(Wayne Moore) = PEN NAME. Lucy Lightfoot goes there part 2
“The number 31 bus had other names. The bus of death, Charons death-taxi. Tomb thirty one. An absolutely proportionately significant amount of lives were discontinued roundabouts in close proximity in time and space, to the number thirty one bus.” Could the bus really be the vacuum wormhole which sucks together the rest of the strayed plot-part jig-saw pieces like splintered rowing-boat fragments all awash in the sea of Lucy’s uncharted mind ? Fragmentary glimpses. Everything had become fragmented. Disjointed in her life. In their lives. They'd all had psychiatrists. They’d all been on pharmaceuticals, they’d all been exceptionally high achievers, with a zest for life, mentally excelling, yet veritably hard to pin-down into any subjective category a-ready for intellectual entrainment into service to the system. Round pegs in square holes. It was one thing Catherine learnt quite early on. You just don’t ask questions nowadays. You never ask why. You don’t ask why there even needs to be television on a bus, in the same way no-one asked why it was now necessary to force bus-users to undergo constant multiple surveillance. Catherine learnt it, Lucy had learnt this. It made more sense, the latter thought, as the governments free distraction, if that T.V. Showed its viewers programmes. “So what” muttered Lucy “does a television do if it doesn’t show programmes ?” There seemed no other possible use for such a machine, and Lucy wondered if the set maybe was showing programmes somehow without people noticing. Lucy had read reports written by neural weapons designers who had blown the whistle on new technologies in existence that could project “synthetic realities” as semiotics embedded in television. “Maybe they were programming people” she caught herself muttering under her breath, then held her bottom lip between her thumb and forefinger. “Talking to yourself is a sign of nuttiness Lucy” she muttered again, followed by a loud “tut !” As she realised what she was still doing. “It’s this case. It’s made me drop those marbles” she thought to herself as her dialogue switched to inner. “Let’s go and pick them up again, girl. Show yourself your barking up the wrong tree. See for yourself. Show yourself it’s not that bus that’s the missing piece.” – Dammit. Dammit she would do. Lucy then took a good, long sip of her milk and honey. She glanced over at the steadily ticking round clock-face. “Three-ay-em.......................I'll go for a trip on that death-trap in the morning” she muttered as her ample bosom slowly rose and fell in time with her ample actual inhalation then exhalation of air.
On the number 31 bus from Wyke street, the gaunt, pale, sleeping yet awake unthinking figures sat in rows, staring directly ahead of them, only subconscious of the constant multiple surveillance, now normal, the constant, irritating parrotlike voice which sometimes stated the locale, and the flickering, concentration destroying, thought erasing television screen. The flicker was fairly unnoticeable, but not imperceptible. If it wasn’t for the fact that every now and then, the black screen flashed bright white, you would be quite forgiven for believing the set to be off. It made Lucy wonder, as she sat there, why this was necessary. What possibly was the point of having a set pretending to be off when it wasn’t ? And what was that sudden brief flash of light ? Why ? There must be a purpose. The subliminal mind-loop was running and the screen pulsed as two chesssquares occupying the same square. The voice came loud and clear and sudden and yet was calm and somehow understated. “We’ve met before Lucy, permit me to introduce myself, I'm your personal spook, Lucy” then laughter. Laughter that echoed so very unnaturally. No. Please no. It was thatvoice again, the grating machine-like American male who had at first tormented her, in some chapters of her split memory, later joined by a female colleague (and this memory spooked her even more) who had sounded just like her. Lucy felt her consciousness torn between levels of awareness now. An hectic electronic buzzing in Lucy’s head now; pops and crackles, faint whines. Then the pain was unbearable. A searing white-hot funnel of flame behind Lucy’s eyes now – – the pain so great, so massive, so concrete now it actualises until there is nothing else. Burning heat, but no warmth, no comfort for Lucy, only the freezing, burning pain. Agony actual, a pain in the brain, it must actually be causing physical damage. Then nothing. As quick as it all happened, it stopped happening. And Lucy was back again, back in the solid world, the real one. Her fake “bunny” fur coat was tucked close all around herself, but where there should have been a snug comforting warmth there was none. How long had it been now, how long since she had opened her eyes to find herself here on her couch....last night ? “Why is it so cold right now ?” the thick furry coat/blanket ( it had actually been a prize possession of Lucy’s for a long time; ever since she was a little girl if ever she needed a cuddle and there was no-one, she would entirely cover with, and drape around her mostly naked body the coat, feeling the always comforting fur next to her smooth skin ). That comforting normality normally comforted her. Right now it felt like a painfully sticky death-shroud stuck to her body with freezing sweat, sliding across her, like incubi incarnated at this level as vampiric slugs. Objectively, her body quivers in a hard, tense fever. Subjectively, long blobs of living slime suck any of her health up into their greedy, diabolical, demonic guts. A brief flash of darkness, like an underpass over her train of consciousness, and the hallucinatory reality flips back down a level and the hideous multiple monstrous slugs are
again Lucy's sweat-soaked coat. Pale-Gray flesh coloured hands protruding from starched bright white shirtsleeves, protruding from shiny black suit fabric manoeuvre a shining metal multicoloured round dial in some secret far-off place now, and as the disk turns, fragmented sections of Lucy’s unconscious compete for awareness as the gleaming circle clicks to a halt. It was at that point she woke up. Lucy rubbed the corners of her eyes with her fingers now as she sat up in bed. “What a strange dream” she considered. “It seemed so real. Seemed so very real – – like it once happened” she continued muttering – – “it reminded me of something.....someone.....something I had to do ?......no that’s silly...” Lucy popped one of the tiny pills out of the film pocket from its metallic card container. She automatically placed it into her dry mouth, and swallowed it along with the contents of the glass of water which was sitting next to her. She nestles back down into bed now and shuts her eyes. The familiar sounds of people moaning, screaming and gibbering return and she is comforted to remember that she is being looked after on this psychiatric ward. “Must be something about these places that makes people have really vivid weird dreams that seem to have been real and stay with them” she mumbles, glancing up at the T.V. which is showing an image she can dimly make out to be a bunny-rabbit. It flickers on and off. EPILOGUE Although in the streets the daylight was bright, in the office only electric-light illuminated the windowless room. Brian Behr stood in smooth-pressed dark suit as he fed the papers into the whining shredder. He allowed himself a degree of satisfaction as he viewed the information being destroyed. Brian goes to flick the power-switch on the shredder to ''off'' now, but pauses, with the tip of his finger on the switch. Over on the side of the desk he notices a single sheet of paper he absent-mindedly had left there. It was the cover-sheet of the now reduced to shreds bundle of papers. It read :
An investigation of the death of
Catherine Knight, and its connection to fifteen other deaths. By Lucy Lightfoot