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Morrison Moore

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15:55 / 18.01.02

But who is Morrison Moore? Sounds like a Scottish gentleman PI.

"The Adventures of Morrison Moore, disgraced ex-Laird of Dunkirk and Womanising Investigator!"

From this thread. Now let's give the old bastard a life, eh?

I'll start - anyone else wants to, they can follow.

Moore looked out across the loch. He had come here to relax, as he did after all the ahrdest cases. His contacts in the police - especially that bastard Chief Inspector howie in CID - had been giving him hell on this one, telling him he had got too close, put people at risk.

Well fuck him, thought Moore, taking three fingers of Laphroaig down his ravaged throat in one gulp. The bastard doesn't know what I saw back there...

pointless and uncalled for

16:08 / 18.01.02

It had been about then years ago that Moore had met Ms. Mendelssohn.
While he still managed to retain the title of Laird he had been invited to a soiree on some opulent estate in Kent. Some self-effacing Lord and his alcoholic wife were trying to elevete their status by bringing in some noble scrubs so that they could talk them up later.
It had been an autumnal evening as the leaves were turning and the air was scented with the delicate fragrance of a bonfire from the far end of the estate.

Moore began drinking early that night as he did nost nights and by the time Ms. Mendellsohn had arrived, fashionably late, he was already in a haze.
Her beauty captured him in an instant and clumsily he began to move on her. He could never work out why she reciprocated.

14:05 / 19.01.02

Then came the Shadow.

14:01 / 20.01.02

"Jesus Christ, it's Orson Welles!" He spluttered as the darkness enveloped him.
"Very amusing, I'm sure..." muttered the vast silhouette looming over Moore. "I have been compared to the celebrated actor, but I prefer to think of myself more like Johnny Depp gone to seed..."
The bulbous mass moved into the light and revealed himself to be Horatio Unwin, Restaurant critic and distant relative of Professor Stanley. Gone to seed, thought Moore in a scotch mist, more like gone to the pie-shop...
Moore was drunk enough to find this rather crap witticism extremely funny and started laughing hysterically, urinating himself as he did so. He passed out from lack of oxygen.
When he came to, the room was completely empty.

14:13 / 20.01.02

Every shred was gone. Furniture, books, carpet. No dust even. Moore looked down at himself and was relieved to find his clothing still safely ensconcing his body. But the bastards has taken his bottle and right now it was the only thing he could think of to kill the headache slowly growing behind his eyes.

Unwin was gone. Moore had the sinking suspicion that it was going to be one of those months. He reached up to scratch and itch on his head and screamed. The bastards had taken his hair too. Peering cautiously down the front of his pants, the ugly truth revealed itself.

All of his hair.

Zoom.

14:22 / 20.01.02

Moore hoisted himself up, itching quite badly and with a throbbing head. He vomited quietly in the corner, and passed out again.

When he came to, he was on a train heading up towards Scotland again. He was dressed in an ill-fitting Lime Green shellsuit and, he realsied with horror, crude slogans were scrawled all over his face.

However, when he felt in his pockets, there was a map. He smiled to himself. For the drunken 'act' had worked, and he had got what he wanted.

14:36 / 20.01.02

Patting himself on the back, then stopping for the strange looks he was receiving, Moore took the map from his pocket.

It was like something a small child who'd had Hitler's brain transplanted into it's stomach might have drawn. Crayon meshed with crazed ballpoint slogans in German that seemed to somehow all point to one location central on the map. Moore glanced out the window, briefly flinching from the bright light. While the headache was worth it he was by no means happy that he'd had to debase himself so to achieve his goals. The map definately outlined a point somewhere in Northern Scotland, far northern. Once he'd found a change of clothes and had a few drinks, he'd have to see about translating the writing on the map. Of all the languages he was fluent in, Moore had never been taken with German. But he knew someone who was.

Zoom.

22:38 / 24.01.02

Sir Christopher Thompson-Thompson-Rhoydes was a specialist in the cryptographic analysis of Emmanuel Kant's abysmal grammar, and few men in England could claim rival for his infatuation for the German language, or his skill-except of course, for that fellow in Bristol with the lisp…but Moore had, in his time, hurt far more than his fair share of men with obnoxious speech impediments, and did not wish to descend back into the darker days of his career, two weeks ago.
Anyway, he has a hold over the the aged professor of German that he coincidentally was traveling to meet. Sir Christopher had been a rising star at Pembroke in the study of all things Teutonic, but his career fell apart following the revelation of his torrid affair with a wax dummy of Rikard Wagner on loan from Madame Tussaud's. The desperate academic had hired Moore to conceal the scandal from his wealthy parents, and the he had succeeded quite aptly. Sadly, the professor was caught in a compromising position at the Baudlian with an original score of Siegfriend only a month, and was cast by his family into exile in Scotland.
Like many academic failures, the doctor proceeded to crawl into a bottle: unlike most, he crawled out again, finding it cramped, and found a distillery instead.
Nonetheless, the memory of that last big score, largely paid in single malt Scotch, brought a brief, stiff smile to Moore's face, which the hangover batted away like a Rangers goalie. Through the thought-haze generated by the sensation that his frontal lobes were beating in time with his heart, Moore recalled that the Thompson-Thompson-Rhoydes case was, in fact, the last time he had allowed soccer yobs to scrawl obscenities on his face with a permanent felt tip, at least in the line of duty, Good, he thought, the professor will recognize me, then, and again attempted a smile. It went no better than the first, so he went off to find another drink,and possibly some company.

[ 25-01-2002: Message edited by: [infinite monkeys] ]

12:25 / 25.01.02

He slid into an empty seat halfway down the dining car. Across the table sat a young girl with a red crew cut, an angry expression and grey rings of old mascara smudged on her cheeks.
"You look like your night has been as hard as mine," he said, extending his hand. "Moore. Morrison Moore."
She eyed him suspiciously and continued sitting on her hands.
"What you want?" she choked, suppressing the need to either vomit or sob raucously.
Beneath her worn leather jacket, her skin was like translucent porcelain, delicately dotted with barely perceptible freckles.
"I'm waiting for someone," she said, her chin beginning to quiver.

[ 25-01-2002: Message edited by: grant ]

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

12:31 / 25.01.02

"Well," Morrison replied, "I think you're really pretty. And cool. Can I put my penis in your ear?"

13:02 / 25.01.02

She squinted as if in sudden pain, gave a little gasp, and vomited profusely in Moore's lap.

16:27 / 25.01.02

Moore backed off in revulsion - not because of the vomit, but because he realised there was a strange, near-ginger creature with an absurd head sitting opposite him.

The creature was reading an obscure volume of Ancient Greek Poetry, Moore surmised.

Mainly because the creature had placed a large sticker on the front reading 'Obscure and Ancient Greek Poetry.'

He had a sense that the creature would be one of those things which wander into your life without warning and ruin it for no reason than their own amusement.

It looked up.

"Well hello, it said...

[ 25-01-2002: Message edited by: Not Me Again ]

16:22 / 28.01.02

Moore did his best to ignore the unwanted attention, and discretely wiped at his lap with a fistful of wadded-up napkins (Amer: serviettes). The girl evidently hadn't been eating well; his long years of experience with bodily effluvium told him that immediately.
She was sitting with her eyes clenched shut, evidently wishing him away.
"You haven't got a penny to your name," he said to her. "You've been waiting on this train for someone with money, a rather handsome, James Dean-type, I'd expect, and," he paused and sniffed a spot of puke on his lapel, "you've been hopelessly sitting here since about 4:30 in the morning."
She opened her eyes, awe mingling with loathing on her face.
"Which means you boarded in Devonshire and are currently hoping against hope your appointment shows up before we reach Edinburgh station, because you're really not looking forward to disembarking somewhere even higher into the windswept north, wearing naught but a leather jacket and a midlength twill skirt, with neither wool socks, sweater or fine warm hat to your name."
"Excuse me," cackled the stranger, "but I believe the lady is with me."
"I would imagine that is for the lady to decide," Moore chuckled, winking at the girl.
She shuddered to herself.

18:34 / 28.01.02

The stranger slowly put his poetry book down and, without taking his blue eyes off of Moore, began eating his own hand. The corners of the girls pale lips curved. Moore, scratched at his hairless itching armpits and shifted in his seat. The horrid creature sucked on the bloody stump that was his wrist. Then threw his large head back and laughed. Moore casually punched the creature in the neck and and set him right. "Well now, that was completely and utterly retarded. May I ask what the point of that was?"

19:24 / 28.01.02

"Is it possible" thought Moore aloud, "That someone spiked my drink back in Kent, and the past sequence of events has been nothing but the deluded froth of my mind's tide?"
"No, sorry." Replied the strange ginger self-cannibal.
"Maybe it's just the DTs then..."
"No, not that either, Moore."
Looking for clues, Moore turned his pockets out to find 96 identical bus tickets.
"Metafiction?"
"Guess again."
"Is this something to do with the Masons?"
"Do you mean the secretive organisation or George and Ethel Mason of 14, Dovecote Lane, Osterley?"
"First one, then the other."
"No and no."
"Bugger."

[ 28-01-2002: Message edited by: BizCo ]

11:30 / 29.01.02

"Tell him," hissed the girl with the red crew cut.

The one handed cannibal waved his stump at her. Apparently, riddles were one the menu, and body fluids on the wall.

"Tell him," she insisted again, "or I will."

"This is about Sir Christopher Thompson-Thompson-Rhoydes, isn't it? Most peculiar chap I ever met..." sais Moore.

"Thilenthe," said the cannibal from Bristol.

At that moment, the conductor appeared in the compartment, and silence indeed arrived with him, except for the slow dripping noise.

12:58 / 29.01.02

Moore remembered he didn't have a ticket.

And he was pretty sure the cannibal freak knew it too.

He hoped the conductor would be receptive to the idea of 96 free bus trips to Hartlepool. Because otherwise there'd be trouble.

He grit his teeth.

13:22 / 29.01.02

"Glad you could make it, Moore," the conductor said in an eerily familiar voice. "I see you've already met your new partners. Thompson-Thompson-Rhoydes will have to wait, I'm afraid."

14:17 / 29.01.02

Moore honestly felt as if his brain was about to leap from his skull and run screaming down the car.

"New partners? And just who the hell are you?" Moore managed to spit through gritted teeth. This nonsense that seemed to be passing for his life nowadays was taking its toll.

The conductor reached up and started picking at what looked like a flap of loose skin on his neck. He pulled at it and Moore watched with the kind of sick fascination he usually reserved for car accidents and paraplegic elephant porn. The conductor gave one sharp yank and his neck and face seemed to come off in one large, pinkish floppy mess. He screamed like Moore had never heard a man scream and keeled over, his face a mess of muscle tissue and bone.

"I told him not to use the expired spirit gum," muttered the cannibal.

Moore blanched visibly and, for lack of anything better to do, turned to his "new partners" and screamed at them to explain.

(Zoom.)

[ 29-01-2002: Message edited by: Captain Zoom ]

03:30 / 30.01.02

With effort, Moore bent down to examine the corpse of the conductor. The man's wallet contained only the Major Arcana of the Thoth-Crowley deck. The slot for the driver's license contained the Trump "the Hierophant," although the back of the card authorized the holder to drive mopeds. Moore pocketed the lot, just in case.
The detective turned to observe his companions in the car. He could not think of these people as partners or colleagues--not until they had proven themselves useful, like that marmoset from the brothel in Panang. Until that time, they were simply people whose liver and kidneys he might steal.
The ginger man had fallen into some sort of silent reverie, and was drumming his feet in time to what could only be the Cab Calloway tune "Minnie the Moocher"--the "hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-hi" bit was a dead giveaway. The young woman was even more quiescent, seeming to have dropped off into dreamless sleep following her cathartic round of vomiting and panic.
Moore did not bother to re-take his seat, instead settling down cross-legged next to the faceless body. Despite the jangled condition of his nerves and logical faculties, his well-trained hands rooted out the dead man's hip flask. The container was made of bronze covered in copious verdigris, studded with elk teeth and engraved with dire warnings in Etruscan. On a whim, he took a cautious sniff and ascertained that the contents was ayahuasca tea adulterated with pina coloda mix. Since the evening was already a loss in terms of logic, sanity, or plot continuity, he took a belt anyway.
As colors abstracted from shapes began to blossom in his field of vision, the whole thing began to make sense: the answers lay in the cheekbones of the dead man. If he could just figure out who they belonged to, perhaps he could recall what case he was working on, and who was going to pay the laundry bill for the shell-suit.

[ 30-01-2002: Message edited by: [infinite monkeys] ]

[ 30-01-2002: Message edited by: [infinite monkeys] ]

11:56 / 30.01.02

"M-mother," he stammered, as the cheekbones sparked recognition.

"No, not mother," said the ginger haired girl. She grabbed him by the collar of the shellsuit and dragged him to his feet.

Surprisingly strong for such a small girl, he thought.

She crossed the compartment and nudged the ginger man on the shoulder. "Desiree," she said, "we're at the station. It's time to go."

"You two go on ahead," replied Desiree, "I'll meet you by my own path."

Desiree immediately began shoving himself out headfirst through one of the half-open windows.

"C'mon," said the girl to Moore. They stepped off the train onto the platform. "It's going to take him a while, but it could be worse. Last time, he insisted on escaping through the jakes. Welcome to Witless-on-the-Heath."

Moore looked around the tiny station platform. The place certainly lived up to its name, from what he could see.

Antiquated gaslamps shed a smoky light on the nameplate, which had been installed upside down. The only other signage consisted of a large painted wooden board, of the type found over tavern doors. This one depicted an eclipse, whether of the sun or moon, he could not determine.

The ginger man, Desiree, had managed to wedge his head and one arm out of the train window, but appeared to be stuck at this point.

[ 30-01-2002: Message edited by: Logos ]

12:41 / 30.01.02

Desiree, eh? A strange name for a man. Suspicious almost. Moore made his 'suspicious' face and reached into his pocket for the woodbine needed to complete it. His hand emerged instead with a bus ticket, and he began to chew on it. Only 95 of them left now.
"95," he muttered quietly to himself, "95."

Having done suspicious, the synapses of his toxin stewed investigator mind decided on ASSERTIVE!

"Right!" he bellowed, his dysfunctional limbs attempting to grab the ginger girl by the arm, but instead ensnaring the hollow steel pole that held up the roof of the train carriage, "We'll see what this 'Witless-on-the-Heath' has to offer in the way of accomodation, grab ourselves some Pie and Chips at the local hostelry and begin our investigations first thing in the morning!"

"Investigations into what?" asked someone or other.
"That," Moore snapped back, pieces of bus ticket dribbling down his ample chin, "is what I was hoping YOU could tell ME!"

22:40 / 02.02.02

"Kant," said Desiree.

"Can't?" repeated Moore, "can't what?"

"Immanuel Kant," said the ginger girl, "father of logical positivism."

14:02 / 04.02.02

"Ah, shite."

The big detective, now on the verge of tears, stumbled across the train carriage like a lamed bison.

"fuckin' philosophy! Again?"

14:11 / 04.02.02

Witless-on-the-heath was a little Englander's dream. It was your standard cottages and coach-houses, cricket and cucumber sandwiches, tea on the lawn, vicar on a bicycle, giant pulsating tentacled Lovecraftian monster engulfing the town hall kind of town.
"WTF?!" Abbreviated Moore.
"World Trade Federation?" Asked a nearby midget. "Sorry Mate, you're in the wrong village. We're strictly a manicured privet hedge, hunting with retired colonels, tiny ineffective post office, urchins scrumping for apples, kindly maiden aunts knitting underwear, hypnotised by evil demonic force kind of town."
"Who are you?" Asked Moore, hoping to get past the Robert Rankin style running jokes.
"I'm the little Englander."
"Oh dear sweet Jesus no..."
And worse was to come.

12:09 / 05.02.02

There were roses everywhere.

pointless and uncalled for

12:17 / 05.02.02

Except a small patch to the east which had Irises.

21:53 / 05.02.02

Machines in the grass. Above, in the sky, a pinkish dodecaedrum floated, and from it came the sound of children's laughter.

21:58 / 05.02.02

I mean, slaughter.

18:53 / 06.02.02

Or, perhaps, disturbingly, both.

The girl led Moore through the field of flowers.

"Be careful of the roses, Moore, they're very toxic, and very valuable." she said as she tromped her way over the irises.

Moore's hands dribbled bus tickets behind him, Hanseling pasteboard through the flowerbeds. He wasn't sure of much in Witless-on-the-Heath, but he was certain he wanted to find his way back out of it, and soon.

At some distance behind them staggered the one-handed ginger cannibal.

Meanwhile, a few miles away...

02:12 / 07.02.02

[ 10-02-2002: Message edited by: [infinite monkeys] ]

19:36 / 06.03.02

"My God," exclaimed Moore, "It's devouring entire narrative passages!"

He gaped at the empty space where the train had been. The singularity gaped back.

19:37 / 06.03.02

"My God," exclaimed Moore, "It's devouring entire narrative passages!"

He gaped at the empty space where the train had been. The singularity gaped back.

01:01 / 07.03.02

Moore shook his head from side to side. The deja vu was getting worse.

"Time is thin here," he murmured to himself, "and is falling inwards on itself."

Moore shook his head from side to side.
his head

Moore shook
from side to side

his head

side to

his head

to side

from

Moore shook

01:32 / 07.03.02

Witless-on-the-Heath coalesced around him, no longer the charming little village it had been moments ago. The odd time dilations could be seen scudding away across the mountains, resurrecting castles and then crumbling them all in the space of seconds.

Moore turned back in the direction of his companion but she was nowhere to be seen. The one-handed ginger man was running across the field, heedless of the roses, shouting "You can't catch me I'm the gingerhead man!" Moore was starting to feel a little faint, and decided a nice quiet B&B and three bottles of rubbing alcohol were in order. He tramped back towards the center of town to look for a likely place to stay.

He stopped. A vision of arriving at the front desk and being asked to sign in to the "Witless-on-the-Heath ledger" swam across his vision, filling him with pop-cultural dread. He spun 270 degrees on his heel and set off in a direction completely separate to his companions.

He almost fell face first into the roses when he tripped over the corpse.

(Zoom.)

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