Whisperings

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Amerikan Dreams: 0

Whisperings Being the Diary extracts of a father and his son in the world known to all as, the Looking-Glass Earth.

By Rob Sharp

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Whisperings Š Rob Sharp 2011 All rights reserved The right for Robert Sharp to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Further information can be obtained by contacting avalonrjs@gmail.com

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Dedicated to my beautiful wife Carole who keeps me anchored in the waking world.

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It’s the scratching behind the wainscot that leaves scars on a house. The fluttering of invisible wings when something is trapped in the chimney. The unseen events as vermin come and go from a dwelling; leaving the edges nibbled and trails of dried faeces marking where they have been.

History is very similar, made from the whisperings between the epic events, the calm before, during and after the storm. It’s structure riddled with the unknown and in some cases, the unwanted conversations of individuals who make a difference. Who play the Game.

Listen to the passing of days. Concentrate on what Time says. Just occasionally, it may talk some sense.

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18th November 1960 The Queen was drunk again.

Leaning back in her ornate royal seat, a Cuban cigar dangling precariously from her delicate fingers, she squinted at the three kings she held in her hand, nestled next to a nine of spades and a three of hearts.

“I’ll match you Kent for your Colorado… and raise you Cardiff,” HRH finally decided, pushing the bone markers into the middle of the pot.

“I’m not accepting Cardiff. What the hell use is a Welsh town to me? Stick to southern Albion or fold,” grunted the wizened old guy in the wheelchair.

“Bugger. Make it Portsmouth then…”

“Are you sure about this, Liz?” her partner in cards queried.

Elizabeth was a practised bluffer when she had the best part of a bottle of 1814 Napoleon Brandy warming her insides. The trouble was, her royal genes never allowed her to quit, even when she had been dealt a duff hand.

Rule Britannia and all that malarkey.

“You are such a woman, Commander Future!” the Queen hiccoughed slightly.

“This is the Imperial Consort of Humanity you are addressing… One knows how to play fucking Poker!”

She dropped a pile of ash from her cigar on the green baize of the tablecloth and brushed it impatiently away.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” snapped the British Monarch. “Game too rich for you, Ares?”

The Hereditary Ruler of the World coughed as one of his beautiful, fetish clad assistants held the oxygen mask to his face for a few seconds, then wiped the perspiration from his brow with a soft cloth. For one of the last Anunnaki alive in the secret world, those dread immortals that had ruled mankind from the shadows since Krom only knew when, the old feller wasn’t faring very well.

That was what seventeen separate assassination attempts in the 20th century alone did for one.

6 “I’ll match Portsmouth with Boston… and see you,” he eventually wheezed.

“Ho-ho!” chortled HRH, cigar clenched between her teeth and that tight familiar 1940’s hairstyle just a little disarrayed. “Get the papers drawn up, baby! Mother England is taking back what has always been hers!” She slapped her cards down on the table, totally overconfident of her victory. “Read them and weep, you old douche bag!”

Ares, or as he preferred to be called in the company of lesser mortals, Viktor Helmuth Bast, took some time fumbling with his cards, but the old goat was relishing his double bluff. Neatly, he finally laid out his three Aces over Queen Elizabeth’s hand.

“Mine, I believe!” he cackled, clawing in the ancient bone tokens to add to his previous winnings. “We can draw a line slightly south of Birmingham and declare all lands below this border as now belonging to the United States of Amerika. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome if you please, Albion – the 51st State!”

The assembled stooges gave Ares a polite round of applause, as the designated referee stepped forward into the light and examined the markers.

“Hells bells! One was robbed!” cried the Queen and nearly fell backwards off her chair. As blonde quiffed Commander Future, looking quite dapper in his latest Carnaby Street fashions, caught her before she hit the deck, he gave the referee a worried grin.

“This can’t be legal… can it?”

Dressed in sombre black, as was his signature style, Anthony Leibowitz scrutinised a dog-eared document that covered these ridiculous gambles. A little something Henry XIII had drafted for such an occasion.

“Allowing the loosing party six months grace to win said territories back… I’m afraid it’s perfectly legal,” he said, pulling a sour face.

“I think one is going to be sick…” quavered HRH, and several flustered members of the Order of Humanity helped her away to find the ladies powder room.

So this was how Amerika allegedly gained control of the south of England.

Except for two things that slightly marred the occasion.

The first being, that the Queen signed her portion of the land transference deeds with the flourish of, ‘Mickey Mouse’.

7 The second being, on completion of said deeds, in the ensuing scuffle between Ares’s Amazon concubines and HRH’s bodyguards, someone nicked off with the document and it was never seen again.

In most of these cases when Johnny Future, self-confessed temporal meddler and all round dodgy geezer had been present at such an historical occasion, all fingers pointed at him. But this time it was the referee that walked out of the Tower of London with the papers concealed up one jacket sleeve.

To this day it is presumed by the various covert agencies that secretly rule the Looking-Glass Earth, that this bit of ill-advised nonsense was spirited away to join Leibowitz’s private collection of the strange. Whatever the fate of that document, from that day forward the south of England was considered in some circles to be the 51st State.

But in his acquisition of the only factual proof, Anthony Leibowitz’s long-lost father would have been proud of him. As the self-proclaimed curator of the strange, the business of collecting weird stuff was never just black and white. Both father and son in their day had trodden a very shaky line between the two.

Sometimes it was the best course of action to be the pick-pocket on the scene, rather than the action-hero. Besides… The 51st State declaration looked cool on Anthony’s House wall, along with all the other purloined documents, pimped, permanently borrowed or purchased on Ebay. Leibowitz was the collector’s collector after all!

Hopefully, that last disaster would curb HRH’s gambling habit mused Anthony – but he wouldn’t have put money on it. As he straightened the framed document in the hall of that secret building grifters knew universally as, the House, Anthony Leibowitz smiled to himself and went inside to make a nice cup of strong tea. 51st State indeed. What ever next; a quick visit to the Tower of Babel?

The smile slipped a tad as he realised he shouldn’t tempt the laws of probability, because if his late father’s writings on that subject were to be believed, the Dark Tower and he had a date with destiny. Exactly when and where were open to conjecture. That was one appointment that Anthony Leibowitz was in no particular hurry to keep.

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June 17th 1868 The stocky older gentlemen in the country tweed suit, sporting a full beard and obviously of Jewish origin and the tall almost painfully thin scholarly type in an Edwardian frock coat and large, thin-framed spectacles made an odd couple. But the venue they had picked to meet at contained such a collection of wonders from around the Empire, that this mismatched pair went mainly unnoticed – which had been the whole idea.

Both had spent some time in the Colonies during the past century or so. For those possessing an extended life, it would have been just plain rude not to visit. But today their whispered exchange was as much about the disunited States of Amerika as it was Mother England.

That vast construction of steel and glass, The Crystal Palace, set elegantly in London’s Penge Common Park, where it had been moved to after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Near the well-heeled folks of Sydenham Hill, it was still the place to be in the summer of 1868. The taller of the two gentlemen, the moon-faced Mr Justin Cheeks affiliated with the British Museum, delicately nibbled at his cheese sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. Next to him, having little appetite at the moment, Rabbi Mordecai Leibowitz sat, nervously reaching inside his jacket to occasionally touch the stock of his Smith and Wesson Model 3 revolver.

“The Royal Society have confirmed that our mutual enemy has begun to rewrite the warp and weft of Time... can you imagine that outrage, Justin?” said Leibowitz quietly.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I can. That is why these invisible scoundrels think they are gods. It’s all a matter of perspective. But I thought you’d be more concerned with this blackguard who is systematically hunting down your peers? Killing off the adventurers of the secret world... pruning its tomb raiders back to the wood!”

“The Baron and I have several theories that they are one in the same. The smaller crimes engineered to camouflage the larger outrage.”

Cheeks laughed shrilly. “Baron Klein? My... have we had a making up? I thought you two were the greatest of rivals!”

9 “We were... we still are!” flustered the Rabbi, his weathered face reddening slightly. “But as this murdering devil Mr Black moves like a shadow amongst our ranks snuffing us out one at a time, it seemed prudent to join forces. Which is why I’ve decided to move our master-plan forward.”

Mr Cheeks choked on his sandwich for a second or two, before the robust Rabbi thumped him on the back to sort the problem.

“One would have liked a little more warning before you launched one of your bad taste jokes, Mordecai.” The moon-faced man blinked back the tears, just a hint of silver showing in each eye. “You weren’t joking… were you? To attempt what you are contemplating rivals what these invisibles are supposedly doing!”

“I know. That is the point. All the serious studies done concerning this LookingGlass Earth that we call home postulate it could be the original planet – the very first Earth within the Lattice of Worlds. At the mercy of some cosmic force we do not yet comprehend, it split from a proto-Earth early in the Multiverse’s history, and became the template for a myriad of parallel worlds. Which is why it reflects so strangely an infinite amount of possibilities, mirrored from all these other Earths.”

“Didn’t our greatest minds once think the sun revolved around this planet too?” smiled Cheeks, wiping a final tear from his eye and wisely abandoning his lunch. “Or that the world was flat?”

“Precisely. Which is why I hold the theory that the real proto-Earth has to be a more chaotic place. A world trapped in flux, neither one thing nor t’other.”

“And you have heard of such an Earth on your many voyages between Realities?”

“Aye – that I have. A devastated wasteland where the only living thing is a black tower that reaches so high into dark storm clouds it eventually pierces the outer reaches of the air we breath! And I mean to visit this world, one day, God willing. Find a weapon hidden within its soulless walls that will send these daemons who meddle with the structure of Time cowering back into their own sorry pasts!”

“Are we talking the Dark Tower here, Mordecai? Have you started looking for children’s faerie tales now?” said the scholar with some incredulity.

10 “I have spoken to travellers across the Betwixt and the Between who claim to have seen it… or at least they have spoken to others who in their turn have heard rumours to the Tower of Babel’s existence.”

Justin Cheeks nodded without further comment. Even in this most public of places, the glass walls often had ears. He just hoped his much travelled friend survived long enough to accomplish this task, for Cheeks’ own people had a legend of such a dismal world and the people who lived there. Where a black tower, a sentient superstructure reached out with an inhuman mind to bind the Realities around it into one immense empire.

The shape-shifters called these unfortunates, the Forces of Babel.

“The Book still going well?” Cheeks tried to lighten the conversation by changing the subject.

“Of course,” replied the Rabbi, cheering up a jot. “It could be my best collection yet, as long as those anal retentive followers of Osiris allow me to do the job they are paying me for!”

“It is their Atlas, Mordecai… the 1862 version. You’re only six years late.”

“Delayed! A few years delayed, that’s all,” growled Mordecai, tugging at his bush of a beard.

The librarian shook his head slightly. The task of assembling the Atlas of the Secret World for those eminent scholars of the Osiran College was becoming another sore point in his friend’s veil of tears. Banishing daemons by day and researching a work of such intricacy by night was proving to be a little beyond his old friend.

“I could chip in with the few odd folk lore references.”

“Then the beast would be authored by Leibowitz and Cheeks! I have done this before, Justin. It’s nearly finished, believe me.” *** The 1862 Osiran Atlas of the Secret World finally came out in 1871. There were only 10 copies ever printed, of which Mordecai kept one for himself, which he kept adding notes

11 to, year upon year, seemingly unable to write the last word. He bequeathed this mighty tome to his son, Anthony. *** Mordecai Leibowitz and the enigmatic Justin Cheeks met irregularly, hiding in plain sight at The Crystal Palace, right up to the time of the Rabbi’s strange disappearance in 1893. Within the librarian’s own circles, investigations were made about Leibowitz’s abduction, questions asked and daemons soundly thrashed, but no trace of the Rabbi was ever found.

Mr. Cheeks settled back into the anonymous world of a scholar, until the time seemed right to contact Mordecai’s only child, Anthony. So the threads of that original, outrageous plan to assault the Tower of Babel were lost… for a generation at least.

Justin Cheeks would be heard down the following years remarking to certain key players in the Game, that mounting an expedition to the Original Earth was as likely to happen as the Queen loosing half of England in a game of cards.

Look how that one turned out.

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December 10th 1876 Mordecai Leibowitz staggered forward out of the dark, through the scarred stone pillars beneath that familiar wrought iron arch. The fog was clinging to the rock of a man like burrs on a donkey’s back. His beard had a wild unkempt nature to it and there was an insane look in those tired, red eyes. Only the Lord knew how many days it had been since he had eaten or slept.

Over one shoulder he carried a type of Native American papoose, made of reindeer hide and strips of tree bark. Nestled inside its warm fur lined interior was a snotnosed tot with a shock of dark hair, who appeared to be fast asleep.

Around this father and son the grime of that lost manor wafted, as a single gaslight illuminated the scene in an odd orange glow. Nailed to one wall, the road sign was just visible. It read, Brisingamen Street.

Leibowitz had made it. He was there.

Set within the confines of New York, the legend chaser had finally returned to the scattering of leaning buildings titled, Little Transylvania – that self-contained, independent state known colloquially as, the Seven Streets. It had not been an easy decision to make to come to this place. He was running out of holes in which to hide.

“Such a face I never expected to zee...” came a familiar, heavily accented voice from out of the gloom that surrounded the crumbling buildings of Brisingamen Street.

The Rabbi clutched at the old gnarled briar club in both bloody hands, looking this way and that into the fog. All his other weapons had been stolen or discarded just getting to the Seven Streets, leaving him with naught but the ancient faerie cudgel. There were figures stood there, just out of sight in the gloom. Skinny figures, tall and vulpine.

The Night People.

Yet it was the shortest, most stout of fellows that stepped forward under the gas lamp. Clothed in black, his hair slicked back, as was the style with his people, Karnstein had the look of one fully fed. But the thin, some might say cruel lips were a little too red and the teeth a little too sharp as he smiled up at the wall of a man and his baby son.

13 “You finally came here... dezpite all our bad blood. After all the history ve have carved together. You limp back here like zome beaten mongrel...” the short, rotund Vampyre suddenly stopped his monologue as he caught sight of a tiny arm waving from inside the papoose. His savage face lit up with delight, all the terror and the dreadful things that had occurred between the Night People and the master of the strange fading away like the fog would at dawn.

“You have a Zon!” Ygor Karnstein cried in glee. “A little boy! Kome... kome inzide thiz inztant. There are devilz abroad tonight! A roaring fire and varm food awaitz the both of you!”

With no word from the exhausted traveller, the Rabbi allowed himself to be bustled away by the Night People. Away from the dogs on his heels.

But they were there, watching from the dark. Three of them.

Their little group of legend killers went by various names, ruled by what ever was in vogue at the time. This year they were whispered in passing as, The Strangers. No more true a description could be found in the whole of Amerika.

The wizened god stood front and centre, leaning heavily on his walking staff.

Flamboyant and fair. Withered and wane. Bloody and bad tempered.

“That’s that then,” sighed Mr Lavender, his frock coat scraping the ground. “He crossed the unseen line into the Seven Streets and we cannot follow.”

“I could burn the gates down. Pop a few ripe Carrion bodies in the process. Are you in the mood for a bonfire, Mr Black?” chattered the pugnacious Mr Peach.

Mr Black, all cadaverous and smouldering, said nothing.

“Leave it,” sighed Lavender again. “Leave him and his bastard son. There will be other days... other ways...” and with that the three villains of the piece allowed the fog to take them, melting away in the stench and the gloom.

“I would have so liked to have had a nibble of the boy...” a ghost of a whisper drifted back out of the night from the ancient Celt. ***

14 Later that eventful night, a quartet of figures took the long walk down an endless spiral of stone steps, their hesitant path traditionally illuminated by blazing torches held high. In the lead was the familiar rotund figure of Ygor Karnstein. During the long hour that it took to descend into the bowels of the earth, no one spoke a word, other than the odd oath as they slipped on a worn stair or were singed by a companion’s light.

Finally, the stairs opened out into a roughly hewn round chamber cut from the bedrock. Braziers already illuminated this holy of holies, as placed around the Crypt of Vlad in lit niches were a vast display of Vampyre paraphernalia. Mordecai Leibowitz was not the only collector in these dark days.

In the centre of the Crypt, a bound beast sat on a worn stone casket. Chains of all manner of metals and magical strengths held this great naked blob of a man at his post, linked through endless body-piercings. Broken tusks protruded from his bottom jaw. His eyes, just black pits in a massive head, had been burned out long ago and his bald skull reflected the flickering lights around him.

The Orc, with skin the same greyish brown of the rock that surrounded him, sniffed at the air.

“Be still, Graven,” said Karnstien, as one might address a child. “Be at peace.”

The guardian sniffed and shuffled away from the casket like a beaten dog, his head bowed. Whilst Karnstein’s companions fed the beast, gave him fresh water, and also removing the fresh dung he had scattered around his prison, the Vampyre elder crossed to the stone casket. Riveted with great iron bolts to the ancient stone was a box of deepest red, which the Vampyre unlocked with a key he always wore on a chain about his neck.

From its cool interior, he gently lifted a crude, disintegrating book.

It bore no cover, having lost such a luxury centuries before. In fact the first few pages of the codex were missing too, their fragments now in a glass case as part of the Nielsen collection scattered around the chamber. The remaining twenty pages being made from thin shavings of wood bound to the left margin with copper hoops.

Licking his thin red lips in anticipation, Karnstein reverently turned the wooden pages one by one until he came to the revered passage and roughly translated it from the runes of Elder Futhark, originally scribed in the early 4th Century Denmark.

“Time will tumble. Thingz will occur. So sayeth I.

15 Take into thine home an enemy. Man vithout vealth. Man vithout shelter.

Yet he shalt carry on hiz back a boy-child, who shall be precious to thee, thy kith and thy kin. A zaviour to the People of the Night.

This babe shalt be Golden.

A light made for use in darkness. Nurture him.”

Karnstein slowly closed the codex.

“And that meant?” asked the sarcastic voice of one of Ygor’s greatest rivals, Manfred Belusci. Where as Ygor was short and stout, Manfred was tall and built like a bear. The Belusci’s and the Karnstien’s had been in a constant state of feuding since the Seven Streets were first founded – something both men had been present for.

“Bors Nielsen’z vords are zometimes a touch convoluted. But thiz prophesy iz clear to me! An enemy vill arrive at our gate vith hiz infant child… The boy vill grow and become important to uz. Be ‘Golden’, vhatever that meanz.”

“Precisely! Vhen Nielsen wrote theze runez sixteen hundred yearz ago, they were prophesiez meant to occur within hiz own lifetime! Bumblers zuch az you have tried to read thingz into them zince the book vas found. The Prophet Nielsen vas still human vhen he wrote half thiz codex! Beink turned vas one–” “I haf no time to argue semantics vith you, Belusci! The comink of Leibowitz and hiz child iz in the codex! Vhy else haz such a self-zentered thief and murderer of our kind appeared at our gate?”

For once, Belusci couldn’t answer that one. As Karnstein carefully locked the book away and headed back for the long climb up into the Seven Streets, his mind was racing at the possibilities. Mordecai Leibowitz had a son… and he had come to Little Transylvania for sanctuary.

What was this little human child destined to do, and how did it weave in with the future of the Vampyres of New York?

“So ve give the father and the zon sanctuary, az the codex sayz,” exclaimed Karnstein.

“Agreed,” replied Belusci.

But neither Undead felt comfortable with the deal. It was as if the future suddenly hung over their heads like a rusted sword on a fraying, rotted rope.

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4th July 1776 In a year of independence for the fledgling Thirteen States of the New World, a rather disparate band of entrepreneurs and bandits gathered under the shadows of the larger celebrations to pool their collective knowledge. Going against the current fashion, the group never gave itself a name, and even in the invisible footnotes of the world’s secret history there is some argument of what they discussed.

Upon asking those there present who still live to this present day, again the minutes of the meeting vary. If one didn’t know better, one would say that the survivors attended several entirely different meetings. Reading between the false memories and the obvious lies, this is an approximate account of what happened on July 4th 1776, in the city of Philadelphia. *** For a Jew, one of God’s chosen people; it must be said that Mordecai Leibowitz was a most pugnacious devil in his youth. Paying for passage to the Colonies on a French trading vessel, when Leibowitz finally made it to the river city of Philadelphia, he looked as if he had been in several scraps. Only on continuously being badgered by the poet and professional swordsman, Acer Via, did the group find out Mordecai had indeed earned his fare in several well-paid bouts of fisticuffs.

“Much as I admire a man with a little muscle about his frame,” Acer said in that somewhat affected tone of his, “Does one have to barrel into the place late, smelling like a prize bull?”

The backroom of a humble Printer had been acquired for the Meet. Acer Via, already local due to the skirmishes with the damned British around the town was first to arrive. Baron Klein came next – driving one of his cursed steam-driven things, which frightened horses and men alike. Then the magikal fraternity sneaked in, under clouds of brimstone and not without a few thunder-flashes.

17 “Show-offs,” Acer remarked as first the dandy Absolom Stark followed by the diminutive gentleman, Mr Daark made their theatrical entrances.

As was traditional in such occasions, the Meet was presided over by a hostess of some renown. A lady in waiting who was there to feed the group, make what notes that were deemed necessary, pass on relevant information to named individuals and if the mood took them, be bedded by one or more of the gentlemen. On this occasion, it was the bounteous Lady Una who served them. She who had been a fabled 16th Century courtesan in the Court of the Faerie Queene; Elizabeth I. Una still looked delectable even in her third century of extended life, but was a woman of some comfortable size these days, rather than the skinny wench she used to be.

By the time Leibowitz ‘barrelled in’, she had already served pots of tea and a late breakfast of devilled kidneys, gridled eggs with rashers of rather salty streaked bacon. So she was not best pleased to have to put more eggs on for the latecomer. He passed on the meat, as one would expect.

“Always one for making an entrance!” Baron Klein grinned, shaking the burly man’s rough hand firmly.

“That infernal machine parked down the side of the building is yours, I presume, Leopold? And you poke fun at me for making an entrance!”

Acer Via kissed the heavily bearded gentleman lightly on both cheeks, as was his continental way. “Time keeping never was your forte, was it Mordecai?”

“I make do. If the sun is approximately in its right place in the heavens I know the hour. The exact day can take care of itself. Ah, Absalom… it’s been a goodly while.”

“Indeed it has, Rabbi. Indeed it has.” The Mage and the Adventurer exchanged stiff handshakes.

“Please, let us abandon titles for the length of this Meet. I would no sooner call thee, Sorcerer, or Wizard to your face. I leave my religion on the peg with my hat and coat until it is time to leave.”

Sat in a dimly lit corner, Daark was true to his name. Bundled in an overcoat he wore one of his leather respiratory masks under his top hat, his eyes concealed behind dark goggles. Although not truly one of the Night People, he often exhibited some of

18 their afflictions when out in daylight. Something to do with the power he coveted from the darker denizens of the world.

“Forgive me for not greeting you appropriately, Mordecai. I am a touch under the weather at the moment,” said the man, nasally.

“Those that deal in death and pestilence, carry it around them like a cloak,” muttered Acer Via, just in earshot. Daark’s head twisted at an odd angle and the twin round lenses in his mask stared at the opinionated gentleman for an uncomfortable length of time. Finally, he looked away again, but a chill had swept through the room at that moment which took a while to clear.

“Gentlemen, gentleman!” the Lady Una made a timely interruption, which was why she was mistress of ceremonies. “Shall we settle down and begin whilst Mr Leibowitz finishes his eggs?”

There was a murmur of consensus and the men pulled up chairs around the smouldering fire even though it was a bright July day. In the road outside, they could hear the muffled cries of street vendors and the clatter of hooves and metal-trimmed wheels on the cobbled stones. Also, from inside the Print Shop came the regular rumble of the heavy rollers moving backwards and forwards over the flatbed presses.

“We are suitably guarded, I take?” Acer addressed the magikal gentlemen. Both nodded solemnly. “Good. As you know, war between these colonies we find ourselves in and the might of the British Empire still labours on even after a goodly year. And what do our daemonic cousins love more than a little bestiality? A good bloody war!”

“Troopers of a suspicious nature have been reported in both armies,” said Stark.

“Aye. But it’s not so much those renegades that fight in plain sight that are our problem, but the vibrations that reflect in the Underneath!” Klein interjected with a passion.

“We are talking reflections of Otherplace here, gentlemen? Just to clear the conversation?” Lady Una butted in.

It was agreed upon with mutterings and secret signs to ward off the devil. Those pockets of reality that existed just outside our five senses, clinging like carbuncles to the fabric of the world were still a mystery even to those professionals gathered there. Whole kingdoms lost in fog, mysterious islands no longer vibrating with the same resonance as

19 other land masses shown of modern maps, and dark territories accessed by hidden doors hewn from rock, or carved from living trees. When Magik had been banished over eight thousand years before from the Looking-Glass world, all those that crawled, swam and flew via its essence faded away and took refuge, for the most, in these pocket universes.

But now and again, these creatures came a-hunting for the taste of mortal flesh.

Usually drawn by the smell of the carnage on some distant battlefield. This was problem number one that the gathering of special folk hoped to solve. Problem number two probably had far more gravitas with the Meet, as he had been a thorn in their backsides for the longest of times.

“What does the old monster call his little gathering this time?” asked Klein, glancing at his pocket watch. The collector and archaeologist had a great reverence for the new technology, and was more a servant to Time than his rival, Leibowitz.

“Children of the Empire,” replied Stark, scratching at his beard. “I think he is being topical, amusing fuckster that he is!”

“And what freaks ride with him?” Leibowitz joined in, his mouth still full of his breakfast.

“The dog-boy, Jonas Griffin… her imperial joyousness, Shi Chin Chow… that immortal hag, Glinder from the Wicca ranks and an enigma using one of the Keys of the Old Gods, Captain Zechariah Faust,” hissed Daark from his dismal corner.

“A mixed bunch. There will be more prancing like trained ponies behind the scenes – there always are. The old general picks his soldiers from the lost and the forgotten. This Captain Faust warrants a closer look though… I’ll put good money on the fact that he is not from this Earth!” said Stark. “But we need to come to a decision about what to do with Lavender. Death or glory, gentlemen? Do we strike against the childeater now, or allow him to pervert the tract of history yet again?”

“That is a course of action best mulled over,” Acer Via said with a sigh. “As I may be so bold to say – immortals such as Lavender are deuced hard to kill!”

As this seemed like a natural break, and minor discussions began about certain individual daemons that would need putting back in the ground before the week was out, Lady Una stood up and rustled her voluminous skirts into some form of order.

20 “Gentlemen… I’ll take my leave of you now whilst you muse over your first problem. I for one would not like to bare arms against the old general without an excellent Scryer saying my chances for victory were bloody good!” She smiled around the bunch, and rubbed her chubby hands together. “Now, I’ve pheasant’s to be plucking for your lunch, and there’s a mountain of potatoes and veg to clean and chop if someone would like to give me a hand, but first, if any one of you fancies a good tupping, I’m fair in the mood!”

There was a great deal of shuffling of boots and looking anywhere but at each other, until the Rabbi finally rose to his feet, wiping his hands and whiskers on a scrap of paper he’d found piled on a wooden bench behind him. With a nod of agreement, the couple linked arms and proceeded up the stairs.

Baron Klein made his excuses and went out to tinker with his steam-machine.

Acer Via did likewise, probably to scour the riverside taverns for a bit of rough trade.

Liked a strapping sailor did the effeminate immortal. Stark laid out an old parchment he had been trying to translate; something from the High Elfin tribes that used to populate the Amerikas before the Magik went away, and Daark just sat in his corner, twiddling his thumbs.

Sometime before lunch was eventually served, the unholy masked Mage spirited himself away and didn’t return until later the following day.

One amusing interlude caught Lady Una’s bright eye as she ripped the feathers from her plump young game birds, with the appearance of the Printer, one John Dunlap.

Rough brown paper in hand, as the meeting had dispersed, he began to pack the piles of printed Broadsides that Mordecai Leibowitz had been eating his breakfast all over.

“Lord’s sake! Paper is in short enough supply with the British at our doors… who made all this mess?”

Striking a long match down the rough chimney brick to light his clay pipe, the Rabbi kept stum.

“They look mighty important, Printer Dunlap. Who’s the customer?” he had the cheek to ask.

21 “Bunch of toffs and military types meeting down the street. Call themselves, the Continental Congress, if you please! I promised them 500 sheets to announce their doings and I can barely muster up 450… What is this all over them? Egg, is it?”

Leibowitz just shrugged and squinted sideways at one of the damaged papers. The Broadsides announced that on this day, the 4th July 1776, the thirteen United States of America declare independence from the British Government of King George III. Mordecai Leibowitz had just wiped his greasy hands on one of the most important documents in human history, would that he knew it.

“That will lead to trouble!” he muttered, nodding towards the declaration, puffing away at his pipe, noticing that the Printer had spelled ‘Amerika’ wrong, without the Germanic rendition of the word. A mistake the secret world would constantly kick against in its referencing of the future United States.

“Tell me about it! What legality this has I have no idea, but the war is only going to get worse, you mark my words!”

Which it did.

As did the secret war with the hoards of Otherplace and that jackanapes, Mr Lavender, only that battle never did come to any conclusion in Leibowitz the Elder’s lifetime, as no one would step forward to murder the old general. Not this time, or the numerous other haphazard Meets that were gathered together to discuss the Pre-Celtic deity.

The old general was going to be a burr in their backsides for some time yet to come.

22

May 26th 1911 It was the day before the great fire on Coney Island that Anthony Leibowitz first met the unique Justin Cheeks – a freak walking amongst the freak-shows of Dreamland. He liked to think that his presence there on that date was just a coincidence. That the electrical surge that blew out all the lamps in the water boat ride, Hell Gate, which consequently caused a workman to kick over a bucket full of hot pitch, starting the infamous fire, had nothing to do with a man who could generate electricity within his own body.

But then that was the secret world for you – strange and freakishly coincidental.

Barely bloodied in the world of the strange, Leibowitz had left his higher education in Ireland to head for the hidden citadel of one of the most charismatic mystery-men of the world – Mr Why. Taken in on a twelve-month apprenticeship with the man who could pose more questions than he answered, he left the Himalayan retreat after slightly over three years. Still wet behind the ears, he at least knew about the seven deadly sins that could kill him on a daily basis, even if he was never too sure how to tackle them.

Between then and now, he had messed about a bit in Bolivia and Argentina with his immortal friend, Acer Via, then spent a lost year looking for ancient Old God artefacts in the jungles and deserts of Africa. Worked under the Ancient and Perilous Alchemists of Berlin, stealing some of their best party tricks and flirted with death and befriended numerous strange people. So long lost in the wilderness, civilization had finally beckoned Anthony once again.

New York was like a magnet to the young man. It was rich and flavoursome, full of folk from the four-corners of the world. Then there were the pretty girls… Poor Anthony still had a weakness for them, his bold confidence in the face of daemonic warriors melting away at the sight of a seductive smile. Would he ever get over this acute shyness with the opposite sex?

Back in the day, the Lenape Indians called Coney Island, Narrioch, the land without shadows. Even in his black, slightly Edwardian suit, Anthony had enjoyed the

23 beautiful May sunshine, kicking off his socks and shoes and walking along the shoreline as the sea nibbled at his toes, until a rather large shadow had joined him. There were no two people on this Earth of those proportions that he knew of. His father’s old sparing partners had often described Cheeks, so he wasn’t caught out too flat-footed.

“Great day, isn’t it?” intoned the scholar in a clipped English accent, towering over Leibowitz.

“Mr Cheeks… I understood the dusty halls of the British Museum was more your taste. What brings you out to these climes?”

“I get out now and again. Sometimes the books and the artefacts bore even me.

Not often, I might add. Just on the odd occasion.”

He was dressed in a lightweight suit, which even though it must have been tailormade for him, hung off him like a rag might from a scarecrow. Over seven feet in height, Justin Cheeks wore a small pork-pie hat, and sported a red bow tie, which made him appear even more like a cartoon figure, with his lanky stick arms and legs.

“Through my own unique sources, I’ve learned that an old enemy of your father’s has sent someone to ‘sort you out’,” said the giant.

“What?” complained the apprentice curator of the strange, “I haven’t done anything!”

“That, I believe, is the point. A certain old general has sent his new boy, Sam ‘Dynamo’ Dexter to rub you out before you get around to doing anything important.”

“Hey! I do important jobs! I found that Key in Africa, after great personal sacrifice and danger…”

“Then promptly lost it again.”

“There was the Black Mirror shard in Chile… A window to other worlds!”

“You broke that. 77 years bad luck!”

“The London daemon?”

“A fake.”

“Indoctrinated by the ancient and secret Alchemists of Berlin?”

“Unfortunately not fakes, but criminally insane. You stole from them – not the best of career moves. They might yet brew up a World War.” “You don’t think much of me, do you Mr Cheeks.”

24 “Let’s get you passed the end of today first, eh? Then I might try to point you back on the path that your late father so industriously paved.”

So it was all about papa once again. How many times did Anthony have to cringe when one of these secret types called him, Leibowitz the Younger? Times had changed since his father had played the Game. The rules were different and the board populated by players with mean, murderous streaks in them. For gosh-darn sakes, who was this Dynamo character for example?

As the two companions headed back across the boardwalk, aiming to see Dreamland and Colonel Joseph G. Ferari’s Trained Wild Animal Area, a typical Brooklyn thug wandered clumsily behind them. Dressed down in battered boots, faded brown pants, a raggedy khaki jumper and an old flat cap pulled low over his eyes, he had the walk and the physique of a tame gorilla and just screamed the title; enforcer.

Now and again, sparks went off between his fingers as he thought of all the lovely ways he could croak this skinny runt dressed in black, as ordered by the duplicitous Mr Lavender.

“So, what was the wildest idea my papa ever had?” Leibowitz tried to steer the conversation away from him, and how bad his record in marshalling the strange had been since he had left the guiding light of Mr Why. “He and some of the wilder fringe elements of the mystery-men were plotting to break the inter-dimensional barrier and storm the mythical Tower of Babel.”

“Wow,” was all Anthony could get out for a moment, not even certain the Tower actually existed. Then, “Did you know my mother?”

“My friendship with your father skipped the few years he was with her. Before you ask, I don’t even know what her name was, only she died bringing you into this world.”

“Same story with who ever I talk to. It’s as though my mother never existed.” On this world at least, thought Anthony, having formed a few wild guesses of where his poor mother really came from. “Name me one of my papa’s ex-partners that I should avoid at all cost!”

25 Besides Mr Lavender, thought the tall man. “Don’t trust Daark. I feel he has tarried in the blacker corners of the universe far too long. He has absorbed too much of the night and it eats at his sanity.”

Anthony nodded his head, impressed. He’d met Mr Daark on a couple of occasions and thought he was as mad as cheese. So they wandered around the rides and freak shows of Dreamland, seemingly oblivious of their brutish tail, engrossed in fascinating conversation about the apprentice’s late father. Until the day wore on, and as they turned a corner there was the would-be murderer.

“That him?” Anthony whispered to Cheeks as the thug blocked their way.

“Matches my description. You should be carrying at least three magikal things about your person to combat this idiot’s powers.”

Leibowitz went a touch red as he delved into his almost empty pockets. Finally he fished out a couple of used tram tickets, a raven feather and three ball barings.

“Is that it?”

“Pretty much,” Anthony confirmed, ignoring the rather saucy picture of a popular Burlesque star that he’d picked up from a boardwalk hut before meeting Cheeks. So that was when the unlikely pair started to run.

Cheeks, built like a giraffe, had the co-ordination of a drunken stick insect.

Leibowitz, although a little on the short side, had garnered much practice on running away from danger. Although Mr Why had attempted to teach him various fighting arts from around the world, he was a klutz at the best of times, more prone to harming himself than any opponent. So it was the apprentice who had to constantly slow down and tow along the librarian. Always a few short yards behind them, Dynamo stomped on, never loosing his pace, always with that totally blank look on his kisser. The look of murder.

“This isn’t going to end well, is it?” Anthony gasped as they skidded around yet another corner near the lion quarters in Dreamland. But the giant was too exhausted to even answer.

Leibowitz’s hand closed around the contents of his pocket again. A feather, three steel balls, and the tram tickets. Then something from his Tibetan mind-training pushed its way through his naturally stubborn resistance. Shoving Cheeks further on, Anthony crouched behind a low wall and waited for his killer to catch up. Mouth dry, heart beating

26 fit to burst, he rolled the ball barings in one hand as the thug stomped around the corner.

With one flick of the wrist, he launched the first projectile. It rolled between Dynamo’s feet without him even noticing.

Marching ever closer, so did the second. Eyes tight shut, Anthony had a little word with his maker. He and the Lord weren’t on the best of terms since God had seen fit to spirit away his father, but there were times like this that pride was best swallowed and apologies made. Teeth gritted, Leibowitz flicked the third steel ball.

Slipping on the sphere, Dynamo’s feet went from under him like in the best Vaudeville shows. With a bellow like a wounded horse, he crashed to the ground on his back. Like a whippet, Anthony Leibowitz was on him. Stamping down heavily on the thug’s right arm, he managed to wedge it through a metal fence. Then with an insane glint in his eye brought on by abject fear, he pulled the raven’s feather from his jacket.

Dropping on to his knees on the man’s chest, he rammed the feather quill-first up Sam’s left nostril. The thug cried out in pain and surprise, his eyes streaming tears.

“Wot you fink you’re playin’ at, you mad bugger!” screamed the man.

“Retribution from the College of Osiris!” babbled Leibowitz, making it up as he went along. “You dare face an agent of the secret and most holy tabernacle alone?”

“Load a rubbish! You shouldn’t have touched me, you little weasel… now you’re going to fry!” A rather nasty look crept over Dynamo’s countenance, and he screwed up his face as if he were about to break wind.

Leaping off the idiot, Leibowitz hugged himself with glee as the man’s electrical power surged straight into the metal fence and was earthed away into the ground.

Dynamo spluttered and popped for a good two minutes, the thug’s evil look morphing to one of complete panic, as once started, his power could not be turned off. Finally, drained of all juice, he lay there totally spent.

“Now,” roared Leibowitz, brandishing a used tram ticket in each hand. “I invoke the sacred scriptures of Osiris and the gods of the Lower Nile! Bring forth your monsters to rend this man limb from limb!”

Dynamo scrambled to his feet, scooping up his cap and backing away.

“You’re balmy, you are! Ruddy nutty as a fruitcake! My boss’ll have your balls for cufflinks, you just see!” With that, the thug ran for his life.

27 Looming back out of the afternoon shadows, Cheeks patted Leibowitz the Younger on one shoulder.

“Insane, inventive, but a ruse your father would have been proud of, I’m sure.

Now, as Mordecai accumulated one of the largest private collections of arcane paraphernalia in the world, why haven’t you armed yourself against such attacks rather than using pure theatre?”

Leibwitz let out a sigh of released tension and pocketed the tickets again. “He kept all his prized totems in the House… You know, the House. I’ve bad memories of staying there when I was small, so I’ve never been back since papa disappeared.”

“But you must… you have to! The next enforcer Lavender sends after you might not be so stupid! Although I imagine that feather up his nose must have really hurt! I see you father’s eternal anger resting inside you… a little better disguised beneath the tomfoolery, but it’s there.”

“Anger? I never remembered that side of him,” Leibowitz sighed again, his legs suddenly turning to jelly as he sat on a wooden bench with a thump. “Then I sense I knew so little about the real man. So we have to go back to the House… Trouble is, for a thing made of bricks and mortar, it has a rather free spirit.”

“Sorry?”

“Didn’t you realise?” Anthony grinned, pleased that Mr Cheeks didn’t know absolutely everything. “The cursed place moves. Papa’s House is a transient building… it could be anywhere in the world!”

As stray sparks still fired off in the bushes, dangerously close to the new electricity cables that criss-crossed Dreamland, the two made plans on how to snare a building that didn’t want to be found. *** The enigmatic scholar Justin Cheeks became a great aid to Leibowitz the Younger, as he had to Anthony’s father for decades before. Under the tall man’s advice, the apprentice eventually returned to the citadel of Mr Why, and this time he listened to the mystery-

28 man’s advice. The day after the events on Coney Island, Anthony began to load his pockets with mystical items; oddest amongst them being his Kensington white mice.

So he became widely known as the lunatic who kept livestock about his person.

29

Sometime 1997 The vast, grey nothingness of the Betwixt and the Between reached in all directions, for ever and ever. This was what the Mariners of this waste called the spaces between worlds. The gaps that existed between Parallel and Alternate universes, creating the pandimensional lattice structure that was the Multiverse.

It was a lonely place to die.

So the odds of finding a small lifeboat in this endless neutral space were next to impossible, so the Snark thought at any rate.

He stood on the Bridge of the Dreadnaught class ship, Heracles, resplendent in his neo-Nazi uniform; peaked cap pulled just low to hide those lying eyes, at least for the women. For the Snark, handsome devil that he was, was a gigolo through and through. A lover not a fighter, but with that omni-present bangle he wore on his right wrist, all silver and golden cogs and wires set in a transparent crystal band, in the best Steampunk tradition, he was bound to be overconfident. For this was the device that allowed him to travel between worlds in his rank within the Forces of Babel, as an executive agent called a Blitzer.

It was the bracelet that picked up the weak distress signal, of course. On a vast ironclad Dreadnaught crewed by two and a half thousand souls, crammed with all the purloined and reverse-engineered marvels gathered from a dimension-spanning empire of over one hundred and eighty versions of Earth, his bangle was the most sophisticated thing arcane-science had ever achieved. Some said it was a gift from the Old Gods, showing their faith in the ever-expanding legions of Babel. Others whispered that each bracelet was crafted beneath the roots of the World Tree, Yggdrasil by a long-bearded dwarf who was imprisoned there.

There was possibly a grain of truth in both fantastic tale. “Commander Rorschach‌ Train your sensors forward to 10 degrees starboard, 53 degrees heavenwise. Then tell me what you see,â€? the Snark spoke into the ships intercom, using the minimum amount of energy as usual.

30 “Distress beacon, sir. Very low on power… you were lucky to hear it!” eventually came the reply.

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” smiled the super-confident soldier. On his home world where the 3rd Reich still continued its thousand-year rule, the Snark’s over-inflated ego was legend.

With a slowness that irked the Blitzer, the vast ironclad reduced its pace, steam venting from its six funnels, emergency sirens wailed out and Jack Tars in their red and white striped jumpers ran hither and thither. Meanwhile, the Snark filed a snag on one of his fingernails.

After what seemed like an eternity, a faint flashing light could be seen off the starboard bow. This slowly expanded to reveal a small white escape pod with all the usual bells and whistles on it. Standard fare for 90% of the craft that scoured the Betwixt and the Between. The Snark watched with some mild interest as the pod was hauled onboard via tractorbeam and placed gently on one of the Wasp attack-drone launch bay hatches. Only then did he slowly descend the iron spiral staircases to walk out onto deck seventeen, one arm poised behind his back, uniform crisp and starched, shiny boots clicking on the metal deck.

The bracelet clicked and hummed as it evaluated the escape pod.

“Two occupants, not in such a bad shape. I hope they have an interesting tale to tell!”

Mentally attuned to his bangle since fascist bastard science-academy, he cajoled it into unsealing the pod. With a hiss and a clank of unlocking bolts, the thing split in half like a white Faberge Egg. Two grimy, slightly frightened white faces stared back at the Snark.

“Welcome aboard the Forces of Babel Dreadnaught, Heracles,” smiled the Snark, extending one gloved hand to help the curvaceous young blonde female out first. “You are perfectly safe now, I have saved you. And you are…?”

The woman looked back at the skinny man, who was all big ears and tight curly black hair. “Bonny Tyler, late of the Skimmer, Oz For Ever. This here’s my crewmate, Rod Stewart,” chirped the brassy blonde with a definite Australian accent. “Any grog going, Adolf? I’m as dry as a witches tit!”

31 Anthony Leibowitz, wondering where the hell the name Rod Stewart had presented itself to his partner’s chaotic mind, reached up as several Jack Tars helped him out of the pod. The capsule that both him and Miss Opal had thought was going to be their coffin – adrift for an eternity in the grey nothingness. It was important that these Forces of Babel lackeys didn’t know who they were… who he was. Over a century before, his illustrious father, Mordecai Leibowitz had been declared an enemy of the Dark Tower. Anthony had been criminalized in 1931 after a particularly messy expedition to Earth 53.

He smiled grimly at the Blitzer who was fawning over Opal, hoping she could distract the man long enough for them to steal a Wasp and get the hell off this boat. But of cause, being who he was, the Snark wished to host a banquet in their honour.

“Bugger,” the curator of the strange muttered underneath his breath. *** The chain of events that had left them stranded in the middle of nowhere was a complex beast full of greed, hilarity, betrayal and a golden fish. Suffice it to say, what began as a twenty-four hour dip into the fabric of stuff outside their own Looking-Glass Earth had ended up in them being dumped overboard from the Parisian Air-Trawler, Golden Bullet to die in the loneliness of the nothing.

Well he had been warned not to trust a member of the British aristocracy. Lord Cain Mephisto may have been the Member of Parliament for Methuselah Square and London West, but he was still a daemon wearing a human disguise underneath it all.

Deceit was in the man’s blood.

Many months ago, so long now that Anthony had forgotten what life had been like living in solitude, a rather vindictive Mage had left Miss Opal in Leibowitz’s charge.

Although still regarded as an apprentice in training, she was already a reputable sorceress in her own right. Her master and husband just happened to be the one-eyed sorcerersupreme, Absalom Stark.

Husband. That was right. Wife to Absalom Stark.

32 Leibowitz had to remind himself of that little fact at least a hundred times a day.

That curvy, youthful figure, smooth creamy skin, the blonde bunches like some naughty schoolgirl and the rude eyes and even ruder mouth that made her Australia’s best export, ever. That was his punishment in the eye of the Mage, to look after temptation. And he had been doing so damn well too… until they were marooned, probably left to die two weeks before. After the first day of assessing the grim situation, they had hardly kept their clothes on for more than five minutes.

Such amazing antics! Opal had taught Anthony things about sex that he hardly thought possible, or at least legal. And now they had been rescued, her husband was going to track him down like the dog he was and slaughter him. No, not just kill him; spread his entrails out across seven dimensions whilst he was still alive.

“Bugger,” he repeated to himself as he and Opal showered together before the meal being held in their honour.

“You’re worried about Absalom, aren’t you?” she asked softly as she soaped his back.

“Too right I bloody well am! If I can just make it to the House – wherever the damn place had wandered off to now – I might be able to access a Door out of this dimension. Set up shop on the Moon or something. I am so dead!”

“Just stop your winging and concentrate on the immediate problem,” she muttered in his ear. “That’s the Snark out there; big high-up tosser in Babel’s box of toy soldiers. I may have to bed the bugger to keep him occupied, but you’ve got to plan us a way off this ruddy Dreadnaught. We’ll sort out some lies to tell my hubby later – if we get out of this frying pan!”

“Frying pan… Fire. I see what you did there. Clever.”

So, squeaky-clean and dressed in borrowed best clothes, the two castaways nervously made their way to the officers’ stateroom where a meal was being laid out in their honour. The Snark and his fellow Babel officers greeted them like old friends, ushered them to their seats and poured them some wine. It was as the alcohol warmed his belly and he began to relax (which was what the Snark obviously hoped for), that Leibowitz began to take note of his surroundings.

33 In the vast oak panelled stateroom, recalling ancient sea-faring vessels of old, was a shelf running right around the room just above head height. Inside numerous glass cases were handcrafted models of various classes of Warp Ships that had trawled between Realities via the great grey nothing. From fantastical Victorian designs, sporting great triangular light-sails through the nuclear steam-powered war ships, and even further back to odd shaped rocket ships propelled from vast iron cannons. But there was just one vessel that immediately caught Anthony’s eye.

In his long and chequered past, Leibowitz’s papa had owned three Inter-Reality ships. First had been the cylindrical cannon-launched Perilous, which had been lost in the Everglades outside an alternative New York on Earth 12 in 1802. Mordecai had then commissioned an elegant Skiff with three tri-sails from future technology stolen from Babel. She was called the Black Widow, and took the master of the strange on many a fine adventure. The Forces of Babel eventually scuttled her in 1840 around the Caul of Dead Earth 7. Not all versions of the little blue planet supported life. Some were just sterile lumps of rock, but could be often found to contain artefacts stored there by the Old Gods – a great attraction for a tomb raider such as Mordecai Leibowitz.

Finally came the third ship his papa owned. A beautiful vessel created with artistic flair by a genius of his time – the great, the cantankerous, Lorenzo Marvelo, inventor and madman in equal parts. The ship sat back on a great wooden keel, ion paddles extended like some great barge of a distant age, and light-sails full set and true. A great prow reached out into the void like a finger pointing to adventure, carved with a figurehead of a voluptuous mermaid like all sea-faring vessels had once had. She made craft such as the Dreadnaught they were currently travelling in appear as ugly, clumsy tin cans.

Launched in 1871, her name was the Rachael Grey and Anthony had been trying to find out the Warp Ship’s final fate for the longest of times. Somehow it was an integral part of the mystery that still surrounded his father’s disappearance.

For Anthony Leibowitz, it would have been a natural thing to lift the model down from the shelf and ask questions about it. But here he was, pretending to be a sportsman lost between realities from a beached Skimmer, named Rod Stewart. To attract attention to the Rachael Grey would attract unwanted curiosity about him and Miss Opal.

34 The whole thing was a bit of a pickle.

Food came and went and the wine flowed. The Snark was a charming host, explaining the current humanitarian policies of Herr Hitler’s daughter, Eva, who was still Chancellor of the whole world back in his Teutonic home of Earth. The sins of the fathers had been forgiven as Nazi Germany liberated the entire planet. Or rather history was rewritten and the genocide camps and the racial cleansing quietly swept under the carpet.

Dumping most of his wine in a large aspidistra plant behind him, as the party grew a little raucous and Opal did her job of distracting the Blitzer, Anthony eventually slipped away in search of a method of escape. It didn’t take him long. Dreadnaught’s were the void’s equivalent of aircraft carriers. In neat black and yellow rows beneath deck 6 were row upon row of natty Wasps, fighter ships that could be launched in swarms, much as their namesake. Tachyon nets like gossamer wings folder back across each garish metal body.

Just as he was about to mount the steps embedded in one of the Wasp’s hulls, a familiar laconic voice stopped him in his tracks.

“I’d leave that one, Herr Leibowitz, if I were you. It has little time-charge left and no armaments.”

The Snark stood with one arm firmly around Miss Opal’s waist. The Wicca of Oz looked a little out of it, either due to too much wine or a little touch of the mind-washing, as from the bangle on the Blitzer’s right wrist, wisps of golden energy like smoke made pretty patterns in the air.

“Game over, I think,” the neo-Nazi smiled. “I mean, even my world has its version of Rod Stewart!”

“At least you didn’t ask me to sing my greatest hits,” Leibowitz sighed, raising his hands in the air.

“What do you think you are doing? We’ve no time for party tricks, Anthony!”

Leibowitz looked totally thrown. “Say what?”

“Third Wasp on your right. She’s primed and ready to go. There will be a twentyfive second window as the Heracles’s defence grid has to be mysteriously rebooted in which you can launch the fighter, then after that you will be, what is the correct phrase?

35 Ah, yes – chopped liver.” With a tender kiss to a surprised Miss Opal, the Blitzer propelled her back into Leibowitz’s arms.

“You’re letting us escape, even though you know our true identities. Why?” “You’ve helped agents from Babel in the past… Saved people who should have been taken as prisoners of a cold war that has been waged on your version of Earth for longer than you realise. Our present ambassador there is called Jack Wilder, a Blitzer too by his rank. He’s a troubled man, that’s all I will say on the subject. We don’t get on.”

“He’s an arse!” Opal interrupted.

“That too. Most of us blessed with these semi-sentient bands are. It comes with the territory. But take this warning with you, Herr Leibowitz. Your Earth is being assessed for colonisation in the next decade. The Forces of Babel are looking to expand into your zone of the Lattice of worlds. Warn your friends. Sound the alarm. When the clone armies begin to drop through cracks in the sky, the devastation could be catastrophic.”

“I thought you put that super-weapon on your wrist in the service of Babel?”

“I did. But I don’t have to approve of Babel’s methods. I’ve seen what a dictatorship does to people on my own Earth. When angered, Babel’s methods can be even more ruthless and cruel. Your father described our clone-legions as, a Plague from Hell. He wasn’t far from the truth.”

Leibowitz turned and helped Miss Opal clamber up into the Wasp’s cockpit, then hesitated for a second. “Is it true about the Dark Tower? A living structure so enormous that it pierces its Earth’s atmosphere?”

“All legend’s have a grain of truth in them, Anthony,” the Snark gave that sarcastic smile again and Leibowitz knew that that was all he was going to get out of the man on that subject. As Anthony clambered up after his friend, he noticed the Blitzer hand Opal something from the other side of the cockpit. A rather large something, but he let his curiosity keep – for now.

The castaways sat in silence in the gloom of the Wasp factory, waiting for the word, the last few weeks a tangle inside both of their heads. <Now,> came the telepathic okay.

36 Leibowitz pressed the red launch button, and they were away into the grey, as simple as that.

“So, what’s in the parcel?” Leibowitz asked a hectic half an hour later as they locked on to their home Earth and let the autopilot take them home. “A talking bomb? A Babel intelligent virus? Don’t tell me the Snark just screwed us over after all we’ve been through!”

“Oh.” Opal suddenly remembered the parting gift the Blitzer had given them, wrapped in a cloth. Pulling the material free, she revealed it was the model of the Rachael Grey that Anthony had been admiring. “He said he thought you might like this. Strange guy.”

“Very. You didn’t… with him to get us free, did you?”

“No! Not quite, anyhow. He’d already sussed who we really were. Digital wanted posters or something between every Blitzer.”

Up ahead, the dull orange corona glow of an approaching Caul broke the grey nothingness. They were nearly home, so now all they had to do was work out how to land this damn Babel ship after penetrating the skin between nothing and Reality again. Then there was one other thing…

“So, are we coming clean to Stark about what we were doing with each other in that survival pod?”

Miss Opal, tying her hair back into her trademarked bunches once again, shrugged her shoulders. “Get real, Ant! The last few weeks never happened. I’ve already spun a fake memory charm over us both that not even my suspicious bloody husband can crack.

We go back to how we were before we took that fool trip outside our own Reality!”

“But it did happen, Opal. You told me… I told you… and I thought all that was for real!”

“Shows what a gullible bugger you are then. We were going to die. People say all kinds of shite when the Grim Reaper is sat there sharpening his scythe. I don’t love you. I never loved you. As you have been supposedly rounding off my education into the worlds of the strange, consider that a repayment via the art of fornication. It was fun – leave it at that. Strewth, but didn’t I use all that rampant unused sexual energy you had to fuel my tantric spells and up the Luck Factor of us being found!”

37 Leibowitz stared at her, open-mouthed. “So, the more we… The more you tapped our energies to boost the distress call?”

“That’s about the truth of it,” she said, giving him a raised eyebrow and that lopsided smile of hers.

“Bugger,” replied Leibowitz, third time definitely not being the charm. “Well. I can’t work with you the same after what we’ve been through. You’ll have to pack up and head back to your husband.”

“Kay,” was all he got out of her as they headed into Reality re-entry. *** They landed the Wasp on the dark side of the world, on the wild wind-driven wastes of Dartmoor in England. Against the star-studded sky, Leibowitz’s House leaned against the wind in silhouette, waiting like a faithful dog, so he realised they were home. That this was their version of the millions of Earths drifting through the Lattice of the Multiverse.

The building must have sensed his return and had shifted its location to meet him.

“There you go,” Opal handed Leibowitz the model of the Rachael Grey in its glass case. Almost as an after thought, she gave him a sisterly peck on the cheek.

“So this really is it between us?” he said, trying to stop his voice from quavering.

“Come on, mate. You and me? There was never any future for that combination. I know my bloody husband is a complete horn-dog and he’s probably either shacked-up with a Voodoo-Child in Bon Temp, or an exotic Aborigine priestess in Sydney – that’s who he is. Two thousand years old and still trying to father a supernatural kid.”

“But why put up with that? We’ve done things… We’ve done great things…”

She placed one finger on his lips to shut him up.

“Absalom would stick your head up your arse and use you as a bowling ball. It’s fine for him to fool around, but I am his wife. His property. I took a lot of vows when he agreed to teach me the ways of Wild Magik. Being his was just part of the small print.

Sorry, Ant. You really are a bonza guy, but not with me.”

38 Before he could embarrass himself even further, Miss Opal rose into the night air and was gone on the wind. Witches of her calibre had abandoned broomsticks long ago and just got on with the sport of flying freestyle.

Clutching the glass case, Leibowitz stared at the legless, blunt-nosed Wasp fighter suspended three feet off the heather, wondering what he was going to do with it. The Warp Ship solved the problem for him by suddenly zipping vertically into the sky until it was gone in a flash of exotic energies; probably returning on the Snark’s instructions.

The House kind of sighed, reflecting Anthony’s melancholia. For a moment he thought of cheese on toast, a nice cup of tea and a warm coal fire in familiar surroundings – a little telepathic suggestion from the mobile building. Well, he’d had worse endings to a busy day. So he hardened his bruised and battered heart, clutched the model of his late father’s last Warp Ship all the closer and tramped across the moor towards home.

But when he thought back, that little trick Opal had taught him with the ice cubes, the rope and the blindfold… the trip hadn’t been a complete bust after all. Maybe next time he’d fall in love with someone who wasn’t a witch or who had a psychopathic immortal warlock for a lover. And those pigs were still taking flying lessons around Tesco’s, despite the astronomical odds.

39

May 3rd 1915 Along the Florida shore walked the two unlikely companions, both sporting long coats and dark hats, as it was a winter sun that shone weakly down on the stretch of manmade beach near Biscayne Bay, with the wind from the ocean turning chilly as November drew to a close.

“We shouldn’t be here,” the taller of the two intoned.

He had a thick Yorkshire accent and was getting more than a little fed up of having to beguile himself in the company of these damn Yanks. Yory Arbuthnot Keighley had the look of a man in his early twenties, yet he had been born on the 1st January 1871. Tall, with a thickset face, his skin was slightly pockmarked as a result of a severe childhood case of chickenpox.

Yory’s gran (‘mad as a box o’ wasps’, as her grandson often described her), who had brought up the eleven-strong Keighley clan herself, what with her daughter being sickly most of her short life, had nearly tanned the skin off his backside when he wouldn’t stop scratching those ruddy spots.

Keighley’s dirty blonde hair was short, in current military style and greased back to appear almost translucent. But it was how the ex-Lion had always worn it, since the old Queen’s days. He moved slower than the passing years, a man stuck in his ways.

“Yorkshire born, Yorkshire bred. Strong in t’arm and thick in t’head!” He had first quoted the ancient insult when the two firm friends had first met just before the turn of the century. No one could say that little ditty, only Keighley himself. Anyone else tried to poke fun at his birthright and they’d end up flat on their backs nursing a bloodied nose.

Anthony Leibowitz, on the other hand, was a different kettle of fish. The paranormal detective (as he was selling himself in popular society these days) had in his youth followed the teachings of an orthodox Jew. When your father’s a Rabbi, you have little choice. But even the venerable Mordecai Leibowitz (or Leibowitz the Elder as the secret history of the world now annoyingly knew him), had slipped from the faith in his

40 later years, vanishing from this Earth under strange circumstances around his only child’s 17th birthday.

Unlike his friend’s rugged handsome face, Leibowitz had a cluster of uneven features, seemingly at war with each other.

“What have you got that I haven’t?” he had once asked Keighley, after another unsuccessful liaison with an eligible young lady.

“Well, I ain’t got two ears like open handsome cab doors, a nose like an eagle’s beak and a boxy high forehead! That do for starters?” the rather cruel reply had come.

The paranormal detective never asked that question again.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Keighley repeated.

“I heard you the first time. You see all this,” Leibowitz gestured to the artificial coastline the two of them were tramping down. “A few years ago it was part of the Everglades. They are reclaiming land at the rate of ten square miles every year! Just think what this place will look like by the 1950s!”

“That, my friend, is t’stuff of fiction. Like I just said, we shouldn’t be here. There is a bloody war on in Europe and these Yanks don’t seem to give a stuff!”

“Ah they will...” the curator of the strange shielded his eyes and looked at the building going on a few miles in land. “The New World is changing fast. Don’t despair, Yory, the Great War isn’t going to end without you!”

He turned and began to scuff his shoes along the wet shoreline. Keighley lingered a while, thinking over old pals lost in the trenches and the regiment he’d left behind to come gallivanting across the Atlantic with his friend. Then the cause had been a rather exciting one.

“Those harpies... Were they real?” the soldier finally asked.

“You’re getting a taste for the exotic, aren’t you my friend? They were as real as the phantom platoon we met in Ypres and that bat-man creature who was plaguing Gotham last year.”

Leibowitz suddenly bent down and plucked something from the sand. Between thumb and forefinger, he held a perfectly crafted sphere of some greyish metal.

“Still got that diamond the Princess of Denmark gave you for saving her life?’

41 Keighley fished inside his waistcoat pocket and produced a beautifully cut gem.

“Me lucky stone. Got us through the Somme that did!” He passed it curiously over to Leibowitz.

Running the diamond across the surface of the metal ball barring, a small cloud of dust scattered in the sea breeze. Holding both diamond and sphere up to the light, the metal was untouched, but the gemstone had a slightly flat side to it.

“Oy!” declared the soldier. “That’s me pension, that is!”

“Well you’ve just lost a few shillings, sorry. I’ll pay you when you cash that bauble in. The workers on this project have been turning up handfuls of these spheres as they sink their foundations into the swamplands. No two the same size – and they’re harder than diamonds! Think of it – a prehistoric metal that cannot be analysed and is super-strong. The Imperial Alchemists of Berlin found a metal that fits this description referred to in the 9th century. They called it, Impervium. Those ancient scientists also worked out how to shape and forge it using extreme cold combined with certain musical notes!”

Keighley scowled at the damaged gemstone. “I should kick you up t’arse for this!’

“You haven’t listened to a word I was saying, you Neanderthal! What wonders lie buried beneath our very feet? People consider Amerika to have little if any history, but I say, there’s a mystery around every corner! A wonder under every stone!” grinned Leibowitz.

“That’s cause thee talk a load of shite most of the time and I’m the only one thickskinned enough to listen!”

So the endless bantering went on as the two mismatched figures walked along the artificial shoreline, holding their hats in place against the ocean breeze. It would be still going on well into the next century, when Anthony Leibowitz decided to live in Amerika full time and the mysteries beneath his feet had long since ceased to just whisper and had risen out of their shallow graves to shout at him full in the face.

But being the curator of the strange, he somehow found the courage to holler right back at them. Then the instincts of fight or flight would usually kick in.

If Keighley were by his side, it would always be the former. If Anthony was alone, it was usually time to toss a coin. His father’s son in the understanding of how the

42 world of the strange worked, Anthony Leibowitz had what he referred to as, ‘subjective courage’. He either talked his way out of a nasty situation or he ran like hell in the opposite direction. *** He was still running until that fateful day in January 1998, when Kismet and the indomitable Mr Black both caught up with him at the same time. When the natural doors of the Multiverse that link all versions of Earth had been flung wide open – all the way down to the mythical Dark Tower of Babel.

Such is the future for the Amerikan Dreams and those forgotten souls brave enough to walk bare-footed through them. Tangled tales and stolen wishes. Children’s laughter and witch’s tears.

Not forgetting the Butterflies. Delicate wings in motion, made from tissue and lies from the moment they emerge from the pupae like a scrap of space-time given life.

Confounding and confusing all in their brief, spectacular four-coloured existence. Never ignore the Butterflies. Just what are they up to?

Paranoia and ecstasy. This in the price we all pay to sit and watch the freak show in the warm, moist darkness, as the Dreams unfold, one at a time.

Enjoy.

43

Notes from the author.

The various inhabitants of the Looking-Glass Earth and indeed that eclectic planet where anything is possible, first came into being over a decade ago. Abortive early novels about this world caused even my poor brain to hurt and were shelved. Finally, one massive tome was completed – far too large to interest any mainstream publishers written by an unknown author. So that too went back in the drawer.

But the stories kept on coming.

Sorter, sharper (no pun intended) and better crafted, the tales began to mount up.

At the heart of most of them was a character named, Anthony Leibowitz, a self-styled curator of the strange, the ultimate collector and guardian of the Looking-Glass Earth’s arcane and future-science totems. He was cunning, an expert liar, painfully shy with the ladies and talked his way out of a potentially lethal situation rather than resorting to violence. Plus he kept wildlife in his pockets.

Anthony’s back-story was simple. His father, when tomb raiding had been the sport of gentlemen in the 18th and 19th Centuries, had accumulated a vast collection of the strange and the wonderful. Days before his son’s seventeenth birthday, the Rabbi Mordecai Leibowitz mysteriously vanished. The tales that followed constantly held up Anthony in comparison with his infamous papa. The son living forever in the shadow of the father.

But as these stories unfurled and the ever-expanding cast began to tell their own adventures, I became as intrigued by Mordecai as I was with his son.

For a religious man, the Rabbi was constantly in trouble, which often resolved in fisticuffs. Unlike his son, he was a ladies man, and had many turbulent relationships with feisty divas. Plus, in some of the legends about Mordecai, he was not averse to playing the villain of the piece.

I was hooked. American Dreams grew to over 20 tales, and its sequel, Amerikan Nightmares is now at a further 10 stories. I felt they needed one publisher to release these

44 self-contained, but interwoven sagas in some cohesive form, along with a reworking of that massive novel still sat in my draw – as that too is a vital part of the Liebowitz story.

Then Amazon produced Kindle and the means to sell short stories and, bingo! I suddenly had that sympathetic publisher with design and print skills to put the on-going legend out there in a format I was satisfied with – Me. So here is Part #0: Whisperings. A low-priced primer to introduce father and son and the world they inhabit, that used to be just like ours until it fell through the LookingGlass. Hopefully you’ll be tempted to buy the next few tales from Amerikan Dreams.

1. The Red Museum of Christopher Vespucci.

2. Bleeding Out or Escape From Island X! 3. The Guns of Avalon.

If these garner interest, there will be more to follow. Let me know what you think of the show so far. You can contact me at – avalonrjs@gmail.com.

Sweet Dreams!

Rob Sharp.