The Sheila and her Spam List Serial Story

Episode 1

*** BEGIN STORY BLOCK ***

Martin looked around. Shaking his head in a vain attempt to clear the effects of alcohol from his perceptions, he studied his surroundings. There was a heavy-looking metal door in the far wall, with no visible means of opening it on this side. The walls themselves were of block-moulded concrete, and so impervious to unaided human assault.

Suddenly, the door burst inwards with a colossal *BANG*. The harsh tube lighting outside highlighted a slim but curvy figure standing in the doorway, some sort of large-calibre firearm still in her hands with a plume of smoke rising from its barrel.

**** END STORY BLOCK ****

Episode 2

****BEGIN STORY BLOCK****

It was the Lemming.

Martin was briefly distracted from his personal danger by what she was wearing. It involved a lot of black leather. Or rather, relatively little black leather, but even less of anything else.

It also involved a disturbingly psychotic grin.

"Aha," she said manically, "prepare to die!"

"Lynnette, if this is your idea of not being nasty to me -"

Just in time his sharp eye caught the movement of her finger on the trigger and he flung himself sideways, Bond-style, at the moment of the explosion.

Martin looked up ruefully from the floor. He was unhurt but his Neph T-shirt had suddenly become very gothic indeed.

"Nice try." She swung the gun round to point at his heart.

"*Christ*, Lynnette..."

"Look, you might as well face it. Your game's over, Martin. Cos I'm going to GET you..."

He dodged another bullet by diving between her legs. This struck him as a particularly neat move in the circumstances.

"Martin, get up and let me finish you off. If you don't stop arsing around I'm going to miss Sainsbury's."

"SAINSBURY'S?!"

"Get out from between my legs, please," she said tartly. "Thankyou." With a complacent smile she pressed the hot gun barrel to his head. At this point his fabled sangfroid finally deserted him. Martin wibbled.

"Lynnette, *please*, just tell me what's going on...Who locked me up here? What do you want to kill me for? What have I *done*?"

Her dark brown eyes looked searchingly into his. "Martin..." she said, "are you all *right*?"

"All right? All right? Of course I'm all f***ing right, you've only thrown me in some concrete dungeon and let off a f***ing bazooka at me..."

"Martin. Look me in the eyes. You actually really believe that, don't you?"

"YES!" he shrieked.

"Martin. This is a water pistol. We're in the laundry room. This is Assassins. It's *not* real life."

"Oh God." He sunk his head in his hands. "You've gone mad. You've finally gone absolutely..."

And then - he heard the tumble drier.

****END STORY BLOCK****

Episode 3

****BEGIN STORY BLOCK****

At first a quiet growling, it grew louder and louder. Martin looked up to find the room empty once more. Wisps of smoke were still drifting to the ceiling; the door was still swinging on failing hinges.

'Oh God', thought Martin, '-what's happening to me?' He cast his mind back to all that he could remember of the night before. The Goth club, the snakebite and black, the other snakebite and black, the point at which he'd lost count... had someone drugged him? Had the minds of his less coherent friends invaded his own?

And, gradually, the tumble-drier roar increased until it was nearly deafening. Martin's earring, which had fallen out in the scuffle, began to vibrate gently across the floor. It sounded as if the whole room was being bodily dragged across a gravel pit.

'I'm hallucinating' said Martin, without much conviction, 'I've got to get out of the laundry room. It's all a - '

'It's all real, Martin' came a familiar voice at his ear. He turned round quickly, but only caught a brief flicker at the corner of his eye.

'Eve?' said Martin 'where are you?'

'Up here!' came the reply. Martin looked up.

'Eve,' he said 'why are you...er... you seem a lot *smaller* than normal-'

Eve giggled, and flew in a dizzying loop around his head.

'Nothing's real anymore, Martin' she said 'and you've got to find out what's going on...'

With that, the tiny Eve hovered on black butterfly-wings in front of him for a few seconds more, and then swooped round to leave the room.

It was too late. The tumble-drier, after a long and grinding journey down the corridor, had finally arrived. Blocking the doorway was a round glass doorway the size of a paddling pool.

Martin looked at it in terror. He could see faces reflected behind him in its surface, and when he looked round they were not there...

****END STORY BLOCK****

Episode 4

****begin story block thingy****

'are you one of the imageless ones???' asked a voice out of the tumble-drier, although it seemed to be more of an queer echo.

'imageless?' gibbered back martin, very confused.

there was a sigh and another voice echoed out 'he is a whole, we cannot become part of him'

martin peered in at tumble dryer and could see two curious figures within. he felt very frightened, but was determined to be confident.

'who are you? where are you?' martin inquired towards the faces in the tumble-dryer.

'its a bit complicated' admitted the first voice, 'we're reflections you see only there was a slight accident involving someone washing the mirror'

'and now you've been left in tumble-dryer, like an odd sock?' giggled eve who was still hovering above.

there was a nod from both the curious images, which were somehow looking strangely familiar but it was always hard to identify reflections in tumble-dryers. both eve and martin felt a sudden impulse to try and hug the images, which actually worked in the reflection, although they were really hugging thin air, they had this odd tingly sensation.

'ooooooooooooh' squealed martin and eve simultaneuously.

eve looked in the tumble dryer and saw a black sock, smiling to herself she thought it looked very interesing, and opened the tumble dryer, but it was not a sock that was inside....

**** end story block ****

Episode 5

*** BEGIN BLOCKY STORE ***

.... It was a strange piece of black material, all curled up so tightly that the deepest darkest secrets in the world could have been hidden inside and no-one would have known. Martin felt a surge of excitement rush through him, and though Eve tried to stop him, she had no physical power, and so he reached out...

"OH! Not *another* sprout-burning kit!" exclaimed Martin, suddenly disappointed. Lemming grinned from ear to ear like the Cheshire cat and ran out of the room... down spiral staircase after spiral staircase into a strange glade. The sun was beaming down through the trees, casting green and yellow shafts of light down onto the stone path. She could hear a stream in the distance, and she could feel the sun beating down on her face.

Suddenly it didn't seem like Winter any more, and she knew that she must be in Newnham. BikBok appeared beside her, sitting in the summerhouse and combing her long, brown hair. Serene and calm, she had no idea what was going on in the recesses of Martin's mind back in the launderette...

Episode 6

*BEGIN STRANGE BLOKE*

"This isn't right, this isn't real!' Shouted Martin to the shadowy reflections.

"Why not?" asked Eve, over the intolerable din of the phantom drier.

"It's just not logical. Nothing is. Not you, them, Lemming, none of it." He replied, feeling the resonance of his body against the cold laundry room floor. Everything was unfamiliar. This was the laundry room, and yet it wasn't somehow. The colours were animated, the walls almost..alive like nightmare matter gone mad with time and shadows from the past. In a fit of panic, Martin stood, brushing Eve aside and leaping across the room to where Lemming had disappeared. Instantly, as his hand grasped for the exit it collapsed away, falling miles before him into a deep abyss of black. The fluid of dreams, the atoms of thought.

"You can't go there." Eve spoke almost fearfully, as though Martin had transgressed against some law.

He involuntarily felt a bolt of terror course through him. She was right. He didn't understand why, but she was so very right. Slowly he turned, afraid of what he might see. He wasn't disappointed. Eve was not quite the small fairy-like creature she had earlier resembled. Martin couldn't bare to look.

"Why?" He whispered, barely able to expell the words.

The answer came, slicing his sanity just as from behind an image of Lemming and Bik Bok solidified in the distant nothingness.

"Because." Eve replied, now in the low, gruff voice of a distant and muffled mountain echo.

"Because you're not real either. Not yet anyway...."

*END STRINGY CHEESE*

Episode 7

****DEEP BREATH IN********

"Excuse me, do you have any washingpowder i could borrow?" came the impeccably polite voice from somewhere far above.

silence. coldwetfeeling.dustysmell.

after awhile Martin decided he would open his eyes a little bit, just a tiny little tincey bit to check for approaching tumbledryers, and then then possibly close them again and stay veryvery still and try not to think...

Thick Rubber Tube.
Thick rubber tube was the first object martin's eyes brought into focus. Further down... wires. tubes. aha, i am behind a row of tumbledryers.. even furtherdown.. moddy puddle around body. aha, explains cold and wet feeling..
Further up.. back wall of tumbledryer rising up to the ceiling
Even further up..
shortblondhair.
blueeyes.
faint freckles on tipof nose.
the somewhat concernedlook.

"Are you ok?" asked The Mr Normalcaiusstudent looking wary.

Martin staggered up to his feet and looked around. sunlight. insideout blacksock in the middle of laundryroom floor. scattered around the floor: charcoaled sprout, small innnocent-lookingpiece of black fabric, oh, and a tiny miniature blackvelvethat with golden beads down the side, that would have been just perfect for somebody about 10 cm tall..

*****ZONKS*********

Episode 8

******A GIN STARRY CLOCK****

Hastily gathering these items into his pockets, Martin prepared to run away and hide, possibly forever or at least until such time as laundry rooms were prepared to resume their normal functions. But this was not to be.

'Not AGAIN,' he thought, as, slowly at first but then ever faster and faster the surrouindings began to shrink. They shrank not as you would expect, all at the same rate, but in patches, so that the ordinary Caius student, now looking quite bemused, was still the size of a large cat whilst the tumble driers had become no larger than so many pinheads. Further afield the shrinkage seemed to have been more severe; in fact the whole of the rest of the world occupied no more space than an average-sized house. Martin could have walked around it in a matter of a minute or two.

A sonorous yet strangely familiar laugh caused Martin to turn. By this stage he had become almost immune to shock and was not perturbed by the vision of a myriad stars sweeping aside as if in deference to allow the passage of this latest apparition. But the apparition itself was worse, far worse than even his most fevered nightmares could have prepared him to face.

It spoke.

'And you believed me to be High Queen merely of the Sheilas? Foolish human! For the Sheila Society is nothing but an image for the wider scheme of things, in which my part is that of - ' (Here Karen coughed almost deprecatingly) ' - Most Unknowable and Majestical Ruler of the Universe, and Master Puppeteer of Humanity'.

Martin gaped unashamedly at the immense image before him. But before he had time to react further he felt - really felt, for the first time in his life - the great strings pulling his limbs this way and that in a strange dance in which his will had no part. At this solemn moment he could not but laugh at the cosmic irony of it all; that Queen Karen had chosen, in demonstration of her unthinkable powers, to make him Dance like the Teletubbies.

*****END CLOCK******

Episode 9

***REGIN SHORTY TOP***

No sooner had he realised this, then the warped space before his eyes began to burst out in green patches. The fragile fabric of reality surrounding him tore itself apart in shreds of emerald and willow-leaf shards, as The Ruler's face, frantically distorted, grinned at him evilly for one last time before disappearing into the whirling mass.

Martin could bear it no longer. He shut his eyes tight and tried to ignore his jerking limbs.

Even so, he could still hear it: the grinding, shrieking chaos of the world remaking itself out of unreality -

- and then -

- silence.

Silence and a creeping feeling, a feeling of searching, of growing, a subtle, fertile warmth...

Martin opened his eyes. He was lying on a green hillside, beneath a sky still misted turquoise with the aftermath of the storm. A thicket of low purple flowers had grown up about his legs. Entwined in tendril and creeping thorn like some sacrifice to the drifting sun, he was caught; even his dancing was stilled.

He tried to listen for the tumbledrier. He knew this wasn't real. But all he could hear was a faint, low grinding underground, like distant water. Meanwhile, a particularly enterprising daisy pushed its head through a link in his chains. For something that was not real, the strengthening sunlight felt surprisingly warm...

Unable to move. He lay there, as noon approached with the threat of sun-blisters on pale goth skin. He thought he saw the ghost of a rabbit the size of a house drift past and off over the green hill. He thought the ragged sail of an ancient ship became visible over the sun's edge. He thought a flock of Ravens formed diamonds in the sky, he thought, he thought -

And when he had thought nearly into delerium, They came up the hill. It was quite hard to see what They were; at the first sight, they appeared to be a slender tree, hung with ribbons and crawling with golden spiders. When They came near him, They stretched out a black-velveted hand and stroked the sweat from his brow.

"You're safe now, Martin..." they whispered in the voices of bees - - and the daisy-chains tightened...

*** REN TOP***

Episode 10

*** BEGIN STORY BLOCK ***

Martin snapped back to awareness. That was a *very* strange dream...

Then he looked across the room and saw a man in coppery-scaled armour, heavy and ornate black metal gauntlets, a full-face helm, and a long and voluminous black cloak. A sword hung from his belt, and dagger hilts protruded from his boots; there was something vaguely gun-like on his belt as well, and a few assorted pouches.

"Go away Valerian. You're supposed to be in my head," he said.

"This is your head, Master. I'm here to warn you that something bad is about to happen."

"What?"

"The end of the world."

And with that, Valerian stepped sideways and vanished, leaving a copper-and-onyx medallion on the floor. Martin retrieved it and studied the complex traceries.

There was a knock at the door...

**** END STORY BLOCK ****

Episode 11

**** NEW BIT ****

...so Martin threw himself out of the window. He fell from the second floor, hurtling towards the ground at an alarming rate, his chains rattling as he did so.

*SPLAT*

Martin landed on Mr-Normal-Caius-Student with a sickening crunch of bones. He looked around in absolute terror. "How could I have done such a thing?" he muttered to himself before deciding that there were far more Mr-Norms where he had come from. He admired the tie-dyed effect which the crimson crash had given his T-shirt and then struggled to his feet.

Back at Kings however, doseybat and Mark were weeping inconsolably at the loss of Goth Spider. Left in it's place there was only a ransom note and a few defaced smily-face Smarties...

The whole of Sheila fell into mourning....

**** END OF CARNAGE HERE ****

Episode 12

**** BEGIN CARNATION HERE ****

...and the little room in Kings' rapidly became the scene of a wibblemeet as more and more spammers found the tragic news lurking in their inboxes. And so it was that Ben, cutting his way through the Trinity Street tourists to offer his condolences and wondering what the police presence outside Caius was about, happened upon a dishevelled figure huddled on the bench by Kings' where night-wanderers stop to eat their Gardies.

Martin was thinking: 'There's nobody I can turn to....Lynnette's trying to kill me and Eve keeps turning into monsters and and and Karen's God and I think Mark and Maria were the scary thing on the hill...'

He was, although he didn't know this, thinking out loud.

"Martin?" said a concerned voice. "Are you on drugs?"

He looked up into the innocently bemused face of Queen Ben.

"Go away," said Martin. "You're another of them."

"Look, it's alright...now just, just tell me what you've taken..."

"I haven't taken anybloodything. I wish I had. You are Sheila Royalty. Sheila is just an image of the wider scheme of things. Therefore you are part of Karen's cosmos-running racket. Therefore, go away."

"Steady on, Martin....!" said Ben in bewibblement.

"Eeeeeeeep!" exclaimed a familiar voice somewhere to the left. "Martin? Martin, that was my dreeeeeam!!!"

Martin jumped like a startled cat, revealing the bloodstains on his bullet-riddled Neph T-shirt, which he had been trying to hide.

The voice belonged to Eve, who had appeared flanked by Lemming and BikBok, in a state of flailing excitement and no hat.

"Ick," she added. "You're bleeding."

****SWITCH NOCARNATION****

EPISODE 13

"No, I've been bled on," said Martin.

"Who by?!"

"Nobody important...Dream?"

"You've been bled on by DREAM?"

"I want to know about your bloody dream!"

"Oh! Well, come up to the bat's room and you'll find out"

Of course, by the time they all got up the stairs Eve had already told Martin her dream, and then told him it again, this time slowly enough for a practised ear to comprehend.

The sound of chanting drifted out into the corridor as the doseybat opened her door. She looked Martin up and down, wibbled quietly, handed him some of her flowing velvety garments and pushed him gently into the bathroom.

Casby, Chris and the Assassins crowd had already collected and so the arrival of Martin, Ben and the girls brought the spamlist up to its full complement. There was not a lot of room in the room.

"we're having a spid-summoning ceremony," explained Mark who was sitting in the middle presiding mournfully over a Sid-sized magic circle.

"I wouldn't," said Eve, "you don't know what *else* you might summon. I think, I think -" she was gasping for words like the kid from 'The Piano' at the Oscars - "I think there's something *supernatural* happening."

"there is," said Mark very quietly. "there always is."

"Well it hasn't happened to me. And now it has. And it's happened to Martin and Lemming too. I was asleep about an hour ago and I had this *dream*...this...*being* or *beings* appeared to me and told me that...oh cripes...that Sheila was an image of the cosmic hierarchy...that there's a High King and a High Queen who rule the universe, and they're opposites like, I don't know, order and chaos, unity and duality, dogs and - stop laughing, this is *serious*! There's a cosmic showdown going on between them. A duel to the death. And whoever wins it's the *end of the world as we know it*...If the High Queen dies there'll be no more free will, no more *randomness*, we'll all be mindless puppets of the High King...and if the High King dies there'll be no more rules, the laws of physics won't apply, or the laws of human behaviour, anything could happen, it'll be like living in Delirium's head...and I don't know about anyone else but I'd *much* rather that than be a robot...and the High Queen appeared to me and told me that I was the Herald and -"

"And I say *I'm* the Herald now," said BikBok, who had quite understandably been arguing this point all the way down Silver Street.

"*I* say Eve's been hitting the vodka again," opined Charlie.

"she hasn't," said Mark. "go on."

"Um. I think BikBok is the Herald for the other side. I think there might be two of us on purpose. But Martin, you see, Martin is the Errant Damsel. He's the adventurer, the hero if you like, so maybe he can save the world...And I had to appear to him and warn him, They gave me wings to fly into his mind..."

"Who's They?" said Casby.

Eve looked away, covered in confusion. "He. She. The High Queen."

"What is this High Queen like," said Casby, "if you can't even be sure if it's a he or a she -"

"Sounds like Mark," said BikBok.

"- or a *they*?"

"Sounds like Mark and Maria," said BikBok. Everyone laughed as they looked at the two of them sitting tangled together, curled round each other in a gorgeous confusion of purple fur and leather and velvet and pale skin and wild fair hair and ribbons and rainbow nails.

"Strangely enough, we are actually two people," said doseybat.

"I know I know I know, it's, I, Sheila is just an image of the wider scheme of things..."

"Calm down, Eve," said Chris, "it was only a dream..."

"It wasn't, it wasn't..."

Casby looked inquiring."What's made you so sure of that?"

"I have," said Martin, as he emerged from the bathroom looking tousled and ambiguous. "Because she did appear to me. And so did the beings she describes. And I was *awake*. Gods. My brain's been shot to hell in the last hour. We are *not* having you on."

"We're not," said Lemming. "I saw some of it. Eve was ten centimetres tall flying round the laundry room in Caius."

And in case anyone should have further doubts, Martin produced...the hat...

*BANG!* There was a thunderous knock at the door.

"Hello?" said doseybat politely. A policeman entered. Lemming inexplicably started shaking with laughter and buried her face in the nearest bit of Chris. Presumably this had something to do with Gilbert and Sullivan.

"hello mr policeman," said Mark, "have you come about the kidnapping? we found this ransom note saying 'if you want to see the spid again say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'..."

"I am Inspector Dim," intoned the policeman. "Dim of the Yard. Nobody leave the room, there's been a murderrrrrrrrrrkkk..."

And his voice died away in horror as something *enormous* began to materialise in the magic circle...

***SWITCH NOCARNATION***

Episode 14

*** BEGIN STORY BLOCK ***

Martin began muttering under his breath. "Shiyyadin al-qimam akbillir rasman. Salib'ut al-qimam."

[author's note: that is merely an attempt to sound vaguely like Arabic; it's in fact complete gibberish but sounds cool]

The figure solidified - but was somehow held immobile. It was a shining, black *thing* with a hard carapace and a many-tentacled mouth. Somehow holding his tattered sanity together (with rather more success than he had with his T-shirt, it might be added), Martin challenged it. "Declare thyself!"

The thing snarled. "I will not obey you, puny mortal."

Martin glared at the thing. "Then ciahra will not be thine."

It blinked. "Very well - I will not oppose one who has knowledge of those powers. I am the harbinger, the one who comes before the storm to tell of it. I am sent by Hakud the Great to these Earthly realms to proclaim the glory of simple order."

Martin scowled. "Return to thy master, then, and tell him this, that one who has paid life's pleasures to see will permit neither pure order, nor pure chaos, to reign. I serve Tanitha of the Balance."

The thing vanished. Martin turned to look at Dim, and saw that he had fainted dead away. Eve was gibbering in the corner. Chris, mark, and Maria merely looked *very* worried. Lemming, who had not been watching, was more or less okay. The assassins looked nervous - but then, they always did. "martin, what's happened to your eyes?" asked mark.

"What about my eyes?"

"they've gone all like the sky at night. dark and starry," replied mark. "they're all spoggly and horrible."

Martin shrugged. "Needs must. Now, there is much to be done. It is a half-moon tonight, so the Lady of Balance will be at her strongest. We must travel far before dawn. Eve, BikBok, I'm afraid I really can't trust either of you - but I'll trust *both* of you. Mark, slap Eve a couple of times to bring her round."

"but dawn's only three hours away and we're not dressed for travelling lots and stuff."

"Doesn't matter where we're going. Now, have we got enough silver jewelry? Everyone has to have some silver on them." Martin pulled off his rings. "Anyone who doesn't, try these."

"Are we taking Dim?" asked Maria.

**** END STORY BLOCK ****

EPISODE 15

*** Story brought back from the dead ***

"I think it'd be better if we didn't" said Casby

Eve giggled briefly, then spoke. "He'll be fine by the morning if things go well, and if they don't then.... it won't matter anyway."

Martin began to head towards the door. The rest of the group paused with indecision for several seconds - just long enough to allow Martin to doubt his vision. This time, he knew it was happening and tried to stop it. He hugged the door tightly and shouted pleadingly to the group. Mark and Eve bounced towards the door, while everyone else cautiously followed.

"Where are we trying to get to?" asked Chris

"Only Martin knows, but he can't..." began Eve

Lemming interrupted and said "We won't get *there*, even though we'll try, but by the time we arrive we'll be somewhere different."

Somehow, everyone understood this and walked on in a silent trance. No one noticed that they weren't walking through Cambridge anymore, but through a grassy meadow surrounded by trees. Dawn was just beginning to break, but there was a dark shadow in the sky. "Look at that!" said Ed to Charlie "It's shaped like the leg of a sleeping giraffe!"

Everyone looked up, except for Mark H, who had fallen asleep on the ground. Maria was the first to see that the dark shadow was a deep shade of purple and it seemed to be coming closer. Everyone became nervous, and Martin cowered behind Maria.

Suddenly, Ed became the focus of attention. He shouted "Smarties!" and retrieved several packets from his bag.

*** story goes back into hiding ***

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The Lemming ldray@ast.cam.ac.uk