Episode 14: Sascha Martin's Great Ungoo Part Four

You’ll recall our heroes pondering a snow globe, lacking snow, and the boys, and Aggie by default, electing not to go.

Mary-Alice volunteered alone … uncertainly, it’s true, and we last observed her bundled roughly off to barrel through the very fabric of reality, by some fantastic breach, to her bedroom in a snow globe, all to put the girl in reach of her accoutrements for fashion; most importantly, her clothes, so she wouldn’t have to dress in snot (which everybody loathes).

Back on Earth, where Landfill used to be, is just an empty hole, ‘cause the snotty sea’s gone exo, right outside, in Aisha’s bowl.

Let us follow Mary-Alice, though, through passages that wend towards her rendezvous with destiny, and not, we hope, her end.

They assembled in a room, but on a spaceship, that’s a bay, with a booth just like a shower stall, and paired with an array of metal sliders, buttons, twirly dials, coloured lights, and more, plus a little space betraying, by its shape, what it was for.

Aisha slid the dome inside it, pulled a cover, closed it tight, and the booth began to ripple with a mazy, lazy light.

Into that went Mary-Alice, with a hesitating tread, and a push, and looks that alternated hope and mortal dread.

But she stood there, firm and clotted, with a poise that didn’t crack, and she didn’t see that Aisha crossed her fingers at her back.

Slam!

Inside the booth, the subject said a lot without a sound.

‘Can we listen?’ Sascha said, but Aisha spun a dial round and ran her dancing little fingers over sliders and controls, till the lights that lit the panel flickered red as burning coals, and bands of colour raced the length of Mary-Alice, head to toes, from the bottom to the top again, and suddenly they froze, and came together, in a light that zapped right through her, all the way, so the bones that formed her skeleton were even on display.

She reappeared, but she was fading into nothing, in the stall.

The expression on her face was not encouraging at all, but rather peaky, as the watchers would recall it, down the track.

Then the light exploded outwards, throwing all the watchers back upon their bottoms in confusion, and alarm, and now they saw that the booth was there, but Mary-Alice wasn’t anymore.

‘What went wrong?’ said Sascha.

‘Nothing!’ Aisha raked him with a frown. ‘That was just as I intended. Look, the booth has powered down.’

‘And it’s empty!’ Luca shouted, and his eyes were all aston’, as he tossed the doorway back and stuck his hand in. ‘Where’s she gone?’

Aisha opened up the little hatch, and lifted out the dome. ‘She’s in here,’ she said, and shook it really hard. ‘Your friend’s at home.’

‘Can we see her?’ Sascha asked,

A shrug from Aisha. ‘Prob’ly not. Knowing her, she won’t be showing till she’s rid of all the snot.’

Sascha half believed he’d see a little figure wave hello, but the doormers didn’t open, and the curtains didn’t blow, and the tiny mega-mansion seemed a soulless little shell … which encouraged him to think she was in there, and doing well.

‘Now the reinstall,’ said Aisha, snatching back the little dome. ‘It’s exciting, don’t you think? And then I’ll send your people home.’

Off she led them, through the spaceship, out the exit, past the goo, to a doorway that she opened in the air and, rushing through went Sascha, braking on the brink of something very deep and black, and he would have ended, then and there, but Aisha pulled him back from the abyss - the deepest, darkest of abysses there could be, which he knew had once been Landfill, then a snotty yellow sea.

Aisha knelt inside the doorway, leaning out above the fall, and she didn’t seem to suffer any vertigo at all, but Sascha did, on her behalf, and stood, unable to respire, till she leaned back in, to turn a wheel and lift the doorway higher.

‘Good. That’s good,’ she said, and pulled the tiny dome (we must suppose), from a secret hidden pocket (she was infamous for those), and, kneeling still, she leaned far out, then even farther out than this, and extending, held the little globe above the dark abyss.

Sascha saw what she intended, and began to utter, ‘No-o-o-o-o!’

But she opened up her hands upon the dome, and let it go.

How it plunged!

He pictured Mary-Alice screaming all the way, saw her pasted to the ceiling, like a frog, in disarray, and all her perfume bottles, bobby pins and combs became a storm of beauty’s weaponry, unleashed to scar and smash her bossy form.

Sascha thought, was this a blessing, to be free of her at last? To anticipate a future less imposed on than the past? Would his life be any better? Yes. His happiness increased, in the absence of harassment by the soon-to-be deceased? Would he miss her not a friendship? No. Her carping? Not at all. Her disruption in the classroom, her graffiti on his wall? No.

And neither would he miss her constant thumping on his door, after school and on the weekend, ‘cause she only lived next door.

And he wouldn’t miss her sniping little posts about his hair, or her noisy, uninvited interventions in his lair, when she sorted everything by colour, graded ‘Yuck’ to ‘Fab,’ saying, ‘Sascha, this is not a very secret secret lab.’

And he wouldn’t miss her nagging via SMS at night.

On the whole, he ought to welcome her demise, but couldn’t … quite.

Time had slowed right down for Sascha. It’s a trick time loves to play.

But for Aisha, it was running fast, and hurrying away as she was turning out her pockets to retrieve a small device, like the one that Luca used for playing ‘Aliens Are Nice’.

At last, reorienting quickly, lying stretched upon the floor, she extended both her hands, and the controller, out the door, to work with flicks and clicks and ‘Oops-a-daisies’ (mercifully few), and a face of fevered focus, till she won a sudden view of something moving in the darkness, like a trick upon the eyes.

It was Landfill’s dome, perhaps with Mary-Alice, on the rise.

Aisha hadn’t let it smash upon the fabled Special Floor, and she’d coaxed it from the depths of utter darkness, furthermore, and was now engaged in guiding it remotely, like a drone, into Landfill’s old coordinates, by line of sight alone.

‘Can I have a go? said Luca, with his most appealing face.

‘No, you can’t. I have to lock it in the centre of the space.’

‘I can do it!’

‘Just be quiet! Or I’ll send you to your room.’

Luca gaped, and Aggie snorted, having joined them in the gloom.

Sascha tried to ask a question, but she only told him, ‘Shoosh!’ adding, ‘Oops,’ as tiny Landfill hurtled past her with a whoosh and flung away, and ‘Oh!’ - her voice the very absence of control - as the dome performed an absolutely stunning double roll, and Mary-Alice, Sascha reckoned, with her mad mascara scrawls, must be peeling off the ceiling as she bounced upon the walls.

The dome was slowing, though, and Aisha sighed.

‘At last, it understands!’

It began a gentle, calming drift in tune with her commands.

Staying level, largely level, it manoeuvred to a stop, at the centre point, above the deepest moment of the drop.

Then she quickly wriggled backwards.

‘That’s the pre-install complete. Now …’

She offered up a hand, and Sascha helped her to her feet.

‘Only one thing left to do,’ she said, ‘and that’s the disendome. Then, you mightn’t all be there yet, but at least you’ll have a home.’

Luca hovered at the exit, which he couldn’t reach before.

‘Can we stay and watch it happen?’

‘No. We have to close the door, or things could leak.’

She closed it firmly, leaving nothing in its place, turned and raced across the plateau at a mad inventor’s pace, towards the ship again. She entered, running fast, but with a smile. ‘The controls are at the other end.’

They hurried down the aisle.

Can we hurry with them?

No, because the episode’s complete.

As you catch the fading echo of the patter of their feet, spare a thought for Mary-Alice, locked in Landfill’s little clone.

Is she there and then, though? Really? Or in spacetime yet unknown?

As for Landfill, can it ever fill its proper where and when?

And will Aggie claim her corner in the library once again?

What of Snotty Bronte, Sascha, Luca? Whither wander they?

Sadly, seven suns must set, before the truth can have its way.