11. AN ESCAPE FROM THE TYRANT

The twentieth centuy's most notorious tyrant puts in an appearance...

There was a particularly black or white or puce cloud drifting on the edge of what might have been her vision or maybe her dreams, and Elaine sort of recognised it, but wasn’t quite sure. And if it was who she thought, she shivered, or shuddered: or both.

“Who’s that?” she asked T***y.

“Oh him! Nobody ever talks about him!” screamed T***y, shocked to her core by the question.

“But that doesn’t help me,” sighed Elaine.

“Then you’d best ask him yourself because no decent soul will ever so much as say his old time name,” replied T***y, “though if we do need to refer to him we call him Gassy.”

“I think I will ask him,” Elaine told her friend/acquaintance, and she suddenly found herself hovering very close to the shadowed stranger.

“Get away! People don’t talk to me!” snapped or crooned Gassy.

“That’s no way to start a relationship,” Elaine told him, “I only wanted to be friendly. Why do they call you Gassy? Is it because it rhymes with Lassie? Were you a dog lover in life?”

“Hated them,” snarled Gassy, “and if I tell you about my name in this Hell then you’ll leave me alone in peace.”

“It’s not Hell,” murmured or groaned Elaine, “I like it here and to me it’s more like Heaven.”

“Then you must have been a goody goody in the old place,” snapped Gassy, “you must have been one of those who believed in loving your fellow man and being nice to strangers…”

“But I was a woman, not a man” smiled Elaine.

“Fellow woman, then!” groaned Gassy, “I had a woman once, a friend, someone to respect and cuddle up to when things go wrong. She was good. At least, she told me she was, though why she would want to share her bed with my sort I never could work out.”

“Maybe she could see something that not even you could?” suggested Elaine, “I mean, we don’t always see ourselves in the most flattering light, do we? But you said she wanted to be with you? That must have meant something.”

“The silly woman tried to kill herself to attract my attention. Said I didn’t pay her enough attention. Twice she did it! Neither time did it work or my attention would have been attracted by her funeral!”

Elaine sighed and would have sat next to him but he wasn’t sitting. Or standing, and he wasn’t dancing either, he was just about floating.

“Suicide’s no way out,” she sighed, “no way of solving any problem. There are enough souls drifting around here who are testament to that!”

“I’m one of them,” he grinned.

“You killed yourself?” She was shocked, though she couldn’t have said why.

“I shot myself. Thoroughly. I mean, when Eva shot herself it was more intending to miss anything vital. She wanted to attract my attention rather than die! You see, my niece had shot herself with my gun and it must have put the idea in her head.”

“Oh dear,” sighed or screeched Elaine.

“But life was never so very important to me,” he grinned, “I mean, other people’s lives. Some people deserve death just because they were born who they are. Racial stuff, inherited from a long line of evil. They deserve death at birth. To cleanse the world of their type.”

“What a dreadful thing to say,” groaned Elaine, “I’m beginning to see why people avoid you.”

“You do? Then maybe you’ll explain it to me! I can’t for the life of me see why I get to be so hated even though I guess everyone hates everyone else in Hell. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect from the sort devils you find here.”

“People aren’t devils,” objected or lauded Elaine, “you’re a person, or rather you were a person! Yet you talk about people as though they ought to be put to death rather than allowed to live! And it’s only in life that we properly learn how to be dead.”

“That’s gobbledegook,” snarled Gassy.

She would have shaken her head, but she didn’t actually have one, so she shook the ground beneath where her feet would have been instead.

“No it isn’t!” she snapped or sighed, “when I was alive I learned how to love. Oh, I do know that the swine I loved ended up killing me, but for a while I loved him and if I was still alive I should imagine that part of my still would. But it’s the love that I learned back then in the olden times that has given me so much pleasure in this Heaven, in The Past.”

“I loved Eva!” snapped Gassy, “and look what good it’s done me! I don’t even see her around here! But I guess she went to Heaven when the cyanide got her!”

“Poison? How dreadful,” murmured Elaine.

“It had to be,” grunted Gassy, “if she’d lived she’d have been hanged. They did that, you know, to us who knew truth and wanted to live lives free from oppression and foreigners.”

“You must have been a very bitter and twisted man,” sighed Elaine, “and I, for one, am bored with your strange deathly philosophy. I mean, killing babies because of their genetic history! And saying you loved your woman, but made no effort to save her. She could have survived, I’m sure of it. Not many women got hanged!”

“She wouldn’t have,” groaned Gassy, “and anyway I gave her the cyanide. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to be alone and not have a do-gooder making silly pronouncements in my ears.”

“Then I’m sorry for you,” snapped Elaine, “I’ll go, then, and leave you in your hell.”

She sauntered or ran or gambolled off and T***y caught up with her.

“You spent a long time talking to him!” she said, almost reproachfully.

“He thinks he’s in Hell.”

“So he should,” grated T***y, “he was responsible for more death and destruction than any man ever. But I won’t say his name…”

“You say death and destruction? And he said his girlfriend was called Eva.. h was taught to us at school … can it be … was I just talking to what’s left of Adolf Hitler?”

“Don’t” hissed T***y, “that name is not allowed in the Past. That man, before he died, and only a few others spread over all of time, were so evil in life than we don’t even acknowledge that they ever existed. We don’t even whisper their names.”

“And Eva?” asked Elaine.

“She’s around somewhere,” murmured T***y, “I avoid her, but she’s got a small circle of friends. As for me, I prefer being with you.”

“But who would have thought … Gassy said some terrible things, yet I could tell that even after all this time in what he sees as Hell he still believes he was right.”

“The odd tyrant stops by and they joke together,” T***y told her, “but only the odd one. “Tyrants are really not that common. Come on, let’s go and haunt somebody nice for s change!”

© Peter Rogerson 03.09.21

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