Narnia Shop Hell Panther

 It was Sunday and it was still raining. Bex was the first awake. She opened the kitchen window, made herself a cup of coffee and then shuffled into the lounge with it. She peeked into the entrance hall. Jarek’s outrageous boots and Mazza’s Docs were conspicuous in their absence. She glanced at her lime green Baby G. It was almost ten o’clock. She hoped they hadn’t been arrested again. A door creaked open upstairs. She could tell from the ghoulish yawn that it was Kypo. She studied the contents of the low table as he hacked and gargled his way through his morning ablutions. The sorry pot plant was still hanging on for dear life after being knocked over innumerable times, smacked by Kypo’s pois, subjected to Al’s experiments and victim to Jarek and Mazza’s roughhousing. A hopeful shoot reached upwards from amidst the other frayed and battered leaves. One of Ash’s dioramas stood next to the plant. It can’t have been one she liked very much, since she’d left it to the chaos of the lounge for more than a week. She usually displayed them for an evening or two before secreting them away to her room again. She was such a sweetie, Bex thought. She wondered how she’d managed to survive so long in this house, with the mad boys and the almost constant stream of interlopers, deadbeats, weirdos and miscellaneous human (and sometimes non-human) detritus they kept bringing home. Ash might be a misfit among misfits, she thought, but she was part of the family.

Bex sipped her coffee and tried to figure out why the diorama looked different. Then she saw it: Ash’s burlap-clad peasant figurines had been given bottle cap hats, the beer company logos painted over with nail polish. She was about to take them off when she realised Ash would probably appreciate the collaborative effort. Her eyes wandered over the rest of the table. Next to the diorama was one of Jarek’s fat candles, a pool of wax at its base fastening it to the grubby raffia mat that passed as a little tablecloth. The rest of the glass tabletop, which by some miracle of modern science was still intact, was adorned with an assortment of half-filled ashtrays, dirty coffee mugs, Kypo’s yellow bong, Al’s ammeter, crocodile clips and other miscellaneous electrical components. 

Bex picked up a used resistor with blobs of solder on each end. She straightened it out and poked it through the sleeve of one of the peasants. Now it had a hat and a staff. 

She noticed a half-smoked spliff resting on the edge of one of the ashtrays. The sight of it sped up her thought process briefly: She was broke and it was raining. She didn’t have homework or anything else that required dedicated concentration. She lit it and took a puff. Kypo appeared as if by magic.

“Alright Bex.”

“Alright Kypo.”

“Give us a drag?” 

She handed it to him and watched the ember eat up the paper as he pulled on it. 

“Thanks luv,” he croaked, handing it back. 

A slithering, thumping noise emanated from outside the longe. It was Al, taking his preferred weekend morning route down the stairs, head-first on his belly. 

“What are you two doing up at this godforsaken hour?” he grumbled as he wormed through the doorway. “Al, it’s ten o’clock in the morning,” Bex replied. 

“Where are the walking nightmares? He’d also noticed the absence of Jarek and Mazza’s shoes. “They’re still not back?” Kypo hadn’t. 

They heard a key in the lock.

“Speak of the devils” Al said, but it was Ash coming back. 

“Nah mate, that’s the angel” Kypo quipped.

Ash propped her umbrella up against the drainpipe by the door and pulled off her pink gumboots in the entranceway. She gave Kypo a sweet smile and unrolled a towel filled with different coloured leaves, twigs and stones onto the floor near the table. 

“Where’ve you been, Ash?” Al asked. 

“Finding interesting things.”

“What for?”

“Finding interesting things is the meaning of life.” she replied.

Al glanced at Kypo, who shrugged: “She could be right, you know.”

“You didn’t see Jarek or Mazza while you were out, by any chance?” Bex asked.

“No.” Ash replied. “We could do a divination though.”

“A divination? Sounds fun.” Bex said. “How do we go about that?”

“We need something of theirs, preferably their hair. That’s to establish a resonance. Then we need avatars.”

“Like the blue people?” Kypo wondered aloud. 

“No, more like voodoo dolls. Except we’ll be using them to find them, not to hurt them.”

“We can use my Skeletor for Jarek!” Al suggested.

“Nice idea, Al, but that won’t be necessary. I already have poppets for everybody in the house.”

Kypo broke the ensuing uncomfortable silence by announcing that he’d go to the boys’ rooms to see if he could find any of their hair. Ash then disappeared into her room leaving Bex on the sofa and Al on the floor. He slithered up to join her. “I’m not at all alarmed that the strange quiet girl has made voodoo effigies of everyone in the house.” Al said.

Bex sipped her coffee and looked at him over the rim of the mug. “Everyone in this house is strange, Al. I think Ash is actually the safest of all of us.”

“...She says, as preparations are made for a divination using poppets and human hair...”

“Al. You made a device to electrocute the postman. Ash’s motives are pure. She believes in magic and she’s obviously prepared to use it.”

“Yeah, to find the maniacs.”

“Our maniacs. C’mon. Humour her Mr. Science man.”

Ash returned with the poppets and set them down next to the leaves and twigs she’d brought in when she arrived. While not particularly realistic, it was easy to tell which was Mazza and which was Jarek. “Can I see my one?” Al asked, suddenly intrigued: She’d managed to capture the essences of the people she’d represented without being too detailed or obvious. 

“I’ll show you later. We’re doing this now. Sit there.” She motioned to a place on the floor. He did as he was told. “You are west. Kypo, sit at ninety degrees to him facing me. Bex, sit on my left. Now Kypo is South, Bex is East and I am North.” She placed the poppets in the middle of the space between them, and arranged the leaves around them. 

Kypo noticed that the reddest one was on his side, the greenest one on Ash’s side and that they were arranged in a colour gradation through orange and brown. Realising he still had the hair he’d found in the rooms, but forgetting which one was which, he passed them to Ash, who deftly wrapped them around the necks of the poppets. She then took Bex’s right hand in her left and Al’s left hand in her right. Sensing what needed to be done, Kypo took their other hands in his. He cast his eyes across the other three’s faces. They all had their eyes closed; Al with an amused smirk, Ash calm and receptive and Bex just looked high. He closed his eyes too and waited. 

There was a crash in the kitchen and a pigeon came flying through the archway connecting to the lounge, shedding feathers and battling to stay airborne. It landed in Kypo’s lap and he launched backwards in surprise, sending it tumbling into the circle of leaves. A large black housecat came hurtling over Bex’s shoulder and landed on the bird, freezing for a moment with its body between its claws. There was a little crunch: It ended its life with a decisive bite to the back of the neck. The cat trotted quickly back the way it had come, exiting through the kitchen window. 

“What the fuuuck!” Kypo said, both hands gripping his afro. Bex was standing on the couch, her reddened eyes wide. Only Al and Ash remained where they had been sitting. Al released her hand and shrugged: “I guess that’s the end of the ritual.”

Ash shook her head. “No, that was the apotheosis of the divination. Look at the circle.”

The poppets had been knocked over , Jarek’s face down and Mazza’s on its back. Only one leaf, a reddish orange one that had been between Kypo and Al, was out of place. A downy grey feather wafted down, alighting silently and unnoticed on the bottle cap hat of the peasant with the resistor staff. Ash cleared her throat. “It is clearly a desperate situation. There is obviously some urgency.” She paused for a moment and then pointed at the gap in the circle of leaves. “They’re in that direction.”

“Is that it?” Al was impressed and his curiosity was piqued. 

Ash stood up. “Well at least one of them is in trouble and we need to go that way to find them.”

“Okay, let’s go! You two coming?” Al looked at Bex, who was still standing on the couch, and then at Kypo, who was still gripping his hair. 

“I think we can let them hold the fort, Al. Besides your techie stuff, do you have something like a tool or a weapon?”

“I have a grappling hook.”

“Bring it.”

Al ran upstairs to get it while Ash went into the entranceway to put her pink gumboots back on.   

“Once you two have got your shit together, do something nice for the poppets,” she told Bex and Kypo, then opened the door for Al, who came bounding down the stairs in an oilskin raincoat and a black backpack slung over one shoulder. Once they’d closed the door behind them, Kypo released his hair and uttered again, quieter this time, “What the fuuuck.”

“You know, Ash, I don’t mean this in a creepy way, but I’ve just discovered I quite like you,” he told her as they marched down the street in the rain. “Discovering new things is the meaning of life,” she said, and then added, “Didn’t you like me before? I got the sense you all liked me. I like you all back. I know I’m the newest in the house but…” 

“You’re safe, Ash, I just thought you were a bit off.”

“Aren’t we all a bit off?”

Al made a thoughtful frown and tilted his head. “All in our own ways, I suppose. South-west right? We should go down here.” It was a cycle path that departed the street at an angle, leading to the wooded section of the local park on the one side and the back of the supermarket on the other. “So, that thing with the cat and the bird… Did you know that would happen?”

“No,” she replied, “but in a divination, one must be receptive to whatever happens. I know you’re an empiricist, but I also know that you know, or at least suspect, that that event happening at that time was a lot more than a coincidence. That’s why you’re coming with me.”

“I’m impressed with your perspicacity but I doubt we’re going to find them just by walking South West.”

“Maybe not, but it’s much less likely that they’ve vanished forever. We’ll find them one way or another. Asking the universe for a sign, getting one and then acting on it sure as shit beats sitting around waiting for something to happen, don’t you agree?”

Al grinned. “I do agree,” he said, shifting his backpack so the grappling hook wouldn’t poke him in the ribs.This was weird but he was having fun.

At that moment they noticed a young woman standing in the path ahead of them. She had long, straight black hair and heavy black make-up. Her pupils were huge. She wasn’t wearing any rain gear and her wet black dress clung to her skinny body. She seemed to recognize them. 

Al and Ash exchanged glances, wordlessly communicating that neither of them knew her. As they got closer, the young woman’s lips started moving, but no sound came out. Ash took her by the hand and asked, “Are you tripping?” She nodded. “Do you know Jarek and Mazza?” She nodded again, vigorously, then pulled Ash off the path and into the trees. Al followed them as they ducked under branches and squeezed between sodden bushes. He almost lost them, so deftly was Ash pulled through the undergrowth by this mad-looking goth. Suddenly, he heard his name called from above: “Al! Al! I can’t climb anymore!” It was Jarek and he sounded desperate, but Al couldn’t see him. From somewhere behind a bush he heard Mazza yell Ash’s name in amazement. He couldn’t find a way around the bush so he barged through it, emerging straight into a bear-hug from Mazza’s bulky body. 

“My God! You guys! Milk for the pigeon! Narnia shop! Fucking hell panther!” Mazza babbled.

“Mate! What are you on about?” Al shook him by the shoulders. The goth girl nodded furiously, as if everything Mazza was saying made perfect sense and she needed to corroborate it. “Ash! Al! Up here!” Jarek shook a branch to show where he was stuck. He was ridiculously high up and they eventually caught sight of his multi-buckled boots through the foliage. 

Ash looked at Al. “You know what to do,” she said. 

Al grinned, and shaking his head, pulled the grappling hook from his bag. The first branch looked very difficult to reach in order to start climbing, but he had a clear shot at one about halfway up. He swung the hook and released it. It wound twice around the branch and stuck fast. Al gave the rope a good, hard tug and then used it to climb up to the first branch. He made his way up to the branch with the hook. Straddling it, he pulled the rope up, and about halfway along, threaded it through his belt. Then he continued to climb up the slippery trunk to get to Jarek.

He found him hugging the trunk, his pupils as big as the goth girl’s and he looked uncharacteristically terrified. “Hey mate. I thought you could climb!” Al said as he got his face level with Jarek’s. 

“I’m tripping my face off!”

“I know for a fact you can climb better when you’re tripping. How did you get up to that first branch?” 

“Some Matrix shit, I don’t know.”

“Okay, more importantly, why?”

“I came for… for our bird. Then the puma thing came.”

“The hell panther?” Perhaps this wasn’t just nonsense from Mazza’s imagination, Al thought.

“Yes! It chased the bird away! And now I can’t climb down! I’m scared of gravity!”

“Okay mate, whatever. You’re incapacitated at the top of a tree. Sounds about normal for you on a Sunday morning. I’m tying this to your belt and then I’m going to climb down a bit. When I say so, I want you to let go of the tree, but make absolutely sure the rope is on this side of the branch. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, when you let go, your weight will pull me up and you’ll come down. We’ll counterbalance each other. I can’t believe you forgot how to climb. You’re as bad as Mazza all of a sudden.” Al said as he climbed down.

“Okay, now!” Al called up when he was ready. Jarek let out a girlish shriek as he let go. A zipping sound accompanied by crashing foliage marked his descent from the upper branches. Al tried to grab him as he tumbled past, but couldn’t get traction on his leather jacket. Jarek kept descending and Al kept ascending until the rope pulled taut against the grappling hook, yanking them both to an abrupt stop. Jarek grabbed the trunk and wedged one of his chunky boots between it and a branch to stabilise himself. Al untied himself, climbed down and the two repeated the process to get Jarek down to the ground. When Al finally wrenched the grappling hook out and made it out of the tree, Ash flashed him a brilliant smile. 

“Nice work bruv! I had a chat with these two while you were up there…”

“They can talk now?”

“Well, more a deciphering of acid poetry and interpretive dance than a chat, but I think I’ve figured out what happened.”

“Okay, let’s hear it on the way home. These three need to get somewhere warm and dry. They look like drowned rats.”

Ash  decided it would be better to facilitate the retelling of their story than try to explain it the way she understood it: “So, you guys went to watch the Psycho Banshees at the Styx, right?” 

“Ohh! The Psycho Banshees!” Jarek exclaimed, as if he’d been reminded of something that happened years ago. 

“And what happened after the show?” Ash prompted.

“Weird stuff. Weird, crazy stuff. Halloween school bus! Alison Wonderland!” Mazza said, awestruck at the recollection.

“Yeah, the band… they had this bus. We helped them pack their instruments… The lead singer, Alison… She invited us onboard. It was like a spooky shrine inside.” Jarek added, rubbing a bruised elbow through his jacket. “There was this hookah with something funky in it,” he continued, “and they gave us LSD. They had to leave town in the morning…” He stopped to examine a tiny red insect running across a leaf. Realising after a while that he was still supposed to be telling what had happened, he carried on: “They dropped us off a couple of blocks away from here with Abbie.” 

“Is this Abbie?” Ash checked, and the goth girl did a little curtsey. She still hadn’t said a word.

“Yeah, and on our way back we found this pigeon with an injured wing,” Jarek said, and Abbie danced away flapping to illustrate that it could only fly for a little bit at a time. 

“You reckon it’s the same bird?” Al asked Ash.

“I don’t doubt it,” she replied. 

“Milk for the pigeon! Fucking Narnia shop!” Mazza blurted out again. 

“You went to the shop to get milk for the pigeon?” Ash asked.

“Yeah, but… we got lost inside the shop,” Jarek told her.

“Hang on. Why milk?” 

Abbie, Jarek and Mazza all looked at each other and then back at Ash and Al. Jarek shrugged like a minaret with a bad puppeteer: “I don’t know, but that’s why we went into the shop. To get milk for the pigeon. But then we got lost inside. We were in a room with crates and boxes. Then we came through the door. It was a fucking Narnia shop!”

“Like, the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?” 

“Yes! We found this door there, and we went through it… and we entered a different world. No more town, just this strange wet forest. Did you come here the same way?” 

“What?” Al and Ash said simultaneously.

“How did you find us in this world!? How did you get here? How are we going to get back!?” Jarek demanded to know as they came to the end of the diagonal cycle path and stepped onto their street. 

“God, you guys are a state.” Al said mirthfully. “The Psycho Banshees sure gave you some strong drugs. Look around. We’re literally a minute’s walk away from our house. You went into a storage area in the shop and then out a door in the back of the building, which faces the forest we found you guys in. Same reality. Admittedly how we found you was a bit weird but we’ll save that for later. So anyway, what happened to your bird?”

“The fucking hell panther!” All three of them yelled indignantly. Abbie had a surprisingly deep voice for her petite body.

Jarek elaborated: “We put it on the ground because it might have healed in the different world, but this panther came from nowhere and tried to jump it.” Abbie leapt into the air. 

“It flew into the tree and the panther chased it, so I chased the panther.”

“Like Neo,” interjected Abbie’s husky contralto, admiringly. 

“Like I said, some Matrix shit. The bird flew into the higher branches and the panther chased it higher and I followed them up…” he paused as he realised that Al wasn’t lying and this actually was their street. “I, um, the bird flew off the top of the tree. I didn’t see where. The hell panther jumped to another tree and then they were both gone. Then something changed… I forgot how to climb. I suddenly got scared of heights!”

“Like me, man!” Mazza mused.

Al turned and whispered to Ash: “Should we tell them?” She shook her head. It was just a large house cat amplified by hallucinogenic perception and the bird was likely a feathery skeleton under someone’s garden shed by now, anyway. 

“We found them!” Ash announced as she opened the front door. 

“They’re drenched and tripping balls!” Al added. Bex ran upstairs  and came back down with towels to drape over her dripping housemates and their new friend. With Jarek and Mazza’s boots finally in their rightful place and Abbie’s ones next to them, they stepped barefoot over the disrupted leaf circle and noticed the two extra figurines on the table with tea towels that Bex had draped over their shoulders. “Hey! It’s us!” Jarek exclaimed, pointing them out to Mazza. “Towels and everything!” He picked his poppet up and inspected it, then asked Ash, “Why is Mazza’s hair wrapped around my one’s neck?”