kagablog

Meanwhile in another dimension, the Clock Shop hovered against a glacial space. The wasteland upon which it stood resembled a gassy tundra, which seemed to flutter constantly into celluloid insubstantiality. The nullifying scape lay between, and somehow outside, the idea of night and day, as though bathed in the effulgence of an alien star. The dense skies were pure white, and images would occasionally flash across them, like a television screen. Static rimmed holes carouseled in the air, sucking nearby cloud-like formations of drifting milky liquid into themselves. Gelatinous creatures creaked across these skies, inverting occasionally, in the manner of stop motion seedpods, bursting fast-forward storm showers of tentacles and tendrils everywhere before they snapping inside out again.

The Clock Shop itself was constructed in the style of a cozy Swiss Chalet. It had been designed and erected in this forlorn and desolate dimension by Dr Dali, functioning as a sanctuary where the good doctor could allow himself to indulge the more catastrophic of his experiments. He was of course supervised closely by the envoys of certain power structures, who retained vested interests in the potential devastating effects of many of his projects. The structure cast a lonely, nostalgic silhouette against an unfathomable horizon; a line which constantly distorted like the melting wax of a lava lamp, warping one’s sense of distance continuously. A quaint, wooden signpost had been spiked into the soft crystalline substance before the chalet. It read: ‘The Clock Shop’, in hand chiseled calligraphy.

The interior of the Clock Shop was disproportionate to the petite Swiss chalet glimpsed from the glassy waste. It was a quirk of this particular reality; inversion of displaced masses - an alien aspect which Doctor Dali had been able to masterfully incorporate into his design. Nobody could ever say for certain how many hidey-holes an individual like Doctor Dali had stashed throughout his personal subway of realities. The man shuffled universes like playing cards. His motives were unknown, his brilliance disturbing. Various powerful organizations consulted with him and hired him for clandestine tasks. He was an easy man to reach despite his secrecy. He displayed an interest in the world, perhaps as much as he displayed for other worlds. Who could even say which world he even came from in the final solution?

Dr Dali sat, legs crossed, in a vast vault. The cavernous chamber was set with gigantic machines and resonant with a deep humming. The metal juggernauts closely resembled the turbines used to draw power from large, antiquated dams. These titanic machines stood at intervals of several hundred meters, disappearing into a receding perspective on either side. The ceiling could not be seen and the walls arched up into a void of lunar darkness. Pylons crackled with bluish electricity between the machines while distant pistons clanged endlessly in the void. The table at which Dr Dali sat had been set with a smoked glass chessboard and a game was in progress. A high spotlight lit the table, distinguishing it from its Industrial surroundings. In appearance Dr Dali was slim, small and wiry. He wore a lab coat stained with luminescent residue and various splatters. He sported a well tailored green tweed suit beneath. The odd thing about the doctor however was the condition of his head and face. Due to some unimaginable accident, his cranium had phased into a mode of existence which lay somewhere beyond the three-dimensional. His quasi-dimensioned head bore a vague resemblance to certain Cubist paintings, except that it was a shifting, unfixed fugue of features. These unmoored fragments fluxed and repositioned themselves according to some unfathomable alien logic. His perceptive faculties had not changed with the accident though, and when questioned about his predicament he would sigh and explain that his head had simply begun to function in a state of reality which most eyes would perceive as ‘conceptual’. Beyond this he would not go and was sometimes known to wear scarves, hats and bulging sunglasses at meetings, accessories which seemed to float and skim on a Rubick’s Cube of eyes, eyebrows, nasal profiles and tidal cheekbones. But in the sanctity of the Clock Shop his head was uncovered, and the ghost of a smile quivered and slunk, across and over and through his amorphous cloud of a skull. Opposite him, across the chessboard, was a squat ginger haired man attired in the manner of a ‘Dad’ from a nineteen fifties television sitcom. He smoked a pipe, wore a cardigan and even sported golf shoes. A nametag on his chest read MR MILLION NO 789678367. In the background could be glimpsed other Mister Million’s, all identical save for their attire which differed according to their various tasks. Some wore lab coats and worked at consoles embedded into the titanic machines. Others were dressed in engineer’s overalls, like garage attendants or Formula One racing mechanics. They all roved like clones, attending to various activities. The chess game was not going well for Mister Million – if that was even his real name.

“This will be the quintillionth time I’ve won,” Dr Dali quipped outrageously, his voice emerging from a mouth which swam like a fish into a fluttering nostril. The nostril submerged beneath a hairline, and the hairline broke like a wave into the area where his chin should have been. An eye drifted, moon-like, over this, turning flat abruptly, like an image on a television screen. Staring at his face, one often got the impression that it had become flat and two dimensional, like something printed onto paper. But this visual quirk did not ever last long and holographic effects were often known to occur soon after this perception. People were known to suffer intense migraines after speaking to the doctor for longer than a few minutes. Mister Million, however, was made of sterner stuff. When he spoke, all the other Mister Million’s spoke too. The reality of a numberless mass of identical figures speaking the same words at once often created staggering choruses. Mister Million often spoke in a quiet whisper, which was amplified by his multitudinous existence.

“I’m sure you exaggerate Doctor,” the army of ginger haired figures replied synchronously.

The gargantuan space created a phased delay in their speech, so that although the sentence was uttered at the same instant, it became fractured subtly in its delivery, mushy at the edges, frayed like an old rag doll. Dr Dali had pondered fixing this little sonic problem only to discover that he perversely enjoyed the dissonance. The presence of Mister Million in his sanctuary was against his wishes. He was there as an agent of outside powers, and it was a presence the Doctor tolerated for various reasons, though it was clear that he preferred his own company. Mister Million wasn’t a bad sort, for an inter-dimensional agent of mysterious origin, and offered his plural services as a private staff (no doubt to also learn as much as possible about the Doctor’s devices from first-hand experience). The Doctor set him to work on various devices, limiting his access and challenging him to countless games of chess in an attempt to belittle him. Mister Million took it all in his stride(s) and the pair evolved into the protagonists of their own private and rather absurd buddy movie.

The chess game progressed rapidly, approaching another bloodthirsty finale. The rhythm of it was howevere rudely interrupted by the sudden clanking and booming of one of the titanic machines. Green light flashed and flickered behind a porthole set into the black metal as a curtain of emerald electricity discharged from the glass. It illuminated several nearby Mister Million’s in a charge of blinding colour, incinerating one of them in an instant. The cloud of fizzing energy billowed about the vault like a flock of hysterical hummingbirds, dissipating into the bluish lightning of the pylons. The enormous mechanism abruptly powered down, rather like a washing machine, which had just completed some arduous and unfathomable cycle. A distant egg timer pinged and a big red light shifted to green. Doctor Dali had turned to observe the action over his shoulder and it seemed that he was smiling, though it was difficult to tell.

“Has the inter-dimensional flytrap caught something?” Mister Million asked in a million voices.

Some of the more damaged Mister Millions nearby spoke in smoke scorched hisses, which added a rather gravelly undertone to the sentence. Doctor Dali swiveled in his seat and this time it was clear that he was smiling.

“Well that is the thing with deep-sea fishing, isn’t it old chap?” the Doctor sniggered. “It’s all in the wrist.”

Mister Million, by now used to Doctor Dali’s absurd deflections, simply nodded, realizing that he wasn’t going to get much more out of him. To his surprise the Doctor began to elucidate upon the occurrence.

“Be a good chap and telephone Mister Sister,” he asked his opponent, moving a rook across the board.

In a distant office cubicle within the hive of the Clock Shop a suited Mister Million began placing a telephone call on an antique rotary dialer.

“It’s an order for the good fellow,” The Doctor continued, slyly placing the enemy king in check.

“Vice is nice,” Mister Million muttered in a wave of sonic interference. “I wasn’t aware that you were undertaking consignments for petty criminals.”

“Oh we all have our vices,” Doctor Dali sneered.

He observed as Mister Million countered his check before quickly snapping him up into a neat little checkmate. Mister Million sighed, a sound reminiscent of a low-tide ocean, leaning back into his chair.

“What should I tell Mister Sister?” He asked, lighting up his pipe.

“Why, tell him his Symbiote is all done and ready of course,” the Doctor smiled enigmatically.