The last few weeks he’d been different. Ever since the night Danny and Ben had got fried by that old holly tree in the back garden, things had just not been the same. He could not put his finger on exactly what had changed but something was not right. He dare not even admit it to his wife lest she think he really had lost the plot this time.
Goodness knows his head ached enough beforehand. He had a very pretty, very talented but highly strung wife. Sometimes he wished he had married someone a little more placid and plain. In turn, she sometimes wished she had married someone with a little more, ‘Get up and go’ as her father was fond of saying. Then there were the twins – he adored them but wished for a volume control and an off button.
The shifts as Danny’s carer were not that demanding but they did seem to go on forever sometimes. And they were tiring. So things in Michael’s head had been far from perfect for a while but at least, from Golden Frog’s point of view, there was plenty of room to stretch one’s legs - figuratively speaking. Indeed there were virtually whole hemispheres of Michael’s brain that were hardly used at all.
‘Ahhh, stupid damn human!’ The Japanese accented words echoed around his head as he walked along the corridor to the kitchen. It was that voice again. Michael had recently started thinking in a strange accent, Japanese certainly, but a bit ‘London’ too. Too much late-night TV and one too many 12 hour shifts was Michael’s hasty self-diagnosis.
‘What’s happening to me?’ Michael worried out loud, talking to himself as he approached the kitchen. Even his emotions did not feel like his own. He was usually so calm, bordering on depressed if truth were known, but now he often felt angry for no explicable reason. The anger was not so bad it just did not feel like it was ‘his’.
Michael heard the voice in his head say, ‘Hey woman! Get dinner now!’ but just managed to avoid saying it. Nathalie who was making lunch gave him an odd look, suspicious but curious. Standing at the kitchen door in Danny’s old house he dearly wanted to passionately embrace her. He also felt compelled to order her to cook him a seafood stir-fry. No sane person would ever order Nathalie about. He didn’t even like seafood.
Michael felt his world was becoming more vague and uncertain by the hour. He had been having very strange dreams recently which added to his sense of the surreal. They frequently involved ornamental ponds and lovely cool fountains. And lily pads. He had developed a huge obsession about lily pads.
Driving home from work, Michael sniffed the air, ‘Water, salt, fish?’ he thought. He skilfully parked Julie the Jalopy (Michael felt the need to name all his vehicles). He sniffed the air again and followed the scent around the corner. He was standing outside the pet-shop. He had smelt live fish from a good 50 yards away. The smell had reached him even through the background sensory hum of city and the wafts of nearby Chinese restaurant. Smelling live fish like that: really very strange. And even more bizarrely for the poor misguided soul formerly known as Michael, but who was now merely part-Michael, was the aquatically inspired desire that flooded his mind.
‘I’ll have that one,’ said Michael authoritatively to the astonished shop-keeper. He was pointing at one of their most expensive tanks, ‘And throw the works in with it too.’
Throwing caution to the wind he had decided to treat himself to a top-of-the-range fish tank - just like that, no dithering at all. It had cost him a quarter of a month's wages. That voice in his head had just said, 'Stuff damn cost!' in that unsettling half-Japanese accent of his. Michael’s old self regained the upper hand. His anxiety returned. How was he going to explain this all to his wife?
It had taken some hours to set everything up that evening. Luckily it was his wife’s turn to put the twins to bed so he had the lounge to himself. Finally, Michael sat back, cup of sweet milky coffee in hand, and relaxed in the small laminate-floored lounge. He admired the new aquarium that now dominated the room. He was going to tell his wife that the tank was Danny’s but he had changed his mind and insisted Michael had it.
As Michael watched the bubbles aerating the tank, a distressing pulsing sensation sneaked up on him like a thief in the night. His entire head began to beat, drum-like, to a dislocated rhythm. His brain became an electrified liquid, firing off thousands of miniature lightning strikes. He tried to call out for help to his wife, she must have fallen asleep upstairs, but no words would come. ‘I’m going to die!’ Michael thought in sheer panic. The sensation moved continuously like waves of molten sound. Hot sparks of lava slowly spread their red tentacles down from his brain along his spine. Armies of fire began to course up and down his body with a life of their own.
He held his head in his hands and with a crawling horror Michael wondered when a great pain would inevitably stab him like a knife. But the greater torment never came. It was almost more unnerving. Something was about to strike him down forever. He wondered if he was having a heart attack or some strange kind of seizure. All this sensation mere moments later, just vanished as suddenly as it had made its unwelcome entrance.
As Michael noticed his pounding heart thudding in his chest, he observed he was still alive. For the first time in a long time he felt himself flood with feelings of intense gratitude, gratitude for just being alive.
Michael tried to convince himself that he hadn't really experienced what his feelings, shaking hands and cold sweat told him that he had. It was just another figment of his imagination, the kind he’d been having far too often recently. When he had calmed down sufficiently he realised with a numb horror that it hadn't ended.
Something else was going on. This time it was icy cool and was slowly spreading from his toes upwards. Before he knew it an utterly blissful chilled sensation engulfed his whole body. It melted away every trouble, every fear, as surely as a fire-hose entrained upon a small camp-fire. It was as though his very soul was the most beautiful flowing water that had ever existed.
This soul-water was sculptured within an endlessly beautiful ocean. He was separate, but somehow not separate, at the same time. He could think of something or nothing, everyone or no one. It was the sort of wonderful that comes around just once upon a blue moon.
Whilst he was in this beautiful state, Golden Frog appeared before Michael’s mind's eye in all his full Biblical glory. There were trumpets and angels and a cloak made of pure golden sun. Golden Frog's voice was as crystal clear as the shimmering air. The frog appeared to be suspended above the Earth in mid-air.
‘I am Golden Frog. Congratulations on the loan of your hardware. All you need to do is obey my every command and this, this fantastic feeling, will be all yours, whenever I, I mean you, want.’
‘Yes we can!’ said Michael feeling as if he had suddenly detached himself. He didn't want to waste a second of the surrounding experience in mere conversation.
‘If you want to experience all this again you need to do me a little favour.’ Golden Frog knew that Michael would have happily BBQ'd his right arm to feel it again. ‘We have to do some, let’s say, rally driving, tomorrow. You may have to loan me your body.’
‘Okay,’ said Michael, who was convinced he was getting a fantastic deal. He even felt slightly sorry for poor old Golden Frog. The frog smiled an enigmatic, slightly threatening smile and then he was gone in a puff of yellow smoke.
Of course he hadn't really gone. He had just turned the lights off and retired to his bedroom in the reticular area of Michael's brain stem. The feelings melted away and Michael gazed peacefully at the fish-tank.
Michael really was no match for Golden Frog. Danny, on the other hand, was one of the very few who could have put up a fight. It wasn't easy holding out against a super-charged mind-entity.
Golden Frog was on his third incarnation upon this world and he was only 50 years old at this moment. He could live up to 500 years on a more amenable planet. Here on Earth 80 years was about all he could take in one go. Three lifetimes spent trying to get off this dump and head back home and now he had fallen in with the most sinister secret agency on this whole forsaken planet! What could be worse than the agency with no name? It was an organisation feared throughout the galaxy. But how else was he to get back home? He had tried and failed so many times now. He felt sorry for himself for a moment or two longer before returning to his default mode of righteous anger.
‘That stupid agency. They think they control me! They think I am just a commodity!’ Golden Frog reflected, a little sadness mixing in with his vitriol. He would make the world laugh at them, and then destroy them if they did not hold good to their promise to help him home. If anyone could do it, he could. In the meantime it suited that they believed he was just a potent weapon, a useful tool.
Sure, they didn't completely trust him; he was much too powerful for that. So they had fitted him with a Mindsnapper, stolen technology from the Fargones. The Fargones were nearly as advanced as the Inter-stellar Mind-frogs, of which race Golden Frog was a part. The agency thought that Golden Frog was merely an 'engineered' mind-entity, a sentient mind-programme from a planet unimaginably far away. They did not suspect he had memories going back for millennia.
The agency did know he was lonely and unable to make the journey back home, wherever that was. This, and the Mindsnapper, gave them their power over him. If Golden Frog manipulated Danny in the way required, the agency might reward him. They said they could assist him home. But how much were they promises really worth?
The next day, despite the distractions of the twins, the strange sensations continued to echo in the dark cavern that had become Michael's mind. Michael had felt uneasy that morning. He wasn't quite sure what reality was any more.
The feelings the night before had been thrilling as well as frightening but the sheer awesome newness of it all lingered long in the mind. Maybe he should go to the doctors he told himself. They would probably only give him some pill though and tell him he was working too hard. He didn't feel quite in control anymore, but somehow, that didn't seem to matter.
Michael went to work and as the day wore on he had more of those strange sinister feelings. He observed the moods passing through him but felt detached as if he was a traveller wandering through a train station in some far corner of the world. He’d done his utmost to ignore any intrusions upon his emotions. Otherwise he'd tried to explain them all away, to be rational, to be sane.
Michael, being at the mercy of Golden Frog's merest whim, offered little resistance. Golden Frog simply planted an intense desire to walk out Danny’s house and drive. Michael couldn’t help but laugh out loud as he drove off, his part-worn tyres spitting dust on the grey tarmac. With Nathalie out shopping for the boy’s return from hospital he was the only carer on duty. Sarah would have to fend for herself.
‘And,’ butted in Golden Frog to Michael telepathically, ignoring the poor quality of Michael’s passing thoughts. ‘You can drive REAL fast. Now that'll be REALLY RELAXING’.
Michael's foot caressed the accelerator pedal as he sped away. He began to drool slightly as various sensual hallucinations swept past his mind's nose. Michael was getting hot under the collar and somewhat damp. He gripped the wheel in a confident manner as he sped up Smithdown Avenue past the enormous new supermarket.
‘Sod the amber light, I'll just jump it,’ Michael thought, acting completely out of character. Michael narrowly missed the front end of a large white van with its contents of one angry builder and a bewildered Alsatian dog. Michael was impressed with his new-found lack of restraint but hoped the man in the van did not catch up with him and give him a good thumping. Michael did not like fighting.
As he passed the Women's Hospital he could feel streaming sensations in his legs and a wonderful warm feeling in his belly. Suddenly, he was overcome with feelings of pure pleasure. A few seconds later it all went black. With his hands still on the driving wheel he passed out cold. The speedometer said forty miles per hour.