The Jack Hansard Series: Season Two

Episode 10.2

'I really need to get out of this habit,' I told the grey world. My voice shook slightly. 'Of slipping out of reality, I mean.'

The words echoed strangely in my ears. I was standing in the same room of wires and blinking lights, though a loss of colour gave a washed-out pallor to the otherwise dramatic scene. Vincent, Rupert and Ang were all statuesque, paused halfway through motion.

Ang hung in the air like some frightful fairy mid-flight, as she leapt past the gun to bite Vincent's wrist. The slimy bastard himself had recoiled, tilted the gun up and clearly pulled the trigger once again, judging by the hot flash of light forming at the tip. Rupert had dropped his little remote: it, too, hovered eerily in the middle of its downward descent.

Wait, the tableau wasn't frozen at all.

I peered closer and observed sluggish movement: eyes slowly widening, mouths forming laborious vowel shapes. The sounds themselves hung in the air as a low, uncomfortable drone, the way a slow motion video distorts noise into an oafish parody of itself.

Glancing over my shoulder I saw Shu also stuck in slow-mo, giving an elastic effect to his vortex shape within the tube.

I waved my hand in front of Vincent's face. He didn't react. Or at least, not fast enough for me to notice.

'They cannot see you,' said Nephthys.

I would say I jumped out of my skin, except I suspect this would no longer have been a metaphor. She'd simply materialised beside me in full blossom colour, her crimson dress stark against the background grey.

'Where am I?' I said. I felt, in a giddy sort of way, that I ought to be suffering chills. That fear ought to be raking icy claws across my flesh. Instead I felt curiously detached, like nothing much really mattered now.

I looked down before Nephthys answered, and discovered my own body sprawled on the floor, leaking a dark pool from my stomach onto the tiles. 'Oh,' I said dully.

The goddess' voice had a dreamy quality. 'We are in the space between life and death.'

'. . . Limbo?' I stooped to inspect my body. It looked like it was still breathing. 'Is this how it ends for me?'

Nephthys drifted away, back to the computer console. 'When you wish to go, I will carry you,' she said. 'You needn't be frightened. This is my realm. It is where I am supposed to dwell.' She bent over the USB again. 'What is a protocol?'

It took a moment to realise she was asking me. 'No idea. An instruction of some sort, I suppose. That's called a computer.' I said this as she fingered the screens hooked up to Shu's tube. 'It's like a . . . a mechanical brain. Calculates things.' I bit my tongue to stop from describing it as 'like magic', but Nephthys did it for me.

'Modern magics,' she murmured.

'You don't seem all that bothered. That your friend is being held captive here, I mean.'

Her eyes passed disinterestedly over the glass. 'I have duties to tend to. The phoenix will reclaim Shu soon enough. As for this . . .' Her finger brushed over the USB. 'Speak.'

A disgruntled, yet familiar and windy voice filled the space.

'I am Zawba'ah, The Eternal Whirlwind.'

I started. 'Bugger me.'

Nephthys' forefinger remained in contact with the device. 'You are caught in a space between,' she observed.

'Free me,' the jinn demanded.

'I can only take you one way. To oblivion.'

'No.'