Curse these fugging migraines, thought Helix Feldspar, cradling his throbbing skull. The stench didn't help matters any. The place smelled like a vat of garlic, stale dishrags, and stomach acids. A drunk tank, they called it—yes, wobbling across a pancaked battlefield, firing drunkards out the revolving cannonbarrel. Fonk! Fonk! Tumbling limb over flailing limb in lazy trajectory. The enemy, brutally assaulted with 160-pound averaged bags of blood, bone, and booze, soon retreats to the hills, waving clenched fists in its wake. Helix winced at the warfare in his left temple, tilting his head to the right in hopes that the pain, subjected to the force of gravity, might skitter to the other side of his forehead, allowing the aching left side a breather.

You couldn't pay him to walk barefoot across the cement floor of the cavernous holding cell. Pisspuddles and unidentifiable masses of various shape, size, and odour formed a fertile soil. Were those dandelions sprouting up in the far corner? Some of those dark shadows stood, some crouched, vaguely watching him. Some were sprawled on the floor sleeping off their hangovers. They appeared to Helix like an expressionistic painted-on backdrop to a play he didn't want to see.

Helix dove a hand into the cerulean trousers he had been lent. All he found was a pressurised ball of lint which he flicked through the bars of the cell door, disinterested. He tried the other pocket. This time he found a tiny metal whistle which he put to his lips and blew. Unsuccessfully. He held the object at eyelevel for scrutiny. Something clogged the air shaft. Where all good insects go to die.

"Guh," he muttered, tossing the whistle in the direction of the ball of lint, landing remarkably close. A sense of claustrophobia swept over him. Restless, he began tapping out a favourite hymn of his on the xylophonic cell bars.

A gruesome-looking police guard with Robert Mitchum eyelids left his poker game and lurched down the corridor to see what all the melodious commotion was about. He stepped heavily on the whistle, which skidded out from under him, indignantly. His right leg kicked up, arms flailing, his nearly-full house scattering in all compass directions. He landed solidly on his rump, concluding Helix's hymn with a resounding percussion effect.

"What's going on in there?" he demanded sorely, shaking his bullet head.

"You can't hold me here," Helix grumped. "I didn't do nothing wrong."

"Like hell." The guard began collecting his scattered hand. "Indecent exposure ain't been lawful for some time now, buddy."

"I wasn't indecently exposed until you jack-in-apes bent me over to handcuff me."

"Fruithead. We'll let you out when we're good an' ready. Now keep it down so I can concentrate." The police guard quickly scanned his cards, then headed back to the game to lose another round.

Helix ran a hand through his turbulent hair, thinking if only he hadn't thrown away the whistle he could have used it lipways like a spoon to dig himself free. How long would it take to tunnel through the concrete with his fingernails? He started to work out the calculations in his head.

"Helix?"

Helix turned to confront the inebriated greeting. It was Chester Luftwaffe, taxidermist and self-professed wine connoisseur. Or drunkard, more specifically. He emerged slightly lopsided from the umbrage of the cell corner, belly sloshing from the recent intake of an entire methuselah of wine. His head was enormous in proportion to the rest of his squirrelly body. He seemed to have misplaced his spectacles and squinted at Helix through topheavy eyelids.

"Helix Feldspar. Last place I expected to find you." Chester hiccuped and a tequila worm shot from his throat, nearly putting out Helix's left eye.

"Mmm," remarked Helix, rubbing the site of impact on his forehead.

"How's the pharmaceutical racket?" It took a few slurred attempts before Chester could successfully pronounce "pharmaceutical."

"Can't complain."

"Say, (hic) I've been meaning to ask if I could stop by for another sample of that sody of yours."

"Chester, that's the fifth sample this week."

"I know, but damn if that stuff ain't good! Just can't get enough of it. You should put that stuff on the market. Probably'd make a fortune." Hiccup.

"Well…"

"Say, why you in here anyway?"

Why was Helix in there? How could he explain why he had gotten on the nine o'clock city bus wearing only a trenchcoat and a pair of canvas shoes when he didn't know himself? Last thing he remembered was storming out of his house after an argument with his wife, Flora. Next thing he knew, he was being hollered at by a pearshaped woman with an umbrella who pointed at the suspicious protrusion in his trenchcoated lap and demanded the authorities be alerted. Then Helix was whisked away to the present police station holding cell. Where his trousers, wallet, and housekey were, he could only suspect.

The bulletheaded policeman returned, this time holding a near-flush. In his other hand he brandished a large iron key.

"Ah, the chief says we gotta let you go," he informed Helix, unlocking the cell door. "Apparently you didn't technically expose yourself, so there's nothing we can hold you on." It was clear from his tone the officer was not as excited about letting prisoners out as he was at letting them in.

Moments later Helix was free on the street. The ominous clouds lurking overhead would not have been out of place in a thirties Universal horror flick, set to the strains of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. He set off in an arbitrary direction, walking on wicker legs. Where to go? He didn't give much favour to the thought of returning home. He was in no mood to confront the wife, adulterous whorebag that she was. Oops, must keep happy thoughts. The sky furrowed its chumbly eyebrows and a pellet of rain springboarding off his nosetip. Then came a cloudcrack and suddenly the hiss of rain was all around him. Damn that he didn't have an umbrella of his own. He stood beneath the awning of a nearby tailor shop to keep dry, but a tear in the awning fabric defeated the purpose. He darted between the raindrops, his eye searching for some form of refuge. Finally he spotted a mispainted doghouse in the corner of an abandoned lot sandwiched between a dry cleaners and a boarded-up toy store. Having no particular use for dignity at this point, (any doghouse in a storm, right Mrs Kresky?) he dashed towards it, feet splashing up tiny plumes of puddlewater, and dove headfirst into the opening. The dead grass floor provided a soft landing pad. Helix adjusted himself and realised there wasn't enough room inside for all of him. His feet stuck comically out the mouth of the structure. He also realised he wasn't alone. A pudgy tortoiseshelled cat watched him from its makeshift bed, fashioned out of the comic section of a newspaper. In its mouth, as if forgotten, was a dirty tampon. Helix and the cat gazed at each other blankly for a moment or two.

"Hello," said Helix.

"Mreow," replied the cat, muffled by the toy in its mouth.

"My name's Helix. What's yours?"

"Mreow."

"You look like a Wimblechook. I'm going to call you Wimblechook. Is that alright?"

"Mreow."

Despite the drenching his feet were taking, Helix settled back to wait out the downpour. After consideration, Wimblechook must have accepted Helix as friend, for it came closer and dropped the dirty tampon in his lap as a gift. Helix scratched the cat behind its ears, which delighted the cat to no end. Presently, lulled by the hypnotic fingertaps of rain on the wooden roof, he fell asleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Crash! With a sweep of his arm, numerous beakers, flagons, and Bunsen burners tumbled off the tabletop, clattering to the laboratory floor. A spot was thus cleared for the lewd writhings of the pair of lovers. Bristol Archer raised his pelvis for a vigorous probing on the subject—a Mrs Flora Feldspar, who resembled an upturned insect, knees splayed in eager anticipation. The table shuddered from Bristol's outrageous oscillations, his ear canal penetrated by Flora's succulent soughing, his pistoning cylinder dangerously approaching critical level. She emitted a sound like steam escaping, spurred by the ferocious abrasion. Soon the torrid duo were making creative use of a few of the scientific instruments which lay strewn around them. Flora found the tapering of an Erlenmeyer flask to be much to her liking. Ah, she now knew the tantalising thrills of Borosilicate glassware.

Exhausted, the pair disentangled themselves and lay with jutting limbs, surveying the lab around them. Shelves of scientific doodads, which neither of them could possibly fathom the proper usage for, lined the walls. A chalkboard was filled with mathematical graffiti and scientific jargon. C17H21NO4 was one of the more prominent scrawls. The only out-of-place artifact was a Mary Poppins movie poster, depicting Julie Andrews descending from a chimneyed London skyline gripping her umbrella.

Bristol Archer was a debonair young pilot who had been obscenely decorated for gunning down the legendary Flying Deutschman during the war. To be perfectly forthright, the Deutschman's plane had simply run out of fuel due to some malfunction of the fuel gauge, and down it went, a puzzled look visible on the goggled face in the cockpit. But England had proclaimed Bristol a hero, and he for one was not the sort of fellow to deprive a nation of its heroes. Bristol returned from the war a menace to medal detectors everywhere, sensationalised in all the newspapers. Soon tiring of his native land, he ventured across the sea to America where he pursued a lifestyle not unlike that of Gladstone Gander. A dedicated social buccaneer.

He first encountered Flora outside the public library where she was returning her overdue book, Sins of a Scrubwoman, and somehow managed to get it lodged in the dropbox mouth. Bristol rushed over to assist her and, well… She was immediately struck by his sinister eyebrows, which suggested to her a Hungarian descent. Flora, of course, couldn't even find Hungary on a globe. South America, she would have guessed, if pressed for its location. Probably somewhere bordering Peru. But to her, "Hungarian" was synonymous with "mysterious," chiefly due to the Bela Lugosi association, one would suspect. The discovery that her rescuer was a celebrated aviator clinched it. She swooned visibly. She had read about daring war pilots and the wicked bits of mischief they got themselves into. Naughty escapades with innkeepers' daughters between flights. Oh yes. He promised her a ride in his airplane. The next day they met for lunch, he took her to his private hangar where she admired the long sleek fuselage of his craft. Then he took her up into the heavens. During this ride she fellated him at an altitude of six thousand feet. Since then, he's only taken her higher.

Having sufficiently recovered from his recent expenditure of energy, Bristol hopped off the table and began prowling through the lab nude, his pendulum swinging from thigh to thigh. His heel came down on a broken Petri dish and he did a onefooted jig as he struggled to remove the shard from his foot. Settled again, he was attracted by a cask filled with a brown fizzy substance.

"I say, what's in here?" he inquired, indicating with thumb.

Flora raised herself on one elbow to see. "Oh that. Just some beverage Helix is working on. Nothing important."

"Is that so?" The inquisitive Bristol sniffed the brown potion. He poured a little into the closest vessel within reach—Flora's size C brassiere cup—and took a drink, running his tongue along his lip exquisitely. "Mmm. Bitter, but not bad at all. What's in it?"

"I dunno. It just tastes like common syrup to me. He's awfully secretive about it."

"Well, where does he keep the ingredients? The bottles must surely be labelled."

"Nah, he just labels the bottles by number. Look, can we talk about something other than Helix and his stupid projects?" She rolled onto her belly and gazed at him, eyes brimming with suggestion. "Like us, for instance."

"I'd love to, sweetums, but I do believe I must cut out," said Bristol, slipping into his clothes.

"What? But what about our trip to that dirty bookstore you told me about?"

"Another time. I'll see you tomorrow, then? Perhaps we'll go up in my plane."

"Okay, Arch."

Light sparkled off his incisor as he looked back from the doorway. "See ya later, elevator."

"In a while, turnstile."

And he was gone, leaving her to straighten up Helix's lab as best she could, sweeping the broken glass aside problematically with a broom whose bristles had long ago been eaten by acid.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The thundering din of the waterfall fills the gorge. The sky is the colour of moist cranberry, the rocks the craggy grey of an old man's beard. On a jagged lip of a pathway overlooking the roaring falls, Helix Feldspar dressed in a deerstalker cap is locked in a round of fisticuffs with the lean sallow figure of Professor Moriarty (bearing a striking resemblance to Bristol Archer, who has grown a wiry mustache for the role). Helix deftly boxes his archfoe squarely on the ear. Queensbury rules discarded, Moriarty strikes out with his foot, kicking Helix in the shin.

"You cad!" Helix cries and brings his umbrella down forcefully on the professor's angular skull.

In retaliation, the professor pulls the old "what's that?" point-over-shoulder tactic, and when Helix falls for it, shoves him brutally. Helix teeters on the edge of the overcropping rocks, the swirling abyss beckoning him. With a swift hand, he reaches forth and seizes the professor's wrist, taking him over with him. The professor, with a receding cry, plummets to certain doom at the bottom of the gorge, helpless to the violence of the seething foam. Helix, on the other hand, has opened his umbrella and gently floats across the chasm on cushioning wind to safety on a lower pathway.

Helix jerked out of his sleep to find himself huddled in the rainsoaked doghouse, Wimblechook straddling his left leg, purring softly. Peeking outside, he discovered the rain had ceased and the sun now squinted shyly through the clouds. Helix's shoes were ruined, his socks thoroughly soaked, and he suffered a hangover from secondhand alcohol vapours from his disconcerting stint in the holding cell. He twisted his leg and the cat slipped off, rolling to a disgruntled stop.

"Come, Wimblechook. Let's not sleep the best part of the day away," though his optimism was a facade, and Wimblechook knew it.

The morning streetscene was bustling with lunacy. In and out of bookstores and candyshops they went, shifty-eyed pedestrians keeping out of each other's way as if magnetic polar-opposites. Carhorns honked random melodies under the rigid truncheon-wand of the intersection policeman conducting traffic. A monstrous bus rumbled past and passengers gawked from dirty windows, mugs pressed against the pane, sticky lizardtongues protruding. A wizened pomegranate vendor chased a noisome gang of children into an alley, waving her cane threateningly. Anchor Pete passed, slurping incessantly, dragging his feet behind, his shoulders dusted with salt. A menacing harridan with medusa hair pestered Helix for a donation to her organisation, the name of which was slurred beyond comprehensibility.

"Nice kitty, nice kitty!" she rasped through diseased gums, bending to stroke. Wimblechook hid behind Helix's trouserleg in terror.

Helix continued his jaunt, stopping momentarily to gaze in a barbershop window. He felt the sudden terror of not being able to find his reflection in the pane. Then it dawned on him that the glass had been temporarily removed for cleaning. He passed the licorice barberpole at halfmast, darting over a small gutterpuddle. Approaching Chester Luftwaffe's taxidermy shop, he noted with dismay that some thoughtless vandal had scribbled "sick my duck" on the brick casing. Though the shop was closed, Helix could see an antlered moosehead leering back at him from the darkened interior.

The sidewalks were sprinkled with post-rain worms out looking for a little action. At the base of a parking meter, two worms lay in a in their traditional mating posture, heads pointed in opposite directions. Fascinating, Helix mused. Are worms the only other creatures besides humans to mate in the 69 position? Well, not "69" exactly. Er, "11" perhaps. He voyeured for a few moments as they coated each other with mucus. Ah, hermaphroditic wormsex. A few feet away, Whimblechook sniffed at a less-fortunate venturer whose midsection had been flattened by an unkind boot.

There were more sights to see. A beanpole bankerman in tophat stood wooden indian in a doorframe alcove, a bowtied orphan swinging to and fro on a dainty umbrella from an iron nail in his forehead. A plastic monk stood on the streetcorner churning a broken barrel organ which emitted scent rather than sound. A periscope protruding from the barrel swivelled rustily, watching Helix pass. In front of the haberdashery a tickertape man wearing goggles and a striped pinsuit was shouting backwards to passersby, saluting mechanically with tenterhook hands. A soft dull clang from above. Heads up, causing hats to topple. In the old church belfry, a webclogged bell groaned tiredly on its pivot, the clapper not clapping but rather thudding as birdbats fled in pairs, guided by sonar—screeching calligraphy overhead.

Finally Helix reached the entrance of the pub and sauntered inside, throat dry as a gulch. In a dim corner a nondescript man was folding himself into his shirt pocket. An old crone squeezed into a booth cackled to herself, beerbreasts spilling onto the tabletop, rippling baggy flesh the colour of tapioca, nothing up her sleeve. Behind a fern, a boy blew syrupy bubbles, his enormous saucereyes following their ascent, splopping above his head with a rank burnt broccoli odour. The unsoldier with caterpillar epaulets slumped miserably at a table, sweating whiskey, a cyanide syringe in his shirtpocket. A beast in the birdfeeder, considerably larger than a sparrow, gobbled down the last cat with a belch. Peepholes in the nautical wallpaintings peered back, unblinking. The portly bartender wore a waxpaper face, a salamander smirk, washing a shotglass with rustcoloured spit.

"Can I get a milk?" Helix attempted.

The bartender's eyes squeaked rubberily as he squinted at the unusual request.

"It's for my ulcers," Helix felt the need to explain.

"Sure thing, mate. Here ya go." He slid a glass of milk across the blistered wood of the bartop towards Helix.

Helix quickly downed half the glass, then wiped his mouth with a gasp. "Whew. Thanks." At his feet, Wimblechook was amusing itself with a piece of dental floss.

"Y'know," said the bartender, the corner of his lip twitching occasionally, "a lotta thirsty people come in here wanting somethin' to drink, like you just did. Sometimes people just don't want hard liquor. They want something a little—softer. Don't know why no one's come out with anything."

"As a matter-of-fact, I've kind of got something in the works…"

"Ya don't say? Let me in on it. We could make a real profit. There's a whole market out there waiting to be filled."

"Well, I was trying to find a cure for the disturbance of internal plumbing, but I ended up with this delicious tasting soda. I've given it to a few people to test the effects and they keep coming back for more."

"Sounds good." The bartender leaned closer. "What's in it?"

"I'm still experimenting with it, you know." Helix's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "Don't let this spread, but I recently replaced the citric acid with phosphoric acid. And I've been toying with the idea of adding glycerine as a preservative. But the real secret ingredient is…" And he realised he had said too much. He shot a glance down at the drink in his hand. "What's happening? What did you put in my milk?"

"Nothin'. Just a little pinch of sodium pentothal…"

"Oh no you don't!" He tossed the glass away furiously and heard it shatter behind the counter. "You'll get nothing more from me!"

"You were saying? The secret ingredient?"

"Go smoke your lower intestinal tract!"

Helix scooped up Wimblechook and was out the door before the cadence of his sentence had faded.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When Helix reached the gravel drive, he aimed not for the front porch of his tidy little cottage, but for the small laboratory he had fashioned for himself in the whitewashed garage behind the house. A cobbled pathway lined with coca shrubs twisted around the house. On his way he scooped up the laboratory key from under a hollow frog.

Before he even snapped on the dangling lightbulb, he could sense someone had invaded his sanctum. The air contained that distinct flavour of violation. Somebody had swept broken glass to one side and covered the pile with a paperbag, evidently satisfied it wouldn't be detected. From a graduated cylinder dangled a polkadot bra which looked suspiciously like one of Flora's. There was a noticeable discoloured stain on the wooden table which he didn't like the look of. His nostrils detected the odour of fornication, although he admitted it might have been that of fried potatoes. He rushed over to unlock a cabinet hidden behind a swivelling shelf where he kept the ingredients and notes to his soda and was relieved to find they had remained untouched.

"Well ain't that a kick in the groin."

Wimblechook meanwhile had found a comfortable spot on the radiator under the window and settled down for a nap.

Helix stared at the soda recipe which he clutched in his hand. Cleverly he had written it in pig latin to deter potential industrial snoops. But his precautions clearly weren't enough. Someone had gotten Flora to let them into the lab and he knew who it was. Surely it was only fortune which prevented the intruder from absconding with the formula. So engrossed in his thoughts was he that he failed to notice Wimblechook twisting in its nap, rolling lazily and plummeting right off the radiator. Dazed, Wimblechook paused to collect its dignity and to make certain its graceless act hadn't been witnessed.

Helix locked the recipe back up in the cabinet and returned the shelf to normal. Moments later he burst into his house where he found Flora crouched on the kitchen counter wearing an aviator's helmet.

"Oh, hi Helix."

She dismounted and removed the flight paraphernalia, then fetched her terrycloth robe from where it hung on a chairback.

"We need to talk about this lover of yours," Helix demanded.

"Oh codswallop. I don't have a lover."

"Yes you do. And you let him into my lab." She shook her head but he would have none of it. "Don't lie to me. I know all about him. It's that unsightly young man I caught leaving the house that time."

"You're being silly."

"You think I'm stupid, don't you? Don't you think I know there's no such magazine as Lifeguard Monthly?"

"Oh, and where were you last night, might I inquire?" she counterattacked. "Off with some floozy in a seedy motel, no doubt."

"Nevermind where I was."

"Did you get her to use an umbrella?"

"You shut up about that!"

She retrieved from the refrigerator a tall glass of milk which she handed him.

"Here. Drink up, hon."

"I don't want any."

"Drink your milk, you big grump, or you'll get an ulcer."

Reluctantly he downed the glass.

"Listen, this flame of yours—he has no interest in you." He was apparently unaware of the newly-acquired milk mustache which undermined his words. "What he's after is the formula to my soda."

"Oh posh."

"It's true. Think. Who was it that wanted to see the lab? You don't give a dead gopher about that place. Confess. He asked to see it, didn't he?"

"No one cares about your stupid soda, Helix. You're so paranoid."

"That's where you're wrong, you ungrateful harpie. There's a void out there in the world of beverages, just aching to be filled by my soda. And I'm not going to let your little lifeguarding lover steal it from me. Understand?"

"You lout. Bristol doesn't give a damn about you or your little drink. He just wants me for who I am. Not just as someone to keep his socks ironed."

"Oh, so Bristol's his name, eh? Well, he's not getting my wife and my formula both! I'm going to see that he doesn't lay a finger on my recipe. I'm going to destroy it. See how that suits him! Then it will be locked safe in my memory."

"You just do that, you old cantankerous windbag."

Pouting, Helix slammed the back door behind him and returned to the solitude of the laboratory. He reached his stool just in time for an acute attack of migraine. Through the ripples of agony he thought of his once beloved Flora. He first knew he loved her when she appeared to him in a dream as Bottecelli's Venus, sailing towards him across placid waters on an upturned umbrella, gripping the handle like a rudder, covering her pubic region with a leopardprint change purse. It started out just fine. Birds chirping and all that romantic shit. What went wrong? When did the love leak out of their marriage, leaving behind a flabby carcass?

He swiveled the shelf and flung open the cabinet doors. The first item he grabbed was the paper which contained the secret recipe. This he crumpled into a pillsized wad. Spreading his jaws wide, he tossed the wad in. Jaws clamped shut, adam's apple bobbed, and with a vigorous gulp, his secret was safe. Next he scooped up the bottles of liquid ingredients one by one, starting with the bottle marked "Ingredient 1" and proceeding serially (despite the situation, he couldn't help but to be methodological) tearing the rubber stoppers off each bottle and dumped the contents down the sink drain. Gurgle gurgle. Counterclockwise. (Ah yes, Coriolis force in the Northern Hemisphere, he thought. But no because conditions certainly wouldn't be right for accurate…) A belch erupted from the drain as the last of the chemicals disappeared therein. Now the soda drink itself, he thought. He lay on his back under the large cask, mouth parted, and turned the spigot to a steady drip drip. He lay beneath, accumulating droplets in his mouth which he would then swallow. Ploink! Ploink! Ploink! Hollow in the moist cavern of his cheeks.

Wimblechook, meanwhile, had discovered an opaque amber container at the back of the cabinet. When tipped over, out spilled a fine white powder. A little found its way onto the tip of the inquisitive kitty's nose. It began licking the stuff cautiously, and after approving of the taste, began consuming it at a more rapid pace, not having eaten since it had stumbled upon a wayward Cheerio the day before.

Helix, fidgeting from impatience, opened the valve a little wider, realising it would take some time to consume the entire cask of soda. There came an unexpected knock at the lab door.

"Gah!" erupted Helix, and promptly choked on a droplet of soda which he was unprepared for.

The door swung open cautiously and there stood Bristol Archer, dressed in a dapper Rorschach vest.

"Hello there. I hesitate to trouble you in the least, but have you perchance come upon a miniature lapel camera? I seem to have mislaid it."

Flora came rushing up behind him, an anxious look on her face.

Helix was livid as he scrambled to his feet. "How dare you, sir, invade the sanctity of my laboratory. Not only on this occasion, but earlier, to fornicate with my wife." He realised a puddle of soda was forming at his feet.

Neither of them noticed Wimblechook, who had scaled the shelving unit and there was dancing a demonic jitterbug, knocking the occasional testtube to its death below.

"You're after my invention, but you'll never lay your hands upon it, as you have my wife." With abandon, he opened the spigot full and a torrent of soda gushed out, accompanied by the sizzle of carbonation.

"Hate to be contradictory, friend," said Bristol, "but that really isn't my intention at all."

"Oh, isn't it?" Helix mocked. His eyes somehow landed on Bristol's Rorschach vest, optically absorbing the symmetrical pattern. He blinked. The subjective image projected onto his brainscreen was of, yes, an umbrella. What the devil was it about umbrellas anyway? What sort of sick twisted Pavlovian nonsense had been done to him? He wiped the image away with an unsteady hand.

"Please don't do anything rash on my behalf," Bristol cautioned, taking a step closer.

Wimblechook was now clawing its way upside down across the ceiling. It dropped and landed on Bristol's head, evidently mistaking his styled hair for some kind of rodent. Bristol tossed the frenzied cat to one side where it tumbled into a cluster of beakers.

"I've destroyed the recipe and soon the drink shall be gone as well," Helix prophesied. "You may have had my wife, but you'll never have my soda! I shit on your father's nose, sir!"

And with that, Helix keeled over and lay face down in the pool of soda, inert. The vapours of carbonation made his nose twitch briefly, then he was still. Bristol knelt and pressed a finger to the neck.

"He's dead," he proclaimed, quite surprised. As he rose, Wimblechook pounced on his leg, grappling with it, trying without much success to wrestle it to the floor.

"Yes, I know," replied Flora. "I've been slipping poison into his milk every night for the past two weeks. Now at last we can get married and be together forever!"

"But—the ingredients are lost. A fortune down the drain," he lamented, trying to shake off the crazed cat. "What's this?" He wiped a finger across the cat's powdered nose. He brought it to his nostril and sniffed. "Aha, cocaine. Ingenious! That would certainly have insured repeat customers. Why didn't we think of that?"

"Fttt! Fttt!" interjected Wimblechook.

"But what about our marriage?"

"The police are going to be after you for manslaughter, sweetie. You'd better hightail it out of here right quickly."

"You come with me," she pleaded. "We'll go to Mexico and be married."

"Sorry, sweetums. I can't afford to get mixed up with you." He removed a handkerchief from the breastpocket of his vest. "Murder is a felony, you know. That would tarnish my record severely." He knelt and soaked the handkerchief in the pool of soda. "If we can just get this analysed, we may be able to discover the ingredients. We've already learned of a few of them. Phosphoric acid, glycerine, and now cocaine." He held the handkerchief over a beaker and squeezed. He repeated this routine a few times until he had collected a decent-sized volume of soda in the beaker, which he then took. "Besides I hate Mexican food. See ya later, elevator."

"In a wh…"

But he was off, hobbling slightly, Wimblechook still clinging to his left leg.

Flora gazed glumly at the lifeless body of her husband, facedown in a pool of soda. Bristol was right, she decided, she should get away as quickly as possible. He must intend to join her in Mexico, that's why he had instructed her to drive away quickly. He didn't want her to go to jail. He did truly love her! She wouldn't let him down by getting herself incarcerated. She hurried into the house to pack a few things she might need where she was going—waterwings, a showercap, a vial of suntan lotion. These she stowed in the trunk of her car. Then, thoughts bubbling with future plans for her and Bristol, she slid behind the wheel and, holding the roadmap upside down by mistake, headed north, bound for Mexico.