“Look, Daddy, it’s a tortoise. We must help him, Daddy, please, Daddy.”
“Fuck off, you little bastard, get the fuck away from me,” barked Ed as the boy’s father waded into the water for the rescue.
“I’m not going to become your fucking pet, you little ponce.”
“Oh, Daddy, can you hear, he is bleating with little tortoise noises crying for help, how sweet. He knows we’re going to save him.”
“Oh, for fuck sake, piss off, piss off and leave me alone, I’m trying to kill myself.”
At this moment the father reached out his enormous hand towards Ed. He seemed like a giant, an absolute colossal monster. Even so, at full stretch he could barely reach him. Patiently moving closer, cautious of the fast currents, the man reached out to his full extension and got his fingers under the shell between his head and left leg. As he levered him from the branch, Ed saw his opportunity and with all the might and strength he could muster, he flicked his head around and bit his hand aggressively.
“Arrhhhh, you little reptile fucker. Did you see that, Billy?”
The man had responded exactly as Ed assumed, pulling out of the rescue attempt abruptly and freeing him from the branch and back into the vicious flow of water.
“You killed him, dad, you drowned the tortoise. He could have been our pet,” the kid snarled at the bemused man as Ed sped off downstream like a sperm in a fallopian tube.
“Ha, ha, mother fucker,” blurted Ed through the watery bubbles as he got tossed upside down in the depraved current. The water gushed in, dragging him to the bottom of the flow, crashing him against rocks and boulders and knocking him from consciousness. Ed had achieved his goal, a relatively painless end. The first suicidal tortoise in the history of the Home Counties had concluded his reptilian adventure, at least for the time being.
Chapter 6
Silicon Alley
Supersonic gusts tore at speed over Ed’s body, forcing his flesh to ripple in fast moving waves of motion. Bewildered and muddled, he started to come round, unable to open his eyes in the whirling tornado. Thoughts flashed through his mind, the fox eating chocolate, the strange adventure in the lair and the dim recollection of eating flowers and lettuce in abundance. He screeched to a halt, decelerating to stillness like an instant sound effect in reverse.
He gradually became aware of a focused ray of light, burning into his eyelids with laser precision. Soon his squinting gave way to blurry vision as he realised he was floating helplessly in some sort of windswept tunnel.
He twisted and turned anxiously with zero gravity, spinning crazily in an anti-clockwise direction catching sight of the stationary laser light once every revolution. His body felt more familiar to him and sensation had come back into his limbs. He lifted his head slightly and glanced down towards his feet. To his amazement he was dressed in his own clothes, the last ones he could remember wearing. He wiggled his feet, crinkling the surface of the light tan Italian leather shoes, creased at the stress points. Above them he could see his light-blue designer jeans with frayed bottoms. He lifted his hands up revealing a large-faced, silver wrist-watch as it popped out from his long shirt and jacket sleeves. He wriggled his fingers, the thick gold wedding ring prominently visible.
“Maybe it was a dream after all?”
He bobbed gently up and down, continuing to spin in a high-powered stream of air which seemed to be battling against a strong counter flow from the side. He started to become aware of a loud gushing sound all around him, like a thousand trains in a single tunnel.
Suddenly, from nowhere, he felt an intense pain around the side of his neck as he was jolted off sharply to his right. He had no idea what was going on.
“By thy leave, nice and easy, I prithee,” he heard loudly in his right ear as he felt himself hurled to the floor with a sobering thud which made up for all the lack of gravity of his bobbling spin. He looked up to see a small wiry man removing a shepherd’s crook from his neck. To his left he could see a large curved opening and what appeared to be some sort of fast-moving, gushing, misty flow, strangely dry but travelling at phenomenal speed from right to left.
“A thousand pardons. I would like to design a better method but really cannot see how it can be done any other way. Good morrow to you.”
The man took the crook into the upright position and rested it on the floor, standing against a curved wall of black glistening rock. Ed remained on the uneven rocky floor, more than startled. He looked down at his hands and stretched them once more, his wedding ring glinting in the small, bright light beams that shone from thin-cut hollows in the arched ceiling. The granite-textured walls gleamed with perfection as the rays spread out over them like rivulets of light from a sculptor’s candle.