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Post By The Hooded Hood Sun Nov 07, 2004 at 03:09:17 pm EST |
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Follies of Youth #23: Flapjack’s Folly | |
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Follies of Youth #23: Flapjack’s Folly Flapjack was having a bad day. The Lair Mansion was full of sixteen-year old women, some of them in heaving bodices, and he wasn’t allowed to molest any of them. He had a nasty feeling that any molest against these particular sixteen-year old women might be his last. But generations of genetics were working against him. He tried to just get on with his chores. The stunulators needed retuning and the alien zoo needed mucking out and the fire extinguishers needed refilling and the monitor cameras in the female gym locker room needed demisting and the slime-tray under the Shoggoth’s quarters needed emptying. He hadn’t yet convinced Sir Mumphrey to invest in a crocodile pit under a tilting floor but he lived in hope. He felt the leader of the Lair Legion was coming round. But even these pleasurable tasks couldn’t help the hunchback get his mind off the heaving maidenly bosoms that were milling around downstairs. He felt a huge urge to grab some innocent flower and climb a belfry. It was practically a family tradition. “A Flapjack gives satisfaction whatsoever the duty,” he repeated to himself, quoting what he’d learned at his great uncle Mortimer’s knee. “It is never enough to lurch. One must become the lurch.” Flapjack worked hard at being a disgusting hunchbacked manservant. It’s not as easy as it looks. There was a bit of a furore downstairs as Lisa summoned the interdimensional imp Eddie who was responsible for the Follies of Youth crisis and the teen Legionnaires present were swept away to some other dimension. Flapjack reacted by dusting the silverware and cutting new eyeholes in the paintings on the main landing. A little while later there was some kind of row when Asil and Hallie forbade the Junior Lair Legion to go looking for the missing teens. Flapjack contributed by waxing the banisters and feeding the spiders making cobwebs in the eaves. His daily routine took him along the first floor corridor (“second floor corridor” he corrected himself, remembering he was a long way from Latvia now) where the Lair Legion’s personal quarters were. He guessed that after the activities of last night with a bunch of pubescent teens padding from room to room he was going to need to change some sheets. Then he heard the noise, a little faint whimper from behind one of the doors. He checked at Nats and Uhuna’s room, but the twanging noises had stopped about midnight when the bed had collapsed, and the other sounds had gradually faded away over the next few hours. Flapjack presumed the young couple were either dead or blissfully unconscious now. The sound wasn’t from them. He lurked along the corridor, listening at doors with a practised ease. The sound came again, muffled, terrified, from inside Goldeneyed’s old room. Ever since Bry Katz had taken a leave of absence from the Legion after his controversial stint as Deputy-Leader, G-Eyed’s lodgings had been sealed until his return. Nobody was supposed to be in there. Flapjack thought of sounding a security alert, but really who was going to come? The Lair Legion were all teens now, and the Juniors were all teens anyway. So the hunchbacked major-domo pulled his much-confiscated passkey and slipped inside. The room was dark. The curtains were closed and it had that musty, unlived-in smell. The whimpering stopped abruptly, but not before Flapjack heard a sharp terrified intake of breath from the en-suite bathroom. “Hey,” he called out. “Is someone in there? Do you need a loofah?” There was no reply, so the hunchback selected a sturdy mop from his cart and used it to push the bathroom door wide. He reached in and flicked on the light. The girl screamed. “Hey, no, it’s okay!” Flapjack assured her. “It’s just socks, is all. Not natural. No need to be intimidated.” She screamed more and scrabbled away from him backwards on hands and heels until she was pressed into the corner of the shower cubicle. “You’re really scared,” Flapjack realised. “Okay, look, I’m putting down the mop. I’m stepping away from the cleaning implement.” The sixteen year old watched him warily, her eyes wide, her hands clutched to her pinafore dress, her long skirts in disarray about her. Her ribbons had come undone and curly chestnut hair sprawled around her shoulders. “I thought pretty much all the teen-Legion has been accounted for by now,” Flapjack puzzled. “Please don’t tell me you’re Messenger.” “W-where am I?” the girl stammered. “What do you want with me?” Flapjack began to mentally compile a list, but he felt it might be best to edit it for later. “You’re safe,” he assured her. “No, really. You’re in the Lair Mansion.” “Where?” She looked around her in horror, staring in disbelief at the fluorescent ring on the ceiling. “Why did you bring me here?” “I didn’t,” Flapjack assured her. “I wish I had, but I didn’t. I was just emptying the bins, and there you were.” She studied him more carefully. “You are a servant of this house?” “A servant? Little darling, I’m the servant. They call me Flapjack.” He smirked a little. “Or big boy, when they know me better.” “F-Flapjack,” the girl repeated. “What is to become of me?” “I dunno,” the LL’s major domo admitted, “but you might want to get out of the shower.” He leered forward confidentially. “They do say that shower’s haunted.” The girl gave a little squeak and hopped past him out of the cubicle. But Flapjack had gone pale. “Aw no…” “What?” swallowed the girl, eyeing him warily and trying to manoeuvre towards the door. “Your name,” Flapjack asked. “It wouldn’t be Marie, would it? Marie Murcheson?” The girl backed away, flushing. “So you do know who I am!” she hissed. “Well I will not just submit to your vile desires, you wicked brute!” “I should hope not,” Flapjack assured her. “That’s not fun at all. But really, my vile desires have nothing to do with this. I didn’t bring you here but I do know how you got to this place.” Marie drew herself up to her full height and tossed her curls. “Then tell me,” she commanded imperiously. “Well, what year do you think it is? Who’s President?” “I do not have a blow to the head, Mr Flapjack. It is 1856, and Mr Franklin Pierce is president of our Union.” “Actually, and I know this might seem a bit weird to you, but it’s 2004 and the President is… nah, you’ve got enough worries of your own. You’ve travelled in time, Mistress Murcheson.” Marie glanced again at the fluorescent tube and the bizarre array of gadgets of the modern bathroom. “You are insane. Let me go!” “No problem,” Flapjack assured her, holding his hands up to show he meant no harm. “That’s the door there. We still have doors in the twenty-first century.” Marie quickly raced across G-Eyed’s bedroom and out onto the landing. She saw the graceful arched window at the end of the corridor and raced towards it. It looked out onto modern Paradopolis. A jetplane soared over the twin Parody Tower leaving a high contrail in the morning sky. “No…” Marie almost sobbed. “It is an illusion, a conjurer’s trick…” She hadn’t realised Flapjack was standing so close to her shoulder. “It’s real I’m afraid. There’s some kind of weird curse thing happening. Lots of the people in this house got zapped back to being sixteen. They’re off dealing with it right now.” “There are more victims here?” the girl demanded. “Not right now. But you’re a bit different from them.” Flapjack swallowed uncomfortably. “See, they were all alive.” He crooked his finger for her to follow and limped along the passage to the hall balcony. “See?” he said, pointing to a picture. It was a portrait of Marie Murcheson, by famous portrait artist William Morris Hunt (1824-1879). She sat austerely in front of a dark arboreal setting, but the artist had somehow captured the brightness in her eyes despite the shadows of her surroundings. “I… have never posed for this,” Marie confessed. Then she saw the inscription on the frame: Marie Murcheson, 1840-1860 Nec scire fas est omnia, vox et praeterea nihil And then she fainted. The smell woke Marie up. She sat up suddenly as the ammonia fumes found their way into he lungs. “What!” she choked. “Where am I?” She was in a different place. The graceful Colonial hallway had been replaced by a barrel roof of dark brick over a windowless chamber of unpainted stone. There were no windows, and the only light came from two burning torches on the wall, a brazier in the corner, and an oil lamp being held by the hunchback who loomed over her. “Don’t scream,” Flapjack pleaded. “Down here the echoes would be horrible.” Marie realised she was on a filthy mattress and her bodice had been loosened. “That was perfectly innocent,” Flapjack assured her. “You fainted. I was just reviving you.” He surreptitiously dropped the sock he’d used as smelling salts into a Wellington boot. Marie did a quick personal check and found she was not too molested. “I’m revived now, thank you,” she told the hunchback. “So am I your captive?” “No, nothing like that,” Flapjack promised her. “Not until the second date, that’s my rule of thumb. I just brought you down to my crypt. I thought you might be more comfortable here.” The girl stared around the foetid junk-filled cobwebbed chamber. “You did?” “Well, all that modern technology was a bit much for you, I think, aeroplanes and electric lights and stuff. It boggled Sir Mumphrey too, and he’s far less boggleable usually. So I brought you here.” Marie peeled herself off the sticky mattress and stood up. Her head brushed the ceiling. Flapjack’s habitual crouch allowed him freedom of movement. “Your master makes you sleep down here?” she checked. What kind of monster would force his servant to live in this squalor. “Oh no,” Flapjack told her. “But I had it written into my contract. It was a deal-breaker.” “You… like it down here?” Flapjack sighed nostalgically. “It reminds me of home,” he confided. “And you carried me off to your lair.” “Well, technically I did, yes. But you have to understand, it’s both nature and nurture for the Flapjacks of the Carpathians. You see a helpless young lady swooned, and you absolutely have to scoop them off and scamper to your fortress or stronghold.” He leaned forward and confided a family secret. “You have to give them sanctuary.” “I see. So I’m safe here, am I?” “For as long as you want to stay,” Flapjack assured her earnestly. “I’ll keep to my side of the bed and everything.” “That’s… very comforting, Mr Flapjack. "And would you mind if I hit you with a blunt object now?” “Oh no,” smiled Flapjack hopefully. “That would be lovely.” Marie Murcheson forced herself to stay calm. Fainting was most definitely the wrong move right now. “Mr Flapjack…” “Call me just Flapjack,” the hunchback invited her. “Or toady, or minion, if you prefer. Or lackey. I don’t usually answer to flunky, but I would for you.” “Er, thank you, um, Flapjack. Would you be so kind then as to explain why there is a portrait of me inscribed with certain dates which seem to indicate that I will die in four years’ time? Or would, assuming I had not been transported into tomorrow as you claim.” “Well, it’s a bit complicated,” her host replied. “Would you care to sit down?” Marie glanced around. “No. Thank you.” “A glass of home-brew, perhaps?” “Just the explanation would be fine, Flapjack.” “Okay. Well, the short version is that you got kidnapped, dragged to this mansion, and sacrificed in this occult ceremony to wed you to an elder god,” the hunchback summarised. “But the good guys interfered, and instead of being eternally enslaved in hideous congress with the Groper Out of Grossness you became a kind of ghost haunting the site instead. A banshee.” The girl considered this. “You’re not the Groper Out of Grossness,” she checked slightly sceptically. “The Groper’s bigger than me by about a city and a half,” Flapjack assured her. “And he has far more tentacles.” “Far more. I see.” Marie decided not to ask the next logical question. “So I die and… haunt this mansion?” “Whenever one of the family here dies you keen in warning. And I think sometimes you defend us from things that go bump in the night. I mean non-teen things that go bump in the night.” “Ah,” said Marie weakly. “And the curse which has affected others who dwell here and reverted them to childhood has also preyed on me. Hence I am alive once more, until the spell is done.” “Something like that,” Flapjack shrugged. “I tend not to spend too much time working out the villains’ plots. They’re always Byzantine and unnecessarily complicated. I generally find a quick forelock tug and a cackle as I pull the big lever keeps ‘em quite content.” “Of course,” Marie agreed dazedly. “Look, I think I will sit down, despite the hazards. This is all a bit much for me.” And she sat down and burst into tears. Flapjack stared at her in panic. He rummaged through the pile of grubby clothing beside the mattress to find a suitable handkerchief and returned with a vest that wasn’t too smelly. “Don’t cry,” he urged. “I’ll keep you safe. Sanctuary.” Marie drew a lace square from her bodice and wiped her eyes, then gave up being ladylike for a moment and honked her nose into it. “I don’t want to die, Flapjack,” she confessed to her strange host. “I don’t want to become some horrid phantom flitting the halls weeping when people die. I want… I want to travel, and see Europe. I want to paint, and to finish my piano lessons. I want adventures. I want to fall in love and live happily ever after.” She looked at the hunchback and read the expression in his face. “But I’m not going to, am I?” Flapjack knew that the Lair Legion were on the case now, taking on the extradimensional imp Eddie to end the spell. “No,” he admitted hoarsely, closing his mismatched eyes. “I don’t think that you are.” They sat together in the guttering torchlight for a moment. “But listen,” Flapjack said suddenly. “We have some time. I don’t know how long but we have some. You want to travel, and do amazing things? Mistress Murcheson, this is the future! And out there’s the greatest city in the world, and more wonders than you could see in a year of wandering round nineteenth century Europe. Cars and planes and TV and computers and art and mystery and architecture and… everything.” Marie looked up at the suddenly-enthusiastic major domo. “Everything?” “Well, lots of things,” Flapjack told her. “You don’t have long, perhaps. So… I guess this is the wrong sort of sanctuary for you. Let’s go see the city. See the world. See tomorrow!” Marie Murcheson was caught up in his sudden animation. “An.. an adventure?” she wondered. “The greatest show on Earth,” Flapjack promised. And before she knew it she was clutching his hand as he dragged her through the door and out into the world of the future. Alea Footnote Est: And since people asked about the Latin caption, I should mention that it's two fairly famous quotes (Mumphrey would have learned them both at school): "Nec scire fas est omnia" is from Carmina IV, 4, 22 by Quintus Horatius Flaccus Horace, usually translated as "One cannot know everything" or "Knowing all is impossible". "Vox et praeterea nihil", is a well known paraphrase from Plutarchus' Apophthegmata Laconica, often rendered as "The voice and nothing more." In the original the quote is "Vox tu es, et nihil praeterea", said by a man on seizing a nightingale and finding little of substance. It is a commonly used tag these days, generally used to mean mere pointless sound, or fine high words with nothing behind them. In the context of an innocent slaughtered girl whose unquiet banshee haunts the mansion, a general sentiment might be derived as "No-one knows all that's going on, and the meaningless voice is nothing." Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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