Chapter 18: The 'Big' Reveal
Sophia Loren's balloon lips crinkled into a smile, youth newly flavoring her features.
"Georgi 'Paul' Bernadinberg, yes, that's me," and they kissed, at long last, and the years melted from Sophia Loren like warm lard, bubbling and hissing, deforming, the oils coming out of newly-burst pores with wet plops like the sound of manure under a shoe. At the end she seemed a hollow shell, like some wax figurine in a dutch oven, her hair having fallen out in large patches so that she looked like a tortured, guttered barbie doll.
Georgi "Paul" Bernadinberg finally opened his eyes with a squelch and then opened them wider and with a half-panicked grunt, he shoved her off his stomach ledge and the skin on her arms broke and spilled a mix of something red with a consistency like curdled milk and rancid canola oil and he screamed through lips that wouldn't open. The skin on her lips had stuck to his - in fact, most of her lower lip, its consistency like kindergarten paste, stayed pressed to his as her body careened backwards and her loose skin flopped and moved unnaturally as though she were some deformed halibut. He tried to pull at his lips but the smell of the red heterogeneous gel on his hands had a smell so bad that he passed out.
"Crickey!" shouted Bella Black, "Why would you do that, Sophia Loren?"
"Did you really think Sophia Loren would be alive after at least 2032? She'd be almost 100 or perhaps many years older than that! Did you really think she would get a day job as a police interrogator? That James K. Vogt's name and twenty cops would take you into a police station and subsequently disappear forever? How stupid are you?"
"Fucking thing sucks!" Bella Black ascertained.
"I do not understand this general shift in the narrative structure," said Janisa De'Loreal, "since I have not yet been a prominent part of the story arc in which you two are characters. I feel like I have suddenly entered a story completely unrelated to mine. Therefore I am confused about whether Sophia Loren is a villain who has been in disguise, and if so whether there have been hints, or whether she has been like this the whole time and Bella Black just keeps unusually bad company. Either way, I am concerned for Old Man Bernadinberg whose name is apparently Paul, too. Very nice lipstick."
The half-lipless body of Sophia Loren still melted, but a structure underneath kept it upright as it flopped around. Its eyes had turned the color and shape of overcooked brussel sprouts, its teeth had fallen to various places on its chin. "How is this for a hint?" its face howled in the same gravel-deep voice it had always used, like a long-time smoker with male genitalia trying to sound like an old woman, "I obviously wear this skin like a cheap robe. This face jerks disjointedly, its lips barely related in their movements to the guttural sounds that emit from them. I move and speak and am described like a loose pillow of cadaverous skin with a puppet-head sticking out of it on a pole. And yet I can sword fight with a zombie werewolf and easily emerge the victor. My arm fell off and I forgot about it in a second!"
Georgi "Paul" Bernadinberg was starting to shrivel up. Piece by piece, his body was desiccating. He no longer breathed.
"And what a coincidence that an entire fortress of policemen, obviously still in use, would have mummified corpses, uncollected, unburied, sitting around tables, laying around a dance floor. That an escape from the fortress entailed walking out without once encountering another living soul. You find this believable? Are you an idiot?"
"I have no idea what you are talking about and I did not know about any of this," Janisa De'Loreal said.
Sophia Loren continued grilling her: "Did it ever cross your mind that the bag of human skin and a corpse-face slathered with makeup might have been the one who bore off the stud's limp frame?"
"But Ed is right there, or who do you mean by stud?" intoned Janisa De'Loreal.
"Is that man alright?" Bella Black wondered. The cadaver had lost all water and all fat. No longer even was there a stomach shelf. The eyelids had shriveled until they would never be able squint again.
Janisa De'Loreal's body laughed as the last rivulets of fat streamed off. The whole scene smelled of rotten eggs, burnt flesh, Listerine, and mimosas. A dark figure remained behind, invisible in that you could never look straight at it.
"You know," Bella Black said, realizing that previous statements were directed at her, "I always thought you were just really old and corpulent."
"You were right there."
Janisa De'Loreal laughed and whispered to Ed.
"Not the fat part, you dastard!" the black figure stated, whose name was a mystery now because it was not really Sophia Loren probably. "I am older than you know. Older than your beau, older than his parents and their parents."
"What the fucking shit?" Bella awed.
"Do you know who I am?" it said.
"No I need more hints" she said.
The figure held up four blades made of pure light.
"Four words," Janisa shouted.
It became the essence of flow, the purest blue. A wind howled and the image of a storm fell over their eyes. They saw before them the first animal ever to walk on land as it made its first steps, they saw Pearl Harbor, they felt the terror of small-eyed pilots in their final moments, the uncertainty and the conviction; they felt a breeze over passive blue water; they heard the sound of seagulls.
"Stop!" said Ed, "those are California seagull noises. Is the first word 'Pacific'?"
The black shape became the essence of affirmation.
"The second word is the answer to a riddle: What has invisible roots, but doesn't grow fruits: up, up it goes, and yet never grows?"
"I think I've heard this one, guys," said teamwork, "it's 'Mountain.'"
"Correct. Now, another riddle: This thing, all things eats: birds, trees, flour, teets; chews iron and other stuff; grinds hard bones to snuff; slays queens with his wicked looks, and is the subject of many books."
"We might need a lot of time for this one," said Ed.
"How did you solve it?!"
"Oh yes, time," said realization, and curiosity piped up: "What's the last word?"
"What have I got in my pocket?"
"You don't even have one of those!"
"Well, does that matter? What's the answer?"
"What difference does it make what you have in a pocket that doesn't exist? Hey, wait! DIFFERENCE! That's it! It's the only thing that makes sense," the voice.
"Gosh darn it," the dark figure said, pulling the abstract Form of subtraction from somewhere within it.
It dawned on Janisa De'Loreal: they had solved the mystery. "You're... the Pacific-Mountain Time Difference?"
The detached jaw of Sophia Loren's face smiled.
To be continued...