consumed.

“Part of the show, are you, Miss Legs? What you got in store for us?”

A grabby hand shot for Juniper’s hemline and all at once Limb Four and the studio stage and the first time she came here slammed to the back of her throat like a taste.

“Stop that!”

Her voice cracked sharp and high above the general row. “Now, mate,” added the silhouette by her, and on that warning the other boy scurried to lose himself from sight.

Juniper, though still crimson, smiled thankfully up.

“Jenny,” she introduced herself, almost shy.

“Pat,” came stoutly back.

Pat seemed kind. Probably most of these wayward ones were. It wasn’t their fault they’d fallen foul of the foulest beings in this world.

“That boy took a risk,” stated Mini-Flash Juniper primly, straightening her skirt. “And he wouldn’t have done if he’d had any clue what the consequences might have been for him.”

Maureen cawed. “Time to start changing them more than once a week,” was her verdict.

Juniper parted from Pat and Maureen in the theatre lobby, not wanting them dragged into any altercation which might ensue, then proceeded to sit pale and skirt-tucked for the duration of the show. Round about her in near total dark the lost ones shouted down the performers with glee, bellowed jocular criticism in massed musical voices, and hurled their multicoloured pellets throughout which clattered to the stage like steady hail.

Seriously, thought Mini-Flash Juniper.

Had Joe liked this?

It was all she could do to breathe with dignity and remember why she was here. Nor had she any illusions that the frequent hard pings rebounding from her head were mere misfires.

Not until the end did a lone man stride slowly into the limelight.

Silence fell, immediate and absolute. The sound of stray pods scattering from his shiny shoes or cracking underneath them seemed very loud.

He was bald, and the short brown hair at his temples slick, like his moustache. This lent his head every sort of sickly gleam beneath the theatre lamps. About him was that disagreeable meatiness of Earthling middle-age, yet he bared his teeth and swaggered as though he thought this more to his advantage than otherwise. He was wearing a blazer of overwhelming red, with a striped tie the same shade, and trousers so white as to make you marvel.

The breathless adulation gripping the audience spoke conclusively on what this man was, and not even his latest disguise could leave Mini-Flash Juniper puzzling over which.

She’d known she’d be face-to-face with her old enemy before tonight was through. In fact she’d been counting on it, not that she flattered herself he was only here for that reason. True, her arrival couldn’t have gone unnoticed, bearing in mind where this place was and who ran it. But an auditorium crammed to the rafters with enraptured girl-slaves? He was likely here on this very spot, revelling in it every night.

“Who do you love?” demanded the man, in the rough voice of a cigarette-smoker.

A roaring chorus bawled hoarsely back the name of Uncle Lasser.

“Do you a new number then,” that one growled. An unseen piano struck up suggestive syrup, and the figure onstage began to sing.

Oh, they took her away, that fine Highlands lass,

She ever was destined through my hands to pass;

When she was here every moment was gold,

Yet all transpired as it was foretold.

They took her away on a sad rainy day,

I never shall call her my own!

That’s why I can’t win;

It’s compounded my sin:

She’s a magnet to my heart of stone.

END OF CHAPTER TWO