Errata: Nineteenth Episode - The Moose Speaks

A moondust highway, long-looped and spangly like a bolt of angel silk, and there I am in the hot tub of a pink stretch limo, the stink of bubbles in the air and me supping cocktails and listening to good music. Next to the plush seats and minibar there’s a moose head mounted on a pine shield with a little gold plaque underneath that says ASK ME ABOUT OUR $6.99 PLATTER and he rolls his googly eyes and says all grizzled like:

‘How’s life, Chief?’

I take a pull on my cocktail – it tastes kind of salty – and I reply: ‘Seems there’s not a day goes by I don’t establish a few new trade routes with lunacy. You know I could use a break? Tranquillity has a bad rap. Bed down in the soft cool cress.’

‘But boredom, huh?’ He flashes me a grin and I see he has a full set of human teeth, white as chalk.

I nod. ‘Boredom, agony.’ I slurp my drink again. Still salty. ‘The two great celestial racquets that knock you out across the court of life. I try my best, but Jenkins. So where’s this road headed, eh?’

The moose looks away and chuckles like it’s some private joke.

‘What about the six ninety-nine platter?’

‘Now that… A palimpsest of metaphors, Chief. Another turning of the wheel. It’ll be in the last place you look. Wake up. I am not a moose.’

So the first thing I did was I lifted my head and my visor was filling with blood and I realised that I’d broken my nose. Smash your beak and the whole universe seems to pinwheel round that central event; the shock, the repulsion, God’s radiant countenance searing through hunched ramparts of denial to boom YOUR NOSE, YOUR NOSE, YOU BROKE YOUR FUCKING NOSE YOU SCHMUCK! and you try to will it false, no no no, but the truth blossoms from the middle of your face like a hideous rose.

Beneath my palms, a fuchsia and charcoal carpet festive with glass shards. Lukewarm brackish fluid gushed from my misshapen nostrils and welled in the back of my throat. I reached round behind me grasping for the buckle that would release my wingset and let me wriggle out of the suit before I drowned. Hacking and spitting, I managed to close my gloved fingers round the buckle’s head and, pressing hard, finally convinced the bastard to detach. The harness click-clunked loose. With the tragic inelegance of a carnival bear I tried to stagger to my feet, layers of impermeable fabric draped blood-sodden over my head and shoulders like a photographer’s cape. The neck seal was tight around my throat; I yanked and clawed, eventually got it off and flung the whole blotched garment to the carpet.

I cast around, delirious with pain, angles reeling and melding. The entire floor was a labyrinth of rectangular support pillars and cardboard boxes in maudlin stacks – no sign of the Phase Vault door anywhere. On my final approach I’d tried to count ten storeys down from the roof, but with all the ruckus below and gory death a very real possibility I must’ve miscalculated. There were no discernable security measures – I guessed most of the anti-intruder systems were focused on the first five storeys, just as Two Blade had said. Any spare Peace sentries had no doubt been scrambled to deal with the rampant dino.

I took some faltering steps foward. My face felt like a bomb crater. Blood soaked into my shirtsleeves and collected at my fingertips in fat blackcurrant droplets. The boxes stacked everywhere bulged with shredded paper. Some were labelled in blue pencil, stuff like: DA Weaponry Schematics, The Truth (revised), Morse Code – Same Old Shit, Operation Hide Evidence Like Letters, The Coincidence Conspiracy, There Is No One At The Controls. One read: Chorizo Countermeasures – Classified! the words struck through with red marker. Most were blank.

I dug into my pocket, tugged out the crumpled scrap of paper onto which Two Blade had painstakingly transcribed the fifty-digit code while squinting through x-ray specs. I looked at the paper, looked up at the dull brown maze, looked at the paper again, like it was a map and the door was suddenly going to reveal itself to me.

A boom like God passing gas. The floor lurched and I crashed crabwise through a wall of boxes, paper whipping up in a tickertape blizzard. I tripped on a heap of ring binders, whacked my skull a peach on the way down. The lights fritzed, a sheet of yellow-brown dust descending in spastic disco. Screams echoed up through the building’s throaty reaches. Flat on my back amongst cardboard debris, I listened for noise from outside, but oh the silence.

When I lifted my head, the door to the Phase Vault was there, patient and beautiful as a mountain bloom. I shrugged aside shredded files, got to my feet.

Now I’ve got you, you asshole.

The keypad was a standard silver twelve-button affair, ten digits, an asterisk and a crosshatch, just like an ATM or a cellphone. All I needed to do was punch in the code and I was home free. I checked my palm. I patted my pockets. Where was it? I glanced around and discovered I was knee-deep in nondescript strips of paper. I started sifting through the heaped detritus, panic rising in my heart. Tantalising half-phrases tickled my subconscious as I went moleman into the morass:

…olytes give thanks to High Stockpriest Jodoswen after record Index rises this quarter…

…not countenance failure,’ Euphrosyne Five told a heated press conference, seconds before a throwing axe struck her directly in the f…

…izo females consist primarily of glue. They must guzzle their bodyweight in shrimp every 24 h…

…d order out of the undifferentiated limbo-matter of Underspace, these various locales analogous, I suppose, to a series of warrens all co-e…

…plied: ‘Breasts. Great shivering heaps of them sans bodies, all sizes, ages and colours. It was the worst birthday I ever…

…rofessor Loafbeard believes the contagion is psychosomatic in origin. Plague Zombies, he argues, have merely ‘accelerated’ their citizenship to its logical conc…

…possible. Escape: impossible. Escape: impossible. Escape: impo…

…st place to hide a book is in a library, it follows that the best place to hide a truth is in plain sight, amongst the multitudinous drab truths of the world. THERE IS NO…

…kins’ aberrant hindbrain cannot perform the most basic evasion responses. His moods range from misery, to apathy, to a kind of stricken joy. He presents a grave threat to publ…

…fractal windmills. Fringe Planes trade has been brisk but analysts are bearish about the prospect o…

…ramount importance that the files contained herein ARE NOT SHREDDED, representing as they do the only evidenc…

Gone gone gone. Hollow with loss I gripped my head and discovered the paper scrap stuck to my cheek with tacky blood. Thank Jenkins.

As I waded up to the door the lights went out. I snapped a flame out of my lighter, held it up to the keypad with the scrap of paper alongside and began punching in digits, some sound chip deep inside the lock peep-peep-peeping with every key press. All around support pillars complained like the wet boughs of a galleon. I was still squint-tapping in the orange-violet flameglow when City Hall spoke from its bones. The noise was like the last anguished bellow of some king mammoth. Outside, almost imperceptibly, the horizon shifted.

Peep. Peep. Peep.

I jabbed dry-mouthed at the keypad, crisply aware I was out of time but terrified of making a mistake and blowing the entire sequence.

Peep. Peep.

I could hear the penitent shrieks of steel struts as inch by inch they conceded to gravity, concrete splitting like chocolate frosting, mortar, rust flakes and brick dust rattle-clopping through the eager cracks.

Peep-peep.

As I punched in the final two numbers the Governor let out a gargling heartbroken yowl – gave voice, for the first time in his foul career, to the feelings of the common man. Sections of ceiling started to collapse. The keypad played a bright ditty and the door slid aside in a rush of cold air, revealing darkness. I stepped inside to a steady rumble and the screams of the condemned.