Botchi

Margot de Silentio strolled into the disused laboratory. It was the first time in over half a decade that she had returned to the scene of her greatest triumph. But now the large, elongated room seemed cold and pale. It was the ideas flowing between the members of her team like chromosomes during meiotic division that had given the place its vigour and warmth. It was this force that had bound them together during the well-documented Routledge years, an inexplicable force, which Margot could not dissect with her expensive dissecting tools. If only that fool Ken Zealous had not tarnished the college’s reputation with his ill-advised promotional campaign which was curiously dubbed ‘Martin’s Blunder’ by the local medical journal The Recovery Position.

Margot began making herself a brew in the southwest corner of the lab. She knew this was frowned on by the top brass at the ‘academy’ but enjoyed sticking her middle finger up to people in positions of so-called power. The stench of singed gauze wafted past the svelte brunette’s Libyan nose as she added the overpriced and utterly disgusting supermarket own-brand sweetener to her already lacklustre tea. She whispered ‘chin chin’ and sipped but twice before pouring the liquid disappointment into the hair-lined sink. Mar, as she would doubtless be known to her friends had she not spent 98% of her youth either in the now defunct opium den or on the street corner with her pimp father-in-law, felt literally dead – not for all the ice-cream in Herbert Von Tripletwister’s general convenience store (Wuppertal branch) could she recall why she had returned to this festering lab. It was in the depths of this confusion that she first felt a boo-boo-boom in her uterus.
“Oh Pegasus, thou beauteous winged quadruped, can this really be true?” In moments of crisis, Mar often sought guidance from this fantabulous mythological beast. For all her intensive scientific knowledge, spanning one score and three years, there was a certain satisfaction to be gained from irrationality. But now ‘she’ was a ‘they’. That was why she had returned here, Mar suddenly recalled, the memory springing forth like a plump salmon jumping in sexual anticipation up a sheer waterfall. What better location could she find to intensively monitor her gestation period than here? True, a hospital would probably be better but that was by the by. Besides, an old acquaintance was expecting her downstairs in the basement, where truly inspirational experiments were once conducted on spare change plundered from the local wishing well, in order to discern the ratio betwixt the value of coin and luck it contained. Perhaps the most profound experiments, however, were conducted on Mar herself, involving string and the colour mauve. Mauve of course being the colour most often associated with the violent reaction some people have to bilateral hypnotherapy. Mar mopped her brow with a felt coaster. As usual, felt triggered memories of the bastard child of Dr Carlos who had tossed the ‘unluckiest coin in the world’ into the local wishing well at Zeck. Carlos Jr had wished for success in his new career as a field minder, but two days later was short changed by 17 zloty at Freido’s Pantry. Studies of the coin revealed no correlation between the coin’s composition and this cruel twist of fate.

Mar decided that it was time to leave the laboratory and to wait downstairs in the basement for her visitor. She opened the door to the spiral staircase and proceeded down the steps into the well-lit basement. The basement, approximately the same size as an average greengrocer’s, was a tribute to the ex-janitor whose portrait hung in the south-east corner. Mar knew the inscription off by heart,
‘Milko Horst – a winery he was not, yet he could strive to forward our understanding of evil in a manner that reinforced his and our resolve, encompassing many traits hung surreptitiously beyond his call of duty, bewitching his serfs with the sorcery of his base, ultimately cementing his steely wrists upon the aprons of time…’

Mar often drew breath and stood at the portrait, pressing the pause button on her duties and pontificating Jesus. A Christian she was not, yet she often wondered what had happened in 30 BC, one of her favourite years for carbon dating. Her hatred of the AD way of life was primarily the reason for her work, and the portrait of the janitor both fuelled and polarised her core beliefs; beliefs that were often seen as dictatorial, particularly from Sizz’s perspective. Mar cared little; her fundamentalism was the camshaft that drove the team’s efforts forward. Sizz was a loser, a chancer who had stumbled into the position after failing as a croupier. He had many stories to tell, not many interesting, too many relating to blackjack, and his manner displeased Mar. He bumbled through his tasks as well as his distinct lack of specialist knowledge would permit, knowing his days were numbered as soon as Mar discovered his prerequisite.

The two had arranged to meet secretly not four months prior, over a remarkably mediocre jus downtown. Both knew that Kluzens must be caught, as he would stop at nothing to locate Base 1 and initiate segment 6 on the Duffield reactor. They had laughed.

Laughter had deserted them both on this dank morn. Sleet hammered Sizz’s features and beat him into mental submission. By the time he arrived, he was playing bingo with himself whilst simultaneously dancing furiously to imaginary off-kilt rhythms. Mar had prepared herself for a shock, but preparations duly counted for zilch upon her apprentice’s entrance. Exasperated, Mar contemplated the frenzy of arcania involved in seemingly inanimate entities and concluded that the worst option was inertia. This meant that the least inaccurate solution to the Duffield conundrum was to consult the E directory. The only way to access this was via Sister Phyllis’s late lover Pertunia, languishing amongst the spirits of the Bracklewurst Ordinance.

Next chapter…