Chapter III.7

'Oh, you're finished, are you?' said Loofah, looking up. He'd been daydreaming and hadn't noticed that the clashing and squawking had ceased.

'Finished what, boy?' asked Hank, with an edge of menace in his voice.

Loofah grinned quickly. 'Um, it's been very nice talking to you both but I think maybe I should be off,' he said, 'The double woman isn't going to find herself, is she?'

'Ha! Ha!' laughed Boris, 'She certainly vill not!'

'You've both been extremely helpful.'

'Good citizens, boy. We al-uss try to do our dooty.'

'The only thing is, though, you haven't given me any clues.'

'Clues?'

'I haven't got any idea what to do next.'

The two great heads glanced towards each other and then back to him.

''T'ain't really our area, boy,' said Hank, 'It's them that normally looks after that side of things—government people, I mean.'

'Oh, I see,' said Loofah, with disappointment.

'Did ze Hart of ze Darkness say noss-sing?' asked Boris.

'No, not a thing. It said that it wasn't authorised to say any more and that if I wanted to pursue the matter I should speak to its superior.'

'And did you?'

'I couldn't. It wouldn't say who that was: authorization problems again.'

'Well, boy, we can help ya out there; the li'l ole deer's boss is—.'

'No! Vait!' shouted Boris.

'The Cow of Light,' finished Hank.

'Zis is not right! If ze hart had not ze permission to give zis information, zen vee should not do zis eye-zer.'

'Goddamnit, Boris, what's the l'il critter here supposed to do if no-one'll tell him nothin'?'

'But where would I find it, this Cow of Light?' asked Loofah.

'No, vee vill not tell you!'

'Where would you expect to find a cow, boy?'

'Stop! I vill not permit zis breech of procedures!'

'On a farm, I suppose.'

'There ya go, comrade,' said Hank, grinning wickedly at his colleague, 'No breech of your precious procedures; he done guessed his-self!'

'Do not play ze games wiz me, yankee, you know vary vell zat—.'

'Shut your beak, asshole.'

This time, thankfully, it was a very brief spat indeed.

'Right then,' began Loofah, once harmony again reigned, 'I'd best be off. Thanks for everything. I'll, um, see you around.'

'Hang on thar, boy,' said Hank, 'Haven't you gone an' forgot a li'l itty-bitty somethin'?'

'Oh, sorry,' said Loofah, remembering his manners and holding out his right hand to shake one of the featherless wings.

'No, boy, you're too damned small.'

'Oh, that's OK. I'll just stand on this log.' Although if the crow just bent down a bit, thought Loofah tetchily, it could easily reach.

'My comrade means zat you are not beeg enough to find ze Magic Vooman,' said Boris, 'She is a vooman—you are an een-sect.'

'I say, that's a bit strong, isn't it?' said Loofah, bristling—and then he remembered.

'So all the time you was a-thinkin' you was normal sized?' laughed Hank, after Loofah had recounted the scene in the graveyard and his escape from the sinister curates.

Loofah had slumped down onto his log and now sat clutching his head in his hands. He nodded.

'And zat vee ver ze ten feets tall?' giggled Boris.

Loofah nodded again.

'Who ever heard of a ten-foot crow? Why, the very idea of such a creature!' roared Hank, as he flapped his bald wing against his plucked chicken body and the two heads banged together in merriment.

'But what am I to do?' asked Loofah miserably, when the mirth had died down a bit.

'Ze answer is seemple,' said Boris, 'Vee must find out how you ver shrunk and zen reverse ze procedure.'

'He's a-right, boy,' said Hank, 'So tell us: what was it the preacher-man did to make you small?'

'He gave me something to eat. A communion biscuit, I think.'

'Ah! Ze magic of ze religion!' cried Boris, 'Vot can vee do against ze supernatural powers?'

'Magic?—pah!' sneered Hank, 'I tell ya, there's gotta be a scientific explanation.'

Boris reared up, clenching his beak. 'Ze communion vay-fers are ze priest-magic for getting ze power over ze people,' he snapped, 'Zis is a vell known fact.'

'Superstitious eye-wash!' snarled Hank and both beaks swung back in readiness for battle.

'Wait!' shouted Loofah. They both paused, eying him with cold hostility.

'It wasn't a magic wafer. It was a chocolate bar of some sort.'

There was a long moment of tense silence.

'A candy bar?' said Hank, eventually.

'Zis is strange. Ze chocolate does not normally cause ze shrinking, more often ze svelling.'

Hank looked blankly at the Russian for a second. Then something seemed to register in his plucked chicken features and he burst out laughing. '"More often the swelling!" he roared, 'That's a good one, Bo-Bo!'

The tension melted and Loofah sighed with relief, well pleased with his new found diplomatic skills.

'But why should a chocolate bar have made me shrink?' he asked.

'Like Boris just said, it's pretty damned strange,' said the American, 'But my guess would be that the blend of ingredients and additives somehow a-reacted with yoos alien visitor metabolism…'

'Resulting in ze generalised molecular contraction!' exclaimed Boris, 'Of course! Zis is ze scientific explanation! You are so clever, Comrade Hanky!'

Hank flushed with quiet pride. 'Now tell us, boy,' he said, 'what kinda candy bar was it?'

'Um, let me think,' pondered Loofah, casting his mind back to the churchyard, 'First there was a milk chocolate coating—thick and generous as I remember—then a caramely toffee topping and finally the crumbly shortbread base. It was actually very nice.'

'Chocolate—toffee—shortbread,' mused Boris, 'You know, I sink I have had such a sveet.'

'It does sound kinda familiar,' agreed Hank.

'Aha! I remember now,' cried the Russian, 'Ze double sveet! Ze von zat is two!'

'Well, Ah'm a corn snake's uncle!' exclaimed Hank, 'Yoos a-right, pardner! The two-in-one, the candy bar that ain't gone in a single bite!'

'And so now all vee need to do is find such a sveet—and ze problem is solved!'

'Bo-Bo, you're a goddamn genius.'

'Ah, vee got it togezzer, Hanky-Vanky, as a team,' said Boris, 'Two heads is all-vays better zan one. Is zis not true, Comrade Ze Seeker?'

Loofah nodded with uncertain agreement. 'I don't want to be a wet blanket,' he then said, 'but even if you are right, how will finding another chocolate bar of the same type help? Surely that will just shrink me even more.'

'Ah, but zis sveet is different, Comrade. It is ze von zat is two.'

'Two sides of the same coin, boy, two halves of the whole.'

'And so ze von half is a reflection of ze uzzer. Ze molecular structures are complimentary…'

'But opposite.'

'And so if ze von half has caused ze shrinking, ze uzzer half vill cause…'

'The opposite!' cried Hank, with delight.

'It all sounds a bit far fetched to me,' said Loofah, 'But in any case it's all rather academic—because we haven't got another chocolate bar, have we?'

Both heads hesitated and then slumped down onto the naked, goose-flesh chest.

'He's a-right, Bo-Bo,' said Hank, glumly, 'We's a-well an' a-truly scuppered—'cos how's we gonna find a goddamn Twix bar way out in these a-here woods?'

Even with his hands clamped over his ears, he could hear it. Loofah winced and cowered against the oak trunk as the screams tore through his skull and pierced his soul. There was a sickening thud as a pole-axe beak smashed down onto the slaughter log, an unearthly wail of agony then a second thud—the coup de grâce—followed by silence.

Loofah lowered his hands and looked miserably at the broken little package that Boris held out for him. Two gaping wounds, with jagged fragments of shattered chocolate jutting through the wrapper, oozed brown sticky fudge.

'These things gotta be done, boy,' said Hank solemnly, 'Ya can't make an omelette without a breakin' eggs.'

Loofah took the slaughtered confectionary, swallowed hard, then tore open the dead plastic skin to reveal the two little corpses that lay—still warm—side by side within.

'They both look the same,' he said, 'Which one should I eat?'

The two bird-heads looked at each other, then back to him.

'I guess it's a case of trial and error, boy,' said Hank, 'Try one an' see what a-happens.'

Loofah pulled out one of the broken chocolate bodies.

'Are you sure this will work?' he said, dubiously, 'Remember that the priest was an official. His Twix was probably made to some special Secretariat formula, whereas I bought this in an ordinary shop.'

'Trust us, boy.'

Loofah shrugged and, clamping his eyes tight shut, lifted the corpse to his mouth and bit into it.

'I sink a leetle beet at a time, yes?' suggested Boris.

Loofah chewed, fighting nausea as the chocolate and toffee flesh collapsed under his molars and the shortbread bones crumbled onto his tongue. But, just as he was sure he was going to vomit, a wave of caramel sweetness flowed across his mouth, followed by the rich flavour of the milk chocolate. The nausea began to recede; he swallowed and bit again.

'Be careful there, boy,' cautioned Hank, 'not too much.'

'It's OK, nothing's happening,' said Loofah, biting another mouthful off the bar. The nausea and guilt had slipped silently down his gullet and disappeared into the bubbling black hole of his intestines, and he was now very much enjoying his little snack.

'No more, no more! Vee should vait a few minutes to see vot…'

It was as he pushed the last bit into his mouth, that he felt the beginnings of the familiar tingling. Starting at his lips, it spread through his mouth and across his face, then down his neck and chest. And with the tingling, came a cold wash of fear; the crows had been right, it was going to work—and he'd gone and eaten the whole of one bar!

'God damn!' shouted Hank, 'The li'l critter's gettin' smaller!'

The vast black beak towered over him like a construction site crane—and was shooting away into the sky. He was indeed shrinking, but many times faster than at the graveside.

'He is going too fast!' cried Boris, 'He must stop, he must eat ze uzzer bar!'

The crow's plucked body and legs zipped up past his face and an uncomfortable lightness fluttered in his belly as if he were descending in a high-speed elevator.

'Quick, boy! Bite the other bar, bite the other bar!'

But Loofah's legs were being pulled apart by the expanding ground and, as he started fumbling the second chocolate stick from its wrapper, he stumbled, over-balanced and fell, the confectionary slipping from his grip.

His fall was broken by a bed of wet moss. For a moment he lay, winded, feeling the damp sponginess pull away under him as it grew, and staring up at the twin-peaked mountain miles above that was leaning over him and filling the sky. Then he pushed himself up and looked around for the fallen wrapper. He saw it, about fifteen feet away although now the size of a small car—it seemed that the Twix bar had stopped shrinking as soon as it left his hand.

He started towards it, struggling through a knee-high forest of growing moss. But his progress was hopelessly slow and at every step he took the giant bar pulled further away, expanding quickly through transit van to double-decker bus. Then something caught his eye about thirty yards away on his left; it was a black beetle, the size of panther, cracking across the moss on spiked legs with its arched carapace gleaming like metal in the grey light. The great coleopteran paused and something sinister glinted in its cut-jewel eyes. Loofah crouched quickly into the chest high moss, but it was too late, it had seen him. The arthropod behemoth charged, scuttling easily across surface of the spongy foliage. With a minuscule scream of terror, Loofah tried to struggle away but he was too small now and slipped down between the plants, getting wedged between two stalks. A moment later the beetle loomed over him, its fifteen feet spiked mandibles sweeping down from the armoured head like over-sized scythes. It hesitated briefly, then passed on—at less than a mouthful, Loofah was no longer worth the effort.

As he sank down between the slippery trunks, Loofah entered a rainforest of wet green light and dense tropical foliage. The moss plants were now great trees that soared above his head, and he slithered down into the algal swamp under their buttressed trunks. A clutch of white springtails hopped past, growing from dogs to elephants before disappearing into the foliage, and a nematode worm arched up out the primal slime like a plesiosaur's neck. Then, pulled under by its surface tension, Loofah was swallowed into the liquid mire.

He was now in a drifting green world. In the distance, great sea-monster nematodes writhed and twisted. A spinning rotifer bumped against him, its thrashing cilia tickling Loofah's skin like moving fur. He kicked away from it before it had chance to expand and swallow him.

Strange beings grew out the hazy slime until it became a soup of squirming life. All around now were the passive green boxes of single celled algae, whirling ciliates the size of lorries, and flagellate bacteria that nuzzled up to him like affectionate dogs. Then the liquid stirred behind him and he twisted round to face a quivering mass of protoplasm that was expanding out of the soup, reaching out for him with loving arms of living jelly. This time there was no escape—he swallowed hard and gritted his teeth, and awaited amoeba's embrace like a man.

Phagocytosis, however, was nowhere near as traumatic as he had feared. Indeed, the protozoan cytoplasm was very like the slime outside: a heaving mass of life, although now of pulsing organelles and slithering cytoplasmic membranes, of ribosomes and mitochondria. Loofah found himself wafted through the living jelly by unseen forces, propelled towards a vast sphere that swelled inexorably as he approached.

It was less manic inside the nucleus, with no more than the quiet throbbing of the life-power. Now, however, jelly was differentiating into a sea of vibrating molecular globules that bounced and tumbled around him like ping-pong balls in a vast tombola, as they carried him inexorably towards the centre.

As it emerged from the pulsing haze, the double helix seemed to be infinite, a twisting thread that meandered, without beginning or end, through the buzzing soup of molecules. Gradually, as Loofah drifted nearer and nearer, he could see that each strand of the helix was in fact comprised of millions of glittering atoms, tiny points of shimmering light in the surrounding blackness, stars in a great helical galaxy.

Soon Loofah was inside one strand of the galaxy, surrounded by stars, rotating slowly as he drifted silently through space. All was now quiet. Indeed, the only sound in the vast emptiness was that of his own breathing (this being somewhat harder and faster than normal on account of the notorious sparseness of the inter-stellar atmosphere). After what seemed like an eon of aimless drifting, he noticed that one of the stars was getting gradually brighter—he could almost feel the loving hug of its gravitational field drawing him towards itself, as if he were a straying infant being returned to the fold.

Swinging in past the first electron—a cold, rock football—he hurtled straight towards the sun. But the next planet, a ball of gas the size of a house that swirled with a million colours, tugged at him with its own gravity and pulled him off course. He was now heading straight for a third planet, an oasis of blue and white in the stark blackness.

Coming in at a tangent, he swept across North America and hammered into the hard cushion of the atmosphere somewhere over the mid-Atlantic. Bounced and buffeted through the screaming stratosphere, he realised then that astronauts had not exaggerated the rigours of re-entry; at one point he nearly lost his spectacles and burn-up was warm enough to dry the last of the river water from his clothes. With wind shrieking in his ears and tearing at his clothes, he watched the British Isles unfold themselves under him like a road map. There were cloud spillages over Wales and the West Country, but he was heading for the Home Counties, for a reassuringly sunny patch to left of the big city.

The green earth was now hurtling upwards with alarming rapidity and Loofah struggled manfully to stay calm. He had once done a parachute jump for charity and he told himself again and again that he'd be OK if he remembered to roll on impact. Then the patch-work of fields and roads and woods zoomed in like an absurdly speeded-up film, and a nanosecond later something cannoned into his soles with the force of a thousand steam hammers, crumpling his legs. Blue sky tumbled over and around him, his legs went over his head, and the hard earth pummelled at his body like an enraged prize fighter. Then a blaze of white light exploded in his brain as what felt like a mountain collided with his skull.

Blackness and stars—he was back drifting in space. All would have been at perfect peace, except that something was moving under his legs and shoulders, pulling at his clothes. He shifted, trying to get comfortable, but still the ground crawled out from under him. With a click of realisation he opened his eyes and the stars swam against bright blueness. He was lying on his back on a patch of flattened vegetation that was tearing away from under him as the inexorable shrinking continued. Three feet away from his head something moved—a tiny white insect was charging madly through the crushed stems towards him.

By the time the crow reached him, Loofah was sitting up and rubbing his bruised body, all the time shifting from one buttock to the other to let the expanding earth out from under him.

'Boy!' squeaked Hank, now pigeon-sized, 'You gotta bite the other bar!'

Boris's head was nodding madly up and in his beak Loofah could now see a tiny fleck of gold plastic wrapper.

'It's too small,' he cried, 'I'll drop it!'

'Goddamnit, boy,' shouted Hank, now up to his knees, 'don't argue!'

It was not easy to manipulate the tiny bar out of its wrapper on his palm, while at the same time keeping his balance on the rapidly expanding ground. Fortunately the Twix was still growing quickly and eventually he held up a little chocolate matchstick.

'Not too much! Not too much!' yelled both the birds at once.

This time Loofah heeded their advice and delicately bit off about a third of the stick. He swallowed—but nothing happened.

'No, boy!' yelled Hank—now level with his shoulder—seeing him lift the pencil of confectionary for another bite, 'Give it time!'

Yet again the crow was proved right; a second later the now familiar tingling burst across Loofah's face and he felt suddenly heavy, like reaching the ground floor in a fast lift.

'This is one helluva a goddamn mess!' said Hank, quietly.

They were standing in middle of a vast area of devastation, the ground-zero of an atomic test. The wood had been flattened as if under some gigantic fist; in all directions the trees were crushed and broken, and everywhere Loofah looked he saw great mounds of fallen foliage and the ghastly white of shattered heartwood. He winced with guilt: it would take a few years of newspaper recycling to make up for this one-man eco-disaster.

The crow—now restored to its normal size—was clucking sadly to itself, surveying its ruined home.

'Zis is terrible, terrible,' muttered Boris, shaking his beak.

'I don't know what to say, I really don't,' said Loofah, genuinely distraught, 'I am so, so sorry.'

'You're goddamn right it's terrible, comrade,' said Hank, ignoring Loofah, 'You sure as hell screwed up this time!'

'I just wish there was something I could do.'

'Vot do you mean I screwed up?' snapped Boris, also ignoring Loofah, 'It vos you zat made heem eat ze wrong von.'

'Actually, I think it was probably my fault,' said Loofah, 'I shouldn't have eaten the whole bar.'

'That's a lie, you goddamn commie son-uva-bitch!'

'Are you calling me the liar, yankee?'

'Please don't start arguing, it won't help at all,' pleaded Loofah.

But the two beaks reared up, preparing for active service.

'Red scum!'

'Look, why don't we just—.'

'Treacherous capitaleest dog!'

Loofah screwed up his courage and stepped forward, arms raised like a boxing referee.

'Stop it!' he bellowed.

They both swung round to face him.

'Look, I've said all this was my fault,' said Loofah, 'So there really is no need for all of this pointless bickering between the two of you.'

Neither head spoke.

'Really, there isn't.'

An endless silence. Loofah's confidence began to evaporate under the cold heat of their silent gaze.

'Why not be friends now?' he went on, nervously, 'Peace between East and West—after all, the Cold War's been over for a long time now.'

Four hostile eyes narrowed.

'Who asked you, asshole?' sneered Hank.

'You keep your beeg nose out, eh?' added Boris.

'Ya crumby li'l punk, ya come round here smashin' the whole goddamn place to pieces—.'

'And zen you start geeving ze lectures like some beeg important apparatchik.'

The crow stepped forward menacingly; the terrifying beaks loomed over Loofah and four black eyes glared cold fury. He started to back away, but was blocked by a fallen oak trunk.

'I think maybe I should be off now,' said Loofah, glancing quickly at the half-chewed bit of Twix that was slowly getting soft in the palm of his hand, 'Although it really has been a pleasure spending time with you gentlemen.'

'Well, we ain't a-finished with you yet, boy,' said Hank, 'So you's a-goin' nowhere.'

'I'd really love to stay a little longer, but you know how it is,' Loofah said with a sheepish grin, surreptitiously lifting his hand to his mouth.

'You go ven vee say you go, and not before—is thees clear?' said Boris.

Loofah chewed quickly and swallowed.

'Bye-bye then,' he said, with some diffidence.