Odin stroked his beard. ‘Hmm, I suppose you’re right at that.’
Tamar kept a creditably straight face and moved smoothly into top gear.
‘Freya will I suppose,’ she said musingly.’
‘What?’
‘She’ll still care, about the Valkyries, I mean.’ She gave him a sly look. ‘How long do you think it would take
her
to forgive and forget?’
‘Odin shuddered. ‘You’ve made your point. What do you want anyway?’
She gestured silently to the sleeping hordes, an evil grin on her face.
‘How about a fate worse than death?’
Odin looked perplexed for a moment; then his face cleared. ‘Marriage?’ he said.
* * *
‘Oh Lord,’ said Stiles as he realised what must be happening. ‘So … people from
here
must be getting moved into the other files of history, to make space for
this
lot?’
‘Of course they are not,’ said Hecaté, but she looked uncertain.
‘Uh huh,’ said Stiles sceptically. ‘Check the anomalies,’ he suggested. ‘See if it shows anything.’
‘But surely …’
‘Please, just check it,’ he begged. ‘I really don’t like this at all.’
‘There are no anomalies in the first file,’ said Hecaté in a relieved tone.
‘Well there wouldn’t be, would there?’ said Stiles discouragingly. ‘Lord Thingy got sent back there, so it’s all back to normal now. What about the next one?’
Hecaté brought up the file. ‘Well, it looks … oh no!’ she turned to Stiles with a distraught face.
‘Hmmm,’ said Stiles. ‘I thought as much.’ He looked at the sleeping Priest, dog, children and huge Viking who had recently joined them. ‘You have to send them back,’ he said. ‘Whatever slight impact on history their little adventure here might have, it couldn’t be worse than the files of history being filled up with random people who don’t belong there surely?’
Hecaté bowed her head. ‘You are right,’ she said. ‘I had not even considered … How do you do that?’ she said suddenly.
Stiles shrugged. ‘Humans are just more used to thinking about the consequences I suppose,’ he said.
Hecaté released the “captives” – for want of a better word, and they all vanished much like Sir Antoine had done.
Stiles breathed a sigh of relief. ‘That’s that sorted then,’ he said. ‘Now we can …’
‘Jack!’ Hecaté tapped him nervously on the shoulder.
Stiles turned. ‘Oh shit!’ he swore. ‘What the hell went wrong?’
~ Chapter Eight ~
‘…
S
aid I was sorry.’ Denny had gone past the pleading thing and was now into the “aren’t women unreasonable, what does she want –
blood
?” thing. The problem was of course, what it always is. He was
not
sorry; he would do it all again, and Tamar knew it. She pointed this out.
Denny held up his hands in defeat. A girlfriend who knows you too well is bad enough, but one who can read your mind, albeit on a limited basis, is a never ending argument in the making. Surely every man’s nightmare.
‘Okay, Okay,’ he said. ‘I admit it, I had fun; I’ve never been one of the lads before, I don’t expect you to understand. It’s like you said to me once, people
like
you, but I’m not used to I, and it … Anyway, the thing is, you’re right, I’m
not
sorry for doing it. I reckon I needed it, it did me good. But,
but
– no hear me out. I
am
sorry that I upset you.’ He opened his mind. ‘Am I telling the truth?’
Tamar gazed at him intently and eventually pronounced reluctantly ‘Yes, I guess you are. She still looked sulky.
Denny gave her a sideways grin that made her thaw a little. ‘I suppose that’s why girls aren’t supposed to go on a lads night out,’ he said. ‘In case they never want to see you again.’
She grinned back, ‘I guess Bjorn and the lads won’t be having that problem anyway,’ she said.
Denny shook his head. Divine retribution in his opinion was an overreaction, but he did not dare say so, he contented himself with. ‘At least you didn’t make me marry you.’ Then he clapped a hand over his mouth. ‘I m-mean …’ he stammered, back pedalling rapidly, as the look on her face threatened to scorch the flesh off his face. ‘I just meant that if we did … if we
were
to get married, I would want it to be for better reasons than that, um. I mean it’s not very romantic is it? Er, ahem.’ He gazed at his feet in apparent deep fascination. ‘So, er where to next?’ he backed into a door nervously and scrabbled at the handle. (Tamar’s revenge should at this point be fairly obvious. Much more wondering just exactly what she
would
do to him and he would be a nervous wreck.)
* * *
It was dark and smoky; strange lights flashed overhead, and the room was filled with the rhythmic thumping of a drumbeat and pounding feet.
Through the murky atmosphere, a hundred or more bodies could just be seen swaying or jumping to the beat like so many zombies surrendering their will to some unseen power. Some moved their heads like pecking vultures, in time to the beat. One came near and stared briefly though unseeing eyes, then moved away as if drawn by some hidden force. Tamar involuntarily drew closer to Denny.
Then began a terrible wailing, which immediately sent the poor people into an appalling frenzy. ‘Take me,’ it shrieked, ‘into insanity.’ Tamar clutched at Denny.
‘What is it?’ she mouthed, her voice lost in the cacophony. Denny looked at her, his shoulders shaking.
‘I’m frightened,’ she admitted, but Denny was laughing out loud by now, and most disturbing of all, he was beginning to move like the rest of them, his head bobbing along to the beat. ‘Dream tripper – tripping on my dreams,’ he mouthed along with the wailing voice.
‘Oh no, I’ve lost him,’ she thought. ‘I’ve got to get him out of here.’
She tried to drag him away from the dancers, as he tried to drag her toward them. She won, naturally.
‘We
have
to go,’ she mouthed at him. ‘It’s some kind of cult or demons or something.’
‘No, it’s not.’ Denny looked surprised; ‘it’s just the nineties.*’
* [
We should not dismiss the possibility here that they were both right – remember in particular 1992
]
Tamar had spent most of the 1990s stuck in her bottle (As related in Djinnx’d) and had never been much of a night-clubber in any case due to her unusual circumstances. (She had attended a ball in 1873 – this was rather different). She was not one hundred percent convinced, that Denny was right, the nightclub still looked to her like a cavern of hell, and if these people were not under a powerful demonic influence then she did not know what. But if Denny was not worried … well, she
was
.
They were over by the bar; Denny was jigging along as they were slyly informed – in ear-splitting tones – that, in fact, “E’s are good” – a euphemism completely lost on Tamar. She was just wondering why they could not simply leave – she was sure that these people would not notice if they grew elephant ears and flapped around the room with them. She was wrong about this, they would notice; they just would not be terribly surprised (E’s are good, after all – the power of suggestion is a wonderful thing.) But Denny seemed to want to stay, she wondered why – it seemed like a terrible place to her, and he was drinking again.
One other thing was troubling her. If this
was
the 1990s, as Denny said, he was in danger of vanishing from existence. This was a period of time after his birth, and if he vanished, so would she, back into the bottle and Askphrit would win. She tried to explain this to him over the sound of a man telling everyone to take the “Last train to transcentral.” (Q. Were these subliminal messages?) but he did not seem to be able to hear her.
‘Come and dance,’ he mouthed to her as the song changed rather appositely to “Please don’t go”.
Tamar found this suspicious. She shook her head firmly and tried to hold him back, but he swigged back the last of his beer and was gone. Tamar leaned against the bar for a few minutes deliberating what to do next. Maybe there was nothing to worry about, Denny seemed okay, apart from his bizarre behaviour, and at least he was still here, that was comforting. And, she supposed things could be worse – at least thus far, there had been no hint of Britney Spears (maybe this was not hell after all.) Then to her horror and disbelief she found her feet tapping along to “Rhythm is a dancer”. This would never do. She set her shoulders, downed the last of her Malibu and pineapple*, shuddered at the glass and set off toward the dance floor intending to drag Denny out of this evil place – by his shaggy hair if necessary.
* [
in the nineties all drinks ordered by women metamorphosed into a Malibu and pineapple – no one has ever been able to satisfactorily explain this. – Tamar, by the way, had not even ordered a drink
]
This place could get into your head if you were not careful. She could feel the beat pulsing through her bones, the desire to dance was overwhelming (More evidence, she felt, that all was not what it seemed) and Denny was already enmeshed in its iniquitous clutches. (Tamar had a tendency toward unnecessary drama. – she was also spiralling into paranoia)
As for Denny, he was eighteen again. This is not a euphemism – at least not entirely. One problem that had not been foreseen by either of our errant time travellers, was that should Denny, being a mortal, find himself in a time period within his own lifetime, where he, in fact, already existed, he would become his former self from that period to avoid temporal anomalies, as two of one person cannot exist at the same time. (This rule does not apply to immortal beings and the supernatural in general – no one knows why, but it is probably a rule of narrative flow – the only exception being ghosts, have you ever heard of anyone being haunted by themselves?)
What had happened was this. The present Denny had been drawn into the aura of the past Denny. This explained why he was having feelings of Déjà vu. He had indeed been here before, except he had not because he was only eighteen, and this was the first time he had been here. Following me so far? Denny was his twenty six year old self living the life of his eighteen year old self. Put in a nutshell, it was a classic case of knowing then what you know now.
So far, his feelings of Déjà vu were vague at best, and he put it down to the fact that he had been in similar places in his past, maybe even this place, in other words, a coincidence. Things were about to get a lot more specific.
‘I thought I told you never to come here again.’ A large man, black greasy hair slicked back, hideous purple satin shirt stretched to straining point on overlarge shoulders was tapping Denny on the shoulder; Denny turned. Behind the bully was a selection of giggling jackals, all similarly dressed in cheap black suits and obviously pretty pleased with themselves.
One of them, with bleached spiky hair, and skinnier even than Denny himself, leaned over his mentor’s shoulder, his Adam’s apple bobbing excitedly. ‘Yeah, we told you never to come here again,’ he reiterated, somewhat unnecessarily in a high pitched voice.
Denny’s head swam for a moment. The sense of Déjà vu overcame him so strongly that he could not focus for a moment.
Denny stared at this former tormentor his mind racing through the possibilities. This had not happened yet, but still he had a clear memory of it. This was Andy Clay, a monolith from Denny’s teenage years and the author of an era of terror for Denny at secondary school. He experienced again (and also, conversely, for the first time) the feelings of injustice that had assailed him on this very occasion. He had thought he had left all this behind him, wasn’t he a grown up now? Apparently not, because, even though this had not happened yet, he could clearly remember what was going to happen. He would be sent away with a face full of broken beer bottle and a severe inferiority complex. So, why wasn’t he scared this time? ‘This time? – Aha!’ Denny did not really understand what had really happened here, but he did understand what he had now – A chance.
He stared coolly at his former tormentor. ‘Hello Andy,’ he said.
A breathless Tamar arrived behind him. ‘Denny …’ she began, then she took in the scene ‘Oh.’
Denny did not even look round. ‘In a minute babe,’ he murmured. Oh, this was too good to be true. Not only did he have the chance to clean Andy Clay’s clocks once and for all. But also he, and all his cronies had now seen him with Tamar, the kind of woman they would never have a chance with even in their dreams. Brilliant!
Andy shifted his gormless gaze over Denny’s shoulder and rather predictably said. ‘Hello darling.’
Tamar, also rather predictably, bristled but said nothing. She had a weird feeling about this. ‘What’s going on?’ she hissed.
‘Unfinished business,’ said Denny calmly.
Tamar got the point immediately. ‘You can’t’ she told him frantically. ‘You mustn’t change the past.’
Denny ignored her; he was damned if he was going to get beaten up again –
again
? There was that confusion again, after all, if he did this he would not have been beaten up in the first place, would he? Whatever, it was his past and he would change it if he wanted to.
‘It’ll create a paradox,’ Tamar said.
‘I think it already has,’ Denny told her. He could still remember the past as it had been, even though he had already decided to change it.
What Tamar knew instinctively but was not able to explain, was that since everything happens somewhere there would be a time line where Denny changed the outcome of this encounter and one where he did not – possibly because he never had the chance. If he did this now, there was a high probability that he would be shunted into an alternate reality, particularly in view of the unstable nature of their presence here. Actually, it was almost a certainty.
Andy had missed most of the actual words of this exchange and had, quite naturally misinterpreted Tamar’s concern. He now pushed Denny aside and grabbed her round the shoulders. ‘How about you and me have a little fun after I finish off this crap rat,’ he suggested. ‘Bet you’d rather be with a real man, eh?’