 
The Inaction Man

By Phillip Donnelly

Copyright 2014 Phillip Donnelly

Second Edition

ISBN: 9781458179340

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover image Velib Along the Seine by Michael Rubbo. All rights remain with artist.

For Sandra

Bio Blurb

After completing a psychology degree, the author realised that he was profoundly misanthropic and set about travelling the world looking for aliens to take him to another planet.

Unable to speak any foreign languages and almost incapable of holding a conversation in his own, he decided to teach English as a foreign language because this was the only job that would allow him to travel widely without any marketable skills or noticeable intelligence.

He has unsuccessfully searched for life from outer space in classrooms in the following countries: Spain, China, Russia, Thailand, Beirut, Dubai, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, France and Vietnam. He currently lives in Hong Kong with his patient and long-suffering wife.

In the future, he hopes to continue his search for alien life forms in different countries, and he would be obliged if any aliens reading this could spirit him off to an altogether more exotic planet in a more harmonious dimension.

Message from the Author

If you enjoy these stories, please feel free to tell me so at phillipdonnelly@gmail.com. If there's something you didn't like, or something you feel could have been better, I'd like to know that too.

More information, videos, and assorted odds and ends can be found on my website.

www.phillipdonnelly.net

Acknowledgements

Cover image Velib Along the Seine by Michael Rubbo. All rights remain with artist. See his website for more images.

Thanks to Neil Fitzgerald for all his input and for naming the heroine Illogical Woman.
Discover other titles by Phillip Donnelly at Smashwords.com

Fiction

 Letters from the Ministry

The Conscript, the Girl and the Virus

The Screen

Boots

Kev the Vampire

Travel Writing

Lebanon – Between East and West

Vietnam – Notes on Nam

China – Me and the Dragon

India – What all the other Books Leave Out

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Fall of the Park of Plants

Chapter 2: Seine Demons

Chapter 3: Origins and Originality

Chapter 4: The Symbol

Chapter 5: Bum Wars

Chapter 6: The Dream of the Dark Lords

Chapter 7: The Screen Teens

Chapter 8: The Sandwich of Doom

Chapter 9: The Prison Ward

Chapter 10: The Illogical Woman

Chapter 11: The Dying of the Light

Chapter 12: Escape from Asylum

Chapter 13: Salvation

Epilogue
Chapter 1

The Fall of the Park of Plants

Inaction Man is a man of his time. Gripped by uncertainty, unsure of where he is, what he is doing, or why he is doing it. The only thing he does know for certain was that what he sees is reality. Others take cloud for substance but his sight pierces the fog of illusion. In the world of the blind, he is the one-eyed monarch. A visionary who can see the cracks and what spills forth from the cracks.

We join Inaction Man in the afternoon of November 15, 2013. He does not know the date, of course, being above petty mortal concerns like days, months and years. With sufficient concentration, and intoxication, he can even forget where he is. This studied ignorance of place and time frees Inaction Man from the power of the space-time continuum. No chain can pull him from A to B. He simply arrives in one location or another. How he got there or where he will go afterwards are matters for fate to decree, its ointment untainted by the fly of volition.

Inaction Man stares into the weak sun, made weaker by the thin web of cloud that hangs over the park. He tries to look behind the sun but its light obscures the dark side. He searches for patterns in the movement of the clouds in the sky. No meaning there. Only fluffy nonsense.

"There are messages everywhere," he shouts at a tree trunk, "but if you can't read, how do you know what they say?" Like an illiterate staring at a poster, he knows he is looking at a message of some kind, but is unable to decipher its true meaning. With long dirty nails, he picks away some of the tree's bark and sniffs it for signs of meaning, but this only provokes a fit of sneezing and a great deal of phlegm. Wiping this yellow liquid on the sleeve of his long coat, this tattered man tries to read a message from the Gods in this mucus but finds none.

When Inaction Man looks up, information carried along retinal nerves and assembled in the visual cortex tell him that he is presently in a large rectangular park. Perhaps this shape is significant, perhaps not. As he contemplates this, he feels the gentle rain swipe a slow and sloppy kiss across his face.

"Lascivious elements, what does this damp caress mean? Why does the sky bathe me?" Inaction Man asks the clouds but they do not answer. There is no meaning here either, he concludes. Rain is a harlot who kisses everyone.

His focus falls to his feet. He looks for meaning in the yellowed leaves that lie around his boots. Leaves that the vampire winds of autumn have bled dry and left desiccated.

The overall picture is clear enough to Inaction Man. The world is dying and he must save it. That much is certain, but what does the hidden text say?

"What does the wind whistle? What do the leaves rustle?" he asks the wind and the leaves.

He walks under a long row of trees, all of whom winter has undressed and left in bony nakedness. Their branches form an arch above Inaction Man, which he takes as a sign that he should walk onwards and look inwards.

He thinks about a recurring dream of his, in which he is ice skating on a lake with his hands tied behind his back. The lake is covered in a thick blanket of fog and he can't make out the shoreline. Everything is grey: the ice, the fog, even the wind. He can hear the ice begin to crack beneath him. If he stops skating, he knows, his weight will crack the ice and he will fall into the lake, never to return. So he skates and stakes, and waits for the shore to materialise.

As the dream ran and reran in the picture house of his imagination, he trudged back and forth through the carpet of dead leaves in Jardins des Plantes.

He stopped walking when a squirrel ran in front of him. Inaction Man saw this as a sign that he should stop hoarding his thoughts and share them with other creatures. The philosophy of inaction needed propagating. As of yet, he was its only adherent.

Our hero cleared his mind of all distractions and acted from the heart, knowing his heart to be good and true. He acted without thinking but with feeling. This is more difficult than it sounds, raised as we are to do the opposite; and to help Inaction Man act through feeling, he often consumed large quantities of alcohol, as he had done earlier in the day.

Inaction Man took the half-empty bottle of vodka from his chapped lips and stood on a bench. He was out of his mind, in the literal sense. By this I mean that his mind was sitting on a thick branch above the park bench, watching his body sway from side to side, as it garnered the power of the motion of the planet, which Inaction Man would use to add more weight to his words.

A gust of wind crashed into Inaction Man's face, buffeted by his beard. A sign, no doubt, that it was time to promote inaction by speaking to himself out loud. He did this more and more lately, knowing that words which are spoken are more powerful than words which are merely thought. They have a physical force, a presence. He believed that giving his words an auditory form, albeit a temporary one, would bring people to the path of righteousness.

"Sounds die quickly," he said to the squirrel on the branch beside him, "but they are the sperm that creates thought."

He cleared his throat and spoke, with a slurred voice that demonstrated his power to alter time.

"I am Inaction Man. I am the light and the way. Look on your works, foolish mortals, and despair. For works are actions, and all action is evil."

Some passers-by, realising that they were in the company of greatness, stopped to listen. Out of respect, they kept their distance.

"Know you this: to act is evil, to inact divine. Actions are the destroyers of worlds. Only through inaction can our world be saved. By inaction shall action be undone."

Inaction Man's animus saw the squirrel stare down from the branch they shared. The nut he carried dropped from its paws and returned to Earth. The power of inaction radiated in all directions.

"Change you ways, wretched sinners. Actors on this stage of death, act not!"

Our hero burped loudly to indicate an imperative of the highest order.

"I am Inaction Man, bringer of peace. Follow me!"

Instead of following him, people moved away from him. To compensate, he became louder, but the louder he became, the further they moved away. Mothers clutched children's hands and dragged them to a safer and safer distance. Even the squirrel moved up to a higher branch.

Inaction Man noted the relationship between his own volubility and the radius of exclusion. He saw their fear and felt the beginning of their hostility towards him and his words. But what was the cause?

He employed all of his superhero senses to uncover the hidden force which was turning the crowd against him. The breadth and depth of his super sensory perceptions, abetted by the last of the vodka, left his head spinning in a vortex of sensual experience. A thousand voices slushed through his mind, twirling in eddies of fear and frustration.

He swayed on the bench, at first gently but then violently, oscillating wildly, like a planet toppling off its axis.

"I am Inaction Man, and I am very... sensitive!"

Having explained this to the crowd, he fell off the bench and stumbled into the sanctuary of a nearby poinsettia flowerbed. He sank into it and tried to wrap himself in a blanket of dead leaves, which he believed had medicinal qualities.

The crowd began to laugh but Inaction Man didn't notice. He was experiencing one of his periodic visions. As he lay on the grass with a broken bottle of vodka at this feet, covering himself in rotting plant life, he heard the cries of pain from the leaves he touched. Writhing in their death throes, they begged him to return them to mother tree but Inaction Man could only weep in sympathy. Under the shrieking of the leaves, he heard the sombre munching sound of bacteria feeding. Slow death. Deafening. He opened his eyes to protect him from the sound, but all around him the yellow wind swept away ghost leaves and brought them back to the void.

"Death is everywhere!" he shouted.

On the wake of death floats all kinds of flotsam. Two shape changers moved into his field of vision, their large heads blotting out the sky. Inaction Man shifted his sights downwards and noted that the heads were connected, via necks, to bodies, each one wrapped in the uniform of a park attendant.

"Short, plump and clearly not of this world," Inaction man whispered to the poinsettias, which nodded their leaves in agreement. Like wax works, the park attendants' faces held only one expression – contempt. They looked at each other and rolled their eyes to the skies, communicating with the dark lords above.

When they spoke Inaction Man heard their voices as they really were, without the sonic mask that normally accompanies shape shifter speech. They made dark, guttural utterances, completely lacking in vowels and tone. Their words flowed backwards rather than forwards, and at half the speed we would consider normal.

Inaction Man thought he could make out the words "park" and "leave" and "wino" among the distortions. This could only mean one thing. The shape changers must be claiming Jardin des Plantes to be part of the sovereign territory of the dark lords, as they had claimed the Louvre complex the month before. They were banishing Inaction Man once again, on pain of imprisonment in the Montparnasse Tower.

Inaction Man briefly considered defending the park against the shape changer invasion but decided against it. He was outnumbered and night was drawing in. The forces of evil should never be challenged at night – this was when their powers were strongest.

His decision was influenced by resurgent memories of being locked in cells. It was not to his liking. All superheroes have their weak spots, and confinement to Inaction Man was like kryptonite to Superman. Imprisonment left him powerless; and after a prolonged period of time without bathing in star light or swimming in alcoholic vision juice, his mortal personality would reassert itself. He needed to protect his superhero powers by maintaining his vagrant liberty and roaming free.

He spoke to the shape changers as he beat a hasty but tactically necessary retreat.

"I am Inaction Man. Lion of Paris and defender of the one true faith. I shall see you vanquished, shape changers... but not today. A battle does not a war make and I shall return... but not today. All evil will fall to the power of inaction... eventually."

Thus spake Inaction Man.

Having achieved a moral victory over the shape changers (a victory of words if not of fact), he moved away from them and left the park. Inaction Man was careful, as always, not to turn his back on the shape shifters, in case they attacked him from behind and stabbed him in the back. There is no word for chivalry in the shape changer's language, but there is a separate appendix for words connected with treachery – subtleties of evil lost on the human mind.

To protect himself, Inaction Man walked backwards all the way through the park to the gated exit near the river, keeping the shape changers in sight at all times. The difficulties of walking backwards meant that our hero crashed into various obstacles, such as rubbish bins and tree trunks. He also fell over a bench at one point, which caused merriment to some onlookers but consternation to those who were sitting on it at the time.

At the gate, Inaction Man lifted both his hands and made a short speech to the park and its panicked residents. Trees wept, grass blades moaned and squirrels were so traumatised that they forgot where they had buried their nuts. "Farewell, my park of plants. Remember me and keep my light in your heart through the darkness to come. I came through and I shall return."
Chapter 2

Seine Demons

Inaction Man shook his head as he relinquished Jardins des Plantes to the dark lords. He had been forced to hand over so much of Paris in the dismal year of 2013.

Walking backwards, he crossed the traffic lights and headed down the banks of the Seine. Inaction Man always took refuge near a river when he came across shape changers. Rivers are a source of life and anathema to most shape changers. In fact, he had once seen a shape changer who came too close to the river burst into flames, such is the power of running fresh water.

The smell of the water revived his spirits but made him lose concentration. The worn stone steps down to the embankment were treacherous enough when walking forward, but taken backwards, they required complete concentration. Inaction Man tumbled backwards and the nasty fall left his nose bloodied and his cheek grazed. He cursed the shape shifters and the power of his vexation acted as an invisible force field that repelled everyone in his vicinity.

The blood quickly congealed in his long and matted beard. Inaction Man took solace in the fact that the red added another colour to his grey and black beard, thereby adding to its rainbow power. Inaction Man rubbed the blood into his superbeard [sic] and ignored the pain.

His smile fell and he started to scratch the beard and furrough his brow when he remembered two shape changers who were not allergic to water. They wore the shape of common street thugs and beat him mercilessly in the dead of night under a lonely bridge, Le Petit Pont. As they were swept away by the joy of violence, and all shape changers are addicted to violence, their human mask slipped and they showed their true form – purple pigs with black tusks and snouts covered in wriggling worms. Inaction Man remembered the punches of their trotters and their squealing most of all.

Other memories crowded in. Shape changers were not the worst of the enemies Inaction Man had to face. The forces of evil was enlisting darker and darker forms. Archaic, primordial beings like spectres, goblins and demons had all fought with Inaction Man. In this age of light and reason, they clung to the shadows, waiting for the coming of the great darkness, when they would emerge to claim dominion. For now, they wore a cloak of invisibility but Inaction Man could see them.

They would appear from behind trees (always dead or dying trees) and drag themselves forward, using their bat-like wings to claw themselves nearer to him. Few of them could walk upright, squashed as they were between Hell and Earth, so they crawled rather than walked. They could not move very quickly, being dead and therefore largely inanimate, but to compensate they used their fear fog – a greenish mist that made it difficult to move. So, when Inaction Man fought one of the undead, it was a slow motion battle.

Only last night, an hour before dawn, as Inaction Man sat on a park bench, a demon pulled itself out of a crack in the pavement. It swelled from two to three dimensions, but gravity forced it downwards and it rested on its bony knees to gain strength. Using its long curving claws, it dragged itself towards Inaction Man, scraping along the pavement and then sliding along the grass.

The green fog of fear seeped from the monster's anus and Inaction Man froze. As it came closer it spoke, using the power of its hypnotic wave speech to further immobilise Inaction Man.

"Come with me to the haunted tree. Let my wings embrace thee. Feel the eternal hug of death."

Inaction Man managed to stand but could not walk away. He would have to fight where he stood.

The creature mustered all its strength and stood upright to face Inaction Man. It lifted one of its claw and prepared to lunge it into Inaction Man's heart.

Our hero opened his belt and dropped his trousers. Pulling down his stained underpants, he unleashed his urine weaponry and took careful aim. Demons are allergic to superhero urine, but Inaction Man wasn't sure that he had a sufficient supply at hand. He had to wait until the demon was almost upon him. At the very last moment, he pointed his mighty hose of virtue in the direction of the spectre.

His aim was true and a stream of uric acid burnt through the demon's torso. Hatred seeped from his yellow bloodshot eyes, even in death and dissolution. The demon fell to earth and seeped into a drain with a malevolent hiss.

Inaction Man remembered his victory and patted the front of his trousers and thanked his kidneys for his urine firewall. A more open display of affection towards his member was unwise, especially here, on the banks of the Seine, with so many bystanders in view.

Every silver lining has a cloud and every victory is just a prelude to defeat. Inaction Man frowned and contemplated what might happen if the demons approached him while he slept. To guard against this eventuality, Inaction Man tried to sleep during the day when the sun's radiation prevented the underworld creatures from shifting dimensions. Our hero patrolled the streets at night, when demons prowled, even watchful, ever suspicious of trees, and always with a ready supply of urine at hand in case of attack. He forced himself to imbibe large quantities of beer to maintain a full bladder.

The previous night's attack had convinced him of the need to carry emergency supplies with him. He purloined a baby's bottle from a sleeping infant and a water pistol from a distracted child, so that if he should be ambushed by a squad of demons, he would have a sufficient supply of superhero uric acid.

Inaction Man loaded his weapons, behind a bush, and continued ambling along the river, losing himself in thoughts of battles won and battles lost. He looked up and realised that he was under a bridge near Notre Dame. His superpower of not noticing things, of blanking out the external world, had brought him here, as it had brought him to so many other places, with a hidden purpose and with no memory of how he had come to be here.

The church bells tolled and Inaction Man placed his superpowers of perception into fifth gear. The first thing he noticed was that day had changed to night. The dead of night, the witching hour. This was when the forces of darkness are at their most powerful. He drank another beer to help him concentrate and keep him alert and to help him see through the fog.

A figure emerged through the brume. From a distance it looked human, but as it got nearer, the shuffling gait told Inaction Man that something was awry.

Inaction Man stood perfectly still and waited for evil to make its move. He fought the fear rising inside him and took it as a sign that a netherworld agent was closing in.

The defender of the Earth put his hand in his trouser pocket and clasped his manhood, ready at a moment's notice to unleash his weapon should the need arise. He had to be careful though. There had been several regrettable incidents recently in which Inaction Man had unleashed his urine hose of demon death too soon. Many had taken great offense at being exposed to it, and none were reassured by Inaction Man's explanation that he had mistaken their poor posture for the attack of a black sun spectre.

The creature approached and stopped right in front of him. She was a changeling, Inaction Man surmised, using his superpower of intuition. Her clothes were filthy and she smelled rank. She removed the hood of her tracksuit and met his eyes. She was shaking and jittery, having already lost that human poise and grace that marks the living from the dead.

It is the eyes of the dead that mark them out most, Inaction Man knew, even when they walk among us. There is a glazed and unfeeling aspect to them; a joylessness in these eyes that cannot love. Her skin showed the decay of death, with a most unnatural plasticity. Trapped as she was between life and death, between light and darkness, there was an all pervasive greyness about her.

Her mouth opened and Inaction Man noticed that the decay had spread to her teeth, which were rotten and barely held in place by purple gums. He also saw how gaunt she was. So thin, in fact, that her skin seemed to be tied around her bones.

This changeling, Inaction Man judged from her eyes, had little human left in her. The process had gone too far and could not be reversed. However, she was not yet fully undead, so his urine would be powerless against her. He needed to be extra vigilant.

It was the changeling who spoke first, with a raspy and broken voice that knew only pain and suffering.

"Avez vous un pièce, monsieur?"

She held out the palm of her hand and Inaction Man noticed the marks running down the veins of her porcelain wrist. He knew these were not the tracks of a drug addict. These marks had been made by the tiny incisors of a vampire rat – a blood sucking creature of darkness, a predator that grew ever more common in the sewers of Paris.

He looked down at the cobblestones, making sure not to look at her face. To avoid a changeling hypnosis one must avoid dead-eye contact. He also kept an ear out for vampire rats which might be lurking in their hundreds in the sewers under his feet.

He spoke to her with a false air of confidence, masking a quiver in his voice by bellowing.

"I name you, changeling. I am Inaction Man, knower of many things."

"Tu me dis quoi!?"

Suddenly the changeling's demeanour altered. She smiled slyly and moved closer to Inaction Man.

Rather than transcribe the young lady's words in guttural French, I shall henceforth render them in English.

"Hey, you're off your head, aren't you? What're you on, man? Got some to spare? I really need a hit. I'm sick, man. Real sick."

Inaction Man heard rustling in the bushes. Fearful of a sewer rat ambush, he stuffed his right hand into his trouser pocket and grabbed his urine hose, ready to blast the vampire rodents with an acid jet if they should try to swarm him.

The girl misunderstood his behaviour entirely.

"You feelin' frisky, dood? I'll do anything you want, man. I'm desperate. Anything you want, man."

She reached out and stroked Inaction Man's arm. She leaned closer to him. It was so cold that Inaction Man could see the condensation of her breath. It stank of death but it told Inaction Man that she was still human enough to be invulnerable to any urine attack he might unleash on her. He would have to banish her with bombast.

"Be gone, pitiful changeling wretch! You are beyond hope, beyond the light. I can offer you no salvation."

The changeling recognised the powers of Inaction Man and staggered off into the darkness, clutching her stomach and swallowing the night. She disappeared into it, vanished into nothingness.

It was another epic victory for Inaction Man. A victory of reason over fear, a victory of good over evil. And yet the victory brought him little solace. He felt depressed and brow-beaten as he walked along the deserted banks of the Seine. A lone figure, a tattered coat upon a stick, he hugged the river's bank as the cold November wind fought with the water, trying to push it underground.

Every so often he could make out the rustle of vampire rats in the undergrowth, waiting for him to fall asleep, ready to pounce.

The forces of evil grew ever stronger. On this day alone, he had met two shape changers in Jardins des Plants and battled a changeling by Notre Dame. There were monsters all around him. For every one you defeated there were ten more ready to take its place. In contrast, he was alone. Earth's only superhero, its one defender and champion.

The sun rose and Inaction Man prepared to end his nightly travails and return to the solace of sleep. He knew the day of reckoning was close at hand. He knew he must struggle even harder to prevent that day. He had to spread inaction before it was too late.

He knew what needed to be done, but he had no idea how to do it.

Chapter 3

Origins and Originality

Some are born superheroes, some become superheroes, and some have superhero status thrust upon them. Inaction Man was most definitely a member of the latter category.

His backstory is as empty yours or mine. Before becoming a superhero, he was a civil servant by the name of David. David Vincent, to be precise. By all accounts, he was a distant and aloof man, fundamentally disinterested both in his job and in the world at large. A man of few words with even less inclination to use them. At best he was civil, but more often than not, he failed to maintain even the most basic courtesies with his colleagues. Unsociability is not, of course, a dismissible offence – at least not in the civil service, and most certainly not in the French civil service. David kept his job and kept to himself.

As year followed year, the dead hand of routine moulded his days into copies of the days that had gone before. His colleagues learned to ignore him as he ignored them. Jour après jour, he woke up, went to work, went home and went to bed. When required to describe his role in one of a performance review, he declared himself to be "a prisoners of habit and a hostages of the human need for predictability." When his supervisor pressed him for more information, and a more conventional response based on his job description, he replied, in a very curt e-mail, that he was "a bear born and brought up in a circus whose life had not really begun. You can make a bear perform tricks, but instinct will always tell the bear that this is not how things are meant to be."

As he approached forty, David noticed something strange happening to his body. He started to feel disconnected from it. Like it was not really his body, like it belonged to someone else. The eyes that he saw with and the hands that he typed with felt mechanised. More worrying still was his growing conviction that his body was turning to stone. It was most evident in his stomach, but the petrification was spreading. Everything was getting colder, becoming lifeless. The world turned greyer, shade by shade. The city was being covered in dust; and beneath the dust, Paris was rusting. Disintegrating. Cracking.

Night offered no solace. David dreamt repeatedly of giant cracks appearing in the city's pavements and buildings. Through these cracks demons slid. At first, they were only lines. Two dimensional aberrations hovering in the air. Cracks above the sidewalk. They unfolded themselves slowly and in the chrysalis gained the third dimension of form. In the dreams, no matter how hard David tried to warn others, they would not listen. Only he could see the demons.

He kept these dreams to himself, suspecting that he had discovered something that he was not meant to know. He also knew enough about the norms of society to realise that if he spoke of his living fossilisation and his nightmares, he would almost certainly be incarcerated. David had a morbid fear of prisons, hospitals and any other form of confinement. For him, a prison cell, a hospital ward, and any other building that he could not walk out of, was a coffin.

David kept more and more to himself. "In silence lies safety," he was later found to have scratched under his desk. He began to count the number of words he used per day, and rationed them down to a hundred.

But the monologue inside his head would not be controlled and counted. It screamed for an audience. In granting himself a confidant, David hoped to be able to tease out his own thoughts and organise them. The best way to do this, he reasoned, would be to imagine he was writing to someone who would understand, someone who also knew that the universe was cracking. He gave this imaginary friend the name Secrecy. One cold November day, David began the first of what was to become many e-mails to Secrecy. He noted down what he had seen and how he felt about it and what he believed it all meant.

He spent more and more time writing messages to Secrecy. At first at home, but then in the office as well. The addiction to catharsis consumed him. The quality of his work began to slip and then to slide and then collapsed completely. While efficiency is hardly the hallmark of any government office, there are certain minimum standards that have to be maintained. David's poor performance became an issue that his supervisor could not ignore. For example, when asked to write an in-depth report on waste water management in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, David took three whole months to finish the report, which to his supervisor's horror, consisted of only seven words: "Not too bad, but could be better."

While this was true, and captured the essence of the matter, David's supervisor had great difficulty explaining that the report's brevity robbed it of a certain gravitas. David, anxious to return to typing to his imaginary friend, and nauseated by the shape of his line manager's nose, accepted the critique and promised to rewrite the report immediately.

However, no sooner had he got back to his desk than he lost himself in a long e-mail to Secrecy on the incipient and insidious fossilisation of humanity. The report on waste water management remained in David's inbox.

This was not the reason for his dismissal, which happened later in the afternoon on the very same day. Distracted at a crucial moment by a fly that had alighted on his sandwich, David inadvertently saved a letter to Secrecy on the company's shared drive, rather than on his encrypted USB key. In other words, he accidentally saved his thoughts in public, rather than private. It was only at this point that his co-workers in the office realised just how strange David actually was.

The letter is reproduced below.

Dearest Secrecy,

I've just come from a meeting with my supervisor, whose purpose I cannot remember, but during the meeting I had a revelation, which I'll share with you now.

As we know, people whose lives are slaves to routine object to anything and anyone that threatens that routine. This isn't, as we imagined, a psychological trait, but rather the effects of an external force. Not knowing its real name, let's call it the Status Quo Force – or SQF, or Squiff.

It grows within us. It wraps itself around our spine and spreads its tentacles to our testacles, and from there spreads through the endocrine system to infect the rest of our body. First it takes our bodies, then it takes our minds.

It controls what you see and what you don't see; what you hear and don't hear. That's why the cracks in our world are invisible to all but you and I, dearest Secrecy, and why we must speak to no-one of our visions.

Our colleagues and family (Squiff ciphers, all!) would surely imprison us to keep us silent.

We must move stealthily, gentle Secrecy, or they will discover us. We must be as quiet as the computer mouse I hold.

"It's worse than you know."

"... Who are you?"

"I am the reader, the one to whom you write, the one you call Secrecy. I am an immortal, charged with the protection of this galaxy from the forces of darkness. I have created two knights on each planet to act as its guardians and sentinels. You are one such knight of light. Your first quest shall be to find the second defender against the FOE."

"The foe? You mean the Squiff?"

"The status quo is merely a weapon, a tool to prevent humanity from perceiving that their world is being taken over."

"If the status quo is a weapon, then who wields it? Tell me this, Secrecy."

"The FOE, the Forces of Evil. Life forms that preceded us. Creatures from before the big bang that gave birth to this blessed age of light. Pan-dimensional beings from before time and space."

"What do they want, Secrecy?"

"They want to return to the Age of Darkness. To turn off time, to close space."

"How can they do that?"

"By spreading dark matter. By subsuming worlds, by turning off suns."

"But why me? Why have you chosen me, Secrecy?"

"You can see the cracks. You are a visionary. You shall henceforth be known to the immortals as Inaction Man."

"...Inaction Man? Why?"

"That is your second quest, noble Inaction Man. To discover the secret of your name. And in so doing, to discover your purpose."

"But why don't you just tell me?"

"You must prove yourself worthy. Before we add to your powers, you must show yourself capable of wielding them wisely."

[Transmission Ends]

David stared at the screen long after the immortal Secrecy stopped typing. When he remembered to save the message, a fly landed on the half-eaten sandwich beside the keyboard. It was a suspicious coincidence, in David's mind. Distracted, he saved the letter outside a folder on the shared drive, with the eye-catching title, Secrecy Squiff.

He didn't notice the rest of the office workers gossiping about him, and since no-one forwarded the saved document to him, he would not have known what they were whispering about.

When the document reached his supervisor, David was called into a private office and asked to consider spending more time at home to help him deal with the complex emotional issues he seemed to be experiencing.

David ran from the office never to return, certain that the forces of evil had taken control of it and were on the point of imprisoning him. Knowing they would search for him in his home, he never set foot there again. To be extra safe, he threw his wallet into a bin, and later that night, changed clothes with a tramp. This and a few day's stubble made him invisible to all who had previously known him. Only the bums are free of the all-seeing state and the dark powers behind the government.

David began his second life, the life of a superhero. He smiled widely, and truth be told, rather wildly. He never looked back, and with time, persistence, and a great deal of alcohol, he even forgot that he had once been someone else. David the morose civil servant was dead. Inaction Man was born. He was sighted, he was keen, and he was ready for his first two missions – to solve the riddle of his name and to find the second knight errant.

Chapter 4

The Symbol

Inaction Man pondered the riddle of his name as he searched for somewhere to bed down for the night, or rather bed down for the day. Inaction man liked to sleep at noon, under the sun's beneficent radioactive shield. In the bushes in which he had slept the night before, near Pont de la Tournelle, with a stunning view of Ile de Saint Louis, he found a broken and rusted bicycle.

Inaction Man disliked bicycles. They are a force for action and therefore anathema to a superhero who opposes all action. But this bicycle broke the rule. A bike that could not be ridden, a bike that celebrated inaction – this was a bicycle worthy of Inaction Man. Could it really be just a coincidence that this machine had entered the space-time continuum at this time and in this place?

"If there is 'a special providence in the fall of a sparrow', as the prince of inaction Hamlet purports there to be, then is this broken bicycle also a gift from the Gods?" Inaction Man asked his beard.

He decided to converse with the bicycle to learn something of its history. As a defender of the Earth, he had to choose his friends carefully.

Conversing with inanimate objects is a skill not easily mastered. Dr Doolittle managed to talk to the animals, but inter-species communication is a straightforward enough business, compared to blood and non-blood dialogue. Flesh and non-flesh exist on different plains and have never been on speaking terms. Striking up a conversation with a piece of wood or a chunk of metal is rarely successful. Those who attempt it usually drown in their own monologue. Even Inaction Man often required chemical assistance to bridge the divide between the animate and the inanimate.

To help him reach a state of spiritual openness in which he could commune with the bicycle, Inaction Man dug up a bottle of methylated spirits that he had previously buried in the ground, under the magic rock that had first alerted him to his superpower of meta-biological speech.

He drank it quickly, gulping the vision juice down. It tasted vile and smelt worse. He had to repress the urge to vomit when the meth hit his stomach. When he had ingested all of the potion, he fell to the ground and breathed in deeply. Like a worm in acid, his lined face creased in pain, with mucus streaming from his nostrils, he lay squirming on the sodden earth.

A fuzziness in his field of vision told him that the spirit elixir was taking hold. A buzzing sound tickled his eardrum, and soon Inaction Man could hear the insects talking to each other about work-related matters. It was all wireworms ever talked about, being single-minded and purposeful creatures with no social life whatsoever. Grubs complained about the cold and the insular lifestyle that being a pupa entailed. Beetles hunted through the leaf litter, picking out the noisiest complainers and making a meal out of their gripes.

Slowly the pain subsided and Inaction Man waited for the spiritual awakening the magical meth potion always brought. As he gasped, the mud he was now caked in began to dry and crack – a prelude to dimension shift. Colours blurred and melted into one another. The ground beneath Inaction Man trembled. The universal cosmos entered his body, through the corpus callosum, making it move in time with the earthwaves.

He saw, heard, felt, smelt and touched the universal truth that matter is energy and energy is matter. Two sides of the same coin but one fundamental force. Matter is just vibrating energy: energy is just vibrating matter. Matter moves slowly: energy moves quickly. He shivered in time with both, and for an instant, he was both forms at once.

Inaction Man staggered over to the bicycle and hugged the rusty frame. The first thing he noticed was that the bike's frame was female. Though far from the first flush of youth, she was not as old as she first appeared. Weather beaten and neglected, certainly; far too young to look as old as she did, undoubtedly. Inaction Man rocked the bike gently and sang her a lullaby to win the bike's trust.

The bicycle was coy at first. She had known many men and was wary of them. In the bike's experience, men simply rode you from one place to another and then abandoned you without a second thought. Men were exploitative and only interested in one thing. Once you had served your purpose, they discarded you. Most never even spoke to you, except to utter the occasional expletives. Men were animals!

However, this was the first time a man had ever hugged the bicycle and there was something emotionally cathartic in it. Against its better judgement, the bike decided to speak with this strange man.

"Speak to me, oh wounded wheel bearer. What is your name?" Inaction Man said.

"I am Velib 5247, but you can call me Velo."

"I am Inaction Man, superhero."

"A superhero, is it? I must say that you don't look like a superhero. Mind you, I've never met one before, so how would I know? They don't ride bikes a lot. When you can fly through the sky there's not much need to. What are your special powers, Inaction Man?"

"The gifts of sound and vision."

"But doesn't everyone have those powers, except the blind and the deaf, of course."

"I possess suprasensorial sight and accelerated audition. I can see things that are not there and hear things that are not said."

"... And is there much call for that kind of thing?" the bike asked.

Inaction Man sensed the bike's disappointment. Perhaps it was hoping for something along the lines of laser eyes or the ability to fly, but Inaction Man was no bling potentate.

"What has brought you to this ruinous state, brave Velo?" Inaction Man asked the bike, caressing its broken wheel.

"A drunk. A man. A drunk man!" Velo cried.

"The only man worse than a drunk man is a sober one," Inaction Man said, nodding wisely. "Both are prone to action but at least a drunkard rarely finishes what he has started. How did the fiend misuse you, battered bicycle?"

"The pup swung his leg over me and rode me as recklessly as a blind skunk. It scared me into speech, so it did. Then he farted on my saddle, the filthy sod. Booze and hash, that's what I smelt. He was so out of his face that he could hear me. I tried to warn the drunken fool that he was going too fast but men never listen! He just kept looking around him, jerking his head right and left and completely ignoring me."

"Men are often deaf to the truth," Inaction Man said.

"I shouted at him to get off me, but the more I yelled, the more crazily he rode. When I screamed, he crashed into a wall. And then, to rub salt in me wounds, he threw me into these bushes here and left me to rust and rot. Cast aside for the piece of old junk that I am. It's enough to make you wish for the crusher's yard, it really is," Velo said, as the metal frame began to quiver.

"This is indeed a sad and bitter tale, sister Velo. On behalf of my race – by which I mean the race of men and not the race of superheroes – I apologise and ask forgiveness. Man's inhumanity to bicycles knows no bounds."

Velo didn't answer but the bike had stopped crying.

"They're a wicked lot, men are," Velo said.

"Where does this malevolence come from?" Inaction Man asked rhetorically. "Not from the ridden but from the rider. A bicycle is not evil in and of itself, and yet there is much evil done through it. In the bicycle we see all that is wrong in man: his need for motion; his craving for action; his drive toward destruction."

"Right you are, Inaction Man," the bike said, with more hesitation than conviction. Or so it seemed to Inaction Man.

"Know you this also, vexed Velo -- thou art no ordinary bicycle. You were meant for a higher purpose!"

"Really? What purpose is that then?"

Inaction Man stood up at this point, picked up a nearby branch, and gently placed it on each wheel of the bicycle. As he mumbled some incantation, he placed his hand reassuringly on Velo's handlebars.

"Velo 5247 of Paris -- I hereby dub you a Knight of the Order of Inaction. From this day forth, thou shall be known as Symbol – if thou wilt take this honour, as I believe thou will, having seen into thine soul, and seen it to be good and true."

"Symbol? A real name? I'm not just Velo 5247 anymore. If I've got a real name, I really exist. Cool!"

"You are sorely needed, Symbol."

"Needed for what exactly, Inaction Man?"

"I do not fully comprehend the exact nature of my mission as of yet, but I know I am responsible for defending Earth against dark forces."

"Defending the Earth, eh? Sounds very important. Tell me, does it pay well then, this superhero lark? Are there many fringe benefits?"

"What would Inaction Man do with money? To spend is to act and cash corrupts the soul. What every superhero really needs is a worthy assistant in their fight against evil, and I would like you to be my assistant, brave Symbol. Will you accept your commission? It will be dangerous, it will be difficult, but the fate of the city, nay the fate of the entire world, hangs in the balance. I need someone beside me I can trust, someone I can rely on. Will you join me?"

This was the first time Velo had been referred to as someone rather than something. The bike was delighted, and for that act alone, it would have followed Inaction Man anywhere.

"I accept! I will defend you always and fight the dark forces and all of that sort of thing."

"Excellent! From this day forth, you shall be a beacon. A warning of the dangers of action and a calling to inaction."

Inaction Man and Symbol fell asleep together under the bushes near the Seine, hugging each other for comfort and safety. Cars and bicycles whizzed past them, completely oblivious to their existence.

They were both sure that this day would go down in history, the day that the Inaction Man met Symbol. As they fell asleep, Inaction Man thought about the great books that would one day be written about their crucial role in the day of reckoning.

They had no idea what their exact role would be, of course. The future was uncertain, but they took comfort in the fact that at least they would certainly be facing the uncertainty together.

Chapter 5

Bum Wars

Carrying his new found friend and ally, Symbol, our superhero and his two-wheeled assistant roamed the night time streets of the Latin Quarter. Inaction Man was proud of Symbol and wrapped his arms through the bike's frame, displaying her to the world like a proud general might display his tanks. However, in spite of all her attributes, Symbol was a side-kick and not a bona fide superhero. She lacked special powers, for one thing, and she lacked blood and bone, for another.

Inaction Man studied the gutters in his quest to discover the second defender of the Earth. On Inaction Man's instructions, Symbol looked to the Heavens, in case a shooting star should propel the other superhero earthwards.

They received some strange looks from passers-by, who questioned why a bedraggled bum was carrying a rusty old bicycle with a broken front wheel. They were even more disturbed by the snippets of conversation the vagabond appeared to be having with himself. They heard two distinct voices: one guttural and broken, but erudite; and the other soft and feminine, but facetious.

"So, Inaction Man, would I be right in saying that you don't really know what your name means yet? That you're only guessing?" Symbol asked.

"No answer have I found. I have postulated various theories, and shouted them to the stars on clear nights, but the stars remain silent."

"The stars come out at night but they don't say much. Tell me this, then. How will you know you know? I mean, how will you know you know what your name means? You might just think you know, you know?" Symbol asked, its back wheel purring in ponder.

"Do not bate me with epistemological circumlocution. You are the Symbol, not a sophist. The moment of revelation will come like a thunderbolt. When you are struck by lightning, you know it! This blissful moment of clarity will be the light that shows me that my life until that point had been darkness."

"And this star shock will tell what you have to do as well, will it?" Symbol said.

"Yes, only then shall I know my place in the greater scheme of things, my stitches in the fabric of the universe, my place in the cosmic order."

"And till then, what?"

"Until then am I doomed to wander the night, vilified by mortal man and hunted by monsters. An eternal seeker on a quest he does not truly understand. A nameless wanderer," Inaction Man said, with a sigh.

"And where will we wander tonight?"

"It is best to avoid all decisions, my all-too inquisitive Symbol. A decision is perilously close to an action, and all action is, I suspect, inherently evil. I never go anywhere intentionally. I merely walk and walk, on and on, and then I look up and find myself somewhere. And with something that must be done. The fates carry me and present my missions. Destiny decrees destination."

"So where will destiny take us tonight?" the bike asked.

"Somewhere. Be it here or be it there, it is of little consequence, just so long as I haven't decided to go there. I find myself where I am, and where I am is where I am meant to be. We must flow with the river and not decide to fight against its flow. This is one of the precepts of the philosophy of inaction: Go with the flow and flow where you go."

Symbol was having difficulty following Inaction Man's logic. Being a bicycle, it was an inherently functional creature. It had little time for philosophy, or abstracts of any kind, for that matter. But in spite of its confusion, Symbol was happy. To be addressed at all was delightful, and still a novelty to a bicycle used to being ridden from A to B, without so much as a polite request beforehand or a kind word of thanks afterwards. The bike lost itself in the warm arms of Inaction Man and its frame purred. Being carried rather than carrying, for the first time in Symbol's life, the bike hoped this journey would go on forever; that Inaction Man would carry Symbol into the light, into an eternal dawn.

Shortly afterwards, in a dimly lit backstreet, a bird dropped a blessing on Inaction Man's head. He felt it, smelt it and tasted it, just to be sure it was a sign that this was the locus in quo. The texture and taste left no doubt and our hero waited for an opportunity to use his powers. To better conceal himself, he crouched in the shadow of a doorway and hugged Symbol under his overcoat, or as much of her as possible.

Within an hour, Inaction Man saw a golden opportunity to promote inaction. On the other side of the road, two tramps were attempting to start a fight, but both were already far too inebriated for it to amount to much. They tried to punch each other, but both of them were swaying so much that they only succeeded in punching the air.

Their conversation was loud but incoherent. They were from Marseilles, but I shall render the vernacular in an equally obscure English accent, which is to say, an Irish accent.

"Dat's enough shite outta you, Vlad. C'mere to me, ya dirty bollix, an' I'll feckin do ya!"

"Do me, will you, Estra? Gone and get away with you. I'll rearrange your face for ya, you dirty sheep shaggin' dipso. I'll f**king do you for dat!"

"Not iffin I do you first!"

The frequent uses of the word 'do' alarmed Inaction Man immediately, primed as he was to prevent anyone doing anything. He decided to intervene in the melee before things went any further. Who knew what might happen if the insanity of action was allowed to run its course in this situation?

"Brothers, end this wickedness at once!" Inaction Man commanded, as he stood up and staggered from the doorway, emerging under the light of an orange streetlamp.

"Do what!" one of the man spat out.

He turned to face Inaction Man, which caused his punch to miss its target entirely. He lost his balance and the man who threw the punch was thrown to the ground by the weight of his own swing. Felled by his own punch, he groaned in the gutter. If the poetic justice of his fall occurred to him, his cursing did not show it.

"Don't do. Be," Inaction Man said and opened his arms, or would have done, if they had not been entwined in the frame of Symbol.

"Be what?" the other drunk said, his voice twisted by confusion and anger.

"Heed the prime directive of the philosophy of inaction and act not. All evil comes from action, all good things flow from inactivity. I repeat the dictate: don't do, simply be."

"Get away to f**k with you, ya shitehawk. We'll do you, mister. Do you up good and proper."

"Yeah, and after we do you, we're gonna stick that banjacked bike up yer arse and go for a ride on yer bollox!"

The two drunks forgot all about their previous animosity and incipient altercation, and now seemed to be united in their hatred of Inaction Man and Symbol. They walked towards our heroes, all lumbering menace.

Inaction Man tried to appeal to their better natures.

"Brethren! Why do you abuse me so? Can you not see I am a bringer of peace, a force for good? Why –"

Inaction Man realised that further reasoning would be futile when one of the tramps picked up a nearby rock and threw it at him. It bounced off Symbol's handlebars and crashed into an adjacent car. This triggering an alarm and left an ominous crack in the windshield. Inaction Man gasped and wondered how long it would be before demons emerged from this crack.

The two vagabonds also wanted to escape but for different reasons.

"Look what you've gone and done, Vlad! The feckin' police will be after us now. If they bang us up we'll never find Godot. The fecker owes me a fiver!"

"Quit yis yer yappin' and just leg it!"

Inaction Man was also concerned about the imminent arrival of the police officers, since so many of them were actually shape changers. He decided to beat a judicious and hasty retreat. He ran from the area, carrying his wounded friend, Symbol.

It is far more difficult for a man to carry a bicycle than it is for a bicycle to carry a man and Inaction Man was soon out of breath. His run became a jog and fell to a stride and then descended into a slow walk, with much wheezing, coughing and sputtering.

At midnight, Inaction Man and Symbol sat silently on the pavement outside the church of St Michel. Inaction Man inspected his companion and found a small dent in its handlebars. It was the bike's first war wound and he told Symbol to wear the injury with pride. One day a ribbon would hang from the handlebar, and suspended from it would dangle a medal for bravery. Symbol was delighted to hear this and asked many questions concerning the ribbon and the nature of the honours she would receive.

Inaction Man painted a beautiful picture of the future, with garlands galore and all manner of processions, but he kept a close eye out for spectres and other dark forces that might have been released through the crack in the car's windshield. Nothing would please a demon more than the irony of destroying Inaction Man through a crack of Symbol's inadvertent creation.

Since a moving target is more difficult to hit, and a reflected one even more so, Inaction Man carried Symbol past the shop front windows of Boulevard St Michel. The designer brand mannequins watched the defenders of the Earth pass by and cheered them on.

Inaction Man told Symbol of the many adventures he has had since his moment of revelation. Many rocks that had been hurled at him, many fists had been laid into him; and perhaps most wounding of all, he spoke of the many jeers and taunts that had been levelled at him by a cruel and uncaring world, oblivious to the role he played in their salvation.

"I am Inaction Man, but no-one knows my name, and no-one knows my pain," he said to Symbol, as a grey dawn rose over the City of Light.

"I am Symbol. With a gammy wheel and a dented bar, I'll still go far," she replied.

Bedding down for the day under some bushes near the river, Inaction Man and Symbol left the real world and entering the world of dreams. It was a world Inaction Man felt much safer in, a world whose rules and regulations he had a greater part in creating. Just before falling asleep, he spoke of this sense of ownership.

"We are the creators in the dream world, protagonists freed from antagonists. 'All men are heroes in dreams,' as Freud has shown. In dreams, we are free. Dreams also carry messages, borne on psychic winds, from other worlds and dimensions. It is possible, loyal Symbol, that the meaning of my name may be revealed in a dream."

"Sweet dreams then," Symbol said.

"We shall interpret our dreams at dusk."

Symbol slept in under a minute. Torpor is an easy state for bicycles to achieve, but this night she dreamt she was flying, with Inaction Man at the handle bars, careering left and right through warm fluffy clouds. Inaction Man's dream had an altogether darker feel to it, something far more gothic and far more prophetic.

Chapter 6

The Dream of the Dark Lords

Inaction Man fell into sleep and his feet twitched as he shifted dimensions. He snored loudly, drooled silently, and when he had built up sufficient reserves, he urinated over himself. This trinity of signs could only mean he was approaching a black hole, the lair of the dark lords. In these pockets of darkness the forces of evil are so strong that they crush even light, but in dreams, the strongest of superheroes may pass through the singularity membrane and visit these prisons.

Inaction Man, in his dream, hid in the psyche a spectre's slave. Our hero had difficulty in seeing anything at first, but in time he learned to refocus. The nearest thing he could compare the black hole world to was a negative photo. It existed in surreal shades of black and blue with overlapping indigos and violets. Everything was formless and shifting. The crisp lines and sharp division that we consider normal are not a part of the dark side's universe, existing as it does not only beyond time but also beyond space.

At first Inaction Man had no idea what was being said – or even that anything was being said – because all he could hear was static and hissing. His visual senses provided little comprehensible input either. By closing his eyes and seeing through his host's eyes, he made out spheres of dark light, arranged in elliptical circles, orbiting around a black glass pyramid.

Our hero needed to know more. He had to look beneath the surface. Fighting back his sense of revulsion, Inaction Man plunged his hands into his host's jelly mind. He grasped giant worms within it and in their gyrations his mind began to melt into the host's mind. Tethered into the grooves of his slave's psyche, he began to understand. Like a tapeworm he fed, and his hands evolved into suckers, but he was forced to keep moving these suckers so that the slime that grew over them would not harden and imprison him. If he stayed too long, he would sink into the jelly and become part of the spectre slave. The defender of the Earth would end his days as a fragment of a dream of a slave to a spectre.

Inaction Man squeezed the worms of his host to comprehend his new environment as quickly as possible. The slave's dark lord, Sillus Lagus, was about to address the other assembled lords in an extra-ordinary meeting. An amorphous ball-like creature, he moved to the centre of the parliament and gravitated above the black pyramid before he spoke:

"I am Sillus Lagus. I ask permission to address the Council of the Dark Lords."

"Tell us, Lord Lagus, of developments on the world known by the day creatures as Earth," a purple sphere hissed.

"Our progress is swift. Humans are highly susceptible to the fog of routine. Already we have turned nearly one in three to stone creatures."

"And what news of the cracks in space and time?" another sphere asked.

Lord Haggarth moved slowly in the innermost circle, and to judge by the sense of revulsion his obsidian presence evoked in the slave, he and his master were bitter enemies.

"The cracks grow wider and more porous," Lord Lagus replied.

"Are you sure they cannot be seen?" Lord Haggarth questioned.

"They are covered by the fog. Ghouls, spectres, changelings and goblins guard the cracks, in case any visionaries happen to pass by."

"Are the battle plans ready, Lord Lagus? When will we start the Nachtblitzkrieg?

"We will launch the lightening night war in one Earth week. In a matter of what they call days, we will turn the Earth into the first ever night world."

A wave of static engulfed in the room and the orb that was Lord Lagus beamed brightly.

"Will they not resist, these Earthlings?"

"We will use the forces of action to ensnare them. The more they struggle to escape, the quicker they will be transformed. The more they fear us and act on this fear, the faster our victory will be. By their action shall they be doomed," Lord Lagus said, with an echo.

"What about the Elementals? Is the Earth not already garrisoned and guarded?" said Lord Haggarth, a former First Admiral and veteran of several failed campaigns.

"Our agents have uncovered only two protectors. The Earth is so distant that the Elementals have left it almost unguarded."

"Almost?" said Lord Haggarth. "We have almost won many wars against the Elementals. And yet we are still imprisoned. Tell us more of the Earth's protectors."

"We have incarcerated one in a psychiatric hospital. Our shape changers keep her under close surveillance and use chemical poisons to petrify her mind."

"What is the protector's name?"

"The Illogical Woman," he replied, after a pause.

"A danger I'm sure you will not ignore, Lord Lagus. We will rely on the power of logic to make people act when we reveal ourselves. We need logic to create fear in their hearts."

"I am aware of the danger, Lord Haggarth. If we have not turned her to stone in time, we shall liquidate the threat."

"And who is the second protector?"

"He is called... "

Lord Lagus paused, unwilling to even say the name, but the longer he remained silent the stronger the parliament's interest became.

"He is called... the Inaction Man."

A tangled mess of hissing crackled through the dark lord spheres and their retainers. The name bred an infectious panic in them.

"So, he does exist after all. Long have we waited to meet him," Lord Haggarth said, more to himself than to the other lords.

Another dark lord spun to the centre of the pyramid and addressed the parliament. He demanded that Lord Lagus cancel the attack at once and repeated the prophesy. Silence grew with each line so that by its end the chamber witnessed only his voice.

"By inaction shall action be undone

The dark lords battle be unwon

Time remain unspun

Space stay far-flung

Pyramids smashed

Plans dashed

Night world

Ash"

Lord Lagus lashed out and sent a fork of violet energy which set the orator of the prophesy spinning. Lagus expanded his spherical shape to triple its normal size and beamed black light at ten times its standard intensity. Several spectres and lesser dark creatures were temporarily blinded.

"No! We defy augury. We will not retreat. Our time has come, our time is now. Inaction Man will be eliminated. I will assign every spectre, every shape changer, every changeling, every last vampire sewer rat to one task only – the death of Inaction Man. Death to Inaction Man! Death!"

Lord Haggarth and some of the older dark lords left the parliament. The dark lords who remained chanted the word 'death' and hid behind it, across all six of the concentric circles of the parliament.

Chapter 7

The Screen Teens

Inaction Man awoke with a start, his consciousness having just moved from one dimension to another. He worried that his host mind, the spectre slave he had just left, might tell its master, Lord Lagus, about his current location. In his haste to leave, he had torn away his grappling hooks and heard the creature he rode parasite on yelp in pain. Inaction Man caught the whiff of urine from his trousers but knew that it was stale and would offer scant protection. He shook Symbol awake, picked her up and ran frantically out of the bushes, hollering crazed warnings about the dark lords.

Many heeded his warning and withdrew to a safe distance and he was glad to see them move away from him. Not all had time to flee. Inaction Man inadvertently startled two star-crossed lovers, who had been sitting on a nearby bench contemplating the beauty of the Seine. Locked in a tight embrace in which they exchanged sweet nothings, neither one had noticed Inaction Man approach. Indeed, Inaction Man hadn't noticed them either, as he was looking behind him and carried a bike in front of him.

They gasped when Inaction Man crashed into their bench and shouted his dire warnings.

"Run! Run for your lives, children of Eros. The dark lords are coming and my bladder is almost empty. I have not enough urine to cover both of you. Run, I say. Run!"

Run away they did, hand in hand. Inaction Man continued with his own escape. He panted into the setting sun with no idea where he was going but with the certain knowledge that he had to go somewhere. Not being caught, he knew, would require all his powers of indecision. The dark lords were sure to try to second guess him and predict where he would hide, so it was only by not thinking about his destination that he could be safe.

He found himself, about a half an hour later, sitting on a bench in a small square called Place Monge. Unable to recall how he had arrived there, he knew he could not have been followed.

"Ignorance is invisibility," he told a confused Symbol.

The last shards of daylight were disappearing over the tops of the buildings when a sense of doom and foreboding stabbed Inaction Man. He wondered if this would be his last night. Even the full moon, which was rising above him, seemed to mock and curse him. He was not a man accustomed to fear, but on this night it surrounded and enveloped him.

He had to defeat it. The shadow creatures smell fear and seek it out. There was also the secondary risk that the threat might tempt our superhero into action. Inaction Man concentrated and lines creased his brow. He gritted his teeth, clenched and unclenched his powerful anal sphincter muscle and farted loudly. By employing his superpower of dementia buttocks thus, he overcame his fear. As the methane vapours wafted through his nostril cavities and passed through the blood brain barrier, Inaction Man began to forget about the threat from the dark lords. To help protect Symbol, he broke wind a second time in the bike's general direction and wafted the holy air around her.

Freed from memory and the fear it engendered, Inaction Man surveyed the square before him, like a king surveying some new dominion. In the centre of the square, near a small fountain, there stood a small group of teenagers, who appeared to be communing through smart phones. All eyes pointed screenwards. Fingers typed truncated words while throats remained silent.

Inaction Man knew the dark truth behind portable screens. Mobile phones and tablet PCs were actually fog machines, but only he could see the dark grey mist spewing out of them. The fog was turning the teenagers to stone right in front of his eyes, but only he could see it.

"Screen children, LED addicts. Is it not a pitiful sight, my Symbol?"

"You mean the teenagers on their phones? They look harmless enough to me, Inaction Man."

"Appearances deceive, like screens deceive. What they see on their screenface is not reality. Look instead at its mirror image, the faces of the teens themselves, if you wish to tell truth from fiction. Note their blank gaze, their vacant visage. These are stone children, poor blind Symbol."

One of the teenagers looked up from his hand held device and noticed Inaction Man staring at him. He nudged his companions who all turned to face Inaction Man. The lazy circle became a semi-circle and all heads pointed towards Inaction Man.

Their faces grew monstrous and even Symbol noted the transmogrification and urged Inaction Man to execute an immediate retreat from the teenagers' field of vision. Like a pack of gargoyles, their lips twisted into grotesque shapes and formed lewd aggressive words. They told Inaction Man, in some vexation and with a great deal of the vernacular, they he should not look in their direction any longer, on pain of physical retribution. Or words to that effect.

"Scruffy hoodlums," Symbol whispered to Inaction Man. "But just to be on the safe side, shouldn't we be moving on?"

"Forgive their harsh words, Symbol, for they know not what they do. It is the screen fog talking, not the teens themselves. I shall speak to them and try to raise the humanity within. If a heart beats inside their rocky exteriors, I shall warm it. And in so doing, I shall turn cold stone to warm flesh. Transubstantiation, you might call it."

"Bloody lunacy is what I'd call it!" Symbol grumbled.

The bicycle tried to convince Inaction Man to leave the teenagers alone but his mind was set. He carried Symbol over his head, both as a message to the teens on the evils of action and as a way to battle harden Symbol, who needed lessons in soldiery. The bicycle had become far too cautious since the brawling vagabonds had dented his handlebars in their projectile assault on the previous evening. Armed with his unwilling Symbol, Inaction Man walked toward the teenagers.

"Look on my bike, ye mighty screen children and despair!" he bellowed.

"He's a total looney. I told you we shouldn't have started on him," one of the younger teens said to the others.

"You're afraid of a smelly bum, are you? What a freakin' cry baby you are," an older teen replied, in what was probably intended to be an aggressive tone but emerged as more of a whimper.

The semi-circle began to break up. Some teens edged backwards while others held their ground, but even they had jittering knees and checked the flight path behind them with rapid turns of the head. Inaction Man moved closer, jagged step by jagged step.

"Suffer children unto me. Let me release you from the fog that suffocates you. Deliver your screens unto my feet and I shall smash them for you."

"He's after our phones! Gonna sell them for booze, I bet," said one of the teenagers, who now sounded more like a child.

"I say we should teach him a lesson," one of the taller boys said, but even as he said so, he was moving towards the back of the group.

The group retreated across the square, in awkward hesitant steps, but Inaction Man was still getting closer and closer. He demanded once more that they render their phones to him, so that he might destroy them and save their skins from petrification.

Noting that the fog was dragging them away from him, Inaction Man started to trot, and would have broken into a run were it not for the difficulty of carrying Symbol's heavy frame above his head – made none the lighter by the bike's constant whining, which he was glad the teenagers couldn't hear. Inaction Man's sudden increase in speed completely routed the teenage gang and they turned and fled in many directions, scattering moments after the ravens at the fountain took to flight.

In their haste to flee, one of the teenager's mobile phones fell out of his jacket pocket and crashed to the ground. Inaction Man saw his chance and used his old brown boot to stamp on it. He heard its crunch of pain and lifted his booth. He saw that the innards of the fog machine were already bleeding, but to be certain of victory, he stomped on the phone twelve more times and cursed the device in thirteen different ways.

He took some of the phone entrails and smeared them over Symbol as a first blood ritual. When the initiation ceremony was complete, he threw his head upwards and laughed wildly.

"Victory is mine. I am Inaction Man, defender of the Earth and despoiler of phones."

Chapter 8

The Sandwich of Doom

With victory won, Inaction Man refocused his eyes and fixed his attentions on a small bistro opposite Place Monge. It was doing a brisk trade. Smokers huddled on the terrace outside, sipping beer and clutching cigarettes, as they watched the world go by. Except, of course, for the part of the world directly in front of them, where a dishevelled man in his forties sat rocking a broken bicycle to and fro, mumbling something to himself about the fog of phones.

Inaction Man watched the people pass in front of the bistro and pitied them. He saw them every day, at five in the afternoon, or others like them. Moving from work to home, from one box to another, oblivious to the changing world around them.

A nearby delivery man opened a van door and our hero tried to warn him of the dangers.

"Van man, lay down your load and heed my warning. You are a lotus eater, a fog muncher. You're wrapped up in repetition, a slave to the Status Quo Force, a Squiff vassal. You're turning to stone. Free yourself of possessions. You don't own them, they own you."

"Get a job!" the man spat back, and quickly entered his van and locked it centrally, before speeding away.

Inaction Man shuddered to think that he too had once been such a man – a man imprisoned by a job, an apartment and all of trappings of the fog of routine – before he saw the truth.

More mundane matters rose to his attention – namely his hunger. He would need to eat something if he was to make it through the dark night ahead.

The main problem was that Inaction Man was not in possession of any of what mortals referred to as money – a means of exchange without which living in modern society was surprisingly difficult, even for superheroes. Inaction Man explained to Symbol that he had to waste a lot of valuable time trying to obtain money. He could not understand why the Elementals who had made him a superhero had not had the foresight to also create a superhero bank account for him.

He didn't need to live lavishly, but he did have needs, just like everyone else. The need to eat, for example; the need for whiskey to keep his skin water tight and prevent his insides from seeping through to his outsides; and the need to drink methylated spirits to promote visions. But now he needed food.

Symbol tried to understand but had never really grasped the concept of food. Inaction Man left him beside the fountain and ordered him to meditate on the matter.

Troubled by the rumbling in his stomach, Inaction Man surveyed the square with the eyes of a hunter. He looked at the bistro again and noticed that a man had just been given a cheese sandwich. A sandwich such as this, he knew, would sate his appetite. However, experience had taught him that food missions such as this one are fraught with difficulties. People could be very reluctant to part with things, even when another's need was far greater than their own. They could even become violent if they perceived themselves to have been the victim of theft. It was, therefore, essential to explain to the giver that they were not being robbed, but rather contributing to a greater cause and becoming active participants in the battle of good against evil.

Inaction Man approached the fat man with the sandwich head on, crossing the road and walking up to him with his hand outstretched in a gesture of peace, which Inaction Man had also noted sometimes had the effect of encouraging people to donate cash to the cause.

The man looked away from Inaction Man and stared downwards, fixed on a pattern in the Formica table top. At first Inaction Man took this to be a sign of respect, as many cast their eyes downwards in his presence, but as he got nearer, he studied the sandwich man's face more closely and realised that he was fearful. When he was close enough to smell the fear he saw that the man had ceased to breathe and was holding his hand in front of his nose. He tried to calm the mortal.

"Fear not, fat man. I may be a superhero, but I was once a mere mortal, like you are now. I mean you no harm and I grant you full permission in breathe in my presence. If you request it, I may even grant you the boon of a methane blessing."

"What!"

"I shall come directly to the point, obese benefactor, for I can see you are a man who appreciates brevity. A man of few words and a man deeply in tune with this age of reason."

"What are you on about, dipso?"

"I am Inaction Man – defender of the day. Last bastion against the amassing forces of the dark lords. I hereby charge you, in the name of all that's good and holy, to relinquish your sandwich unto me, for I have need of it."

"Get your own bloody sandwich, you smelly bum! Now, f**k off, motherf**ker!"

Inaction Man, inflamed by this coarse language, felt himself losing his temper.

"Hold thy tongue, flabmeister and sandwich merchant. Inaction Man is no fornicator of incest. Why do you abuse me so? Release the baguette unto me, I say again, or you should feel the wrath of Inaction Man."

"The rat of what?"

At this point, the baguette found itself in Inaction Man's hand, but he had not taken it. To take something in this way would have been to act, and to act was bad enough in itself, but to act in such a criminal way would have brought disrepute to the name of Inaction Man. A superhero may persuade someone to give, but he must never steal.

What actually happened was that the baguette had made its own way into Inaction Man's hand, obviously choosing Inaction Man over the fat man. In Inaction Man's experience, even so-called inanimate objects can in fact move, given sufficient cause. Further evidence of this was that the baguette then made its way down Inaction Man's trousers, attempting to cement the relationship between them. Half of the baguette stuck out over our hero's belt, flaunting its infidelity to the fat man.

He did not take kindly to this rejection by his sandwich and deluded himself into believing that Inaction Man had stolen it. In a rage, he clenched his fist and punched Inaction Man on the nose, knocking him backwards. Inaction Man stumbled and fell into the gutter, where he lay dazed and confused. Bloodied but not broken, he realised that events had become very serious and that he would need to deploy all his powers of inaction.

Symbol shouted at Inaction Man and begged him to run for his life but he remained quite still in the gutter and focused not on the towering angry figure above him, but instead on the stars in the night sky above both of them. He saw a billion points of light, all dependent on him, all willing him to succeed and defeat the forces of the dark lords.

He held onto this thought as the fat man kicked him over and over again: in his face, in his ribs, in his stomach. He even vented his frustration on his erstwhile sandwich, and stamped it into mush, determined that if he could not have it, no-one would.

Inaction Man began to lose consciousness, pummelled as he was by the fat man – this breaker of bones, this settler of arguments, this teacher of lessons.

Symbol looked on aghast. The bicycle was desperate to intervene but was unable to. Crippled by its broken front wheel, its spokes stood on end as the brave Inaction Man held firm to his principles and refused to act.

Eventually the police arrived and pulled the fat man away. They bundled him into a police car, much to his annoyance. Inaction Man saw none of this, lost as he was in unconsciousness; contemplating the beauty of the heavens from within the confines of his own mind, entering that Zen state of complete inaction, complete inactivity.

He was placed on a stretcher and brought to an ambulance. The stretcher bearers winced at the smell coming from Inaction Man, who was convinced that all forms of bathing would reduce his superpowers and had not deigned to do so for over a year.

His mottled beard and matted grey hair were now soaked in blood, which was still streaming from his nose and flowing from his mouth, carrying his shattered teeth away from their only home. Under his clothes, purple patches marked his bruised body and covered his broken bones and cracked ribs.

As the ambulance pulled away, Symbol was left alone. Lost and lonely, silent near a fountain in Place Monge, she wept for Inaction Man and his heroic struggles – not with the forces of evil, but with the evil of man.

Chapter 9

The Prison Ward

When Inaction Man awoke he knew something was missing. His clothes, obviously; and his methylated spirit supply, understandably; and his broken bicycle, lamentably. But something far more important had been stolen from him – time. He wasn't sure exactly how much time had been taken, or even who had taken it or for what purpose, but he was sure that time had been removed from his life.

On the positive side, he was reasonably certain that he was still alive; and as long as he was alive, there was hope for the human race.

"The world revolves around me," he told the world, "and since I live, its revolutions may continue. L'etat c'est moi," said the sun king. The world didn't listen, or if it did so, it made no reply.

Inaction Man lifted his bed sheets and studied how the world had changed. His body had been repaired. His bruises healed, his bones uncracked. Who had done this to him? And what had they done with the stolen time? And where was Symbol?

He surveyed his new environment carefully. He appeared to be lying horizontally in a bed with clean white sheets. It was the first time in years he had woken up in a bed, and although it was a great deal more comfortable than waking up in the streets or under a bush, it terrified him. Sleeping in a bed, as every child knows, means that something could be lurking underneath you, in the space between bed and floor. The most dangerous space of all, beloved by ghouls and spectres. Inaction Man had spent years sleeping outside to eliminated this hazardous space from his life. He leaned out of the bed to check the bed-floor space and assured himself that it was goblin free.

As he put his head back on its pillow he let out a loud sigh of loss. No Symbol, no vision juice, no urine soaked protective clothing. And above all else, at least spatially, no sky. Inaction Man needed to see the sky when he woke up. He kept away from anything with a roof on it as a matter of general principle. A roof is a prison waiting to happen, he felt. Roofs separate us from the heavens. Hell, Inaction Man believed, was a roof stretching on forever and ever.

How could he win back the sky and all his other lost treasures? The first step would be to escape from his bed, and then from his ward and then from whatever building contained it.

His bed was one of many other beds, all laid out in a row, and each one contained a sleeping human. Or something that appeared to be human. How could he be sure that each prostrate form was not a changeling assassin?

A good way to test if a sleeping thing is actually human is to hold the nose of the creature closed. If they open their mouth to breathe, they must be human. Otherwise they are either from the dark side or dead, or possibly both. Inaction Man had got himself into trouble on numerous occasions by using this method to test the humanity of suspicious characters; and in remembering the anger of his test subjects, he judged it prudent to suspend any possible experiments until he knew more about his current location.

There were windows in front of the bed that looked out on a large garden. Inaction Man was used to being on the outside of windows looking in. He had forgotten that the inverse relationship was considered normal. He wondered if it were possible to do both at the same time, to be both outside looking in and inside looking out. The thought disturbed him, like everything else in this new home. He stayed still and hoped that no-one would see him. He was Inaction Man, and must remain as inactive as possible.

After about an hour, a man in a white coat approached him, holding a clipboard and a pen. He was in his early forties and his face wore a world-weary expression, in spite of, or perhaps because of the forced smile. It was a face that had seen too much and had long since stopped liking what it saw.

He spoke to Inaction Man patiently, if rather patronisingly, and his voice was melodic and soothing. Inaction Man felt reasonably certain he was a real human and not a shape changer.

"I'm Doctor Robert," the man in the white coat began. "I'm going to ask you some questions, alright? Firstly, please tell me who you are."

"I am Inaction Man, defender of the Earth against the Dark Lord Lagus and his demon armies."

"I see... and do you have any other name?"

"I was once known as David, before my conversion to superhero. But it was all a long time ago, this mortal life. David had to die for Inaction Man to be born."

"And did David have any family?"

"No. He was alone."

"And does Inaction Man have any friends or family?" the doctor asked. "Anyone we might be able to call to let them know you're safe and sound?"

"Only Symbol. Do you know you what has become of my trusted assistant?"

"Your assistant? No, I don't know. How might we locate Symbol?" the doctor asked.

"A symbol isn't hard to find if you know what you're looking for. My Symbol's most distinguishing feature is her broken front wheel, an ever static reminder of the inappropriacy of action. And of course you will know the warrior by her rusty frame, symbolising the savagery of time. Have you seen my Symbol, Doctor? Perhaps she is in the waiting room."

"No, she isn't here, I'm afraid," the doctor said absent-mindedly, as he scribbled notes on Inaction Man's chart.

"Then send for her at once, good medic. Seek Symbol out in Place Monge. She may still be resting on the bench near the fountain where I left her. Dispatch your best men at once. It is imperative that Symbol is returned to me without delay. It is mission critical. Go forth!" Inaction Man demanded, raising his voice.

"Please be calm, sir."

"Calm! How can I be calm when Symbol lies alone and defenceless? I must save my broken bicycle!" said Inaction Man.

He threw back the sheets and was about to leave his bed.

"Please stay where you are, sir!"

"Unhand me, jailor!"

The doctor tried to detain Inaction Man, but he was so determined to get up that the he couldn't hold our hero down. He pushed the doctor to the ground and ran toward the door. The doctor called for assistance from security, who forcibly detained Inaction Man. They dragged him back to the bed, his feet unable to gain any traction on the sterile polished floor. After a great deal of thrashing about on the bed, the doctor managed to give Inaction Man an injection to make him sleep.

"Time thief! I defy you! Do you really think you can imprison me in slumbered forgetfulness? I spit on your chemical oblivion. I will never sleep!" Inaction Man said, just before he fell asleep.

"Transfer this patient to the psychiatric ward at once," Doctor Robert told two burly nurse's aids, who had replaced the security guards at Inaction Man's bedside.

More time was stolen from the defender of the Earth.

Inaction Man woke up a second time. He was in a different bed in a different room, but this one was much smaller and had bars on the windows, and he was the only occupant. The room reeked of pain and despair. Its walls, soaked in bitter memories, bled continuously.

After a quantity of time Inaction Man could not properly determine, owing to the drugs he had been administered, a woman called A. Nurse spoke to him and brought him to another doctor, called Doctor O' Brien.

The new doctor pestered Inaction Man with a great deal of irrelevant questions concerning his former life, but he wouldn't answer any of Inaction Man's questions or give him any information concerning the health or location of Symbol. He refused point blank to rescue Symbol from Place Monge. This enraged our hero and he stood up and pointed his index finger in the doctor's face, determined to channel all of his psychic force into making the doctor change his mind and bending him to his will.

"You shall rue the day you refused me, churlish bone merchant. I am Inaction Man, defender of the Earth, and I tell you one last time to heed my instructions and return the Symbol to my side. Issue the orders, Doctor."

"Increase this patient's anti-psychotics, Nurse Driscall. Bring him up to 600 mg per day of chlorpromazine."

Chapter 10

The Illogical Woman

After administering the medication, the nurse brought Inaction Man to a place which bore the sign Recreation Room. It contained fifteen men and woman of various ages and in varying states of disrepair. There was an overpowering smell of disinfectant, but under that, lurked the whiff disease.

"What fresh Hell is this?" he asked the nurse.

"Now, now, Patient X. Let's have none of that kind of talk in the rec room," the Nurse said. "Some of our patients get all worked up when newcomers start talking about Hell and whatnot. Hell is a four-letter word in these parts, you know," she said and laughed at her own joke.

She nodded at three women in white uniforms who watched over the room. When Inaction Man first saw them it was out of the corner of his eye, and with this enhanced vision, he noted that they had only one body but three heads. When he faced them directly they had one body apiece. Shape changers, clearly. Inaction Man knew they bore a special malice toward him. He looked around the room for a door to escape through.

"Tell me, in the name of all that's true, where is the exit from this pit of demons?" he asked the nurse who had brought him.

"Exit? But you've only just entered."

He wanted to protest but his mind was sluggish and he had difficulty forming thoughts and even more difficulty translating them into words. His powers were being affected by the psychotropic medication and he could not be sure of anything. In a moment of horrific confusion, he even doubted that he alone could see reality as it really was. Could he even be completely sure he was Inaction Man, defender of the Earth? Ghosts of his former personality spread poison doubts through the contours of his brain. He was losing focus, in danger of forgetting his mission.

"Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am," he repeated to himself, in an attempt to protect his identity.

"Do you think you could think you are a bit more quietly?" said the nurse.

Inaction Man surveyed his prison with growing alarm. Shape changers he could fight. Three would be difficult, he knew, especially as they were armed with hypodermic syringes, but his bladder was full and his ardour stronger still. It was the other people in the room that truly frightened Inaction Man. They behaved very strangely indeed. Some of them spoke gibberish to themselves continuously, but they appeared to believe they were talking to real people. Others rocked back and forth and sang the same refrains over and over. Inaction Man wondered why he had been placed among such obviously deranged company.

"Nurse, why have you placed me in the company of these mad men? I am Inaction Man, defender of..." began our hero, but an involuntary yawn interrupted him.

"Just sit here with the catatonics, Patient X. Let the medicine work its magic," the nurse said.

"Black magic. I am Inaction..." but another yawn crippled his power of speech.

"Shh... Don't speak. Close your eyes and relax. Let the medication wash all this nonsense out of you. Soon enough you'll be back to yourself again," the nurse said and left Inaction Man on the armchair.

A great many patients stared into space and did not move at all, and the nurse sat Inaction Man among them. He struggled to retain control of his own mind. "I am Inaction Man," he said to himself, over and over.

One of the patients at the other side of the room stared at him. It unnerved him, that stare and those unblinking eyes. She had jet black hair and the greenest eyes he had ever seen. Her skin, in contrast, was as white as a snow cloud. Her long tapered nose and thin pursed lips made her look rather raven-like, and she sat perched on the edge of her chair, as though she would swoop down on him at any moment.

Her lips moved constantly but Inaction Man was too far away to make out what she was saying. As drugged and confused as he was, he was still compus mentis enough to realise that she was not a shape changer or a changeling. She was human, he was sure of that, and yet somehow more than human. He noted the overpowering and intoxicating sense of attraction he felt towards her.

After what felt like a lifetime of staring she approached him. She sat behind him and spoke to the back of his head. She whispered verse in his right ear and at the same time tapped his left ear gently with her rolling finger tips, as if to mark out the rhythm of what she said. At the end of each line, she wiggled her little finger in his ear canal. It was an unusual form of communication and one Inaction Man had never encountered before, not even in vision time or on dream journeys, but it was also deeply hypnotic. More importantly, it helped him to stay awake and fight the power of the drugs that threatened to drown him.

"Words of fear draw near you hear

Sights of fright unite in bite

Serpents low unfold all foe

Into darkness must not go"

Inaction Man's curiosity rose with each line. He was sure that if he could look beyond the surface meaning of her words that he would find the deeper meaning.

He struggled against his drooping eyelids and forced his lolling tongue to form a question.

"Tell me, young maid. What do you know of darkness, fear and serpents? Have you seen the harbingers of the dark lords?"

"Darkness falls not with night

Demons, trolls, changelings, fright

Black holes in darkness sings

Cracks inside a frightened thing

Who would be king

Who would be king"

She started to wring her hands at this point, and rocked her head to the left and right, but she was behind Inaction Man, so he didn't notice.

Her words and the poking of his ear canal had unblocked the prison in which Inaction Man had hidden his dream of the night before his incarceration. The dark lords had spoken of two superheroes to defend Earth – the Inaction Man and the Illogical Woman. Could this be her? He had to ask her.

"Are you the Illogical Woman?"

"Logic comes alone to she

Logic born of woman tree

Logic in its own defence

Born of mortal ignorance

Know you me

I can see"

There could be no doubt. Her words were as clear as they could possibly be, given the nature of her power of illogicality. This was the Illogical Woman, his superhero partner.

A brief moment of joy was followed by a pang of fear. Union was achieved but at what cost? The world's two superheroes were imprisoned in a chamber of terrors and surrounded by the insane. Was this a dark lord trap? They were being closely watched by three nurses, all shape changers, who took notes on clipboards and were far too interested in Inaction Man and Illogical Woman.

He felt the eyes of the dark lords upon him. Waiting for their time to strike, waiting for the night to fall, waiting for the darkness to come.

Chapter 11

The Dying of the Light

Inaction Man and Illogical Woman immediately became inseparable. They had much in common and much to discuss.

In a note to Symbol, which Inaction Man wrote on toilet roll paper in a cubicle, he praised the fresh perspective that Illogical Woman offered on many issues. He also approved of her determination to communicate through rhyming verse, which although difficult to understand, was a melodious form of code. However, he had to admit to Symbol that he wished she would speak to him face-to-face, rather than always positioning herself behind his head and tapping out messages on his ears as she spoke. Inaction Man folded the toilet paper into squares, blew his nose in it to avoid suspicion, and kept the message in his shirt pocket. With a heavy sigh he wondered when he would see Symbol again and be able to rub the note on her handlebars.

Illogical Woman sent messages inwards rather than outwards. She used her tongue to draw letters and words on the inside of her left cheek and used the roof of her mouth for punctuation. In a letter to herself, she spoke warmly of Inaction Man. He took her ideas seriously, even if he was incapable of versespeak and almost as chained to logical thinking as a mere mortal. Most importantly of all, she wrote on her mouth, his ears were very tappable and even flickable. In the Illogical Universe, ear tappability is a crucial attribute in any partner.

Ear tapping coded versespeak did not lend itself to easy communication. Nor did the lack of a superhero training and induction programme. Inaction Man and Illogical Woman often referred to alien worlds and alternate universes using entirely different terms. They had a shared purpose but different vocabularies. This lexical incompatibility, if you didn't listen very carefully, might lead you to conclude – as the nurses did on their clipboards – that our two protagonists were simply babbling to themselves, lost in worlds of their own creation, rather than two superheroes bound together in a common fight against their shared enemies.

Their primary enemy, they both agreed, were the shape changers who wore the skin of nurses. To confuse them, Inaction Man suggested they present a moving target, so they began to walk from one corner of the Recreation Room to another. Illogical Woman improved upon the plan and said that "to confuse and confound, make us both backward bound," but walking backwards was not really within the remit of either of their superhero powers and they continually walked into things and fell over.

One of the nurses insisted they stop moving in this curious manner and threatened them with physical restraints. "Clear evidence," Inaction Man told Illogical Woman, "that our circumlocutious perambulation befuddled our fiendish foes." They later tried to hide under the tables and behind the sofa, but one of the nurses always found them.

Inaction Man insisted that inaction was the key to success, so our two heroes pretended to be statues. In these frozen postures, they kept their eyes open and waited for the first opportunity to escape from their prison and for the evil machinations of the shape changing nurses.

Keeping your eyes open is not an easy business when your blood is soaked with poisons designed to make them shut. The chemical weapons, which the nurses called medicine, battled against our heroes' willpowers. The nurses shot clozapine into Inaction Man and drowned Illogical Woman in Zyprexa.

Hypnos and Morpheus won in the end, and the statues went from standing to sitting, and from sitting to nodding, and from nodding to sleep. So much medicine was in their bloodstreams that the nurses couldn't wake them and they had to be carried to their respective beds. When the defenders of the Earth woke up the next morning, they discovered that yet more time had been stolen from them.

Worse than this theft of time was the insidious theft of reason. The poisoned chalice of the hypodermic drugs had twisted their minds while they slept. When Inaction Man opened his eyes, he saw that the world was greyer.

"What dark magic has allowed you to drain this world of all its hue and texture?" he asked the nurse who shook him awake. She didn't answer and Inaction Man apprehended the third loss. "Time, sight and sound. One sense trips upon another's heels, so quickly do they fly from me." The background hum of cosmic conversations was beginning to fade. How lonely existence was without those voices in his head. In their place came a deafening silence, a freezing silence. He was, he realised, falling victim to the fog, which was being pumped into the Recreation Room through the ventilation shafts. He could feel himself being turned to stone. Doubt and confusion filled him and he started to question his superhero status. The poison also affected his body, making his hands tremble and his face tick – side effects of losing his superpower of inaction.

The Illogical Woman also felt the horrors of the fog. The quality of her verse deteriorated, and at one point, her darkest hour, she even began to question the necessity of speaking in rhyme and the indispensability of being illogical at all times.

The two superheroes held an emergency conference, huddled behind the sofa, shaking and twitching. Inaction Man spoke first, trying to disguise the growing sense of self-doubt which was crushing him from within.

"The psychic mosquitos bled me while I slept, Illogical Woman. My visions are fading; my insights, blurred. Do you also feel an ebb in your powers? Speak to me, oh mistress of illogicality."

"Dopamine my receptors block

Antipsychotics mock and mock

Clozapine the darkness feeds

Zyprexa my rhymes it steals"

"We must escape from this dungeon before we are twisted back into human form. Frown not, long-nosed nymph, for I, Inaction Man, Tsar of all inaction, have a plan. We will meet in the garden after lunch, arriving separately to avoid suspicion, at the giant oak tree by the far wall, where the drunken goblin Hiver stands guard. When he slips into his margarine stupor we shall use the tree to climb over the wall and make our escape. This is my plan. This is what we must do. This is how we must act!"

Illogical Woman spun back in horror, pointing her tapered index finger at him.

"Inaction Man his powers deny

In his haste to flee and fly

A plan he makes a plot he schemes

He does and does and deeds and deeds

Inaction Man hath lost his way

Inaction Man doth die today"

Inaction Man turned pale when he saw the truth in Illogical Woman's words. He was bound to fight action in all its forms. Yet here he was, planning action, spreading the very corruption he had sworn to cleanse. But what other solution was there?

Illogical Woman was suspicious, but she checked his ear wax consistency with her tongue and tasted that he was telling the truth. She sat behind him, wrapped herself around him to help them move more quickly, and put her hands over his eyes to help him see more clearly. She rocked him with her rhyme of unreason:

"Fire with fire must we fight

Or else be lost to endless night

Meet we at the goblin tree

Climb the wall and then be free

So, after lunch, right?"

Illogical Woman gasped at the absolute lack of rhyme. She began to gently sob, feeling her powers desert her.

They sat entwined behind the sofa until lunch. The world's two great superheroes rocked back and forth, trying to conserve and share their powers, to wrap each other in a superhero shield. Neither spoke but both wondered if they could protect each other against the end of vision, as they raged against the dying of the light.

Chapter 12

Escape from Asylum

As Inaction Man had predicted, the goblin Hiver was drugged and catatonic by late afternoon. Empty margarine containers were strewn all around him. Other rubbish lay carelessly under the trees branches and a mange-ridden cat prowled among the debris of the ravaged bin. Clear evidence, if any were needed, that the tree was an access point for the dark lords. An important one too, and it would not have been left under the protection of the addled and addicted Hiver if he were not so closely related to Lord Lagus. A direct line, albeit an illegitimate one, ensured that Hiver was present, in body if not in mind. His long green ears flopped over his forehead and his pointed nose, smeared in bubbling margarine, glistened in the bloody red sunshine. His back rested on the oak tree that was his home and he snored his windy snore.

Illogical Woman worried that he might only be pretending, so she shook him violently to check he was really asleep. In case their escape might wake him up, Inaction Man spun a circle of urine around where the goblin slept, which would imprison him until evaporation robbed the circle of its power.

Illogical Woman, as svelte as a cat and as strong as a rat, climbed the tree with ease. With her aid, a grunting Inaction Man managed to reach the branch of freedom. He sat on the branch and moved along it. Slowly, carefully and with the gentle encouragement of moss and leaves, he came nearer and nearer to the tall wall that surrounded the psychiatric institution. Illogical woman, who had already walked along the branch, with one eye closed to help her balance, waited for him on top of the wall and sang nursery rhymes backwards to ward off bad luck.

With the help of the foliage and assorted flora, and Illogical Woman's lilting voice, Inaction Man made it to the wall. Both heroes sat there for a moment and looked into each other's eyes. He wanted to give words to the intense emotional attachment he experienced but words failed him. Illogical Woman had no such difficulty expressing herself. She used her tongue to write "I love you" on the inside of her cheek and drew the largest of exclamation marks on her palate. Inaction Man didn't notice, his powers of perception weakened by the chemical compounds polluting his bloodstream.

Instead he directed his own tongue to pondering how they might reunite their feet with the ground. Their feet dangled in mid-air and Illogical Woman counted them, backwards then forwards, but this didn't bring any of their feet closer to the ground, as she had predicted it would. Inaction Man suggested they hang from the wall to reduce the distance of the fall back to Earth and thereby limit the accelerative powers of gravity. Reluctantly, Illogical Woman did just this, but she wouldn't let Inaction Man jump until she had measured the approximate distance of his fall with her hands and assured herself that it wasn't thirteen hands worth.

The moved away from the wall. Inaction Man walked forwards, careful to cleanse his mind of any thought of a destination, and Illogical Woman skipped backwards. As evening crept upon them it began to rain and the weather turned much colder. Both superheroes were without coats because Illogical Woman feared putting them on might have aroused suspicion in the psychiatric home. Inaction Man pointed out that the other patients often wore coats when they went into the garden, but Illogical Woman was convinced that only wearing a t-shirt on a cold November day was inherently illogical and therefore must be the right thing to do. Inaction Man, who had been homeless for years and knew what cold could do, didn't press the point, since the principles of inaction strictly forbade him from doing so.

As the cold and wet bit deeper and deeper, he couldn't help but worry that the philosophy of inaction meant that he must leave all decisions in the hands of Illogical Woman, who was determined to choose the worst of any two options presented to her, simply because that was the alternative that made the least sense. This thought and the darkness of the night placed a barrier between the two heroes. The cold hardened this barrier and the rain glued its mortar.

Through the rain and the chill wind, shivering and hungry, Inaction Man and Illogical Woman tramped on through the damp streets of Paris 75005, the Latin Quarter. Their t-shirts and everything else they wore were wringing wet because Illogical Woman refused to shelter from a downpour but rather embraced it. She also challenged several pedestrians to walk on the right side of the pavement, as she felt that was the right thing to do, semantically speaking.

Inaction Man realised that he and Illogical Woman were two very different kinds of superheroes. While they may have been united in purpose, they were divided in methods. He was a master of disguise, a prince of invisibility, whereas Illogical Woman flaunted her superpowers, recklessly and needlessly incurring the wrath of mortals, to whom she paid no heed. More worryingly, she was no doubt alerting every agent of the dark lords to their presence.

A flash of lightening showed Inaction Man that this night would be the last night; that they would either defeat the forces of evil or be defeated by them. With Illogical Woman there could be no half measures. Perhaps it was for the best, he thought. No more lost years of trying to discern his mission in the fall of a leaf. The night of reckoning was at hand, and he was glad of it.

With a roar of laughter he understood now that the weather had been a dark lord trap. He walked into the middle of the road and held his arm at a ninety degree angle, his index finger beaming his message to every gargoyle in Notre Dame.

"Mark you this, hellhounds large and small. The seraphim of the non-sensical and Inaction Man are united. We are one. Let the dark lords conjure up all the storms of Hell. Let Hell itself breathe down sulphurous winds and pour acid rains upon us. We will weather all storms. We are one and we will win!"
Chapter 13

Salvation

Through the misty rain and the cold wind they marched on, crossing the Seine at the Pont de l'Archeveche. The lovers' locks that decorated the bridge would stop their hearts from breaking, according to Illogical Woman.

They strode into the courtyard of the Louvre Museum. Inaction Man felt a churning in his stomach and his intestines rumbled. He realised that it would end in this place. Somewhere deep in his guts he had always known this. On this very square, under the glare of the Black Pyramid, obsidian shape changers had first banished him from a part of Paris. More and more of the city was theirs now, but this was the first sovereign territory of the dark lords. The Pyramide du Louvre was their main bridge into our world.

"The end is nigh," Inaction Man said out loud. Illogical Woman took this as a cue to begin walking on her haunches, which slowed both heroes progress, but both moved onwards, if a great deal more slowly. The two of them stared upwards, mindful of the watchful stone gargoyles perched around the roof of the Cours Napoleon.

Inaction Man checked if Illogical Woman had noticed the moving statues.

"The monsters turn animate. Rock grows flesh. While in the city below, humans turn to stone."

"Petrification of the human nation

Gargoyles feed and

Speed from seed"

He pointed behind them, in the Jardin du Carrousel, to draw Illogical Woman's attention to the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who stood guard on top of smallest arc, the Arc du Carrousel. The riders looked to the distant Arc du Triomphe and held their swords in line with the golden eye of the Luxor Obelisk, a focal point and a conduit of dark energy. On each side of the Concorde, the giant dark energy batteries of the Madeleine and the National Assembly hummed.

For hundreds of years, Inaction Man told Illogical Woman, the dark lords had planned this city's outline and its geometric patterns, converting it into a trans-dimensional transportation hub. This dark matter server would bring their world into ours.

"They will be here soon, Illogical Woman. The clock nears midnight."

"It's later than you think

Close your eyes and sink

Into the enfant école

The garden of sold souls"

Illogical Woman put one hand over Inaction Man's eyes and used her other hand to turn him around, so that he pointed towards the Jardin des Tuileries. She blew hard into his ear and when he opened his eyes he saw an army of infant spectres cavorting. The park had become their nursery and playground. In corpse bodies, they practised moving flesh in the world of matter – a difficult task for a dark matter creature. Most of the bodies were missing at least one limb, some were mere stumps. Ghoul slaves moved among the carnage, bringing fresh cadavers and ferrying away discarded body parts.

"They're here," Inaction Man said.

"We're here," Illogical Woman replied.

The superheroes ran to the middle of Cours Napoleon, right in front of the Grande Pyramide. They were flanked on all sides by triangular lakes of dark matter. They stared into the nexus of worlds, the Pyramid of the dark lords.

A thunderclap tore the sky above the Grand Pyramide and demon after demon spewed forth. They circled above the square briefly before flying off to their allotted rooftop to await the orders to manifest themselves.

"They will lay waste to this world of men and machine. They only wait upon the order of Lord Lagus. Only we can stop them," Inaction Man shouted above the sulphurous winds.

Humanity's last hope, two incongruous figures shivering in wet t-shirts on a cold November night, saw the murderous future. With eyes wild, both of them stood transfixed at the Grande Pyramide.

Inaction Man looked deep into Illogical Woman's eyes and asked for a plan. They were outnumbered thousands to one. An army of filth was all around them and soon they would attack. In the distance, they could see shape changers in the guise of policemen staring at them.

"The hour is at hand, Illogical Woman. Search deep within yourself and tell me how these Dark Lords can be defeated. For logic tells me we are doomed and all is lost."

"Take the future from the past

In black glass let loose a blast

Rest brave Symbol in this place

Funerals end by act of grace

Deface"

Inaction Man took only a moment to decode the plan, so attuned had our superheroes become.

"It is a cunning plan. A brave and worthy plan, fair siren, but where can I find my dearest Symbol now. She fell in battle in Place Monge and must lay in ground unsanctified until the last trumpet call."

"Symbol was a Velib true

And like all good Velibs is made anew"

Illogical Woman pointed at a passing cyclist and Inaction Man immediately understood what he had to do. He stood in front of the cyclist, holding out the palm of his hand in a signal to stop. Illogical Woman skipped after him, careful as always to avoid the cracks in the pavement.

The cyclist, who had been cycling quite quickly, braked and skidded on the wet cobblestones and came off the bike. He looked up and saw a wet tramp standing over him. Behind the smelly vagabond, a deranged woman in her thirties, dressed head to toe in black, soaked to the skin, skipping towards him and pointing menacingly.

He tried to get up but slipped again. Illogical Woman crawled to the back of his head and spoke feverishly, tapping his ears at the same time.

"Unhand this bike and take mortal flight

Go pray the world won't end tonight"

The man ran away, badly shaken by the fall from the bike and his encounter with what he later described as two deranged drug addicts.

Inaction Man knew there was no time to lose and followed Illogical Woman's finger, quickly picking up the bike and mounting it. Illogical woman deftly jumped on top of the pannier at the front of the bike and sat in it. This blocked Inaction Man's view but Illogical Woman used her index finger to direct him, and to direct the attack on the citadel of dark power. She roused all of them with a battle cry.

"Onward brave knights

To fight to fight

Once more into the breach

We ride we ride we ride"

Symbol, a little jealous of Illogical Woman but proud to be part of Inaction Man's team again, rode on towards the pyramid of black glass.

The shape changers who bore the uniforms of police officers saw the danger and took up positions to defend the Pyramid. One of them upholstered a gun and pointed it at the oncoming trio.

Illogical Woman noted the danger and told Inaction Man to make evasive manoeuvres, but he told her this wasn't necessary, since bullets can have no effect on superheroes.

Perhaps the shape changer's leader realised this also because he ordered his officer to put his gun down. He walked towards the oncoming bike, a menacing figure in dripping black leather. At the very last moment, he took out his truncheon and stuck the nightstick in Symbol's spokes, breaking his front wheel and knocking Inaction Man and Illogical Woman off the bike.

Inaction Man knew this was a good sign. Symbol was broken once more, so the power of symbolism was restored to him. The holy trinity was now truly complete. Inaction Man, Illogical Woman and Symbol would defend the Earth against the forces of evil.

Illogical woman took an intense dislike to the chief shape changer's ears and tried to bite the left one off. His screams and the blood flowing from his ear shocked the other shape changers and they hesitated for a moment. Slowly, with a grim determination, they surrounded Illogical Woman and began to tighten the circle. One officer held a gun, another a truncheon, and a third, a dispenser of mace.

Inaction Man took advantage of the shape changer's distraction to deliver his mortal blow. He ran to Symbol, which had careered to the vary walls of the Pyramid. He picked the bike up, lifted it above his head, and with a Herculean effort, smashed it into the pyramid, breaking its glass.

With this one act of heroism, the perfect symmetry the dark lords needed for their transfer was broken and the spectres were sucked back into the vortex. Inaction Man looked up and laughed as they were whipped back into the rapidly closing holes in space and time.

The shape changers, enraged by the defeat of their masters, blinded him with chemical sprays and electrocuted him with Taser shots. Having vented their spleen, they carried his frozen body away and brought him in a van to a police station, and from there, they ferried him to a high security psychiatric institution.
Epilogue

Shortly after the events described in the previous chapter, Inaction Man lay trapped inside the body of a man called David Vincent. He tried to make David find out what had happened to Illogical Woman and Symbol, but David, filled with poisonous Lithium, refused to listen to him. Inaction Man could not discover what had become of his greatest love and his most faithful servant. Blocked by chemical walls, Inaction Man was shut out of consciousness. Starved of thought, his batteries dry, he came to mind less and less frequently. Eventually he stopped coming up for air altogether.

David Vincent was pleased with this act of wilful forgetfulness, as was his psychiatrist, who pronounced him cured. Patient Vincent was discharged and his medication was tapered off. Inaction Man became a memory that was never remembered. A suppressed thought.

But a thought can take years to decompose. Some thoughts stay with us until the grave, till death us do part. Inaction Man grew thin. In time, he withered. He fell in on himself, like a collapsing star. He lay dejected and depressed, in the depths of David's unconscious mind. Unloved and unwanted, a shameful memory. But he didn't die. Some thoughts never die, they just get smaller and smaller. They wait, like the herpes virus, in the infinite cocoon of latency.

The man called David didn't accept this and pronounced Inaction Man dead and gone. He returned to the world of the office and the life he had rejected. His new job was in a different city, in a different role, in a different company. He changed everything and declared himself to be a new man.

But in his darker moments he wondered is anything had really changed. David couldn't help thinking that his new office was very much like his old office. Everyone who worked in it was just a bad copy of someone from his previous office. The same conversations, the same back-biting, the same everything.

"Only the software updates. People remain the same," he wrote in a toilet cubicle one morning, but then scribbled over the message.

Faced with a sour present the sweetness of memory was hard to resist. Inaction Man resurfaced, first in dreams and then in daydreams.

Recognising his mind to be troubled, David found another psychiatrist. In his first appointment, David spoke of his malaise.

"Every office is a prison."

"You can leave an office," the psychiatrist said.

"But you can't leave office life. What comfort lies in spreadsheets? What power rests in PowerPoints? When you've fought demons, why do battle in petty office squabbles?"

"The demons didn't exist. You know this, don't you, David?"

His doctor renewed David's Lithium prescription but the world remained grey and insipid. Life stayed black and white.

David took a break from a rather dull administrative task and searched the internet for a dimly remembered quote about a man who dreams he is a butterfly. Google threw up the Chinese proverb in a nanosecond and David spend seven thousand seconds reading and rereading it.

"Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man."

Shaking himself free of the thought, David tried to force himself back into work, but he couldn't concentrate. He grew ever more despondent, his work suffered and he was eventually dismissed. It made little impression on him. He was living but somehow dead inside. Inaction Man told him that he was being turned to stone, and David fought to silence that nagging voice. He must never listen to Inaction Man. If he was certain of nothing else, he was sure of that.

On impulse, shortly after his dismissal, he returned to Paris and went to the Pyramide. He stared and stared but saw nothing. He felt nothing. He was the quintessential 21st century man. All he knew was emptiness, loneliness and nothingness.

We will leave him here now, this non-descript man. Standing in a square and looking up at a pyramid of black glass. He once fought spectres and goblins; he was once the scourge of demons and shape changers; he once defeated Lord Lagus and the dark lords. But now he finds himself powerless against that greatest of all the dark lords – Melancholy.

He sighs, this man of our time. Awake and oh so very tired. He breathes in and looks up. In the distance, a black spot. It grows larger. The spot becomes a blob and the blob grows appendages.

The sun shines once more. Colours bleed into bubbling life. Voices chime like bells.

David sees a woman on a bike. Long black hair blows in the wind, like wings flapping.

She rides erratically, veering from left to right. A punctured bicycle, perhaps. Or something greater.

The universe cracks but only Inaction Man can hear it.

The End

