With further apologies to C S Lewis
In Part One we told how little Michael Gove stumbled out of his parents’ wardrobe into a freezing wasteland run by the evil White Witch, who has pledged to obey the continent’s Imperial Controller Junckerbord. Now read on . . .
Michael awoke screaming and screaming, ‘THIS IS NOT BETRAYAL, THIS IS NOT BETRAYAL AT ALL.’ He was drenched in sweat, smelling of the Jobbery syrup now being pumped into him every night via a syringe fixed to him by the witch’s henchman Olly-The-State-Will-Wither-Away.
Poor Michael. His dreams had been those of Lady Macbeth and the bloody knife and hands not washable by the oceans. In his nightmares his mind had gone back to a large flaxen-haired bulky figure, strange but of good will, who was then his friend and was helping. Had Michael really plunged a two-foot knife into the back of this trusting chum? Had this assassination not ‘trammelled up the consequence’ of the act, but let the gates of hell open and the White Witch assume total power over Remainia? Was he, Michael, at the deepest level not a nice honest chap but the very cause of the permafrost now blighting this benighted land? And more, had his betrayals not ended there, were his nightmares of guilt correctly accusing him of betraying McFee’s fishing communities, telling them to forget their fish and collect plastic from the Pacific instead?
Michael’s waking hours were plagued with these Shakespearean episodes – no he had not put the eyes out of his host in a castle, no . . . but had he in fact betrayed all he stood for by joining the dark side, WW’s new empire under Junckerbord’s grand design, now entitled Versailles, to be finalised in a train carriage, giving control to foreign oppressors? Yes, Michael had done that, and was the cause of all of it with his assassination of the bulky friend, letting all hell break loose.
Michael tried to get out of his bed, but Olly was already there pumping more syrup into his veins. And was that a doctor in a white coat with the logo ‘Soviet medicare’ on his lapel?
Meanwhile Dominic was also needing extra doses of syrup, and more sessions with the therapist on learning to love the WW’s Whitepaper and its mad giveaway of the inhabitants’ rights, money, justice, army, health system and any else she could think of. Dom got sweaty too, partly because he was now always tied to Olly. Yes, tied with a digital cable a few feet, sorry metres, long fixed into his neck by a USB port.
(In fact it was later discovered that Junckerbord’s minion Selmayrthumbscrew controlled Olly by a wi-fi version of this digital link and had done for years. What was new was the wi-fi connection from Olly into the head of WW, unbeknown to her. She was in fact a very unusual mutant without a mind of her own, a mix of zombie and machine, and needed another real mind to fill the void. Olly was this inhabiting mind. This was why WW, in the eyes of her unfortunate subjects, seemed to be in the grip of an obsessive compulsive disorder as well as repetitive syndrome, sounding like a taped message in a railway station.)
As for Liam, he was rather ignored and little used at all, but under the normal syrup dosage parroted what WW and Olly inserted into his ‘mind’. He was a lost soul with nowhere to go. The permafrost just got deeper and colder, no hope was anywhere in this land of the seventh level of frozen hell, WW and Olly could do as they liked, with the Jobbery syrup keeping WW on her throne in Checkmate palace. If anything, things were getting worse and worse . . .
