The Return of Scrunch Girl II

Now

The room had had everything stripped from it except its memories. Rectangles of colour covered the walls where long gone posters had once protected the wallpaper from the bleaching effects of the sunlight. Carpet fragments detailed the archaeology of the furniture that once occupied this space, four pock marks the legacy of a chair, larger hollows for the wardrobe and drawers. Despite the emptiness, harshly illuminated by a lone unshaded bulb, Danny could still see every one of his old bedroom’s departed contents.

He’d wanted to sleep here tonight. His parents bed was already made, and certainly more comfortable than the collapsible death trap he’d manhandled up the stairs, but there were consolations other than a firm mattress to be sought tonight. He’d reoccupied this room many times in his thoughts in the years since he’d left home and had only agreed to return here because of the opportunity to be able to do it in person. Even if the other who joined him in his dream room wouldn’t be here.

Having successfully unfolded the bed, Danny slowly began to make it, half-heartedly arranging a series of sheets and blankets. It was warm enough in the room, a lone radiator still providing enough heat despite a long period of disuse, but Danny had always hated the cold of night and often over compensated with layer after layer of bed clothes.

He almost didn’t hear the noise, caught up as he was in the thought-free routine of his chore. It was only on the second time round that he realised something was at the window.

It was difficult to see outside. Night had fallen and the newspaper that covered the window pane couldn’t be shifted without removing it completely. But something had very definitely rapped on the window.

There it was again. Danny went over to it to investigate, removing the latches from the battered frame of the sash. It took three hard slams with the heel of his palm before it opened, the effort of the last causing him to overbalance. He’d almost regained his footing only to lose it again with surprise when he caught sight of the culprit behind the tapping.

There, sat on the window sill, staring impassively into the room was a large grey owl, the largest bird that Danny had ever seen. It turned its head with an eerie slowness, bringing its formidable gaze to bear on him. Without warning, it gave out a salutatory hoot.

‘Is there something I can do for you?’ asked Danny.

The bird hooted affirmatively at him and extended its wings as though it meant to take flight. Instead it hopped into the room, flapping only to guide its downward course. It stood on the bare boards of the floor, close enough to Danny to make him nervous. Until, as if its actions hadn’t been peculiar enough already, it began to grow. Danny’s nerves quickly gave way to excitement. It had been half a lifetime since he had last felt like this.

The owl had reached the size of a small child when its metamorphosis diverted from the expected path. It stopped growing proportionately and started to sprout up in height only. A few stray feathers fluttered to the floor, the rest melting into the body as it lengthened, their bleak grey being subsumed by the rose pigment that was spreading across its surface. Bony talons fleshed out and separated, four toes becoming five on each of what was now clearly a pair of feet. Danny noticed some sort of bracelet above the left ankle, its strap expanding to accommodate the growing limb.

Through it all though, the wings remained. The bird-thing was as tall as Danny now, taller, the last of its body feathers dissolving away to reveal an unmistakably feminine body. The loud pink of its skin mellowed as if new flesh was rapidly ageing and hardening, the legs flexed as they filled out to their full muscular extent. With the transformation nearing its completion the creature seemed to become aware of human modesty, folding its angel’s wings across its chest and abdomen. Now, only the head was still changing, the beak softening to a smirking mouth and a wrinkled nose; the eyes lightening from their fierce predatory stare; fine, closely cropped dark brown hair crowning it all. And then, when the process had ended, the winged woman sneezed.

‘Gaah, how pathetic is that?’ she sniffled. ‘Allergic to my own feathers.’

‘Ann?’

‘Hello, Danny? How’re you doing?’

‘I’m.., I’m fine...,’ stammered Danny. ‘How are you? I mean, it’s great to see you. What are you doing here?’

Ann nodded in the vague direction of the window. ‘I’ve been in town, visiting my Mum and Dad for a few days. When I heard you were back too, I thought I’d pop over and say “Hi”’.

‘Well, “Hi” yourself. Yeah, I’m just house sitting for a couple of weeks while my folks are on holiday. Thought I’d have a bit of time to myself. Not that I’m not open to visitors.’ He leaned toward Ann, adopting the stance of someone in the know offering sage advice. ‘You know, there is a door to this house. We don’t usually require that people change into birds and fly in through the window.’

Ann raised her eyebrows in mock surprise.

‘You don’t?’

‘Not unless they’ve forgotten their clothes.’

Ann ruffled the feathers on her wings coquettishly. ‘Ah, now there’s a reason for that. But I don’t want to go into that right away…’ She trailed off as if embarrassed but Danny couldn’t tell if this was genuine or part of the tease she seemed to be putting him through.

It was clear that the two friends were pleased to see each other again, even in these unusual circumstances. Yet the ice that forms in a long absence was still waiting to be broken. Danny went to shut the window in lieu of anything to say.

A suitably polite topic for conversation popped into his head.

‘I saw you on the news last week. You and the rest of Manchester Miracle –

‘Manchester Galaxy,’ corrected Ann. ‘Miracle are the super-team with the international profile and the sponsorship deals. We’re more locally based, pretty small scale. Most of us have only recently graduated from the Paracademy.’

‘Yeah, Galaxy, sorry. But anyway, the motorway bridge collapse at Barton. I remember the rubble being removed as part of the rescue. Was that -?’

‘Me as the elephant?’ interrupted Ann. ‘Yeah, I didn’t think that would work. I had to scrabble through the concrete in the shape of a hamster.’ She laughed. ‘I don’t know why I chose that instead of a rat or something more sensible. I just remembered the one Sara used to have. It was the first thing that came to mind so I went with it. When I got through I shifted as much of the rubble as I could when I grew to elephant size. That gave Good Sport and The Cube the space they needed to get everybody out.’

‘”Good Sport” and “The Cube”, eh? And what do you call yourself?’

‘Ah, now that was tricky,’ admitted Ann. ‘When you graduate you don’t have to come up with a nom de masque, but it’s pretty much the done thing. It took me weeks before I decided on

Any.’

‘What were they, then?’ asked Danny.

‘No, “Any” was the name I decided on. “Any” as in “can become any-one or any-thing”.’ She frowned. ‘What do you think? I bet you don’t like it, do you?’

‘It’s all right. I’m just disappointed you ignored my suggestion.’

‘What? What suggestion? When was this?’

Danny deliberately turned away from Ann so she couldn’t see him bite his lip to stop laughing.

‘You know, around the time Surrey Invincibles and the other first few super-teams started up.’

Without noticing, Ann and Danny had fallen back into their old routine of goad and counter-goad.

‘That’s nearly ten years ago, you idiot. How am I supposed to remember that?’ She could tell what he was up to, he knew, but she played her part nonetheless.

‘Okay, I give up,’ Ann admitted. ‘Spare me any further agony. What did you think I should call

myself?’

‘”Scrunch Girl”,’ blurted out Danny without hesitation. He waited for Ann’s reaction. She was either stunned into silence or was being diplomatic. ‘”Scrunch”, like Bobbi, the shapeshifter in the comics with her rival, Bella. She could change her appearance too, and when she did, she made a “scrunch” noise.’

‘A “scrunch” noise?’ asked Ann, tapping her wingtips impatiently.

‘Er, yeah. I just thought it’d be something that’d catch on with the public. You know, your trademark.’

‘That’s all very well and good, Dan, but for three things.’

‘What?’

Ann paced back and forth as she made her list. ‘One: I have never, ever in my life, for whatever reason made a “scrunch” noise. Are we quite clear on this?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ agreed Danny, innocence personified.

‘Two: the first thing we’re taught at the Paracademy is to avoid any association with comics in any way, shape or form. It’s bad for the image.’

‘I can see how it would be.’

‘And three: it’s crap. For that reason alone, I wouldn’t think of using it.’

‘That’s a relief,’ said Danny. ‘I prefer “Any” anyway.’

‘And so say all of us,’ replied Ann.

‘Why are you here, Ann?’ asked Danny. This did catch Ann unawares. After the lighthearted banter of the last couple of minutes she hadn’t expected things to turn so serious so quickly. ‘I don’t think we’ve spoken, or even written to one another more than half a dozen times since you went off to that Paracademy place. Why come in person now?’

Very deliberately Ann walked entered the shadow that occupied the corner of the room.

‘Do you remember that night, Danny?’ He knew when she was referring to, how could he not? He nodded. ‘I’ve visited there regularly over the years. Not often; it’s a special place. I don’t ever want to lose sight of that through familiarity. But when I heard you’d be back here, that you’d be back here. I wanted to come.’

Ann took one step out of darkness and then leapt on to the bed. In the fraction of a second it took her to cover that distance she altered. In one fluid movement she propelled herself forward and reshaped her body, dispensing with woman and wing, landing on four viciously clawed feet, a panther, night condensed into feline form.

Danny flinched, his knowledge of what had taken place before him overridden by a basic fear of the predator. As Ann-panther growled and hissed at him fleeing was starting to look like a prudent course of action.

‘It’s amazing to think how hard it was to give up my humanity all those years ago,’ said the great cat. ‘The fear that if I left my self behind, I might never find it again. Now it’s as second nature as scratching an itch.’ She sank her claws into the thin cotton of the bedsheets, the collapsable bed’s overanxious springs voicing their protest.

Danny blinked.

‘Your voice. You sound like you. I mean…’

‘Something else I learned at school,’ she purred. ‘With a little thought I can simulate a human tongue and vocal chords in most mammal forms. I’ve come a long way.’

The panther sat on its hind legs at the edge of the bed like an oversized house cat. Its tail flicked rapidly from side to side before suddenly shrivelling away completely. Another change was taking place.

This one unfolded much slower. Ann’s limbs transformed first, her forelegs resolving into arms, which she then leaned back on allowing her hind legs room to grow down to the floor. Trunk, neck and head moulded their way back to womanhood, Ann stretching and flexing as if to ease the movement of her reshaping body. Yet even as her form became recognizably human, she retained the short black fur of the panther, by desire or necessity, Danny couldn’t tell. At the last, the furry Ann shivered from head to toe and her coat vanished like oil droplets shaken from her skin.

‘A long way,’ reiterated Ann, ‘but I haven’t forgotten where it started.’

Danny had been so captivated by Ann’s metamorphic display that it was a moment before he realised something wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t that Ann had abandoned the wings that she had used to cover herself with earlier, it was that it was a different Ann.

Sitting on the bed, sixteen years after her last visit to this room, was the girl who had cried in Danny’s arms so long ago.

More than the owl, more than the panther, seeing a memory brought to life was the most unnerving thing Danny had seen this night. The past peered at him beneath long, unkempt strands of dark brown hair, her thin, frail frame exactly as it had been fixed in his mind all this time.

‘I’d still be this person if it weren’t for you, Danny. Older, maybe, but still as weak. Still afraid to embrace the gifts I’d been given, keeping them only as a curiosity for myself rather than something I could be proud of. To be a freak instead of a marvel.’

Danny couldn’t help smiling at Ann’s use of those words. He’d replayed the conversation where he’d called Ann a ‘marvel’ many times, wincing at how corny it must have sounded when he’d confided his innermost thoughts, wondering if he’d embarrassed himself by revealing them. Now all he felt was the same quivering excitement that had been the reason he had spoken so openly back then.

Ann stood and changed again, subtly this time. Years passed over her features, confidence and strength replacing the uncertainty of her teenage face. Her hair receded to the close crop Danny had seen her wearing earlier that evening. Her body firmed and toned, immature muscles developing in seconds and then, in turn, undergoing almost instantaneous refinement and redefinition as if trained in the space of a heartbeat.

‘I’m here to thank you, Danny, something I should have done a long time ago. And to have a little fun. I’ve spent the last seven and a bit years training and studying. This is the first free time I’ve had since I joined Galaxy. It’d be nice to use my powers for something other than shifting rubble and fighting crime.’