And so I hovered and I waited and I chewed upon my astral fingernails. Was the Tyler Technique going to come up cosmic trumps? Would what I hoped for occur because I had done absolutely nothing whatever to make it occur, but even less to stop it? So to speak.
And I hovered and I waited.
And then I heard a little sound.
It was a little hissing sound. As of pressurised steam backing up. And I drifted low and spied that a little needle on a little dial, one that had been most recently tapped, was moving into the red. And smoke was beginning to rise from the vicinity of the valve, which had been switched to the off position, rather than having been left on the on. And a lever that had been pushed down rather than having been left pushed up was starting to vibrate.
And the hissing and the smoking and the vibrating grew and grew and grew. And instrumentation boards began to pop and fizz and then to burst into flame.
And many red lights began to flash.
And panels lit up with the words-
EMERGENCY PROCEDURE SUBJECT RELEASE
And the fixings that fixed me clicked and released and the fluid drained from the tank.
And I returned with haste to my body, now sprawled on the floor of the tank. And I stretched my limbs and climbed to my feet. And I praised the Tyler Technique.
68
Tick tock went the clock, counting down to midnight.
Did you know that the average human life lasts less than one thousand months? It doesn’t sound like much when you put it like that. And it isn’t very much really. And like anything that matters, the less you have of it, the more precious it becomes.
As I rose all wet and bare-bottom-naked from the floor of that floatation tank and gave out with another of those great atavistic howls that were finding so much favour with me of late, I really felt the preciousness of life.
That and the need for underpants.
You just can’t go into battle in nowt but your bare skuddies. It’s not a good look and they’ll never put it in the movie version, the one where Ray Harryhausen is doing the animated monsters.
I was in definite need of underpants and I knew just where to find them.
It was going to be tricky getting from the floatation-tank room all the way up to the God-knows-how-many- floors-above top-most lair and loveless office of Papa Keith Crossbar, necromancer, murderer and head of the CIA. I was going to have to make my way up carefully.
And so I got down to a bit of the old Doctor Strange magic mambo. I crept to the door of the room, pressed my ear to it, nipped outside in my spirit-self and had a good look-see. All clear, so back into my body and out into the corridor and so on. It was a damn fine system, and it occurred to me that should I be able to best the horrible Homunculus and save the World in general, a legitimate job might be found for me in the CIA, as a spy or an undercover agent. Now that I was not only a skilled detective, but also a Master of the Mystic Arts.
I upped to the changing rooms above that smelled of plimsolls and man-bits and sought out one of those smart black suits whose style never dates as long as they’re not made of polyester. And I eventually found one that fitted rather well, and I decided that in keeping with the mission I was presently engaged upon, I would go ‘commando’ while wearing this suit. I did put on a white shirt, though, and a black tie. And a pair of socks and shoes. And, probably best of all, a really spiffing pair of Ray-Bans. And I examined my reflection in a changing-room mirror. And as God had done when finished with His big six days of labour, I looked upon all that I had made and beheld it was very good. And very cool.
And then I heard voices and I did slippings away.
I noticed that there was no shortage of wall clocks in this building, and that the nearest one that I noticed displayed its hands in the twenty-to-midnight position.
Which meant a number of things to me.
That Kevin in Pharmaceuticals would probably by now have loaded the golden girlie up with happy juice.
That a couple of burly ninja types would probably be heading to the floatation tank to hoik me out to face whatever horrors the Homunculus intended for me.
And that the quicker I could get up to the office of the thoroughgoing swine and put paid to his eldritch schemes, then probably the better.
Outside the thunder crashed and bashed and the lightning did all that could reasonably be expected of it.
This final showdown should, at least, not lack for suitable SFX and noises-off, I thought.
I wondered, perhaps, if I should take the lift.
Lift or stairs?
Stairs or lift?
It would be a lot of floors and a lot of stairs-
And Hell, I looked the part. I could blend in here. Dressed like this I could pass for a CIA man-in-black spook any day of the week.
With the possible exception of Tuesday.
But then today wasn’t Tuesday.
I took the lift.
I pressed ‘Penthouse Office’.
And then I did something rather clever.
I left my body standing in the lift and put my astral mind once more to the application of the Tyler Technique.
I concentrated really hard and then did nothing at all.
And I accompanied the rising lift all the way up in the astral, as it were. And I observed all those folk who were about to push the lift button on various floors. I watched them as they missed the button, changed their minds, tripped over, bumped into one another. And on floor thirty-seven, the tall woman from Sales Services, Ms Williams, fell suddenly into a passionate embrace with Trevellian from Corporate Holdings. Much to the shock of his fiancee Ms Hayward of Musical Therapy (the one with the sweet nose who played the steel pan), who had not in fact gone home early, but simply popped out to purchase a new pair of pan sticks. Because she was having a secret affair with Jonny, the manager of the pan-stick shop. Who was the half-brother of Dave, the evil cat’s paw of the Homunculus. Who really quite fancied Ms Williams.
Office life, eh?
So, basically I got all the way up to the top floor unmolested, whipped back inside my body and stepped from that lift looking like a million dollars and cool as a mountain stream.
Just in time to hear all the alarms going off.
‘That would be them finding me missing from the floatation tank,’ I told myself. On the off-chance that I hadn’t already figured it out. ‘So best get a bit of a move on, eh?’
And then I did one of those duckings aside and divings for cover, which, as I previously mentioned, you have to know how to do rather than try and learn. Because the lift beside mine made that dinging noise that lifts do to signify their arrival and my extrasensory nose told me that there were two men in that lift and one golden girlie. So I ducked behind one of those corporate potted plants, the likes of which you can never grow in your own home, which are watered regularly by strange little Japanese men in overalls. Who always whistle old Go West numbers and smell rather strongly of bicycles.
Or was that a dream I once had?
‘Hold on there,’ I told myself. Quietly and behind the cover of the corporate potted plant. A Ficus elasticus decora, I think. ‘Keep your mind together. Don’t go wandering off on any tangents. This is neither the time nor the place.’ And I tried very very hard to stay focused, which wasn’t too easy, I can tell you, because the temptation to
