Rehab was hell on Earth. Every night I woke to the sound of screaming – usually my own. A rainbow of bodily fluids coated the wall like a mad mural as I smeared at it desperately, swiping the air to chase the demons away. Yet slowly, one by one, the pegs faded, the blocks pinging gracefully from existence, the scores and buckets and multiballs disappearing like ghosts into the daylight. At last, I could glimpse the clear, crisp edges of reality. It was over.

Back in my office, the debt collectors had turned the place over, smashing the lock and taking anything of value, scattering my files and notes like a kid tearing at wrapping paper on Christmas Day. It took me half an hour to notice anything was out of the ordinary.

Rabbit called. Said Bjorn, the dame, and all their cronies had gone down to the big house. All the drug money in the world couldn’t save them this time. I smiled. I watched his hat disappear behind the door frame, his leather jacket plodding down the creaking staircase and to adventure. Said he was going to try some Ancient Greek place this time. I wish him the best of luck.

And so, I kick back, a foot sweeping the piles of paper and empty bottles from my desk to the floor, and I gaze upon the city. Somewhere, in the night, a little crime was going down. A siren wails. Somewhere, a damsel was in distress.

Dames. Ha. I’d had enough of those to last me a lifetime. Eventually, though, at the back of my mind, I knew the bills would pile up once more. The collectors would be back, the baseball bats a little bigger and the goons a little meaner. A dark, mysterious figure would come a-calling and… Well, what can I say? Maybe people would call me a mug, falling hook, line and sinker for a pretty face, a few credits and a ghost to chase down some alleyway.

But hell. I’m Dick Turpentine. I’m a detective. It’s what I do.

~ FIN ~

“Dick. Dumb, Dead Dick.”

The boss stepped into the corridor, M16 tight against his chest. “You should have stayed at home,” Bjorn said, his face shadowed against the rising sun. “Alcoholism and squalor aren’t so bad. You never know, the debt collectors may even have given you a painless end.”

I took cover behind a pillar, as the M16 barked at me, splattering little chunks of marble around my feet. “It’s over, Bjorn!” I called out from my cover. “There’s a nice, comfy cell out there, just for you.”
“You shall die!” Bjorn shouted, twenty rounds banging against the shimmering column.

I turned with the cat’s cumbersome rifle, and fired. Bjorn screamed, clutching a bloody sleeve, and tossed a small, heavy object in my direction.

My tortured legs pounded the cold floor, and the hot searing blast shrieked behind me, scattering little chunks of green marble overhead and pock-marking the wall. The M16 chased me down the corridor, Bjorn’s wrath biting at my heels, my body running on pure pain and anger. Covered in sweat, the sniper rifle’s grip slipped from my grasp. I made to pick it up, but a handful of .223 NATO rounds changed my mind. I slid on the cold, slick floor, bullets flying, and burst into a large office. Above me, Bjorn smiled down in oils. Outside, through a large window, the sun was rising over the distant jagged skyline of the city, casting a cold, golden light across the treetops.

“Detective,” the dame said, slinking from the shadows. “You are a persistent thing. Impressive. It’s a shame I shall have to kill you now.”

The contacts thudded into the wall behind me, lightning racing in slow motion down the wires and tinting the slowly waking dawn with a bright and painful blue. I ducked behind another column, as Bjorn burst in, his large, muscular body shadowed against the morning sun.

“There!” the dame called, pointing at the column I was hiding behind. “He’s there!”
Bjorn turned, peering into the darkness of my hiding place, his rifle rising.

In that instant, my head pounded. All the adrenaline and fear and, yes, peggle, rushed straight upwards, swamping my battered brain in sound and fury. Suddenly, everything was clear. The mist vanished, and I was left in the clear light of morning, with but one path left shining through the snaking maze of death and failure. I turned from my cover, and saw Bjorn slowly take aim as I accelerated towards him. Dimly, I heard the dame whisper “No…” and then:

The window exploded outwards, Bjorn and I, and together we fell, the last ounces of my energy falling away as our bodies thudded against the strobing dirt.

And, as the lights faded from my vision, I realised the flashing was the red and blue of justice. A rabbit’s face leaned over mine, his gestures and shouts growing faint, and everything turned to darkness.

The goons cooled out on the dead, black tiles as I staggered on into the dark fortress of pain. In the distance, the sound of voices, hurried voices, the sound of a cornered animal, ready to fight to the death. And I, and my .45, would oblige it.

The door crashed open as my head thumped against my skull, colours and pegs flickering and pulsating like the lightning that still twitched up and down my body. Two goons fell. My .45 roared into the night like a pitbull unleashed for the first time upon its prey. Renfield stood behind an upturned table, Thompson in hand, ready for this fight to the death. That was OK by me. I wasn’t taking any prisoners tonight. This was personal.
“Detective,” Renfield yelled over the thunder of bullets shredding the door frame I was sheltering behind. “I see you are a persistent patron of the arts.” Another cavalcade of splintering oak pinged against the wall opposite.
His shadow made for the door behind him as he called out “You may be interested in my latest work, entitled ‘The Death of a Meddler’. It will cost you an arm and a leg.”
I cursed, reloading the pistol as I leapt over the fallen furniture into the next room.

Butterflies raced overhead, the peggle turning the glass-panelled menagerie into a swirling phantasm of horror. The Thompson chattered in the distance, catching the display cases and showering the room with broken glass as the butterflies streamed around us. I fought my way through the flapping wings to the sound of the blare of the machinegun.

A large, black sphere rolled into the corridor in front of me. I stopped, momentarily, dumbstruck by this thing in front of me, until I saw the fuse.
The blastwave seared my tattered jacket as I swung round the corner just in time. I heard a familiar laugh, as Renfield cursed and told him to fire.
Splork’s grin echoed off a cracked mirror, the reflection of a pump-action glinting in the moonlit hallway.
“Some people,” he called, firing a shell around the corner, pellets pinging off the wall, “know when it’s Game Over, Dick!” He roared, pumping both barrels in my direction.

Steadily, I took aim from the mirror, and made my shot. The gun roared twice, pinging off the wall where I placed the sights. Two shouts rang out into the darkened hall. Splork moaned and Renfield – well, it was probably a curse in French or something. In the mirror, I saw two figures crumple into their own world of pain. It was nice to give back to the community now and then.

In the hallway, a giant pyramid stood, mummies and statues and other ancient junk lining the walls like soldiers guarding the tomb of an ancient king. At the top, the circus cat sat, a rifle in his lap.

“Roll up, roll up!” The cat called, taking aim, “It’s the amazing Dick Turpentine. Watch as he takes bullet after bullet, hit after hit, and yet, ladies and gentlemen, HE STILL WON’T JUST DIE.”
Behind him, the sun was beginning to rise, and it lit the top of his head like a halo. I saw the flash of the rifle as a glint on this crown and rolled as the round shredded the cold stone floor where I was just standing.

Kat Tut screeched incoherently and fired again, the shots flying wildly about me. I sheltered behind a sarcophagus, the poor, dead guy inside taking a bullet or two that should have had my name on it. I turned and pulled the trigger. It clicked at me, spent. The rifle’s scope glinted in my face.
The shot whistled past my ear, showering me with dust and debris as it shattered the wall behind. I was sweating, the universe still spinning. This couldn’t be the end. Not now. Not now…

In the shadows, the rising sun slowly lighting the dark corners of the room, I saw the heavy object, standing ready to serve its king. I smiled.

The brief look of surprise on Tut’s face was framed perfectly in the ancient weapon’s sights. “Say hello to Osiris for me” I croaked, and the face was replaced by a cloud of debris as the crossbow smashed into the eye of the pyramid, blowing the clown backwards from his lofty pedestal.

I moved on, as the darkness of night lingered in the cool clutches of dawn. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the sound of hooves.

The hatchback puttered along the country lane, eyes peering out at us from the darkness of the forest. Ahead of us, the limo was pulling into a gateway, the steel doors swinging behind it. Rabbit killed the engine by the edge of the road, the darkness of the trees seeping into the vehicle.

“I’ll scout ahead,” I told the greying treasure hunter. “You ditch the car and circle round the back.” Rabbit nodded, reaching for the whip in the back seat. I slipped out the passenger door, and crept towards the wall, looking for a leg over amongst the trees lining the dark, forbidding estate.

Some minutes later, I found myself at the walls of the mansion, peering round a pillar to the doorway, where a lone goon stood guard, surrounded by a moat thick with koi carp and other, more exotic specimens. I felt for the cold comfort of my Colt .45, the ten steel balls nestled inside the chamber, cool and ready to enter the maelstrom of vengeance and turbulent fury that awaited me in those thick, stone walls. Peggle. Ha. It wasn’t about how good you were. It was chaos and luck, and anyone who thought differently was a fool.

Moments later, the goon’s skull shuddered against my pistol grip, and the man fell like a sack of potatoes onto the steps below. Free ball. I tipped his unconscious body into the moat. “Sleep with the fishes,” I whispered.

Inside, the lobby echoed like a morgue, each footstep ringing like a church bell in the night. The room was filled with tanks. Vast, shimmering containers, a wall of glass separating me from the ocean of life. In the distance, I thought I could make out a giant serpent, swimming into the darkness. Leaning closer, I almost missed the shape that darted suddenly behind me.

The world lit up, a universe of pain dancing like fire and stars before my eyes. My own private burlesque of agony, the sensation arcing like lightning across my body. Burnt, beaten, drugged and exhausted, I collapsed to the floor. The shape loomed overhead, smiling. The taser started to glow again.

Sparks flew. I watched as my coat smouldered as the limp garment, sodden with rainwater, tried and failed to douse the pain. Looking up, all I could see was Peggle, points and bonuses for surviving this long, like the game pitied me, somewhere within the deep, screwed-up folds of grey that consisted of my brain. What was left of it, anyway.

“Hello, Detective,” the figure said, swimming into view from behind a wall of pain. I stared upwards, watching the ceiling throb and spin, individual blocks popping and disappearing from view. 100 points. The last ball, spinning into the darkness below. Game over.
“It’s…” White pain flashing behind my eyes. “You.”
“Yes, Detective. It’s me.” The dame smiled. Blood-red lips smiled faintly in the shadows, shimmering with the light rippling through the tanks.
“I admit,” she continued, “you’ve been rather useful, despite your ineptitude. I can see it in your eyes. They got to you. How are they, detective? The blocks and pegs, haunting every waking moment?”
As the image grew into focus, I merely smiled. From my view on the ground, I could see that the legs, blue and orange blocks tracing every curve, did indeed go all the way up. She noticed my grin, and her face screwed up like a child denied a candy bar in the store.

The broad hit me again, the white flash of pain surging through my feeble body once more. Pegs popped into existence, disappearing one by one like soap bubbles, leaving behind little tens and hundreds. I gasped in pain, and the frown on her pretty little face turned right into a vicious little smile.
“I’ve worked so hard to get to where I am, you know. He’s running scared. Bjorn thinks the feds are on to him. Can you believe it? You send one third-rate detective crawling his way and he thinks the world is crashing down on him.” She smiled again, a flash of gleaming, knife-like white teeth in the darkness. “Guess who offered her services in removing the threat?”
She paused, perhaps expecting me to answer. I merely groaned. She continued, a lithe arm waving the petite taser like a particularly hot schoolteacher gesticulating with a chalkboard eraser.

“That Rabbit proved to be more useless than a marshmallow revolver. Kept bawling about honour and ‘biding his time’. The fool seemed more adept at plundering the wealth of dead civilisations than grasping the here and now of cold, hard revenge. I needed someone more direct. Someone not versed in the art of subtlety and espionage.”
I was about to protest, but instead coughed, great black blobs hocking up onto my miserable excuse for a jacket. The dame stepped back in horror, her gleaming white eyes hidden by a brief frown.
“With your help, I made it to the Institute, Bjorn’s front – no doubt you found it for yourself. There, I was given access to his accounts, files, some of the oldest skeletons in the darkest of closets. Anything to make the feds vanish, as indeed I claimed was my speciality.”

She started to pace about, waving the little taser at the wall, a portrait of her face hanging in the darkness. The delicate instrument was a little poodle that looked sweet enough on the outside, but that could turn your privates into dogmeat in a blink. Behind her, the fish swam, oblivious to it all.
“He welcomed me into his little enclave with open arms. I was like one of them. It was pathetic, really. A criminal mastermind, infiltrated and betrayed like a gullible child.”
She turned to gaze scornfully upon me once more.
“And now, my little secret agent, it is time to say goodbye. But oh,” she pouted, a look of mock sadness upon her pretty little face, “don’t be sad. I have a parting gift. Since you seem to like Peggle so much, I thought I would bring you one of these, fresh and piping hot from that snivelling rat’s experimental drug lab. After all,” she said, bringing something I couldn’t quite see from her tiny purse, “if Peggle is good as it is…”
She leaned in towards me. I tried and failed to scuttle backwards, to escape, but all that came out was a feeble “No… no…”
“…you can only imagine what Peggle Extreme is like.”

The world exploded, set on fire, was immolated in colour and sound and screaming, screaming pain. I barely heard her say “Goodbye” as the chaos of light and shape rushed past me. I writhed in terror on the cold, dark floor, the surges of blocks and pegs and balls and points and long shots and slides and bucket shots and triple plays battered my head like a baseball bat with broken glass sticking out of it. Time merged into space merged into a sea of unending nightmares.

Later – I have no idea how much later – I heard footsteps on the tiles, and the sound of voices. The click of safety catches, the gloves coming off and revealing by fists of steel. With infinite effort, I heaved myself from the floor and staggered into the shifting shapes and colours in the shadows, my body screaming in a thousand million places, to seek my vengeance and end this. It’s game over, Bjorn, I whispered to the demons that lay in the darkness. And you won’t get a replay with a bullet in the skull.

His image flickered on the sad-looking TV screens in the window of the little electronics store on the corner. I watched, biding my time, studying my prey.

“So yeah. This is my inner sanctum, you know, where I can just go and chill and try out some new chords or whatever. Check this one out.”
The figure on the screen gestured at the room in front of them.
“This one is from the Ukraine, you know? Custom-made from guitar parts found in Chernobyl. It’s got special atom power, you know, like energy from the Sun, kind of savage nature hewn into the living wood.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” the presenter asked him. The figure waved an arm, the stub of a cigarette dangling limply between two digits.
“Yeah, well rock is dangerous, you know? Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of safety, you know, when you’re up on stage and your guitar is glowing – I mean literally glowing – from the intensity of the rock coming out of it. That’s some power there, man.”

“So this next song,” the interviewer continued, the bars on the radio dancing to the sound of his voice in the dying embers of the city’s twilight, “is called ‘Zen Master’.”
“Yeah,” the other voice continued, “a lot of my songs are inspired by Eastern philosophy, you know, it’s like there’s a kind of chi running through them. With Zen, you know, you can kind of go places where normal rock musicians can’t. It’s like – you know reincarnation?” He paused briefly, before continuing “yeah, well it’s like when you die you come back as some other life form, and the best people come back as like, kings or whatever. Well, when rock stars die they come back as songs, so this one is kind of Hendrix, come back in a song, like he’s speaking to me through the music. Another one I’ve got is the reincarnation of Palmer Cartney…”
“Palmer Cartney’s dead?” the announcer asked, shocked.
“Nah, well, you know, if he were, like…”
I grimaced as the drums started, and listened to the wail of the guitar fade out into the sound of the wind and rain as they rushed down 49th street.

I glanced up at the poster outside. A single figure, glowing as he hollered into a mic – either from backlighting, or from radioactive instruments. Not that I cared enough to study it closer. Peggle swam in front of my eyes, taunting me, and I coughed, my body trying to wash away its sins like a sailor on the Titanic trying to mop up the sea with a sponge. Instead, I slipped down an alleyway, into a back entrance, and out of the cold night and into the underworld of backstage rock ‘n’ roll.

“…sure plays a mean PEG-GLE”
The crowd was in ecstasy, a baying mob of faces and fists, the Eastern mysticism bullcrap on stage held back by a tide of thirst for the blood of the old gods, the gods of rock. The spotlight was on Hu, a single dot across the crowded auditorium. And, in the darkness… Bjorn? My, lady luck had waltzed into my office that night, wrapped in a ribbon and precious little else. I fought my way forward, entering the battle lines of the near-rioting herd.

The final chords were dying as I finally reached the front, my tattered coat drenched in beer and sweat and other fluids I felt best left uninvestigated. Green flares raced towards the sky as Hu’s warbling shriek finally reached its climax, shattering the Peggle blocks that swam around the amplifiers in a flush of noise and light. The crowd screamed as one, and it was over.

Outside, in the ravenous darkness and driving rain, I watched Hu and his entourage climb into a darkened limo. Waving down a nearby taxi, I leaned into the window, waving for the driver to follow the vast elongated slab of glossy junk they called a car. The face looked back at me, and a wave of recognition passed over it, and all the memories of lost fares with it. The cab drove off, a single birdie flipped for my benefit. I watched in despair as the limo door slammed shut, and the engine revving off into the stream of traffic flowing down the vast canyons of the city.

I turned, a horn honking behind me.
“Detective!” A leather-jacketed arm motioned to me out of the window. Quickly, I staggered into the passenger seat. A big buck-toothed smile flashed at me as we pulled into the road after the escaping limo.
“Since when were you a rock fan?” I asked my knight in shining armour.
“It’s like Hu says, my dear Turpentine,” Warren Rabbit said, overtaking a red hatchback as it wailed on its horn in futile protest, “Success comes with the purchase of not one, but two tickets to vengeance.”

Amen to that, I thought, as we raced after our quarry. In the distance, I saw the limo take a turn, and called out “Left! Hang a left!” to Rabbit, who swerved past a lorry as it roared in fury at being cut up. As we turned, I caught a glimpse of something through the limo’s tinted glass. Two bright, white eyes through the darkness and the rain and the blare of streetlights.
Could it be…?

I shivered inside the red silk dressing gown, my self wrapped around the warm mug of coffee the leather jacketed figure had just handed me. A fireplace sat in front of me, mercifully unlit. I had seen enough pyrotechnics to last me a lifetime.

Above the mantlepiece, an ancient map hung, framed and protected from the elements by a sheet of glass. In the reflections, I watched the pegs dance, snaking blocks tracing the lines etched across it so many decades ago.

“The name’s Warren Rabbit,” the figure said, emerging from the hallway, depositing his hat on the stand in the corner. “You’re damn lucky I was out there, otherwise you could kiss that sorry hide of yours goodbye. Oh,” he added, sitting down in the faded armchair beside me, “and you can kiss that coat of yours goodbye, too. It’s got so many burns on it it looks like it was attacked by a swarm of dragons.”
“S’mine,” I said, stubbornly, clinging to what earthly things were left to me.
“Suit yourself,” Rabbit replied, getting up from his creaking seat “The remains of your jacket are on the hatstand. The gun seems fine – as does the hip-flask.” He studied my small relief.
As he pottered over to the cabinet, I looked at the photos on the walls around me.

“Ah, the tomb of Zuma,” Rabbit said, noticing my roving eye. “It was to be my greatest exploit. Not that it turned out like that, of course. Brandy?”

I accepted the tumbler with a trembling hand as the gentleman continued. “I’m an archaeologist, by trade, though of course a little treasure hunting on the side never hurt anyone. I had uncovered the find of the decade, perhaps even century, and was just about to extract one of the largest gems anyone has discovered in the South American jungle, when my hat fell off, triggering some undetected booby trap.”

“Of course, I still made it out, though barely, clutching the enormous gem and trying not to lose my hat as the traps chased me all the way out of the tomb. It was as big as my head – no, bigger, I tell you.”
As I watched him tell the story, the pegs swum in front of his face. I convulsed, feeling the nausea rise, and Rabbit looked at me briefly with an air of concern. The feeling passed, and after a while he continued.
“So when I finally emerged into the daylight, who should be waiting there but a bunch of goons, holding my pilot hostage. At first I thought they were the agents of the fascists or some such thugs, but their accents were more eastern European, perhaps even Scandinavian. It took me a few years afterwards to discover who they really were, and how they had followed me through the jungle. It was three years after the event that I first stumbled across the name ‘Bjorn’.”
He watched my eyes widen, and smiled gently, sipping his liquor.

“Of course, they stole our plane, forcing us to trek for miles down the Guayllabamba before we persuded a jungle tribe to boat us downstream and back to civilisation.”
He drained the rest of his brandy, and placed the glass down on the side table with a thud. He stood suddenly, staring up at the map.
“I have spent years, decades, chasing these criminals, but to little avail. Impressive, then, that you managed to untangle their web so quickly, though I see their little game has taken its toll on you.” He turned to gaze dispassionately upon my trembling hands and wild eyes.
“I have another lead. You know of The Hu?” He paused briefly, but continued before I could reply. “Yes, of course. They are performing in the city tomorrow night. Their lead guitarist, Master Hu, is an accomplice of Bjorn’s little crime syndicate. It is rumoured that Bjorn himself will be in attendance.” He paced to and fro in front of the dead fireplace. “All this, of course, is hearsay. However, it is the best lead we have right now. The only problem is that I don’t know how to proceed, exactly, given that only I am in fit shape to…” He stopped, noticing with concern my silhouette making for the door, the remnants of my overcoat already slipping over my shoulders. “Where are you going?”
I turned, the shadow of my hat covering my stubbled, charred features.

“I’m going to rock somebody’s world.”
The door swung shut, and I staggered into the cold night, my path laid out before me like a line of blocks, and I the steel ball of vengeance.

A roach scuttled under the baseboard. The vacant was cold, the night air swirling through the broken panes. I gazed down from the apartment onto the street below, watching.

Beneath a lamppost, the Archduke of Arson, the Pharaoh of Fire, Lord Cinderbottom stood blowing smoke into the dark, damp air, chasing pussy. A few alley cats hung around him, drawn to his dark, illicit power. Cheap kitties, in thrall to their Imam of Immolation. I watched.

Something below me juddered. I saw a plume of flame billowing into the street, a scream rippling outwards with the heatwave that seared through the broken windows. Panicked, I made for the door, trying to find a way out. Had I been made?

Through an open window in the stairwell, I watched Lord Cinderbottom help a few tenants to safety, no doubt ones who had coughed up their share in his racket. His big crocodile grin failed to mask the dark heart that burned within. I rushed onwards, desperately seeking sancturary. I found instead a wall of flame, and blindly, ran back up the stairs to the roof.

From the top of the building, I saw the flames leap ever higher, as a silhouette rose amongst the conflagration. Lord Cinderbottom, pouring fuel on the flames from above. As I gagged for air amongst the choking smoke and dust, the Oligarch of Oxidation looked down.
“I see you finally decided to alight upon my turf, Detective” he called, the gas causing gouts of orange to blossom into the sky.
I staggered back, trying to pull the revolver from my coat. I fell, succumbing to the smoke.
“Well, now,” the winged demon was saying “much as I’ve found this enlightening, I have some bad news for you.” He paused, watching me writhe on the rooftop. “You’re fired.”
The Prince of Plasma rose above the inferno, and vanished into the billowing black pillars of smoke.

Through the flames, I saw peggle. The blocks danced with the flames, pulsating as the alarm bells were drowned out by the roar of the Lord’s flare. I wanted to laugh at the sick humour of it all, the laugh of a man who is condemned to death but realises that he will never, after all, be asked to pay back the fifty dollars he owes his friend. Instead I coughed, the ugliness of everything that had poured into my body this past week coming out in black, glistening gouts upon the concrete.

As the wall of heat closed in, I heard a crash coming from behind the wall of orange. A shape moved through the conflagration, parting the flames. And, as my vision faded to red, I saw a hat, and a whip, and a big, buck-toothed smile, and then nothing.

A siren wailed outside. Cry on another shoulder, I told it, slugging back another glass. I got my own problems. Baseball-bat shaped problems, lightly seasoned with debt, defeat, and death. The bottle glugged in agreement. The glass tipped back, and the problems faded into one. The blocks swam in front of my eyes, and I clumsily swatted at them, pinging some of them away. Twenty points.

Something swung in front of me, tumbling the blocks to ruin. A face loomed above me. Thin, red crescent. I made to raise a finger, ready to send a steel ball along it, when the crescent moved.

“Hello, Dick.” The syllables went down like honey, cutting through the nicotine and cheap liquor that lined my innards, the purity making me shiver. “I have something for you.”

The image blurred into focus. “A fireman.” Was this some sort of test? I looked up. A female face was swimming in and out of my vision.

“Lord Cinderbottom, to his friends. He’s a bent fireman, burning down properties that owe him protection money. In Bjorn’s gang for sure.”
“Why?” Her perfume cut the dank air like napalm, a faint red glow as a cruiser rolled past.
“You looked like you needed a hand. Your trail is as dry as a flame-grilled desert, detective.”
I squinted as she turned to leave, trying to figure out her features through the alcohol haze. “Who are you?” I asked, unsettled.
She cast me a backward glance, frowning. For a second all the demons in Hell descended upon me in that one instant, before she spoke. “You’re drunk.”
“Oh yeah?” I called back. “At least in the morning I’ll be-” The door slammed shut. “Drunker,” I told the frosted glass, weakly.

My captor beamed at me. I struggled a grimace, coughing violently and expelling particles of cake onto the grimy carpet.

“This was one I took last summer,” she droned, her nasal tones drilling into my skull as the rancid tea turned tricks on my stomach. I was trapped, unable to move, my energy spent and will pummelled to dust.

She had found me lying in a puddle of sweat and fear and exhaustion. Dragging me deeper into her lair, watched over by the demon Claude, “he’s a sweetie really, but he can pinch you something awful if you disturb him, you know” I was placed in a chair and, being forced to eat cake and tea, “this one’s of Stonehenge, where I saw balloons and aliens” was tortured, mercilessly, with “and I made the badgers a sandwich” photos of her holidays.

As she penetrated into the soft tissue of my brain with tales of Russian spires, I watched numbers dance in front of me, faint bonuses drifting in and out of view as every object shimmered with the image of my addiction.

The pyramids swum in front of me, hard edges lined by blocks, waiting to be felled. Her thick, floral scent seeped into my nose, violating my sinuses and growing its dank trendrils in my subconscious. I saw flowers, and wanted to vomit. The luke-warm tea sank into my throat, damping any such expressions of self.

I wanted to run, but instead the wall snaked before me, Peggle following close behind, like a dragon waiting to disembowel and torch its prey. Time taunted me, ambling when it should be running, fleeing this dark phantasmagoria. Then, as my mind slipped into darkness and my spirit lay ready to give itself up to the underworld, a miracle occurred. The slideshow ended.

“Oh well,” my captor said, rising stiffly from her chair. “More tea?”
As she padded away to return with more tools of torment, a vast wave of purpose came over me, and, summoning all the forces at my command, I staggered for the door and out, into the cold, clear downpour of freedom.

As I limped back to my office, suit and shirt tattered and stained, my heart slowly fell. I had escaped, beaten my demons and saved my sanity, but the case was dead. I would have to find some other lead, or else face once more the kiss of Gretel in some loan shark’s basement, and with it the end of everthing.

The lobsters eyes fixed me, as time and space melted about us, the darkened room dissolved to reveal the hell underneath.

“Use Claude’s magic flippers,” the phantasm implored as I clasped at my ears, trying to block the demonic shrieks that pierced my waking nightmare. “It is like a game, non?”
The bitter irony coursed its way down my throat, choking as my body convulsed yet again.

I found myself underwater, gasping for air. As the demon-figure muttered on in his alien dialect, I tried to raise myself to the surface and failed, instead falling onto my hands. My hands…
My hands had become flippers. I tried to scream but could not, and instead the lobster continued to converse at length with a ghostly fish. And all about them, Peggle. I wanted to cry, to force tears from my dry, aching eyes.

As I looked back up, the lobster seemed to tower above me. Around him, Peggle, a shield and a weapon, striking at the heart of the city, entering its bloodstream and rendering its defences helpless. People fled and I wanted to join them, but could not. I had become the demon I feared the most.

Flailing, I grasped at the nearest solid object, but my cumbersome claws slipped, and I fell back, staring into the face of the apparition.

What do you want? I cried wordlessly, my mouth failing me. As if by way of answer it attacked, giant, dripping jaws tearing at my carapace. In panic, I flung my arms in front of me, flinching from the unending torment.

Then, as if upon the wings of an angel, a light crept into the room. Gradually, the torment abated, as the light filled the room, bringing clarity to the world through my stinging eyes. Without a sound, the demon turned, and slipped beneath the waves of my turbulent subconscious, leaving only calm as the sun rose to drive the cold, screaming night away.

I do not know how long I lay there, but it was fully day by the time the door creaked open, and a silhouette reached for the light-switch before noticing me on the floor, cowering and dishevelled.

“Oh, you poor thing,” it said. “You look like hell. Let me have a look at you.”
As it happened, the nightmare had only just begun.