Chapter 5

Stars burst before his eyes.

Not just any kind of stars, mind you. It was Orion’s Belt with part of the Horsehead nebula.

When he was seven, his elder brother had knocked him out with unabridged box-set of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Ever since then, he had been very particular about his stars.

Now like then, the world slowly turned inky black, sounds gradually pointed to mute and he started floating.

Later, somewhere in the darkness, a heavy drum started pounding a single note.

D#. D#. D#.

Perfect pitch wasn’t something he had been born with. Only years of tutoring at expensive private schools had given him that. Thanks to it, he now knew the exact note of his heartbeat.

D#!?

If left to him he would have wanted his heart to pound out something different. Say, maybe, E#7dim5. Maybe, that would have given him a more mysterious air. Maybe, that would have made him a chick magnet.

He laughed sardonically. Two angry orange strobes burst in his head, knocking him back. The drums grew louder and set up a pulsating jungle rhythm.

‘I got to open my eyes.’

He blinked.

The bright sunlight streaming into the room seemed like a fiscal blow suffered by Merrill Lynch investors. He brought his arms up to shield his eyes from the pain.

He turned and glared at the writer.

‘Y’er crazy!’ he spat, ‘Pulp Fiction meets Monty Python? You can’t mix genres like that, you insufferable twit!’ This unwanted aggravation caused his accent to oscillate wildly between Cowboy American to 18th century British, finally settling in comfortably somewhere mid-Atlantic.

But mixing and matching had been going on for centuries. Bungalow, rendezvous and zeitgeist nodded their collective heads in agreement.

More ominously for him, there, nestled by the writer’s bedside table were three books, Pulp Fiction, a Spike Milligan novel and a book of Grimm’s fairy tales.

After a while, his eyes got used to the light and he looked around.

Outside, it was a brilliant spring morning.

But inside were three beds. One large bed, one middle-sized bed and one tiny baby bed.

‘Goldilocks!’ he screamed.

The dame had him running around in circles.