Widdershins Part 1

Someone had hacked intuition and was broadcasting on that frequency, he knew it — they all knew it. They had been coming together under a loose banner for an age now. Their groups had many names but the one thing that each and every member had in common was their fleeting relationship with sleep. That sleep was something that was not natural for any of these people was perhaps their saving grace — they occupied the midnight hour and ruled the pre-dawn and post-dusk. Shadow dwellers that were charged with carrying torches to illuminate the way for others who were doomed to fall by the wayside.

Jerry had told him that he was a true Philosopher King — that all the tests, which they had been forcing him to take at school, were in fact part of clandestine recruitment programme that the Elders had been running parallel to the education system for centuries, ever since The Sand first emerged as a threat. Who would believe that when they first heard it? Who would swallow that line with its hook and sinker? The first thing he had been taught to do was to question things and that was what he brought to bear upon the whole situation — taking razor thin slices with Occam’s razor to get to the heart of the matter. He made sashimi of their logic — took the whole machinery apart and then put it back together while they were still blinking in the shine of his inquisitor light.

‘You are perfect for the job,’ said Thomas, of whom it was rumoured that he was the actual Torquemada that had led the fearsome inquisition.

He flipped what Ersatz at first took to be a coin towards him and which he found to be a small button badge with a question mark super-imposed over an eye.

‘So put it on,’ offered TT, with a smile to make sharks nervous.

‘I get a membership badge?’

‘Sure, why not? Tattoos like we used dish out in the old days are a lot more painful, but if you are feeling brave we can have Egon knock one up for you.’

‘Egon?’

‘Schiele: well-known painter sometime.’

‘You use sometime as a phrase a hell of a lot.’

‘Well, what would you prefer? You realise of course that time as a unidirectional phenomenon is a myth that was debunked a fair while ago? We think now in terms of simultaneity and frequency modulation when we talk of different temporal indexes.’

‘You lost me somewhere around the point where you started speaking.’

‘My boy, if I believed that you would have the last bullet in my revolver’s chamber nestled between your frontal lobes. Now, we expect you to go out there and start recruiting your team — start taking apart the organisations which The Sand rests its kingdoms on.’

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