Tales of the Parodyverse

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This message Premiere #26: Here Comes a Candle… was posted by The fearful fate of the Sorceress, as revealed by... the Hooded Hood on Tuesday, September 3, 2002 at 06:02.

Premiere #26: Here Comes a Candle…

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”Oranges and lemons,” say the bells of St Clements
“You owe me five farthings,” say the bells of St Martins…
Whitney Darkness, the Sorceress, woke from a troubled slumber and found herself lying on crayoned grass under a chalk-blue sky with a crooked yellow sun that radiated straight yellow lines.
”When will you pay me?” say the bells of Old Bailey
“When I grow rich,” say the bells of Shoreditch…
She pulled herself from the ground and felt the sticky blood on the side of her face from the head wound she had sustained. The little children who were dancing around her watched in surprise as she staggered a bit and vomited after her concussion.
”When will that be?” say the bells of Stepney
“I do not know,” says the great bell of Bow
Whitney wanted to ask the children who held hands and swirled in a circle about her where she was or how she came to be here. The last she remembered was being attacked by Amazing Guy in the sanatorium of Herringcarp Asylum. She wondered for a chilling moment if she had died. She wondered if she was going mad.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!
The axeman merged out of shadowy nothingness and swung his weapon into the neck of the nearest child. The arterial spray doused Whitney before she could even move. By then the murderer had grabbed a second screaming child and was pulling back his blade. The other infants fled in terror. The scene was dark now, a pitch-black sky over rain-slicked cobbles.
“No!” called the Sorceress, reaching out to the world around her to command the unseen pulses and save the child.
Nothing happened. There was no world there to command. The boy’s scream ended abruptly as the axe ended his life.
“Damn you!” screamed Whitney, running forward to beat at the murderer’s chest. She found he was bigger than her, much bigger. Suddenly she knew she was only a child herself, no older than she had been when grandmother had first shown her the secret weft of magic.
The axeman dropped his second corpse and grabbed Whitney as his next victim.
“No!” she cried out, in fear as he lowered her neck for the chop. Then her training kicked in and she focussed her will against her fear and balled up her horror and terror into a tiny bright package and hurled it at her attacker. If she couldn’t use the world around her she would use what she carried inside.
The axeman took the black sphere right in the chest and shattered like a mirror. Whitney was left kneeling there in her blood-stained nightdress, trembling with the effort of the magics she had cast.
Slowly the children came back, large-eyed and timid.
Little boy, ate a plum, cholera bad, kingdom come
“Where are we?” Sorceress asked them.
Bigger boy, seagull’s nest, broken rope, eternal rest
“The bad place,” they told her.
“How do we get out?”
Little girl, box of paints, licked the brush, joined the saints
“We don’t. We stay here until the Bad Men come and get us, and then we die.”
Whitney pulled herself to her feet. “No,” she told them. “We don’t. We get out of here. There has to be a way.”
All the children, hear them squeal, taken off for Jenkin’s meal.
The children thought about this. Finally, a frightened child of no more than five ventured, “We could try and find the Hero and get him to take us to the Wizard.”
“The hero?” Whitney questioned. “What hero?”
“The one who fights the Bad Men, like the Bloodybones and the Rawheads and the Flay-Boggarts and the Dark-Woses,” they told her.
It took all the rest of Whitney’s internal arcane reserves and a few pounds of her body mass to craft the locational spell that led them to the hero, but it was worth it. She even knew the hero when she saw him. “Premiere?”
“Sorceress. What are you doing here?”
“I have no idea. What about you?”
“I’m not here. Not really. I’m just a memory of me, if that makes any sense.”
“I’m a witch. You’d be surprised what makes sense to me. So where is here?” Now the environment looked like a Christmas card, with deep snow and little cottages covered in icicles. The bloody tracks across the snow were atypical though.
And somewhere in the back of Whitney’s mind an old nursery-rhyme started up:
Mamma had said, “Peter my dear, I must go out and leave you here.
But mind you heed well what I say – Don’t suck your thumb while I’m away…
“We’re inside somebody’s mind, I think,” memory-Premiere told her. “We’re thoughts inside Mad Wendy’s unconsciousness.”
“Mad Wendy?” Sorceress remembered. “The mega-psionic from Technopolis who drew people into her elaborate psychotic personal universe?”
The great tall tailor always comes, To little boys who suck their thumbs!”
Mamma had scarcely turned her back, The thumb was in, alas, alack!
“The same. It seems she remembers me fondly. But she never met you.”
“I’m as puzzled as you about how I came here,” admitted Whitney. She tried to struggle with mounting nervousness. “Am I still concussed, suffering from brain damage? Are these children real or just memories? They seem to think you can help me find a wizard who can get us out.”
“Some of them are real, trapped here for so long they’ve been forgotten. But even the memories of innocents deserve a better place than this,” considered Premiere. “Interesting. I didn’t know about a Wizard until you mentioned him, but now I find I’m aware of where he is.”
The door flew open, in he ran – The great long, red-legged Scissorman!

“Duck!” shouted Premiere, lunging forward to intercept the impossible thin sticklike creature with blades for hands that had risen up behind Sorceress. The thing dodged past his defense and gashed him from shoulder to hip.

“That’s not possible,” denied Whitney. “I’ve seen him take missiles and not be scratched!”
Peter cried out in pain and fear, But Mamma was out, and did not hear.

Another gash opened up the science hero’s chest and sent him sprawling backwards. The Scissorman leaned forward for the kill.

“I remember him being harder to hurt than that,” frowned Whitney, concentrating her thoughts.

The Scissorman’s blade shattered on Premiere’s throat. Premiere rose up and tore the monster into pieces.

“Ouch,” he said, touching his bloody wounds. “Let’s find you this Wizard before something else comes to kill us.”

There was a yellow brick road to follow to an emerald tower.
The door leads to a dungeon that is deep and dark with sin
And little dwarfs go out of it and little dwarfs go in.

“I’d better go in first,” Premiere decided. “After all, I’m not real.”

“No, I’ll go first,” Whitney argued. “Because I am.”

Premiere wrenched the heavy chains from the doorway and bent the gates open. Xander the Improbable looked up from his reading and said, “Ah, you got here. Splendid.”

“Father?” Whitney checked. “Or a memory of you?”

“Is there a difference?” the master of the mystic crafts shrugged. “I’m sorry to make you get here by the long dangerous route, but it was hard enough getting us inside poor Wendy’s head in the first place. It took considerable effort to persuade her to reach out across dimensions with that phenomenal psi capacity of hers and pluck you right out of a Technopolitan dimensional rift.”

“What?” Sorceress puzzled.

“You were being dragged away to become the torture-toy of the Red Watchman. I had to pull in a lot of favors to get you out of that. I managed to get you trapped inside an insane girl’s head instead. Presently she’ll wake up and we can get out and make our way home. Until then it’s going to be very, very unpleasant.”
Jesus save me from the teeth, Of things that rise from Underneath…

“Then why did you bring me here?” demanded Whitney.

“Because however nasty it is here it’s better than leaving you to the torments of the Red Watchman,” answered Premiere.

Xander flinched. “Yes,” he agreed. “And I could only save one of you this way,” he added very quietly.
Jesus guard me while I sleep, From creatures formless, from the deep.

Then the monsters burst out to take them and Premiere battled again and Xander drew his daughter very close to him and said, “Morning is coming. It’s only a nightmare. Daddy’s here.”

___________________________________

NOTE: All the nursery rhymes from this story are authentic. Yes, folks really did tell this kind of stuff to kids. Every child needs some kind of psychological trauma.

This poster posed from 212.159.32.46 when they posted

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