The secret of the lost gavel

He woke with a killer headache and groaned slowly while checking his genitalia for evidence of alteration.

Ah, there they were, right where he’d left them.

A sharp and loud beeping assaulted his ears leaving him feeling as if he’d been aurally mugged.

An eye slowly opened and focussed on a mobile telephone not far from his face.

A message on its face flashed on and off.

Donnie attempted to move but found he couldn’t. His face appeared stuck to whatever he was resting against.

He moved a little, experimentally pulling at the surface and slowly his face came away with a rip of paper. He peeled his eyes open and cracked his jaw.

There was a newspaper on the desk, coated in red stickiness; some had ripped off and was still stuck to his face. The headline, on the newsprint that remained, screamed:

Advertising Triumph!

A picture of a pyramid accompanied the statement, though the rest of the report was obscured by haemoglobin.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, dabbing at the top of his head where the scab of a wound was clear evidence of being belted by something fairly unpleasant. The caked blood acted as a macabre hair-gel.

Below the report was another, equally unbelievable, this one had an image of triangular mirrors against a starry backdrop.

‘Solar Mirrors launched,’ read Donnie. ‘Global Warming to be finally controllable.’

He snorted derision.

‘Wankers.’

Donnie glanced around the depressingly dull office. Dark wood-panelling insinuated itself upwards from the grotty wooden floor, stopping partway up the walls in much the same way as rising damp. Beyond this was nasty-looking peeling wallpaper terminating in a cracked and probably asbestos-infested ceiling.

In the middle of the ceiling a fan slowly rotated, like a bored fast-food service assistant. It seemed to be saying, ‘Do you want air with that?’.

Donnie decided to help the asbestosis along a little, and reached into the top drawer where he found a packet of Gauloises and a silver zippo lighter with an amusing aeronautical motif. A practiced flip and click resulted in a lit cigarette landing between his lips.

He flipped the newspaper open onto page 39 to his horoscope while slowly flexing his face, trying to get back some feeling and to crack the sticky red varnish over it.