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| A Britney Spears wallpaper I downloaded from somewhere, 'cause it's pretty and a bit scary |
If you are easily scared, then please, skip to another post or web site.
Go for a walk, have some tea, arrange a lunch with friends.
This is a genuine nightmare that I've just finished writing down after waking up, before I forgot it, so if you really like having the hairs on the back of your neck raised then read on.
I don't know when it started but it seemed like every day, at around the same time, tea-time, 6 o'clock, I'd catch a glimpse of Tinkerbell.
Initially these were fleeting out-of-the-corner-of-one-eye affairs, but by the time things changed I was able to walk along, and Tinkerbell would fly three feet in front of me, one foot to the left, so that our relative positions didn't change, like Tinkerbell and I were the only things real and the rest was just background.
Just before she would leave she made that most Tinkerbell-ious of poses, shoulders shrugged, left knee bent so her heel was in the air behind her, hands clasped, with a beautifully innocent and playful smile, then, just as the smile reached its full bloom, blink - she was gone.
I mentioned this to my mother and she told me to stop messing.
Then, one day, finally, I noticed that my mother was outside, knitting.
It was 6:01 pm and Tinkerbell was still with me.
I said "hey, mother, here's Tinkerbell!" - she didn't even lift her gaze from the knitting.
Then out of anger, bewilderment, dismay, I positioned myself so that Tinkerbell, who always maintained her fixed relative position to me, was between my mother and her knitting.
Mother initially swiped at Tinkerbells position, thinking her to be a jimmy-joe - I guess if I could see Tinkerbell from that angle she might look like a jimmy-joe.
Mothers hand passed straight through Tinkerbell, but Tinkerbell moved anyway, which, because she had never done that before, was most disconcerting to me - she was just flying around in the air.
I lost track of her for a split second, but when I spotted her again she had in her hand a string or lace, and on the other end of the lace there appeared to be a parcel of some kind with the lace tied around it on all four sides, with a bow in the middle.
As she flew up in the air, I noticed that the parcel was now the size of a shoe-box, but it wasn't a shoe box, but was darkest black and what was that on its door? A tumbler.
I didn't have to tell my mother what was falling towards her.
The growing shadow at our feet was all the warning she needed - I've never seen mother move so fast - she was like a cat!
Still, she had just cleared her garden chair when the 10 foot tall
one-and-a-half-ton safe made a home for itself in the ground with its top 3 feet forward and one foot to the left of its base, a very odd angle.
Tinkerbell still had her playful smile in full bloom when she pulled out her snub-nosed 45 revolver and started shooting at me, but by then other people had been alerted that something odd was going on (a falling 1.5 ton safe will do that) and Tinkerbell had all sorts of things flying at her to upset her aim.
As the days and weeks went by it became clear that Tinkerbell wasn't a creature of imagination as well as not being a creature of the imagination.WTF?
Nope.
The town was flattened and the only things standing proud were 1.5 ton safes at really odd angles and most surfaces had at least one bullet hole or ricochet on them.
The closest any one had gotten to nailing her was a booby trap that involved an under-street coal bunker and one of Tinkerbells own fallen safes.
I don't know the details of the plan, I was too busy dodging bullets.
For the briefest of moments Tinkerbell had her right foot caught between a safe (now mostly buried in the street) and the street itself and that's when someone emptied a sack of corn starch into the air and lit a hair-spray container spray with a lighter.
Initially nothing happened, the air white with corn starch and a faint glow, but the corn starch caught with Tinkerbell in it.
I guess that was about the time Tinkerbell stopped smiling.
Even though I was over 50 feet away she let off a volley of three shots, which by now I had become used to, you really can see those bullets coming towards you if you're expecting them.
Still, her rate of fire was such that one of them still managed to snag my shirt, picking off a button near my navel although I myself was still uninjured, a source of bewilderment to both Tinkerbell and myself, obviously for different reasons.
It has to be said that Tinkerbell was one hell of a good shot, which, considering the fact that she never once hit me, is a genuine paradox.
That was the last of the remaining towns folk, the fire ball set something off.
I'd say that it was another booby trap which met the corn starch fire ball in an untimely manner but I'd be guessing.
Then I was in my bedroom, it was dark, quiet, and just as I was waking up I thought I could glimpse Tinkerbell, 3 feet above my bed, one foot to the left.
And before I woke up, before I remembered the dream, I could hear Tinkerbell say
"Take care, Philip, someone bad's coming"
